Europe and Its Empires: From Rome to the European Union*

Abstract

This article claims that the territorial structure of government results from a tension between scale and community. The benefits of scale arise from the nature of public goods, and include economic exchange, political power and protection against external shocks. Communities are double-edged in that they are characterized by parochial altruism. Altruism and social solidarity facilitate government within communities, but parochial attachments constrain government among communities. Scale and community, as theorized here, provide a setting for strategic choice. Both are in flux as patterns of human interaction change, and government itself shapes those patterns. Evidence is drawn from the five largest polities in the history of western Europe: the Roman Empire, the Frankish Empire, Napoleonic France, the Third Reich and the European Union.

‘We the People’ versus ‘We the Heads of States’: the debate on the democratic deficit of the European Union

“…However, the EU was originally established to cope with common risks, problems and concerns, above all those of securing lasting peace and economic growth (Marks 2012). Trying to force the EU to reconstruct itself in terms of the democratic logic of 'We the People' may very likely not only undermine its own policy-politics logic of 'We the Political Authorities', and thereby its capacities to deal in a politically efficient way with those high-consequence challenges that its member states cannot cope adequately with themselves (Majone 2006;Bartolini and Hix 2006).…”

“…What is today known as the EU took shape in the first place because the nation states needed a transnational system that after the Second World War could secure lasting peace, facilitate economic competitiveness and growth and enhance the welfare and well-being of the populations (Marks 2012). The EU was at the outset crafted as an output-oriented system for handling those challenges that its member states could not deal with themselves.…”

Authority Under Construction: The European Union in Comparative Political Perspective

“…Of course, some EU scholars have indeed explicitly drawn comparisons with historical forms of governance, challenging us to draw out the differences and similarities with past political orders (Ruggie, 1993;Caporaso, 1996;Marks, 1997Marks, , 2012Bartolini, 2005). A few scholars have begun explicitly to compare the EU to historical processes of state formation or state building, without assuming that the EU will or should evolve into a state (Sbragia, 1992(Sbragia, , 2005Ansell and Di Palma, 2004;Kelemen, 2007Kelemen, , 2014Mérand, 2008;Börner and Eigmüller, 2015;Menon, 2017).…”

ExplainingEuropean Disintegration

“…Similar to explanations of fragmenting or failing federations, studies of imperial decline thus offer a multitude of factors that can lead to disintegration. A theory to explain imperial collapse would quickly become ‘a theory of almost everything’ (Marks, , p. 15). Instead of providing a list of disintegrative factors, a proper explanation should provide a comprehensive yet coherent view on how these factors are interrelated in the process of (European) disintegration.…”