The European State

Abstract

It is not desirable and probably not possible even to speak of a European state as one speaks of the French state or even of the American, German, or Swiss federal state. However, partisans of an integrated Europe do not seem to have their sights on any constitutional model other than the federal state. Their institutional fantasy is fixed on the “United States of Europe,” envisaged along the lines of Federal Germany or the Confédération helvétique. It is true that Switzerland, notwithstanding its modest geographical dimensions, is a successful example of a federal state organizing peaceful coexistence and cooperative solidarity among different “nationalities” within a confederation with four official languages, of which the three principal ones even appear to represent Europe in microcosm, at least as it has been constructed. Those who demand federalism, taking inspiration from the existing national models to think of a “Constitution of Europe,” do not consider a difficulty in the fact that in all these cases, the federal state that serves as implicit model is always a national state. Yet the trivial originality of such a European state (if for “state” we take the legal meaning) is that it would necessarily be supranational.