Social Europe: Sovereignty: A False Friend In The Defence Of National Identity

However, in both contexts, the word has been the focus of disabling paradoxes. Nationally, the idea of the ‘separation of powers’ has meant that, in liberal democracies at least, there is no sovereign, in the sense of an ultimate holder of legal and political power. Internationally, diplomacy and war have meant that no island-state has ever been entire of itself, let alone equal to all others. States have never stopped interfering in each other’s internal affairs, politically and economically and through the use of armed force, and, on the other hand, they have never stopped inventing ever more complex rules and systems for making their restless co-existence possible and profitable. [...]

The consequence of all this is that traditional ideas of constitutionalism have had to be revised. National constitutional systems now flow seamlessly into the international constitutional system, and vice versa. The two constitutional systems are now inseparable. That is the origin of the European Union seen, on the one hand, as an international-national constitutional union, responding to the multiple disasters of the first half of the 20th century, and seen, other the other hand, as an effort to share the political and economic economies of scale latent in our local co-existence, in response to a world that Europe no longer dominates but which, on the contrary, poses a huge challenge to the survival and flourishing of the European countries, individually and collectively. [...]

European integration might serve to overcome the worst aspects of the 19th century invention of aggressive nationalism. Patriotism is a profound human experience that did not need to be invented. Love of a precious source of one’s identity cannot be overridden by law and government, however rational they might otherwise be. It has certainly been abused and manipulated in the service of nationalism. In the context of European integration, the word ‘sovereignty’ has been used to express resistance to what is seen as a threat to a cherished sense of collective identity other than citizenship of the EU, a citizenship which is still a perilously weak form of self-identifying. Europe contains many stronger forms of self-identifying, including the collective self-identifying of the citizens of each member state and the self-identifying of the multiple peoples present within each of the member states.

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