What Union Costs: Federalist and Anti-Federalist Lessons for Europe

Geopolitical rupture has a way of returning constitutional questions to the foreground. Russia’s war against Ukraine, renewed debates over European rearmament, and growing uncertainty about long-term U.S. security guarantees have all forced Europeans to ask whether the institutional structure of the European Union is adequate to a harsher strategic age. Behind immediate policy disputes lies a more fundamental question: what kind of political union can Europe build, and what constitutional costs would such a project entail?

The American founding offers no ready-made blueprint for answering that question. Europe in the twenty-first century is not the United States in 1787, and the European Union is not a state in waiting. Yet the Federalist and Anti-Federalist debates remain instructive because they bring into view enduring tensions that accompany all projects of union-building: the tension between effective collective capacity and the preservation of local self-government, the tension between fiscal and military power and democratic restraint, and the tension between legal integration and political authorization. The enduring value of the American debate lies less in imitation than in clarification.

This piece argues that the American founding should be read as a constitutional argument about the conditions and limits of union. In the Federalist papers, Hamilton (No. 23) and Madison (No. 10) insisted that a durable union required an energetic center capable of overcoming fragmentation, safeguarding public credit, and containing the destructive effects of faction. The Anti-Federalists on the other side (in Essay 1 and Essay 5 in particular; if interested a critical apparatus is available here) warned that such a center might itself become a threat to liberty by weakening accountability, hollowing out local democracy, and concentrating fiscal power too far from the citizenry.. Taken together, these positions illuminate the central dilemma that Europe now faces: how to create sufficient common power to act in a dangerous world without undermining the democratic and constitutional plurality on which the Union rests.

Union and the Problem of Scale

The constitutional argument at the American founding was shaped by a problem that remains familiar today: how can a large and diverse political order govern effectively without becoming either impotent or domineering? The Federalists regarded the weakness of the Articles of Confederation as evidence that loose coordination among states was not enough to secure public safety, fiscal reliability, or coherent action. In Federalist No. 23, Hamilton argued that a union entrusted with common defense must possess powers commensurate with its responsibilities, since a government denied adequate means cannot reliably achieve indispensable ends. The logic of this argument is not merely administrative. It suggests that constitutional design must begin from the tasks a political order is expected to perform.

Madison’s argument in Federalist No. 10 adds a second layer to this case for union. He famously described the unequal distribution of property as a persistent source of faction and argued that a large republic would better control the effects of faction than small republics vulnerable to intense and concentrated interests. The extended republic, on this view, would not eliminate conflict but disperse and mediate it through scale, representation, and institutional complexity. Political enlargement was thus defended not as an enemy of liberty, but as one of its conditions.

This Federalist logic has an obvious relevance for Europe. A union that aims to provide defense coordination, strategic investment, economic stabilization, and geopolitical weight cannot rely indefinitely on purely decentralized decision-making. Where security threats intensify and collective goods become more demanding, the need for central fiscal and administrative instruments grows stronger. The Federalist lesson is therefore not simply that more power is desirable at the center, but that a union unable to act decisively may fail in ways that ultimately damage liberty and stability more profoundly than carefully bounded centralization would.

Property, Liberty, and Constitutional Order

The Federalist defense of stronger union was closely connected to a broader understanding of liberty, property, and the purposes of government. Madison’s 1792 essay “Property” is especially revealing because it expands the concept of property beyond material possessions to include opinions, religious liberty, personal security, and the free use of one’s faculties. This broader understanding matters because it links the protection of liberty to the protection of a sphere of individual independence that government must secure impartially.

According to Madison in “Property”, government does not merely defend external possessions. It protects what individuals may properly call their own, whether that means land, conscience, labor, or bodily security. This helps explain why American constitutional development has often treated interference with property, contract, and economic freedom as a particularly sensitive constitutional matter. Once liberty and property are conceptually fused, taxation, redistribution, regulation, and labor law can appear not only as ordinary policy questions but as potential incursions into a protected domain of personal independence.

This constitutional vocabulary had long-term consequences. As classically argued by Gordon S. Wood (1969) and more recently examined by Paul Frymer (2017) in terms of American imperialism, this way of speaking about liberty and property contributed to a political tradition in which property and market freedom acquired unusual normative weight, while positive social rights remained comparatively weakly grounded in constitutional language. In comparative perspective, this is especially important for Europe. Many European constitutional orders have treated property as a right, but one embedded within a broader framework of social obligation, public purpose, and welfare-state legitimacy. The American founding therefore reveals a different constitutional grammar, one that privileges negative liberty and security against encroachment more strongly than affirmative guarantees of provision.

Anti-Federalist Warnings

The Anti-Federalists approached the same constitutional moment from the opposite direction. They did not deny the need for order, nor were they indifferent to liberty or property. Their concern was that the proposed Constitution created a national authority too distant from the people and too weakly checked by local forms of accountability. In Brutus No. 1, the Anti-Federalist case begins from the claim that republican self-government depends on political scale. Representatives can know the interests and sentiments of the people only where the political community remains small enough to sustain meaningful oversight and civic attachment.

This was not merely a nostalgic defense of localism. It was a structural warning about what happens when authority becomes remote. Political distance, for the Anti-Federalists (No. 1), undermines accountability, encourages elite self-aggrandizement, and weakens the practical ability of citizens to resist abuses of power. Their argument therefore speaks directly to a problem that continues to shape contemporary European politics: institutions may be legally legitimate and functionally necessary, yet still appear socially distant and politically thin.

The Anti-Federalist critique becomes even sharper in discussions of taxation. In Brutus No. 5, the federal taxing power appears not simply as an instrument of governance but as a transformative concentration of authority. The power to reach every source of revenue, down to ordinary necessities, would allow the center to penetrate deeply into social life, weaken the fiscal autonomy of subordinate units, and establish administrative machinery capable of exercising coercive supervision over the population. In this argument, fiscal capacity is never just technical capacity. It is constitutional power in its most consequential form.

That insight remains highly relevant to Europe. Any move toward common debt, shared defense spending, coordinated taxation, or central budgetary instruments changes not only policy output but also the balance of political authority within the Union. The Anti-Federalists remind us that the creation of common power can strengthen a union while simultaneously risking alienation, distrust, and the erosion of intermediate political attachments. Their enduring importance lies in the insistence that capacity without proximity may solve one problem while deepening another.

Democratic Authorization

One of the most difficult questions raised by projects of union concerns authorization: who empowers the center, and on what basis? For Gordon S. Wood (1969), the American founding confronted this issue under highly exclusionary conditions, but it nonetheless claimed to speak in the name of a single people. Bernard Bailyn (1969, in a classic analysis of the ideological origins of the revolution shows that this claim was always partial and contested, yet it mattered because it provided a constituent frame within which debates about sovereignty, authority, and obligation could unfold.

Europe’s situation is much more complex. The European Union has developed through treaties, courts, market integration, and intergovernmental bargains rather than through a single constituent act. Its legitimacy is therefore layered and dispersed: it rests on member states, national electorates, supranational law, technocratic performance, and judicial enforcement. This complexity gives the Union flexibility, but it also creates a chronic problem of democratic intelligibility. When integration deepens in areas such as defense, industrial policy, migration, or fiscal coordination, the question of who has authorized these steps becomes politically unavoidable.

The American case suggests that this problem cannot be solved by institutional design alone. Durable union requires not only capacity but a credible account of political membership and shared obligation. A union that governs more intensively must also justify itself more persuasively. This does not mean that Europe needs to replicate a classic federal founding. It does mean that integration based mainly on functional necessity may eventually run into limits if citizens cannot recognize themselves as participants in the political order being built.

Courts, Rights, and Delayed Conflict

The American constitutional tradition also illustrates the limits of legal settlement. Founding-era arguments about liberty, property, and power did not disappear once the Constitution was ratified. They were carried forward into later disputes over taxation, labor, regulation, federal authority, and social policy, often in juridified form. Because the founding, as seen both in Federalist No. 10 and Madison’s “Property,” constitutionalized fear of both majoritarian redistribution and centralized coercion, later political conflicts were frequently translated into disputes about constitutional boundaries rather than treated as ordinary democratic disagreements.

This dynamic matters for Europe as well. Courts can stabilize commitments, secure rights, and protect common rules, but they cannot substitute for democratic settlement where underlying conflicts concern identity, solidarity, redistribution, and the purposes of political union. Judicial integration may preserve functional coherence while also displacing public contestation. The result can be a widening gap between constitutional development and democratic authorization.

The broader American trajectory reinforces this point. The Civil War, Reconstruction, and the New Deal all reshaped the meaning of union because the founding settlement had left crucial questions unresolved. Issues of coercion, membership, rights, and public responsibility were not settled once and for all in Philadelphia. They returned in new forms under the pressure of crisis, social transformation, and political struggle. The lesson is not that founding moments are unimportant, but that they rarely eliminate the need for later constitutional reconstruction.

Lessons for Europe

What, then, does the American experience actually teach Europe? First, it suggests that union under conditions of danger and interdependence requires real common capacities. As both Hamilton (in No. 23) and Madison (in No. 44) argue, a political order that cannot defend itself, mobilize resources, or respond coherently to crisis will struggle to preserve either legitimacy or liberty over time. Second, it shows that such capacities are never cost-free. Centralization alters the balance between center and periphery, law and politics, effectiveness and accountability.

Third, the American debate highlights that the deepest constitutional questions concern not only institutional competence but the normative vocabulary of the polity. As not only Frymer and Wood argue, but also J.G.A. Pocock’s (1975) The Machiavellian Moment amply shows, a constitutional order that speaks predominantly in the language of property, negative liberty, and suspicion of power will discipline politics differently from one that also grants affirmative weight to social inclusion, public purpose, and welfare guarantees. Europe’s constitutional traditions have often been more open to this latter grammar. That difference may prove decisive if deeper union is to be justified not only as a security necessity but also as a socially legitimate political project.

Finally, the American case advises both ambition and restraint. The Federalists were right that dispersed authority can produce paralysis at moments when coordinated action is indispensable. The Anti-Federalists were right that distant power can erode the very democratic life it claims to secure. Europe’s challenge is therefore not to choose one side of the eighteenth-century American debate against the other. It is to recognize that both identified permanent features of union-building that remain in tension and must be managed rather than solved once and for all.

Conclusion

The Federalist and Anti-Federalist debates remain instructive because they reveal the constitutional dilemmas that arise whenever a political union seeks to become more capable in response to external danger and internal fragmentation. They show that questions of fiscal power, coercive authority, democratic legitimacy, and civic attachment cannot be separated from one another. Stronger union may be necessary, but it is never politically innocent.

For Europe, the American founding offers neither a template to follow nor a cautionary tale to reject outright. Its real value lies in clarifying the stakes. A union that acquires greater strategic capacity must decide not only what powers to centralize, but how to authorize them, how to limit them, and how to connect them to a political community that can recognize those powers as its own. That is the constitutional question now returning to Europe with renewed urgency.