🇪🇺Post-American Europe, Part I: The Deep Historical Logic of European Unity
From medieval rivalry to the Pax Democratica: why Europe’s unique political ecology was always destined for integration, and why it must now defend that legacy alone
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The alliance between the United States and the main Western European democracies have been among the most stable and solid geopolitical blocs in recorded history. After the 2024 election, the United States has decided to withdraw from military and economic commitments in the Atlantic basin, and there is a substantial risk that even its democratic governance can be replaced. In a series of three articles, I will try to, first, provide context, and then strategic advice to address this challenge.
In this first article, I examine the historical roots of the European Union (EU): Europe was an ecology of competing, often warring jurisdictions that, after the Second World War, were integrated into the American Pax Democratica. Our generational challenge is to maintain the greatest American legacy: the EU.
In the second article, the complex governance of the EU is characterised as a nomocracy, a harmonising and consociational confederacy which is less efficient but more robust than the other large international actors. Minimalistic institutional reform is proposed to strengthen European democracies in the age of populism: first, by embracing parliamentarianism over presidentialism and by using collegiality and sortition for High Court nominations.
After these contextual articles, the final instalment proposes policies to address technological dependency and the foreign policy stance of the post-American Europe.
European history before 1945: balanced, networked and synchronised
The historic periods of rapid material and cultural progress (the so-called efflorescences) are characterised by an ecology of political entities in mutual conflict, and internal regimes where increasing state capacity is balanced by the translation of political power from a small extractive group to larger and production-oriented political coalitions.
The Greco-Roman efflorescence (-600 to 28 AD), the medieval Italian and Hanseatic republics, and the Great Divergence between the West and the Rest (1450-circa 2000) are the products of intensified interstate conflict and deepening republican governance.
In “Dynamic among Nations,” Hilary Root summarises and modernises this old thesis with a brilliant secular comparison between a centralised China and polycentric Europe.
On four different occasions, the Chinese state was able to unify its geopolitical basin of attraction. After each Golden Age, a period of extractive intensification and decay followed, ultimately leading to a collapse as deep as the Fall of Rome.
In comparison, the European states after Rome were never able to fully unify, leading to recurring tensions and warfare. Yet, despite this habitual state of conflict, a system of competitive power centres allowed Europe to regenerate even after the most intense shocks and destructive wars.
European medieval politics was characterised by three major conflicts: the struggle between the King and the nobility, the tension between the Church and the secular world, and the pre-national struggles among various European kings. These three axes made late-medieval Europe into a political ecology as competitive as that of the Hellenic world at the end of the Archaic period.
For the entire Modern and Contemporary Periods ( following the Hundred Years' War), England actively counterbalanced the other major European powers, such as Spain under Philip II, France under Louis XIV and Napoleon, and Germany in the two World Wars. The "balance of Europe" doctrine prevented a premature European unification, saving the ecology of competing jurisdictions that were crucial to the Great Divergence.
Even when the bourgeois order replaced the feudal system, the networked structure of European international politics and the cultural and economic synchronisation of national histories remained and formed an invisible structure.
It was upon these foundations of quasi-nationhood that the EU was initially established, creating a new era of cooperation and integration among the politically fragmented but culturally synchronised states of Europe.
The European branch of the Pax Democratica system
An entire academic literature, dating back to Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, has attempted to explain the stylised fact that mature democracies "do not wage war against each other", that is, the so-called “Pax Democratica”.
However, the 19th century presents a paradox: it was both an era of political liberalisation and rising international tensions, ultimately culminating in World War 1. Most notably, the opposing alliances in that earth-shattering conflict were largely composed of liberalised states, and the global economy was experiencing a high point of free trade and international economic integration.
Something was very clearly lacking in the late 19th-century globalisation1.
On the other hand, after the Second World War, the United States provided military protection, imposed democratic regimes and integrated its own economy with those of its European allies.
Beyond the sheer momentum of the United States, there were fundamental forces that reinforced the Pax Democratica in postwar Europe: Tony Judt, in his monumental “Postwar”, suggested that massive population exchanges after the II World War made post-war nations more homogeneous and politically viable.
Additionally, the land factor (in the Ricardian sense, that is, agricultural and mining land), which has been the main source of elite income throughout the entirety of recorded history, became marginal in the mid-20th century, making the conquest of “the indestructible powers of the Earth” less attractive.
Finally, the American anti-imperialist principle of “no taxation without representation” makes democratic annexation deeply counterproductive: by giving the right to vote to a conquered people, a democratic invader imports political turmoil into their own system; under “no taxation without representation,” fiscal assets are earmarked with political liabilities, and conquest therefore becomes undesirable. Even an extremely simple and successful case of democratic annexation (the East German absorption) has proven to have some destabilising consequences.
In postwar Europe, a combination of economic development, the Welfare State, demographic stabilisation, and federal mechanisms (to normalise sub-national cultural specificities) defused social discontent and the geopolitical fractures of the European past.
Moreover, through financial investments or the multinational presence of companies, the American Hegemony created a system of common capitalist interests that has substituted the classical belligerence of mercantilist capitalism.
Before its universalisation around 1991, the transatlantic community was the successful embryo of what we know as ‘Globalisation’. To some extent, the EU has been a “doughnut confederation” because its centre was the non-participating United States.
Now, the void has turned from formal to material, and our generation must defend the heritage of the American Hegemony without its founding member.
Arturo Macías is an Economist at the Spanish Central Bank. He has made several academic contributions on voting mechanisms, natural resource economics, and the mind-body problem, and regularly writes on the Effective Altruism Forum. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily coincide with those of Banco de España or the Eurosystem.
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See “El problema de la expansion republicana” (Revista de Occidente, June 2022) for a detailed development of this argument.
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Very interesting. I've cross-posted it. I wonder if you share the concern I raised: the EU's lack of a stable center of legitimate power.
Arturo, gracias for this "A short history of Europe" text with important reflections and historical moments. Have you read or are you familiar with Ulrich Beck's ideas and arguments in "Cosmopolitan Europe"? It is about both the EU's development as well as the EU in relation to our world in general.