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21 J. Common Mkt. Stud. 57 (1982-1983)
Europe as a Confederation: The Community and the Nation-State

handle is hein.journals/jcmks21 and id is 56 raw text is: Europe as a Confederation: the Community and the Nation-State WILLIAM WALLACE The collapse of integration theory does not necessarily carry with it the collapse of European integration. In spite of oil crises, economic recession, and political instability, the European Community remains a functioning political system. Certainly, it does not function well; but few political systems have functioned well under the difficult circumstances of the 1970s, even those equipped with a full range of policies and a strong central administration. Certainly, too, it has disappointed the hopes of the more idealistic of its founders, and failed to achieve the most ambitious of its objectives. But - as will be argued below - those hopes were founded upon two linked illusions: that politics could be tamed within the European enterprise, and that national governments would allow themselves to be bypassed and undermined. Grand and rhetorical objectives are the stuff of summit conferences, as they are in the USA of inaugural speeches; intended to lift the imagination and to provide a sense of movement and direction, without necessarily committing their authors to reach their ultimate destination. European cooperation is a profoundly political process, best understood in the familiar terms of political analysis, not in the arcane language of functionalism or the loose concepts of regime theory. It is not only today's reality that is complex and messy;' the realities of politics were always so. In heroic times, perhaps, men created new federations out of a clear sense of purpose, supported by a public which shared that purpose. The myth of the making of the American constitution, in its popular form, portrays the founding fathers as men of wisdom and vision, their opponents as scattered and obscurantist. Closer examination of the record demons- trates that Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee were defending as honourable a mixture of ideals and interests as that promoted by Hamilton and Madison. The mythology of European integration has similarly endowed the statesmen of the 1950s and the electorates they led with a vision and a purpose which their successors are sadly seen to lack. The ' Stanley Hoffimann, Reflections on the nation-state in Western Europe today, see above.