"The rational organization, at the global level, of human
existence...is clearly an absolute necessity." --Eduard Shevardnadze, 1992

There are moments when the swirling mists in which modern European
political speech seems deliberately to envelop itself are dissipated
by sudden, perhaps unintended, flashes of linguistic clarity. Two
remarks made in 1994 have illuminated, if only in silhouette, the
broad outlines of current European geopolitics and political culture.

The first came in May, when Boris Yeltsin paid a state visit to
Germany. The theme of his visit was the entry of Russia into all
European organizations, ultimately including NATO and the European
Union. As a priority, though, Yeltsin concentrated on a theme dear to
the Russian heart, the strengthening of the Conference on Security
and Cooperation in Europe, to which Moscow would like NATO to be
subordinate. The Russian president declared to an eager
audience--using words that would have been music to the ears of the
former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, as well as to many
contemporary politicians--that he wanted a "politically, economically
and spiritually unified architecture for our continent, which must
not isolate countries or groups of countries or separate them
according to the criteria of friend or enemy..."[emphasis added].

The second came in November. A few months previously, the ruling
Christian Democratic parliamentary group in Germany had published a
policy document entitled "Reflections on European Policy," which
contained striking proposals for the future political architecture of
the European Union. It called for the federal political union of a
hard core of five countries in the European Union (France, Germany,
Benelux). The document, which Chancellor Kohl has welcomed and
defended, and perhaps even surreptitiously encouraged, threatens that
if political union does not occur on its own terms, Germany might go
it alone in Europe, overturning the whole apple cart of postwar
European cooperation. According to this scheme, otherwise known as
the "concentric circles plan," all European Union policy would be
made by the hard core--or more precisely, by the hard core of the
hard core, France and Germany--and followed in variable participatory
arrangements by other member states. On a tour of European capitals
to peddle the plan, the CDU's foreign policy spokesman, Karl Lamers,
expressed the regret that many people in Europe were reluctant to
take such a bold leap toward political union, because they
experienced "the emotional difficulty of abandoning revered and
cherished institutions and notions even if, like the concept of
national sovereignty, they have long since become an
illusion."[emphasis added].

What do these remarks tell us about the likely evolution of Europe's
political architecture after the end of the Cold War? One thing is
immediately clear: Germany and Russia are the two largest and most
powerful countries in Europe. If there is to be a truly united
Europe, and not just a united Western Europe, then one of the most
important axes along which it will develop will be Berlin-Moscow. The
Germans, more than any other Western Europeans are aware of this.
Indeed, the CDU document emphasizes that the European Union's primary
foreign policy objective must be to ensure stability in Eastern
Europe by constructing an "all-encompassing partnership with Russia."
Similarly, Mr. Kozyrev, the Russian foreign minister, has often
spoken of the "special relationship" between Germany and Russia.

It is preoccupying, therefore, to observe in these remarks by
political representatives of both countries a clutch of ideas which
displays a striking contempt for the philosophical bases of democracy
and the rule of law. It is even more preoccupying to realize that
these remarks are utterly typical of contemporary European political
discourse. Indeed, they have become its common currency. Slogans such
as "United Europe," "falling borders," "convergence" and
"integration" trip lightly off the lips of all post-Cold War European
leaders. They are the foreign policy counterparts of similar slogans
about "protection" and "social security" which have become the staple
diet fed to voters at home. These clichés are disturbing because they
are manifestations of the extent to which European politicians have
lost a sense of the true meaning of politics itself.

Friends and Enemies

Politics is the necessary prerequisite for democracy because it is
only within a certain polity, a state, where the rules of the game
and the common reference points are understood, that democratic
debate and democratic accountability can be assured. Democracy
inevitably presupposes constitutional independence or national
statehood because, before the democratic mechanisms of control over
political power--a legislature, an independent judiciary, a free
press--can be put in place, the basic right of the state to rule--its
authority--must first be recognized. It is only from this fundamental
recognition of legitimacy that the rule of law can flow. If a people
agrees that the state has the right to rule, then that people is
constituted as a political entity. Without politics, therefore, there
can be no statehood, and if politics and statehood disintegrate, as
they are doing in Europe, then democracy will disintegrate too.
Politics is the realm of human freedom.

Yeltsin's proclaimed desire not to separate countries according to
the criterion of friend and enemy recalls the famous definition of
politics made by the right-wing German jurist, Carl Schmitt.
According to Schmitt, writing in 1932, areas of human activity like
morality, aesthetics, and economics each have their own criteria:
good and evil, beautiful and ugly, profitable and damaging. Politics,
he insists, is an area of human activity distinct from the others,
and its criterion is the distinction between friend and enemy. Anyone
who tries to overcome that distinction, as Yeltsin is, is trying to
overcome politics itself. Yeltsin is not saying, "I was your enemy,
now I am your friend," he is saying that the distinction itself
should no longer apply.

What does Schmitt mean? First, he does not mean that a state always
has enemies, although this may be so, but that politics only exists
where there is conflict, and that both foreign and domestic politics
consist in making the distinction between friend and enemy. An enemy
need not be evil or ugly or economically damaging: he does not have
to be hated or despised. The distinction between friend and enemy in
this sense is merely intended to indicate the difference between
association (with a friend) or dissociation (from an enemy). This is
not a bellicose or aggressive way of defining politics, it is a
factual one: where there is no conflict there is no politics, only
management. The term enemy is by no means limited to the military
sense, nor is the definition intended to assimilate politics to war.
On the contrary, war is not the continuation of politics by other
means, but something different from politics, with its own separate
set of rules.

Nor does this definition rule out peace between peoples or states, or
even neutrality. The decisive issue is that political life is the
domain in which the possibility of making the distinction obtains.
Indeed, far from peace being the absence of an enemy, one can make
peace only with an enemy. Just as there is no peace without an enemy,
there is no politics without the possibility of knowing who one's
(political) enemies are.

Indeed, peace is not the absence of antagonism or conflict, but the
absence of war. This fact underlines the essential difference between
politics and war: it would clearly be contrary to the essence of
politics as such to want to suppress one's enemies, or to dissipate
the distinction between friend and enemy into obscurity. This is
precisely because politics lives off enmity, the opposition between
parties and interests and ideologies, the antagonism between
different opinions, values and goals, as well as the divergence
between different solutions which are proposed in order to attain the
common good.In a European continent where "consensus," "cooperation,"
"stability," and "negotiation" are widely proclaimed as the cardinal
virtues (most notably by the British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd,
who often seems to believe that diplomatic negotiation is a good
thing even if it does not produce any results, as in Yugoslavia) this
fact is almost universally misunderstood.

As Publius wrote in the Tenth Federalist Paper, "the principal task
of modern legislation...involves the spirit of party and faction in
the necessary and ordinary operations of the government." It is the
purpose of good government to contain and to channel this inevitable
facet of human behavior. But the negation of the enemy in domestic
politics, in the name of universal tolerance for instance, is
nonsense precisely because tolerance is a matter of behavior between
men--one tolerates one's political enemy--and not a relationship of
ideas. The irenic notion of universal tolerance is therefore not
evidence of bad judgment, it is the absence of judgment. It is
irrelevant whether we approve or disapprove of the distinction
between friend and enemy, for it is an incontrovertible fact of human
(i.e. political) existence. It is only in Utopia--i.e. nowhere--that
the distinction between friend and enemy does not apply.

The same is true of foreign policy, where peace denotes a certain
relationship between states. No law enjoining peace can maintain
itself in mere virtue of its status as law, without the political
will of two or more distinct parties--enemies--expressed in a peace
treaty. The notion of peace without a treaty representing the
expression of genuine convictions of those parties and the rules by
which they agree to abide, is nonsense. Similarly, in domestic
politics no constitution within a state can maintain itself if not
supported by citizens who recognize its political authority. If peace
is not the absence of conflict, the difference between peace and war
is simply that in peace, a state or a person does not seek to destroy
the enemy, but rather recognizes him as an equal in all his
difference. Accordingly, any so-called proclamation of peace which
implies the suppression or the negation of the enemy is in reality a
camouflaged declaration of war. This is the danger in Yeltsin's
remark. To put it bluntly, if the price of peace with Russia after
the Cold War is the disappearance of the states of Western Europe as
genuine political entities in any meaningful sense, then that price
is too high.

The Primacy of Stability

The Soviet Union long sought to remove the American presence in
Europe, and to instigate instead a pan-European political and
military organization. The CSCE, which arose out of a proposal made
by Ceausescu to de Gaulle on Brezhnev's behalf in 1968, comes closest
to what Russia wants. This is because the CSCE--which in January
became the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe--is
not a military alliance like NATO. Instead, as the chairman of the
recent Budapest conference of the CSCE made clear, "The CSCE is a
unique organization, because it deals not only with relations between
states but also within states, with the relationship between the
state and the citizen." In other words, the CSCE blurs the very
distinction between friend and enemy by obscuring that between
internal and external affairs.

This is because the so-called "Moscow Document" signed in 1991,
introduced a series of commitments governing the relationship between
states and their citizens, including such things as the rights of
women, migrant workers and disabled persons, as well as more general
commitments to democracy and the rule of law. It also included an
important provision relating to the rights of minorities by making
reference to a report on national minorities which thereby achieves
normative status within the CSCE. That report declares that, "Issues
concerning national minorities...are matters of legitimate
international concern and consequently do not constitute exclusively
an internal affair of the respective State." States which are deemed
to have minorities problems might be required by the CSCE to do
anything from providing education in minority languages to
establishing local autonomy.

First, this interest in minorities is germane to Russia. The collapse
of the Soviet Union has been followed by the creation, not only of
the Commonwealth of Independent States and a forum for economic
"cooperation" between its "member states," but also by the rallying
to the CIS of initially recalcitrant states like Moldova, on the
pretext that the Russian minorities there need protecting. Similar
influence has been exerted over the Baltic states, especially
Estonia. Americans who are preoccupied with the rising problem of
"group rights," which seems to be undermining their own constitution,
will recognize the de jure classification of individuals into ethnic
groups as an instrument of state control and social management,
because groups are more easy to control and to speak for than
individuals.

Second, it is a consequence of the CSCE's unique combination of
internal and external competencies that, whatever the outcome of the
legal debate on the precise status of the Helsinki Final Act and the
associated documents, the CSCE in total is "the source of an
overarching European constitutional order which sets the standards to
which all national legal and political institutions in Europe must
conform."

Therefore, far from being a defense alliance like NATO, which is
directed against a potential outside aggressor and intended to
preserve the internal integrity and peace of the signatory states,
the CSCE's pretense that it can pacify the whole gamut of political
antagonism from workers' rights to national minority
questions--itself a mistaken aim, as anyone who has digested the
above argument about the nature of politics will see--risks making it
more like a transcontinental military police force. The use of CSCE
"peacekeeping forces" is one way in which it proposes to do this, and
a precedent was set in December when such a force was dispatched to
Azerbaijan. A moment's thought should suffice to realize the enormity
of this: imagine NATO troops being called in to impose a military
solution to a disturbance--or even to preempt a potential one--within
a NATO member state. Indeed, such principles, which attribute the
highest value to stability, might even legitimate the use of a
national army against its own citizens, as in Chechnya.

In case any of these fears seem exaggerated, it should not be
forgotten that three of the key architects of the Maastricht Treaty
on European Union, François Mitterrand, Jacques Delors and John
Major, have all made extraordinary remarks about the primacy of
stability over democracy. The two Frenchmen initially welcomed the
Moscow putsch in 1991, Delors saying that it could have "positive
aspects." Indeed, he even declared to the European parliament just
after it occurred that, "We cannot unite the states of Western Europe
and at the same time encourage the breakaway of Soviet Republics," by
which he presumably meant that the European Union and the Soviet
Union were similar institutions. The pro-Serb policy of London and
Paris is similarly predicated on a preference for large political
entities over the bothersome multiplicity of small nations. No
politician has given clearer expression to this than John Major, who
declared in 1993 that, "The biggest single element behind what has
happened in Bosnia is the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the
discipline that that exerted over the ancient hatreds in the old
Yugoslavia"--a grotesque contortion of the truth, not only because
Yugoslavia ceased to be under Soviet "discipline" in 1948, but also
because communist leaders like Slobodan Milosevic, Thodor Zhivkov,
and Nicolae Ceausescu, to name but the worst and not to mention their
contemporary epigones, were themselves rabid nationalists, whose
regimes--by virtue of their very collapse!--were not stable.

It is in exactly the same vein that the Russian foreign minister,
Andrei Kozyrev, has already said--and many have echoed his
thought--that the main threat to security in Europe is from
"nationalist extremists." He has realized, by observing his Western
counterparts, that if a politician can claim that "populism" is
likely to erupt at any minute, then he can justify almost endless
amounts of governmental control over society. Kozyrev's idea is that
the CSCE will quell any such threat. But, as we have seen above,
peace denotes an equilibrium of forces between parties. A legal order
cannot be maintained without authority, that is, without the
meta-legal force accorded to it by citizens or states. An
organization which pretends that such force does not exist is perhaps
merely trying to camouflage the inevitable fact that it does. In any
case, one man's nationalist extremist is another man's freedom
fighter, as the violent overthrows of democratically elected
Presidents Gamsakhurdia in Georgia and Elchibey in Azerbaijan have
shown.

To protest against all this is not to claim that sovereign states
have the right to abuse individuals or groups within their borders.
Rather, it is to insist, against the current drift towards the
internationalization of government, that international law or policy
is not necessarily any wiser than that made by national governments.
Very often it is far more stupid, as the debacle over Yugoslavia
shows. Indeed, the CSCE's conference in Budapest in December failed
even to mention the Yugoslav war in its communique, an illustration
of how surreal international bureaucratic government quickly becomes.
Nor is international policy any less political. Moreover, at least
national politics might be democratic, and controllable by a national
parliament, while international politics, by definition, never is. It
is the task of all states to maintain peace within their borders by
policing their citizens, and to defend that internal peace from
external aggression. The CSCE's confusion of these two roles means
that it wants to assume state-like power, but without explaining in
whose name it acts.

The CSCE is also the focal point of a series of bilateral treaties
signed between the Western powers and Russia, many of which require
that the relationship between the signatory states be governed by the
commitments laid out in the CSCE documents. This is a curious manner
of submitting free foreign policy decision-making to the say-so of an
international committee. But it explains why Kozyrev has called the
CSCE and the lattice-work of treaties a "net" in which the states of
Europe are to be "entangled," arguing that it is only through such an
entanglement that stability can be achieved. In other words, foreign
policy, which for many philosophers is a paradigm at the
international level of the kind of free political action that existed
in the Greek polis, where democracy was founded, is to disappear as a
forum for free action and instead be smothered under a bureaucratic
and pseudo-legal "mechanism."

Like other utopias, this one spells the end of politics and law, for
it assumes that foreign policy can disappear. It is absurd to think
that either domestic or foreign politics can be managed by a
committee, and that disputes can be resolved by
international-bureaucratic mechanisms. Such absurdities are in
reality little but the institutionalization of political cowardice,
for they all derive from a desire to shield politicians from ever
having to take a decision for whose unwelcome consequences they might
be held responsible. Courage, as Churchill said, is the greatest of
all political virtues because it presupposes all the rest. Political
existence requires a constant, courageous struggle. If a people loses
the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, this does not
mean that politics disappears from the world. It merely means that a
weak people disappears from the world, and that its constitution is
subsumed into someone else's.

It is precisely because politics is the realm of freedom that
politics cannot be governed by prescriptive rules. It is depressing
to realize that the lesson learned by Britain and America in the
economic domain in the 1980s--that economies cannot be planned--has
been spectacularly unlearned in the political domain by continental
Europe since the Cold War. It is a modernist, constructivist conceit
to believe that political life can be planned in advance. (The CSCE's
aims to engage in "conflict-prevention" is a perfect example of this
mentality.) This is not just because political life, like economics,
is very complex. It is above all because statesmanship, like law,
contains as its fundamental principle the possibility of genuine
decision-making, i.e. the possibility that political decisions might
leave the normal framework of rules to create something exceptional.
It is hardly surprising, given that Europe's share of world trade has
declined by 25 percent in the last ten years, that Europe's economic
backwardness should spill over and influence its political reasoning
too.

For, as that other great German jurist and philosopher Leo Strauss
realized:

"What cannot be decided in advance by universal rules, what can only
be decided in the critical moment by the most competent and
conscientious statesman on the spot, can be made visible as just, in
retrospect, to all; the objective discrimination between extreme
actions which were just and extreme actions which were unjust is one
of the noblest duties of the historian."

Indeed, it is precisely the genius of the Anglo-Saxon common law
tradition to have preserved, unlike continental Europe, the
Aristotelian notion that justice inheres in individual decisions and
actions, and not in general principles. It is only in such sovereign
decisions that true statesmanship is revealed, just as it is only in
sovereign individual decisions that the virtue of the citizen is
revealed.

Sovereignty, Properly Misunderstood

Why so much attention to the CSCE, an organism which is at best in an
embryonic stage of development? The reason is that another
organization, the European Union, which is in a very mature stage of
development and apparent growth, draws on many of the same unwelcome
principles. Like the CSCE, for instance, the Maastricht Treaty is
full of "mechanisms" to enable governments to decide this or that,
especially in the domains of foreign and defense policy, as if
decision-making were a procedural matter. But, more profoundly, the
German plans for federal political union within the European Union
fit inside the CSCE's overall plans for the entire continent like a
Russian doll. This is for the same philosophical reasons as have been
outlined above.

Karl Lamers' conviction that national sovereignty has long since
become an illusion counts as one of the great accepted truths among
the Europhile cognoscenti. Indeed, the comments made about
sovereignty in the European Community are generally of an almost
unimaginable crassness and infantility. It is almost impossible to
find any modern European politician who can correctly define--or even
betray an instinctive understanding of--national sovereignty, and
there are plenty of European intellectuals who will tell you that it
is an outdated concept. Those in favor of European integration, for
instance, will tell you, in the same breath, that sovereignty is a
meaningless concept and that the nation-states have already lost it
anyway.

The argument usually goes like this: the nation-states of Europe are
economically interdependent and must react to events outside their
individual control. Therefore they are no longer sovereign. The only
way to regain their lost power (or "sovereignty") is to join forces
and act together. The former British foreign secretary, Lord (then
Sir Geoffrey) Howe, has expressed this thought by writing that
"sovereignty is a nation's practical ability to make its influence
felt in the world."

All this is deeply misguided. Far from being meaningless, sovereignty
is the definitive quality of a constitutionally independent state. If
a country is constitutionally independent, it is sovereign. A country
does not become less sovereign if it becomes less powerful. To say
that "sovereignty" is meaningless is to say that "constitution,"
"independence," and "state" are meaningless concepts as well. It is
rather like wanting to overcome the distinction between friend and
enemy.

Far from being a call for all-powerful national government, defense
of the concept of national sovereignty is the most important defense
of democracy in modern Europe. De Gaulle used to say that he
considered national sovereignty and democracy to be the same thing.
The point about national sovereignty is not that the state is either
internally or externally all-powerful (although there can, by
definition, not be a higher constitutional authority than that of a
sovereign entity), it is rather to clarify the source of the
authority which the state exercises. If the state is democratic, that
source is the people or the nation. At bottom, this inability to
understand sovereignty, and the concomitant view that it is "an
illusion," is based on a simple and worrying confusion between
authority and power, a distinction which is the cornerstone of all
legal reasoning. It is extremely worrying that all modern European
politicians, almost without exception, make this error.

This is why the CSCE's pretense to be the source of a new
constitutional order for the whole of Europe dovetails with the
proclaimed aim of some very powerful players in European politics,
most notably the German governing party, to subsume national
constitutions in a European one. Let us be clear: the weasel words
about "uniting Europe while protecting national differences," and the
widespread refusal (such as that of the French Prime Minister Edouard
Balladur) even to address the question of sovereignty, means that
what is an offer is not a clearly proclaimed intention to replace the
states of Western Europe by one super-state, but instead a legal and
political order predicated on the blurring of those fundamental
concepts which are the building blocks of law, democracy, and freedom.

The rhetoric about borders reinforces this dovetailing. It is
fashionable to say that borders are coming down all over Europe, and
unfashionable and seemingly narrow-minded to want to maintain them.
In the moments when Russia expresses hostility to the eastward
extension of NATO, for instance, it protests against "the creation of
new lines of division in Europe." But, like the others, this
political slogan ignores the legal importance of borders, whether
national or regional, as de-limiting domains of jurisdiction. In
ancient Greek, the word for "law," nomos, is derived from nemein, to
distribute, to possess (what was distributed), or to dwell--to the
extent that Heraclitus could pun on "law" and "hedge," as in, "The
people should fight for the law as for a wall." The law, indeed, was
originally identified with the boundary line between properties
(later, between cities), and even if the concept of law has evolved
since, it is clear that a domain of jurisdiction must be spatially
defined for it truly to exist. It is only in the communist mind that
a border need be a barrier.

To abolish borders (rather than to open them) or to make them so vast
and vague as to be non-existent ("from Vancouver to Vladivostock") is
ultimately to undermine the rule of law, for it risks abolishing even
the possibility of statehood. In the EU, outright federalists and
crypto-federalists are united by their failure to understand the
legal and political significance of borders. In the CSCE, there is no
proposal to abolish national borders (indeed their inviolability is
one of its central commitments) but rather the aim is to make them
irrelevant. But states, as the subjects of international law, must
exist as such if international law is to exist, and they must also
exist if domestic law is to exist.

The advantage of national sovereignty over supranational sovereignty
is that it is based on a reality, namely that pre-existing political
entity which is the nation. Nations are not founded, they grow. Even
if a state has a formal foundation date, the nation on which it is
based will already have contained a whole tapestry of habits,
conventions, rules, and historical and cultural reference points
which will enable it to exist as a political entity. It is only when
the cultural basis for political discourse exists that democracy can
obtain. A good constitution, like good law, is one which reflects
reality and does not seek to destroy it. This is why the notion that
the European parliament can ever replace national parliaments as the
holder of political legitimacy, or even as a forum for political
accountability and democracy, is naive.

The widespread misunderstanding of the inherently conservative nature of democracy is reflected in the strikingly undemocratic nature of the German proposals to construct a federal union of a "hard core" of states. First, the proposals ride a coach and horses through the principle of national self-determination, by insisting that all European policy henceforth be made by majority vote between the member states. Indeed, they even promise to provide the "hard core" with its own autochthonous constitution, and to abolish the national veto on any further constitutional and institutional developments.

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.