Europe’s Flickering Philadelphia Moment
Europe’s Flickering Philadelphia Moment
Russell L. Riley
Associate Professor and Research Fellow
University of Virginia
If the present moment be lost it is hard to say what may be our fate.
James Madison, in Philadelphia, to Thomas Jefferson, in Paris
6 September 1787
Over a year and a half after French and Dutch voters stunned Europe’s political elites
by saying no to a proposed continental constitution, European leaders remain unable
to agree on a path out of the wreckage. Some have called for scrapping entirely the
constitutional experiment as a failed and costly diversion. Better, they say, to redirect
the continent’s political energies into more fruitful areas of cooperation, such as internal
market cohesion. But others very much disagree and continue to seek ways around the
formidable obstacles created by two negative votes in a process requiring unanimous
consent. In September 2006, Germany’s foreign minister declared that one of his
country’s highest priorities during its term as European Union president in 2007 will
be to breathe new life into the rejected charter.1 The to-and-fro among the contenders
for the constitution’s fate has—with the help of an occasionally hyperbolic European
press—evoked images of Monty Python, featuring running arguments about whether
the constitution is dead or alive . . . or not dead yet.2
Although these developments have been little followed in the United States, they
are, in fact, the stuff of James Madison’s nightmares. It was precisely the specter of
constitutional rejection, and the disorientation that would follow, that moved Madison
in 1787 to join with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in the frenetic composition of
The Federalist Papers. An exhaustive set of newspaper essays defending every aspect of
that new constitution sprang from their profound anxiety about whether they could
in fact get their handiwork ratified.
It is worth recalling that the primary target of Publius’s efforts was New York,
Russell L. Riley is an associate professor and research fellow of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the
University of Virginia, where he co-chairs the Presidential Oral History Program.
Copyright © 2007 by the Brown Journal of World Affairs
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Russell L. Riley
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the France of their union—a large, proud, and politically indispensable member with
an independent streak and a demonstrated genius for being difficult. New York’s vast
size, and vaster ego, made it deeply reluctant to join the common effort to siphon
power to a stronger central government. Ultimately, of course, the state did vote to
ratify the constitution, convinced that New Yorkers would benefit from trading more
of their autonomy for membership in a broader and deeper union. Unlike the current
situation in Europe, a sufficient number of states accepted the same bargain to bring
to life their constitution.
Perhaps these different outcomes can be attributed to the power of Publius’s pen.
(A European Federalist, though contemplated, was never compiled by the Euro-constitution’s framers.3) But this reasoning is flawed on two counts. First, most scholars agree
that The Federalist actually had little real impact on the U.S. ratification debates.4 Second,
close observers of European politics have concluded that France and the Netherlands
were motivated by a kind of visceral discontent with the broad direction of European
affairs that is not very susceptible to rational refutation. Severe economic anxiety (associated with the unimpeded invasion from the east of low-wage laborers, symbolized
by the oft-observed “Polish plumber”); xenophobia (especially in relation to a large and
growing Muslim population); and discomfort with power being drained away from
proud national capitals all played a part in the decision to halt the movement toward
a stronger but more remote central government. Some disappointed advocates of the
European constitution have indeed bemoaned a weak effort to promote its virtues to
European publics—to take seriously, as the authors of The Federalist had, the need to
win over popular opinion. But it is not at all certain that the emotional disaffection of
Europe’s naysayers would have yielded to even the best-constructed arguments for the
merits of the new constitution’s approval.
The absence of a European Federalist is, however, notable for another reason. So
much of the European constitution making experiment was deliberately modeled on
the United States’ experience that the failure to follow the U.S. example in this regard
is a remarkable exception. The Europeans decided to convene a U.S.–style constitutional convention in 2002 and they were acutely conscious throughout of both the
text of the U.S. Constitution and—marketing aside—the procedures that created it.5
The convention’s head, former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, called their
work Europe’s “Philadelphia moment.”6
Yet the European homage to U.S. constitutionalism went much further. Giscard fended off criticism of his assuming this crucial job at the advanced age of 76 by
noting that Benjamin Franklin was five years older when the U.S. founders worked
their magic in 1787.7 At various other times, Giscard’s role was compared to that of
Hamilton, Madison, Washington, and—oddly, by Giscard himself—to Jefferson, who
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Europe’s Flickering Philadelphia Moment
was diplomatizing in Paris while the Philadelphia convention met.8 In addition, commonplace in contemporaneous press accounts in Europe was a comparison of how the
transatlantic founders dealt with a common core problem—the need to find a delicate
balance between the union’s large and small states.9 And throughout the process, observers questioned how far the project ought to move toward the creation of a “United
States of Europe.”10
Admittedly, the product of the European convention’s labors was underwhelming—the Euro-constitution is a poor likeness of its U.S. cousin. Although the European delegates held the model of the U.S. Constitution as their ideal, they ended up
with something more closely approximating Alabama’s rambling state charter—over
400 pages of text. (Europe’s constitutionEurope’s constitution-writers thus
writers thus bring to mind the old saw
about the child who knew how to spell bring to mind the old saw about the
banana but just didn’t know when to child who knew how to spell banana
stop.) The thickness of the document has
subsequently become an easily exploited but just didn’t know when to stop.
metaphor for the bloat that many already associate with a distant, extravagant central
government in Brussels.11 This marathon of legalistic prose has provided ample fodder for
opponents to pluck out passages for ridicule. Among U.S. critics, the Euro-constitution’s
preamble has been an easy target. Where the United States Constitution begins with
the music of democracy—“We the people . . .”—the European version opens in opéra
bouffe: “His majesty the King of the Belgians . . .”
The U.S. criticism, however, has not been primarily about details, but about the
very attempt at unity. Comfortably perched on the shoulders of political giants who
made a constitution for the ages in 1787, Americans have smugly looked down on the
European struggle for deeper union as a fool’s errand, a doomed exercise in aggrandizement among peoples far too diverse and conflicted ever to succeed as one. The United
States, as historian Michael Kammen has reminded us, is a nation of constitutionworshippers, prideful in a compact so perfect as to resist comparison.12 The confusions
in Europe of the past year have merely confirmed, then, the unique character of the
United States’ blessed national charter.
Yet an honest look at how the U.S. Constitution came to life, and how its reach
expanded, actually encourages humility. It is an abiding irony that by emphasizing
the difficult and sometimes unhappy course of their own union building experiment,
Americans might actually move their European rivals to adopt a more modest approach
to one of the most ambitious political projects ever attempted in the free world. A realistic understanding of the complexities of the U.S. union building experiment may
actually provide clues to Europe’s constitution makers about how they might escape a
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Russell L. Riley
political trap of their own devising.
A Miracle in Philadelphia?
224
The notion of a “miracle in Philadelphia” is an attractive bit of mythology, not just to
Americans who like to celebrate their past, but also to Europe’s constitution makers.
It suggests that under the proper set of circumstances, with the right group of people
convened in a spirit of rational cooperation, it is possible to craft a document capable
of forging unity out of untold diversity. There is, however, much more to the U.S. story
than this secular version of an immaculate conception.
The constitution-making process in the United States began well before the Philadelphia convention, even before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The
dispersed colonials of that day first began to join hands across colony lines to develop
a common response to what they perceived as increasingly heavy-handed rule by the
British Parliament. Shortly after independence, the Continental Congress adopted “The
Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union,” which went into effect in 1781. Under
the Articles, the central government was at the mercy of the states, which retained the
vast majority of the governing power. The subsequent movement toward a stronger
central government was motivated largely because of the inability of Congress under the
Articles to regulate commerce or to speak with a unified voice in foreign affairs. After
an unsuccessful attempt to reform the Articles in Annapolis in 1786, the Philadelphia
framers met and decided to scrap the old system of government and to begin anew.
The creation of the U.S. Constitution was thus an iterative process. The document
evolved into its current form because earlier versions had once been thought superior,
adopted as such, tested, and fallen short of the mark. Success grew from failure. Indeed,
the reasons that the Articles collapsed are remarkably like the problems that now vex
the European Union. The division of labor between the central and the constituent
governments on matters like commerce and foreign policy provoked severe dispute.13
And a requirement of super-majority decision making encumbered the United States
then just as it does the EU today. Americans moved away from these inefficient arrangements because they were convinced that nothing short of real, consequential
unity would suffice. The European experiment has stalled because Europeans have not
yet reached that pass.
The Philadelphia convention did not, it should be strongly emphasized, produce
a constitution above reproach. It is seldom noted that Philadelphia’s miracle workers
produced a document that required radical revision almost before the ink was dry on
the parchment. Those who drafted it recognized immediately that it had to be fundamentally changed in order to win ratification by the necessary number of states. A slate
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Europe’s Flickering Philadelphia Moment
of ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, was agreed upon as the price of approval. Not
long thereafter, they had to make drastic changes to the presidential selection process
(through the Twelfth Amendment) to account for the unexpected development of
continental political parties. The specifics of this history suggest that there is significant
precedent, if the European founders wish to avail themselves of it, for taking another
crack at getting their particulars right, even within their unforgiving framework of
unanimous consent.
Both the U.S. Constitution and the European Union Constitution met with
substantial skepticism at home and abroad. There is a remarkable symmetry in how
they were received by those on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The eastward volleys of the United States today sound like perfect echoes of the westward critique that
Europe leveled on the Philadelphia constitution over 200 years earlier.
“The truth,” as a London Times critic put it less than a year after the Philadelphia
convention, “is that the thirteen United States may cordially unite on one point—that
of their independency, [but] it is not possible, perhaps, from their different relative situations and interests, to devise a plan of constitution that can meet equal approbation,
or insure any lasting harmony among them.”14 Some in Europe thus firmly believed
that the diversity of the thirteen states was an insurmountable obstacle to the development of a unified whole. The constitution was expected, unrealistically, to embrace
the governance of peoples ranging across far too big and complex a space to yield to
a single government.
British readers were told in this and other commentaries (which sometimes took
their cues from U.S. anti-federalists) of an array of deficiencies. The division of power
between the constituent governments and the central government was deeply flawed.
The inner logic and structure of the constitution was a mare’s nest, with the central
government framed in an unworkable fashion. There was an unconscionable democratic
deficit, with the public interest lost in an institutional muddle; the most popular branch
had little power, either to “promote good, or restrain bad Government.”15 Ultimately
the U.S. Constitution seemed overly reliant on governors detached from the people,
bound only by their own unchecked sense of what was in the public good. It was as
though all the lessons of self-government accumulated over the years had been forgotten in this exercise in mindless union building.
The current brief against the Euro-constitution reads remarkably the same: It
tries to make a single people from too diverse a stock. Its internal structures are overly
centralized and complex. And the government is too remote from the people and too
dependent on cold, faceless bureaucrats. 16 So when George Will predicted in May 2005
that “Europe’s elites—political, commercial and media—may [soon] learn the limits of
their ability to impose their political fetishes on restive and rarely consulted publics,”
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he might have offered a footnote to the Times’ “Leonidas.” “This being the beginning
of American Freedom,” wrote the pseudonymous critic on 1 April 1788, “it is very clear
the ending will be Slavery. For it can not be denied, that this Constitution is, in its
first principles, highly and dangerously Oligarchic—and it is every where agreed that a
Government administered by a few, is, of all Governments, the worst.”17
The Power of the Other
226
One considerable advantage the Americans enjoyed when starting their union was the
existence of a powerful common enemy. The excesses of British rule were indispensable
to drawing the colonials together. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence was among
other things a brilliant piece of political demonizing, featuring a George III who made
a splendid foil. Americans bonded with one another in common cause because of their
shared “history of repeated injuries and usurpations.” Georgians and Vermonters—as
different as they were—had suffered alike the king’s “long train of abuses” and so found
reason to set aside their differences in service of a continental union.
Today, some of Europe’s most esteemed thinkers have wondered whether the essential missing ingredient for unity is a common emotion—something to inspire people
on the continent to think of themselves no longer as French or Dutch (or German or
Czech), but as European. Europe’s extraordinary inheritance of high culture—especially
its art and music—has sometimes been cited as one potential unifying agent. Unfortunately however, the simplest unifying emotion to conjure may be the negative: fear
of the other. There are in Europe today two potential “perils” against which European
publics might rally.
The first is the Americans themselves. Indeed, a significant impetus for Europe’s
constitutional convention was a desire to create a balancing mechanism against U.S.
power. Thus, the European constitutional experiment already is already tinged somewhat
with contra–U.S. sentiments—notwithstanding Europe’s admiration for fundamental
U.S. constitutional forms.18 While U.S. popular culture and the central tenets of its
democracy remain extraordinarily appealing to the rest of the world, the facts of U.S.
political and economic dominance cause even the United States’ closest friends to
chafe sometimes. Unparalleled power has created a mixture of envy and fear—and has
tended more toward the latter in recent years as Europeans have watched with mounting
anxiety as the United States stirs up a hornets’ nest not far off in Iraq. Washington still
benefits from an immense reservoir of goodwill that developed during and just after the
cold war, but these reserves are now being depleted at a remarkably rapid pace. Polls
indicating that Europeans now regard China more favorably than the United States
reflect this alarming development.19
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Europe’s Flickering Philadelphia Moment
The second other is the Turks. The Turkish question—or more broadly, the issue
of Islamic immigration—remains without a doubt the most emotional, and perhaps
incendiary, issue confronting the European Union. The continent is host to a large
population of Turkish migrants whose loyalty to their native ways and religious beliefs
makes them a very visible presence. Anti-Turkish resentments, by some evidence, appear to be growing. There is significant political pressure in virtually every European
country to keep Turkish migration in check. In some prominent cases—such as with
Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Joerg Haider in Austria—these movements have
enjoyed considerable success.
From the outside, it is not easy to comprehend precisely how such fears might
contribute to a deepening sense of oppositional European identity. But these things
have a way of following their own dark logic. Indeed, even after episodes of tragic consequence—whether the outbreak of war or the establishment of death camps at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen—it is often
difficult to believe the sequence of events Too often the darker angels of human
that brought them about. Too often the nature are vastly more creative than we
darker angels of human nature are vastly
can imagine them to be prospectively.
more creative than we can imagine them
to be prospectively. One of the oldest lessons of politics is that it is difficult to know
how far demonizing of the other might go once the genie is loosed from the bottle.
Europe’s leaders thus far have attempted to make a constitution largely without
exploiting the kinds of demons that might make their task easier. It is strange that
more critical attention has been focused on the impracticality of framing a European
constitution than on the laudable choice to take the high, but hard, road toward constitutional unity.
The Perils of Expansion
The Turkish question also highlights the fact that the making of a constitution is only
half of the story here. While Europe has been attempting to “deepen” the unity of its
membership with a new constitution, it has also been engaged in a historically striking
effort to expand. This is where the parallel with U.S. history becomes especially complex—and disquieting. For when attention swings from constitution making to expansion, the American metaphor shifts from Independence Hall to Bleeding Kansas.
U.S. historical experience was for the most part sequential: first, a constitution,
and then growth in the existing membership through a relatively deliberate pace of
expansion. It took nearly six decades for the original 13 states to reach the current size
of the European Union (27 members)—a level of post–cold war expansion the EU
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accomplished, by comparison, practically overnight. Even so simplified, the results in
the U.S. were ultimately disastrous. Expansion in the United States led the country
near the brink of civil war on several occasions before it finally erupted in 1861.
The Europeans, however, are attempting to do both at the same time—framing
a constitution establishing the terms of unity among an already diverse membership
of nations, while simultaneously absorbing into the EU family a large number of new
member states with their own distinctive traits and problems. Clearly the pace of European growth is something far beyond anything
Clearly the pace of European in the U.S. experience. Yet the period of westgrowth is something far beyond ward expansion in the United States indicates
anything in the U.S. experience. how difficult expansion can be, even holding
the text of the framing document constant.
The collapsing of expansion and constitution making into a single process creates an
extraordinarily complex game of three-dimensional diplomatic chess.
Growth in a political family raises two fundamental questions: Do the prospective additions fit in with the existing members? And what, if anything, will growth
mean for the way decisions are made by the family? The first question concerns the
character, culture, and identity of the union; the second deals with the practical business of governing. Membership questions are among the most troublesome in all of
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politics. In the United States, they were the stuff of heated conflict during the major
period of its growth, between the founding era and the Civil War. Europe is now finding what these growing pains are like. Added numbers in the councils of government
from newly admitted areas is making for serious problems in keeping the machinery of
Brussels functioning—and not just because the EU now needs more seats at the table.
The Lithuanian vantage on continental politics, for example, is likely to be significantly
different from the French or British perspectives.
Although it is not commonly characterized this way, the U.S. Civil War was itself
a product of expansion. As the nation moved westward in the first six decades of the
nineteenth century, it had to confront again and again the possibility that the original
compromises established in Philadelphia would come unraveled. Each successive addition to the United States provoked basic questions about whether the uneasy balance of
free and slave states could be maintained. In 1820, and again in 1850, disagreements
over how to deal with additional member states were so severe that grand compromises
had to be crafted to stave off disunion. The limits were reached in 1861.
Notwithstanding Lincoln’s very public (and very sincere) pledges to keep his hands
off slavery in the states where it then existed, the South began to secede from the Union
in anticipation of the inauguration of a man who had preached the evils of the peculiar
institution. The bloody war that followed flowed from long-simmering disputes over
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Europe’s Flickering Philadelphia Moment
the compatibility of differing economic systems (slave versus free) within the union; the
sanctity of freely held elections; the legitimacy of secession; and the ultimate location of
sovereignty. Six-hundred thousand U.S. soldiers lost their lives contesting these issues.
These fundamentals of constitutional democracy were thus settled in the United States
not by gentlemen in powdered wigs treating each other to discourses on Montesquieu
in a Pennsylvania meeting hall, but by Americans thrusting bayonets into one another
in the bloody meadows of Antietam and Gettysburg. This is, grimly, as much a part of
the U.S. example of union-building as the “miracle in Philadelphia.”
The Politics of Peace
The Europeans, of course, have already had their war. The initial movement toward a
free and meaningful unification of European states began while memories of World War
II were still fresh. The absence of armed conflict between the member states since that
time is often cited as a sign of the European Union’s extraordinary success in achieving
its most fundamental aim—peace. At a time when the EU has experienced what may
be its most damaging setback, this is the accomplishment its leaders point to most
proudly to justify a decades-long effort to create an ever-closer union.
Yet supporters of a stronger union worry that the EU is a victim of its own success. The fears of war that motivated older Europeans to seek cooperation no longer
plague the young, for whom the possibilities of war are as remote as the black and white
photographs of destruction they casually pass over in their textbooks while fiddling with
their iPods. As Dominique Moisi of the Institut Français des Relations Internationals
has observed, peace is no longer a mission for the young; it is simply an accepted fact
of their environment. “The idea that they would resume war with their neighbors is
absurd to them.”20
With peace established, the remaining arguments in favor of deepening integration
and furthering expansion are a more complicated lot. Given the dark history of this
continent, it is no doubt a sign of enormous progress that its most menacing figure at
the moment is the Varsovian bearing a plunger. But where war and peace are issues of
stark clarity, those that seem to matter most to Europeans today—how to preserve their
ways of life and their vocations in a globalized age—are murkier. It is not clear how the
development of a larger and deeper European Union, or a continental constitution,
is expected to solve them. In the absence of a compelling argument to grant greater
authority to Brussels, the ancient attachments of land and language have reasserted
themselves with vigor.
The United States’ history suggests that expanding a constitutional union under
the best of circumstances is excruciatingly difficult work—and that the Europeans might
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Russell L. Riley
benefit from contemplating whether a more deliberate pace would be in their longterm best interest. Also, regardless of whether The Federalist actually made a difference
in the U.S. case, its publication was a sign of what Jefferson called in the Declaration
of Independence a “decent respect [for] the opinions of mankind.” Europe’s political
elites would do well to see the centrality of that respect for public opinion in the success
of the U.S. experiment and thus the need to cultivate popular attitudes as a means of
establishing legitimacy. The absence of a European Federalist is important here as a piece
of evidence that fits too well into the perception that the political leadership has given
insufficient attention to how their constitutional handiwork plays in the pub or café.
Still, in the end, the Europeans’ effort to embrace one another—after a century
plagued by dislocation, bloodshed, and enforced separation—ought to be seen as one
of the grandest attempts at statecraft of all time, regardless of the errors in execution
that have until now burdened the attempt. If there is one thing that Americans should
understand from their own experience, it is that mistakes, occasionally big ones, are
inevitable along the path to a successful continental union. W
A
The author would like to thank the Salzburg Seminar for providing the inspiration and
space for writing this essay, and Tim and Marie-Louise Ryback and Tarek Masoud for
their assistance with it.
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Notes
1. Stefan Nicola, “Analysis: High Hopes for German EU Period,” United Press International, 6 September 2006.
2. See Stanley Johnson, “Don’t Bury the Constitution Just Yet—As Ever, Europe Will Find a Way
Around the Current Crisis,” Guardian (London), 9 June 2005. In at least one instance the Monty Python
reference was explicitly made, by the colorful British MP Dennis Skinner.
3. Vincent Tournier, “Where’s the Boeuf?” New York Times, 27 May 2005.
4. See, for example, Clinton Rossiter, “Introduction” in The Federalist Papers (New York: New American
Library, 1961), xi.
5. Tournier, “Where’s the Boeuf?”; George Parker, “One Summit Conquered but It Is Still a Hard Climb
to the Peak of Ratification,” Financial Times, 21 June 2004; Ian Black, “Giscard Hailed as the Socrates
of New Europe,” Guardian (London), 14 June 2003; Denis Staunton, “Major Step towards Sorting Out
Jumble of Treaties,” Irish Times, 27 May 2003; Paul Gillespie, “Madisonian Moment or Moment of Madness?” Irish Times, 21 June 2004.
6. “The Real Conference—Blair Has Developed a Means to Deflect Debate from the Central Issues of
the EU Constitution,” Sunday Telegraph (London), 5 October 2003.
7. Stephen Castle, “Skirmishes as Leaders Meet to Plot Future of Europe,” Independent (London), 28
February 2002.
8. George F. Will, “A Botched Constitution,” Washington Post, 27 July 2003; David Lawday, “The New
Statesman Profile—Valery Giscard d’Estaing,” New Statesman, 4 March 2002.
9. James A. Thomson, “Why U.S. History Holds a Lesson for Europe,” Financial Times, 19 December 2003; John Tagliabue, “European Union Can’t Reach Deal on Constitution,” New York Times, 14
December 2003.
10. “The Founding Fathers, Maybe,” Economist, 23 February 2002.
11. Paul Robinson, “A Dodgy Constitution,” Spectator, 8 February 2003.
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Europe’s Flickering Philadelphia Moment
12. Michael Kammen, A Machine that Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).
13. Andrew C. McLaughlin, The Confederation and the Constitution, 1783–1789 (New York: Collier
Books, 1962).
14. Times, 22 May 1788.
15. Leonidas, “New Government of America,” Times, 1 April 1788.
16. Robert McCrum, “Focus: From Jefferson’s Brevity to Convolutions of Bureaucrats,” Observer,
14 December 2003; T.R. Reid, “Europeans Open Talks on Drafting Constitution,” Washington Post, 1
March 2002; Michael Prowse, “Common Thread That’s Proving Hard to Find,” Financial Times, 20 June
2002.
17. Ibid; George F. Will, “Europe at the Precipice,” Washington Post, 29 May 2005.
18. See Andrew Stuttaford, “Constitutionally Indisposed,” National Review Online, 22 February 2005;
Gerard Baker, “Against United Europe,” Weekly Standard, 22 September 2003.
19. Guy Dinmore, “Anti-Americanism Gives China the Edge in Poll,” Financial Times, 24 June
2005.
20. Dominique Moisi, “America and the World” (keynote address, Salzburg Seminar Board of Directors,
25 June 2005). Audio is available at http://www.salzburgseminar.org/2005NewsArchives.cfm.
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