Will the Europeans Seize Their “Once-in- History Opportunity”? — Comments on James M. Buchanan’s Essay “Europe’s Constitutional Opportunity

Abstract

In 1990, shortly after the the Iron Curtain fell, reversing the division of Europe, James Buchanan published an optimistic essay on Europe’s constitutional future. In his estimation “Europe is now presented with a historically unique opportunity to achieve that greatness which has so long remained unrealized” (1990,1). His proposal involves a “federal union within which members of the separate units co-operate for the achievement of widely recognized and commonly shared objectives, those of internal (intra-European) peace and economic prosperity, within political arrangements that ensure individual liberties and, at the same time, allow for the maximal practicable achievement of standards of justice”. The constitutional requirements for peace and prosperity according to Buchanan are constitutional guarantees of free trade inside and outside the union (p. 16), a monetary constitution based on competing national central banks plus equal rights for all European citizens to make transactions in whatever currency they prefer (p. 13) and, finally, a federal structure for the union, in which the member states share sovereignty, yet at the same time they should not fall into the centralization trap as the American states did in the post-Lincoln era (p. 6 and 17).