(Page 19 of 27) - What Can the EU Learn from the American Federalism? authored by Bodnari, Florentina.

is represented through the national and European elections. The citizens and the
peoples of the member states are equally represented, as stipulates the federal principle
of the protection of smaller states and their population (Preuss, 1996:217). As the EU
deepens its federal competence, there is more and more concern about a democratic
deficit. The same problem was present also in 1787-1788 when the US Constitution
was presented to popularly elected conventions in the thirteen states for ratification.
The founding fathers - Hamilton, Madison and Jay had difficulties to find a name for
the government. They emphasised that the “new government” was neither national nor
federal or confederal, but a composition of both. Thus, the authors of The Federalist
called it a “general government.” In this way they could convince the Antifederalists
that the Constitution was enough confederal in order to preserve the co-sovereign
existence of the states as well as enough republican in order to guarantee the rights and
safety of the people. Later Alexis de Tocqueville called in 1830 the US government
“an incomplete national government” (in: Kincaid, 1999:36-37).

On the economic level, the Central Bank of the EU can be compared with the Federal
Reserve System of the USA. The Central Bank of the EU is far more federal than the
Federal Reserve System of the USA. The central banks of the member countries pool
their sovereignty to the EU, but they do not cede their sovereignty, which would
exclude their direct participation. The economy places a significant role in any
federation. More competences will the EU get, more it can look like “too big, too
powerful, and too wasteful” (like the USA case was), but if the question comes to
finance significant areas, then the member states are in favour of the powerful Union.

However, the EU differs as well in many areas from the USA dual federalism:

1. the EU functions on a treaty-based process of flexible accommodation, instead of

relying on fixed constitutional rights;

2. the federal system of constitutional power has been replaced by the subsidiarity

principle, which is the expression of the EU’s new face of treaty federalism. The scope
and dimension of the EU are tied to negotiated criteria of necessity and efficiency;

3. the EU did not adopt the American Senate model, but the Bundesrat German model

based on weighted council representation (cf. Hueglin, 2000:1);

4. Comparing the EU today with the USA before as far as resistance to federal authority is

concerned, the result is that the EU will be much more resistant. From the perspective
of cultural, linguistic, and ethnic homogeneity versus heterogeneity, the EC/EU is far
more heterogeneous on all these dimensions than the pre-Civil War American Union.
However, the European states have more traditions of independence than the American
states had during the Revolutionary War and the quasi-independence under the Articles
of Confederation (Friedman Goldstein, 2001: 18-19).

The EU as a future federation is dominated by a political debate comparing to the USA
analysis of federalism, which is characterised by an analytic scholarly dimension that
dominates its usage. Wessels argues that: “… the transfer of real powers to the EC and their
extensive use by the Council (which in its decision-making and interaction style points at an
amalgamation of national systems) make actual practice closer to a system of cooperative
federalism such as that in the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany” (Wessels,
1991). The American view on the EU is largely divided into two different opinions. The first
concerns the fact that the EU is viewed as a free trade area. From this economic point of view:
“the institutional dynamics of the Community are largely ignored or overlooked while the