Page:ELO 1(1), 6–25. European public law after empires.pdf/4

Rh form of political association is arguably not the nation-state. For most of political modernity, the European states were, as a rule, empires. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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