Page:ELO 1(1), 6–25. European public law after empires.pdf/14

Rh The new European public law order that emerged, however, not merely presented a new vision for domestic constitutional law but also a new way of regulating interstate relations within Europe. With the collapse of the European maritime empires, European international law came to an end, yet the new ‘universal’ international law was insufficient to stabilise interstate relations within Europe. This was the view not merely of the Americans but also the elites that came to dominate Western Europe and shape its post-World War II reconstruction, namely, the Christian Democratic parties. Although there were always tensions between the views of the Americans and the European Christian Democrats, the project of reconstituting Europe proceeded from an underlying consensus that Europe had to be reconstituted with new forms of interstate as well domestic constitutional relations. The alternative they reached for was not the new world order of universal international law but rather what had always been the viable alternative to empire, namely, federation. What the Americans as well as the Christian Democratic European elites could agree on was that European interstate relations could not be reconstituted on the old idea of the balance of power that had always relied on imperial expansion outside Europe. Rather, European interstate relations had to be governed by a new federal union. Europe needed to create ‘peace by federation’, in the words of Beveridge.

In the decades after World War II, ‘Europe’ became the core project that the transnational Christian Democratic elites rallied around. Of crucial importance was the common European market, which provided the material conditions for rebuilding the European states, and thereby stabilising them. ‘Economic security’ was seen as essential not just in providing the material foundations of military defence against a communist invasion but perhaps more significantly to win ‘the battle for reconstruction’ against communism. To many people in post-war Western Europe, communism represented technological advancement and material prosperity rather than authoritarianism and dictatorship. The project of European integration, both the European Economic Community (EEC) and the ECHR, was in this way a part of a centreright political project of guarding Western Europe against a revolution through the voting booth. The creation of an economically prosperous European common market was to be the foundation for a new ‘anti-totalitarian’ reconstitution of Europe. The EEC was understood as a means to promote the material reconstruction and welfare that would allow the Member States to defend themselves from the ‘totalitarian threat’ of communism. Within the new