Amid Faltering Plans for Unity, Europe Needs own ‘Federalist Papers’ : Maastricht: When mapping out concepts of union, leaders forgot the inspirational debate and vision provided by America’s Founding Fathers.

The main problem with Europe is that we fail to learn from the one democracy that managed to put together a lasting federal state by consent. As Europe’s leaders gathered Friday at the Birmingham summit to salvage the foundering prospects of unity, this stubborn refusal to learn from America was on display again.

Europe is now where the United States was in the 1780s, and the latest Euro-folly is to try to build a coherent continental state system without going through the elementary precaution of first writing the “Federalist Papers.”

Together, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay presented more than a cogent and elegant argument for the federal principle of “E Pluribus Unum.” They gave the embryonic nation a public debate, and a blazing inspiration that explained why the United States was such a marvelous, visionary idea.

“It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question,” Hamilton began, “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

Contrast this with the pettiness of the summit on Europe’s future. The lesson of the Danish vote against and the French vote so narrowly for the Maastricht Treaty on European unity is that Europe’s voters have been neither persuaded by debate nor inspired by vision.

The civil war that Maastricht has provoked inside Britain’s Conservative government, and the anguish among Germans who fear their deutsche mark is at risk, reveals the enduring power of Europe’s old tribal concerns and totems. Because Europe has had no “Federalist Papers,” no eloquent and passionate Founding Fathers, the entire venture is bogged down in nationalist squabbles.

Cheap U.S. and Polish coal and non-polluting natural gas are two things nobody can blame on the European Community. That has not stopped Britain’s coal miners, faced with virtual extinction, from organizing protest meetings at Friday’s European summit.

It would have been the same had the summit taken place in Rome, where strikes and mass protest marches have already begun against the Italian government’s austerity program. Had the summit been held in Germany, the new Europe’s real power center, then neo-Nazis and former East Germans aggrieved at “economic discrimination” would have vied for the best spots to demonstrate.

If Europe’s leaders had gathered in Paris, French farmers would doubtless have dumped their characteristic “manure protests” outside the palace steps, to warn them not to tamper with swollen farm subsidies. Just to keep their tractors in training, they dropped their pungent loads in cities across France, anyway.

But no issue infuriating the British, Germans, French and Italians has much to do with the European Community, or the tottering prospects for European unity that the EC leaders gathered in Birmingham to save. The French farmers are worried about U.S. food exports, the Germans about refugees from the East, the Italians about government spending cuts and the British about the dreadful state of the mismanaged economy.

Because the chairmanship of the European Community rotates among the 12 members, Friday’s summit was convened by Britain’s Prime Minister John Major. He has just fought off a revolt against the Maastricht Treaty at the Conservative Party’s annual conference earlier this month. Major is also trying to mend fences with Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl, after the British accused German bankers of sabotaging the pound sterling to hurl the whole Exchange Rate Mechanism into confusion.

This was serious, because the ERM was meant to be the halfway-house toward an eventual single European currency, one of the treaty’s two main provisions. The other was the commitment to move toward political unity, meaning a single defense and foreign policy. We have seen how miserable a failure that has been, with Europe’s irresolute response to the war in what used to be Yugoslavia.

The objective at Friday’s Euro-summit was to paper over all these cracks. The European leaders sought to reassure German bankers, British Conservatives, French farmers, Danish skeptics and Italian strikers that Maastricht would not be so strong a commitment as all were assured it was when the treaty was negotiated last year.

The mechanism of this emollience is one of those ugly new words Europe seems to coin: subsidiarity . This vague principle means that the Euro-bureaucrats in Brussels should not assume any powers better left to national and local governments.

Subsidiarity is also the mechanism by which Major hopes to hold his warring party factions together. In Paris, it is the French Socialist Party’s hope of avoiding complete electoral disaster next year. But nowhere in Europe does it amount to the kind of rallying cry sent out by Hamilton, Jay and Madison in 1787. Nor does it begin to address the urgency of the current Euro-crisis.

The new European idea, so far, is based on the attempt to create a single market. But the core of Europe still remains the old idea of a protectionist bloc, subsidizing its farmers to be self-sufficient in food and to keep out cheap food from the rest of the world. Europe remains a Zollverein, a Customs Union, run by bureaucrats who still wear 12 different national uniforms.

If Europe had its “Federalist Papers,” the defensive huddle in Birmingham would have been something far more inspirational.

If Europe had its Hamilton, there would be bold appeals to take advantage of our 12 national tongues and insist every European school graduate be bilingual, starting with the children going into primary schools this year. If Europe had its John Jay, there would be some real federation-building, with demands that every professional and vocational qualification include the experience of living and working in another European country for at least a year.

If Europe had its Madison, we would hear a clamorous demand for the central new institution of Europe to be its elected Parliament, invested with real powers, instead of the current secretive conspiracy of government between the Brussels bureaucrats and the constant Councils of Ministers of the various nation states. As Madison argued in Federalist Paper 63: “The difference most relied on between the American and other republics consists in the principle of representation, which is the pivot on which the former move.”

That principle of representation, of building a democracy, was the core of the intensely practical vision laid out by America’s Founding Fathers. The absence of any such vision, among 12 jealous national governments grappling with recession and tribal animosities, is what makes Birmingham’s Euro-summit such a pettifogging, uninspiring affair. In 1787, America had great men; Europe is floundering amid the politics of pygmies.