form of political association is arguably not the nation-state. For most of political modernity, the European states were, as a rule, empires.[1] The great land empires that collapsed after World War I were unions of several relatively autonomous juridical, political and territorial entities that ruled over several ‘peoples’ speaking multiple languages and belonging to multiple religious denominations.[2] Within the maritime empires that held on a few decades longer, the European metropoles were for the most part dwarfed by the number and size of their oversees subjects and territories.[3] The metropolitan European ‘people’ was generally a minority compared to the colonial population also governed, directly or indirectly, by the European states, albeit by different laws and with fewer rights.[4] Until the end of the ‘age of empire’ with World War I, European nation-states – one people, one territory, one ruling authority – were the exception rather than the rule.[5] It was only after the ‘Great War’ that proper nation-states were created on a large scale in Eastern Europe in the lands of the now former Habsburg Empire, Ottoman Empire and German Empire. These new nation-states, however, only survived for roughly two decades before they were annexed during the imperial conquests of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.[6] With the exception of Austria, all the Central and Eastern European nation-states that had been created after World War I did not emerge as ‘sovereign’ states after World War II but were rather under the more or less direct rule of the Soviet Union.
In contrast to nation-states, empires are composite legal and political entities that combine or transcend aspects of domestic and international law and politics.[7] What this means is that composite legal and political entities are the historical default, not unitary, sovereign nation-states. If we take into account that political modernity has been overwhelmingly shaped by the political form of the empire, the notion that Europe is today governed by a legal and political system that does not conform to the model of the sovereign nation-state already appears less unique. If we accept that composite legal and political entities are not exceptional, we are forced to conclude that if the EU is unique, it is not because it is a composite legal and political entity.[8]
However, within the study of European integration and EU law, it is generally maintained that the EU is unique exactly because its constitutional nature calls into question the principles of
- ↑ As Gurminder K Bhambra, ‘The Current Crisis of Europe: Refugees, Colonialism, and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism’ 23 (2017) European Law Journal 395, 404 put it: ‘[M]ost European states were imperial states as much as they were national states – and often prior to or alongside becoming national states – and so the political community of the state was much wider and more stratified than is usually acknowledged’. See also Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (University of Chicago Press 2005).
- ↑ Pieter M Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2016); Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (Yale University Press 2003); Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History ch 11.
- ↑ For a global history of empire, see Burbank and Cooper Empires in World History. For a long durée history of European maritime empires, see David B Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415–1980 (Yale University Press 2000). See also Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires.
- ↑ Unlike federations, Michael Doyle, Empires 36 writes, empires ‘are not organized on the basis of political equality among societies or individuals. The domain of empire is a people subject to unequal rule. One nation’s government determines who rules another society’s political life’. See also Bhambra, ‘The Current Crisis of Europe’ 401.
- ↑ Andreas Wimmer and Brian Min, ‘From Empire to Nation-State: Explaining Wars in the Modern World, 1816–2001’ 71 (2006) American Sociological Review 867, 870.
- ↑ Timothy Snyder, ‘Integration and Disintegration: Europe, Ukraine, and the World’ 74 (2015) Slavic Review 695; Mazower, Dark Continent; Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (Allen Lane 2017) 39–41; Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History 450–1.
- ↑ Olivier Beaud, ‘Federation and Empire: About a Conceptual Distinction of Political Forms’ in Amnon Lev (ed), The Federal Idea: Public Law between Governance and Political Life (Hart Publishing 2016); Olivier Beaud, ‘Propos Introductifs’ 14 (2015) Jus Politicum [http://juspoliticum.com/article/Propos-introductifs-970.html]; Doyle, Empires 34–6.
- ↑ For two different arguments to that effect, see Signe Rehling Larsen, The Constitutional Theory of the Federation and the European Union (Oxford University Press 2021); Jan Zielonka, Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union (Oxford University Press 2006).
