The FBI was created in 1908,
more than a century after the U.S. federal system of dual sovereignty had gone
into effect in 1989; before then, the U.S. had been a military alliance and then
a confederation of sovereign countries (under the Articles of Confederation).
An ahistorical American mindset tends to overlook the international beginnings
of that political union, and especially that the federal system designed in the
Convention in 1787 incorporated both national and international elements into
the federal level. This history bears not only on the American federal system,
but also in how it can be accurately compared with the E.U.’s system, which
also divided governmental sovereignty between the federal and state levels, and
whose federal level also contains national and international elements,
institutionally. Unfortunately for the E.U., the destructive technology
available in the twenty-first century, as in advanced weaponry for mass
destruction, has put pressure on E.U. officials to federalize intelligence-capabilities
that could otherwise take over a century, as in the case of the U.S., to be
federalized from the state level. Such pressure could exacerbate fears that the
E.U. might be headed like a fast train to becoming a central state, consolidated
at the expense of even its distinctly federal elements—for the U.S. had arguably
consolidated too much, given its empire-scale, since at least the end of World
War II.
The full essay is at "E.U. Federalism."
