Malcolm Lowe has written a highly engaging opinion piece for the Gatestone Institute explaining how the project of the European Union has attempted to replicate American-style federalism, and has ultimately been failing in these efforts. Of course no small part of this has to do with the fact that, as diverse as the fifty states of the American union may well be, the nations of Europe are radically more diverse. Out of that diversity a reactionary nationalism is being sustained, one that refuses to be quelled by the post-nationalist European project. Still, Lowe explains how many of the EU’s failings in its attempt to duplicate the U.S. stem from structural and organizational problems. The EU’s democracy deficit is just one very striking way in which European federalists have failed to live up to the standard set by their American counterparts.

On further reflection, however, the lack of democracy witnessed in the EU is not merely consequential. Rather, the favoring of bureaucracy over democracy stems from a core ideological difference. Whereas America was a nation founded around a positive ideal of the liberty of the individual, the EU has arisen as a response to a perceived problem, and in that sense has a negative starting point. For European federalists the problem is believed to be that of nations and the wars they engage in; hence the EU’s genesis in the 1950s as the European Coal and Steel Community—the point being that the very materials necessary for warfare would be confiscated and held collectively.

Initially, the emphasis on free trade alienated much of the left from the European project. Yet, as the anti-nationalist elements of this project gradually became more pronounced, the left would become the primary advocate for a federal Europe. Indeed, several key figures from the radical student movement of the ’60s and ’70s—such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit—would later assume important positions in driving the European project forward. And so the vast bureaucracy of the EU would soon enough become a tool by which progressives could advance their agenda. The proposed EU constitution of 2004 sought to regulate just about every conceivable area of life for Europeans. In this way the project had become utopian on two accounts; first in its promise to end war and the resentments of national rivalry so as to usher in a kind of universal brotherhood of man, and secondly by regulating daily life in accordance with more “enlightened” principles.

Whereas the structure of government in the U.S. seeks to protect against tyranny by investing legislative powers at the state level, the EU seeks to drain away the power of the elected parliaments of the various European states, accumulating it in the hands of a centralized bureaucracy that believes it knows how to use this power for a higher good. This is just one of many observable differences. While America has consistently sought to bolster its national identity around a set of values and the American way of life, the EU shuns the notion of national identity, and its president Herman Van Rompuy has spoken gushingly of the prospect of world government. Nor does the EU share the American emphasis on freedom of religion and freedom of expression. Censorship of that which is deemed politically incorrect is now the norm in Europe and the EU could be said to be at best ambivalent about religion.  

The anti-Americanism that is prevalent among parts of European society not only rejects much of American culture—dismissing it as crass materialism—but it clarifies around a rejection of American foreign policy. This is not simply driven by the usual leftist hostility to militarism or Western interventionism, but more fundamentally it stems from ideas about the end of history and how the world should be run. Rejecting the notion of great power politics, or the idea that there might be a good side and a bad side in a conflict, the European federalists are not merely post-nationalists, but rather they are such because they are also post-history. For the EU federalists, history is not still being made, the end point is clear, it now only has to be universally formalized.

Malcolm Lowe’s piece makes some very interesting points. But it would be mistaken to think that European federalists tried to recreate America and have simply gotten stuck halfway. What they have been trying to create is an alternative to the United States; an anti-America.