This would be bad enough, were all the European Union's present institutions not already undemocratic. The Commission, the most powerful organ in the Union, is composed of unelected officials, and is the sole initiator, and in some cases, executor of policy. It is constitutionally independent, i.e. accountable to no one. The Council of Ministers is also unaccountable, and it represents as thorough a confusion between executive and legislature as it is possible to imagine. Composed of ministers from each member state, it is the supreme legislative body of the Union. No doubt part of the reason why European national governments are all so keen on the EU is that it enables them, as governments, to sit in the Council of Ministers in a legislative capacity, for the Council is subject to no parliamentary control whatever. It is unelected as a body (although most of its members are elected in their home countries), and it answers neither to the European parliament nor to national parliaments. Its meetings take place in secret and decisions are taken by majority vote, which extinguishes all national parliamentary control over its activities, because, if ever called to account for a vote by his national parliament, a minister can always plead that he was in a minority. Indeed, in general terms, it is always convenient for national politicians to have "Europe" either as a vehicle with which to propagate their more unrealistic promises or as a whipping-boy for their own failures.

Meanwhile, the judges of the European Court of Justice, the approximate equivalent of the Supreme Court of the United States, are very often not even judges by training at all. Perhaps this is why the Court has a thirty year history of bending Community law (which takes immediate and total precedence over national law) in order to force a greater and greater degree of legal and political centralization.

The final window on national democracy will be shut if, as proposed, Europe adopts a single currency. This will be managed by an independent Central Bank, which is supposed to be sealed off from national governments, parliaments, and electorates. As the Maastricht treaty and the German government make absolutely clear, monetary policy is extremely political, for it presupposes that the whole gamut of other policies--fiscal, budgetary, social, foreign and even defense--be subordinated to its commitment to the undefined goal of "price stability." As Lamers himself has said, "monetary union is the highest and purest form of integration." In other words, the Maastricht treaty, which obliges member states to join a monetary union, proposes to transfer the power currently exercised by national governments accountable to national parliaments to two unaccountable institutions, the Council of Ministers and the Central Bank. This means that power currently exercised democratically and within the framework of national constitutions will be transformed into totally discretionary power. But government is not about administering society--an impossible task--it is about upholding the law. Unfortunately, most Western European states have such a moribund political and civic culture that most voters seem actually to want the state to control their lives at the price of personal liberty, all in the name of security.

When Germany ratified the Treaty of Maastricht in 1993, it awarded itself two rights which no other country has within the present European legal order. The Federal Constitutional Court at Karlsruhe proclaimed itself the final arbiter in any disputes in interpretation of European Community law between itself and the Court of Justice of the European Communities in Luxembourg. This flies in the face of thirty years of Community jurisprudence, which insists that Community law always takes immediate and direct priority over national law, even over national constitutional law.

Secondly, Germany awarded itself the right, through an extremely imaginative reading of the treaty, to withdraw from its commitment to engage in the process of monetary union. Its supreme judges argued that the treaty committed it only to maintaining price stability, and that if that as yet undefined goal were to be unfulfilled, then Germany could withdraw from the monetary union. The court even evoked the possibility that new, stronger political institutions might be necessary in order to make the monetary union work, noting that in the past, such as in the transition of Germany from North German Federation to German Empire in 1871, political union had been the prerequisite for monetary union. In other words, the CDU is saying that monetary union must occur on Germany's terms, and those terms are the adoption of a federal political union of five countries, in which Germany alone will represent 50 percent in terms of population.

This is why the CDU document hovers between threats--"Without such a continued development of (West) European integration Germany could be required, or as a result of its own security needs, tempted, to ensure the stability of Eastern Europe alone and by traditional means"--and professions of European faith. It is also striking that the document calls explicitly for France and Germany to exercise a hegemony over the peripheral states: "No substantial action in foreign or European policy may be taken without prior Franco-German agreement." Mr. Lamers, who, in a rather Kozyrevian phrase, calls the British Euroskeptics "national ideologues," glosses the same thought by saying that the "hard core" would exercise "an irresistible force" on the peripheral states, and that any attempt to resist that force would be "self-centered and ultimately irrational."

Perhaps the most striking remark in Lamers' writings is the claim that Germany had understood the lessons of European history better than other states because of "the catastrophe of 1945." This is a surprisingly common remark in modern Germany. One would expect Germans to say that they have learned their lessons from what happened in 1933 or 1939, not 1945. Most Europeans, like most Americans, see May 1945 not as the date of the victory of the Allies over Germany, but of the victory of democracy over dictatorship, and thus no catastrophe. But if modern German policymakers say that it is from 1945 that they have learned the lessons of history, then the lesson in question can only be that Germany can never succeed in dominating Europe on its own, and conversely, that hegemony can only be exercised together with others, because it is at its weakest when surrounded by enemies. Germany's need for allies is due to its vulnerable position in the center of Europe: its power is augmented when a clutch of allies is gathered on its frontiers, especially if for economic or political reasons they are obliged to toe the German line. This is what is happening both in the proposed creation of a hard core for Western Europe and with the eastward extension of the European Union to include all Germany's former client states in Eastern Europe.

It is striking that no French politician seems to understand how badly Germany needs France in order to clothe its hegemony in Western Europe in respectability. France is the decent apparel with which German power can gird its loins, for if France were not in the hard core, then the European Union would clearly be a German empire. It is noteworthy, therefore, that Germany proposes to exercise its power behind a French (or European) fig-leaf, a convenient way of not assuming its responsibilities.

It is in this vein that most German politicians call for the old doctrine of the "balance of power" in Europe to be overthrown. It is odd that this view should be politically correct these days, for German leaders from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Hitler have sung the same song, arguing that the balance of power in Europe is nothing but a perfidious British (or sometimes American) policy to ensure that the continental European powers remain weak. Proposals to reinforce political union in Europe--whether in France or in Germany--are nearly always accompanied by an expression of desire for Europe to affirm its power against America and Japan. But what such explicit or implicit attacks on the balance of power conveniently obscure is the fact that those countries which have supported the doctrine of the balance of power have never had any hegemonial ambitions on the continent, unlike those which reject it. What could be a better principle for the government of the European continent than that a certain equity or balance be maintained between the major powers? We have already seen that peace and the maintenance of law depends upon such an equity. Indeed, the doctrine of the balance of power is one of the wisest and most profound insights into the way the European continent should operate, and it is sad to see it being scorned yet again. If the myth of destabilizing European nationalism--and the concomitant view that it can be contained only within supranational organizations--continues to cast its spell over the decisions of Europe's political architects, then it will prove to be a self-fulfilling fantasy.

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