The European Parliament

This is a study of the background and evolution of the European Parliament, and in particular of the role of a popularlyelected European Parliament as a "legitimating" factor in the development of a nascent United States of Europe.

To speak of history while it is still "news" is an exceedingly risky enterprise. Yet it is not unreasonable, even now, to argue that the years 19891992 will be seen, in future generations even, perhaps, in future centuries as one of the epochal, revolutionary turning points in world history. Certainly it can be said that a world order that had existed for roughly half a century, that of the "Cold War era," came to an end in these years. Whether these years will usher in a "new world order," in the phrase so much used by President George Bush during the Persian Gulf War, (And scarcely heard since the war ended. An irony of the times is that the U.S. has had at this time of flux a President profoundly dedicated to the status quo and "business as usual." This is not without broader significance to our discussion. The potential for a popularlyelected European Parliament to generate the impulse for a United States of Europe is increased by the inability of the United States of America to define a broad new role of world leadership for itself creating a vacuum "Europe" may increasingly tend to fill), or only the beginning of prolonged instability and disorder, remains to be seen. But it is entirely plausible, even probable, that,

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alist Papers. The attempt to resolve the localcosmopolitan conflict both intellectual, and in terms of a practical political program was revived as soon as "Europe" began to take form, after AD 1000, and has continued to the present. The Crusades were launched in part as a means of focusing the energies of quarrelsome knights and directing it outward, against the Muslim world. Not only did they get the knights out of one another's hair (and that of their subjects), but it also joined them together in a Europewide enterprise. The desire to unite Europe would be part of the crusading impulse for the next five hundred years. About 1500, Niccolo Machiavelli could argue that the forcible suppression of local patriotisms within Italy by a tyrannical Prince would not be too high a price to pay for the unification of Italy, whose local states were all together threatened by a stronger France and a newly integrated Spain (Machiavelli, 1950, pp.94-98). Two and a half centuries later, Edward Gibbon expressed the view that the Europe of his day, though divided among everwarring dynastic states, was already effectively integrated indeed, that it had found an ideal balance between localism and a stifling Romanstyle imperia

Category: Government - T