A More Perfect Union? American Lessons for Europe at a Crossroads
The invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s rearmament debates, and the uncertain future of American security guarantees have made the adequacy of Europe’s institutions hard to ignore. The deeper question — what kind of union Europe needs, and can build — has returned with new urgency.
The essays gathered here ask what the American experience — more particularly the debates between federalists and anti-federalists — can teach about the costs, limits, and possibilities of building a union, and whether those lessons travel to Europe at all. Some contributors find in the American case, and in the debates that produced it, real resources for thinking about Europe’s fiscal and political capacities. Others are more skeptical: they question whether the analogy holds, or argue that what the American path required — in scale, coercion, and lost accountability — is exactly what Europe should avoid repeating. Still others ask whether the founding was ever as coherent as its admirers have assumed.
We didn’t ask contributors to agree, and they don’t. That disagreement mirrors, in miniature, the unresolved argument at the heart of the European project itself.
Finding Europe’s “We the People” Moment
Dale Mineshima-Lowe (Parami University) argues that the United States’ founding experiences can shed light on where the EU needs to focus its energies to strengthen its political union.
Size and Democracy: Why the Federalist Papers Are Not a Blueprint for a More Democratic Europe
Dirk Jörke (TU Darmstadt) argues that since The (U.S.) Constitution led to a loss of democracy, primarily because of the size of the new political space, Federalist’s ideas should not be regarded as a blueprint for democratizing the European Union.
An Upper House: Anti-democratic Privilege or Savior of Republicanism?
Michael Weinman (Indiana University) Michael Weinman examines contemporary critiques of the United States Senate as an antidemocratic vestige of the slaveholding character of the Early American Republic and imagines how Publius would reply, based on the arguments of Federalist Nos. 62-63.
Imperial by Design: Is the US Model Worth Emulating?
Eva Marlene Hausteiner (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg) argues that far from serving as a historical safeguard against empire, U.S. federalism has been entangled with colonial and imperial practices since the nation’s founding—a finding that should give pause to those who assume federal structures, including a prospective European framework, are inherently immune to imperial drift.
