Is the E.U. More Than the Sum of Its Parts?

In the wake of David Cameron’s announcement that he would try to renegotiate Britain’s obligations in the E.U. then have an “in or out” referendum in his state on whether it should secede from the Union, Francois Hollande of France warned that state interests were in the process of usurping “the European interest.” According to the French president, Cameron was heading the E.U. down the path in which each state “looks for what is good for itself and only itself.” As such, the Union would simply be an aggregation of state interests. The question is perhaps the old one of whether the whole is more than the sum of the parts. In proffering different answers, the European federalists and anti-federalists (or Euro-skeptics) have fundamentally different conceptions of what the E.U. is.

The complete essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires, available at Amazon.

Is the E.U. no more than an aggregation of its states, or does a distinct whole exist such that the E.U. is itself distinct from its states?