In a speech titled "Democracy in Europe," Dr. Lawrence Siedentop, politics department chair at Oxford University, described the history of Europe's federalist heritage and future prospects yesterday.
"What form will the European Union take?" he asked. Furthermore, how does one curtail the indefinite centralization of governmental power while maintaining a regional sense of "moral justice?"
Taking a historical approach, Siedentop spent the first half of his speech correlating the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville and Montesquieu with the political sentiment of their time.
Democracy was considered an impossibility for large populaces and aristocracy a veritable necessity, he said.
According to Siedentop, aristocracy was an effective system because it maintained order by preserving individual roles in a small government and by providing recognizable outlets for public acceptance and dissent.
The historical pattern of nations without aristocracies was an unfavorable one. The advent of empires resulted in the replacement of despotic aristocratic control with the "remote sentiment" of ruling "strangers," he said.
According to popular political mindset of the time, such bureaucratic leadership contributed to the erosion of common language, the blurring of local culture, and the threatening of social privilege, Seidentop said.
However, as De Tocqueville pointed out, the American colonies had a common language, a localized system of government that merely awaited the establishment of a federal overseer, and a "consensus of justice" derived from the Christian tradition, Siedentop said.
Deriving its basis from the U.S. model for central government, local autonomy, and legal system, post-revolutionary France created a new political system. However, unlike the U.S., France did not create a federalist state, he said.
According to Siedentop, France's "technocratic" system of government will ultimately be used as a model for the European Union. The political systems of other European nations are too incompatible with Europe's heterogeneous makeup.
For instance, the conflicts associated with the United Kingdom's entrenched personal history and Germany's overwhelming federal authority rendered them individually ineffective, he said.
The keys to developing a successful European Union lay outside the immediate realm of the political model, Siedentop said. These keys to European unification are sovereignty, common language, an effective jury system, and a lawyer-based political class.
Siedentop said that sovereignty was widely dependent on the ability of citizens to give up cynicism and have confidence in the legal system.
Since English is rapidly becoming the second language of most European countries, it could easily serve as a sort of universal adapter, he said.
Europe is likely to adopt France's legal system, he said. And a lawyer-based political class would be an inevitable result of such a litigious society.
This is important because an effective jury system and lawyer political class "would defend the importance of local customs," he said.
Such a development would hardly be a "conspiracy by the French" to impose their value system on all of Europe, but rather a natural transgression influenced by modern political situations and mindsets, he said.
