re: EU and UN (Cameron Sawyer, Russia)

Bienvenido Macario wrote on 3 November:

It [the EU] is a non-nation international organization very much like the United Nations.

Cameron Sawyer responds:

Au contraire, the EU and the UN could hardly be more different. The essence of this difference is in the extent of delegation of sovereignty to the respective institutions, which in the case of the UN is slight and sporadic (and the UN does not make laws), and in the case of the EU is broad and systematic (and exercised through actual laws, a huge pile of them in fact). As a result of that, the UN has no practical power except to harangue, apart from sporadic, isolated cases, mostly where the UN is used to manage some failed state which is forced by other countries to delegate certain aspects of sovereignty. The case of the EU is completely and totally different–the member states systematically and broadly delegated an ever-increasing degree of sovereignty to the EU, which by now has reached the stage where the EU exercises a significant amount of sovereign power, while, as various WAISers have pointed out, not being subject to much democratic control.

You see, a regular national government has a traditional form of sovereignty which is derived from the feudal rights of big landlords–a kind of ownership of a certain geographical area which gave the landlords the right to demand military service, extract taxes, and impose laws on the peasants living in that area. Modern states work on very much the same principles, except that democracy has helped a lot to give a certain voice to those former peasants over whom sovereignty is exercised. But the “sovereign” has the same nature and functions; just that it is no longer a landlord or a king, but a government not overtly acting in its own interests, but rather on behalf of the peasantry (at least, theoretically, but that is already good). The EU is another landlord on top, to whom a whole series of powers have been delegated by the traditional landlords. This power is so strong that it has been argued vigorously in some court cases that EU sovereignty is actually not delegated at all, but original.

(See: http://www.enelsyn.gr/papers/w4/Paper%20by%20Andras%20Jakab.pdf).

The article cited above is quite fascinating and I recommend it to WAISers interested in these questions. The article shows that massive confusion exists in the various EU member states about the affect of EU membership on the sovereignty of EU member states. I have to say, that these facts lend objective support to Nigel Jones’s thesis about the EU’s achieving statehood by stealth–here is concrete evidence. I particularly love this phrase in the cited article:

“So, how can we solve on a legal level the conflict between European integration and national sovereignty? What should be our answer to the question concerning sovereignty in the EU? My point was exactly it is a misunderstanding that we should answer the question. The real
lawyerly task (as we have seen analogically in different constitutional laws) is to neutralise this question. There are times where straight answers are needed–like the 16-17th centuries. And there are times where not–like now. Or to put it in a more cynical manner: our task is to avoid or to prevent the question, and if someone still poses it then we should give a ’solution’ that does not say anything practical for conflicts. Any other ’solution’ would just strengthen the possibility of conflicts, though we should rather prevent them. The paradoxical lawyerly task in this situation is to build up a legal uncertainty as to the legal outcome of a conflict (by building up complicated conceptual constructs which make virtually impossible the straight use of the sovereignty argument) . . . ”

Op. cit., pp. 15-16

Wow! There’s your smoking gun, Nigel! You can send me a bottle.

JE comments: Yes, but what EU commission regulates the (snail-mail) posting of liquor to non-EU destinations?