The E.U.: A Political Union

Strong’s The Antifederalist is a series of essays critical of the American federal system in which governmental sovereignty is “dual,” meaning that both the Union and the member-states have at least some such sovereignty that the other cannot abolish or override. Had more credence been paid to the arguments in that text, perhaps the state governments would have more power at the federal level to protect their retained sovereignty from federal encroachment. The drafting of the E.U. paid more heed to those arguments in terms of safeguarding state sovereignty by considerable direct involvement of state officials at the federal level. Even so, Euroskeptics have warned of a centralized state in the process, and the U.S. has furnished them with an actual instance of a nearly consolidated empire-scale federal system. The warnings may thus be valid even with the additional safeguards that the E.U. has but the U.S. lacks, at least as of 2026, but claims that the E.U. does not have a federal system and is not a political union of states ring hollow as they are utterly false. So too, but the way, is the mislabeling of the E.U. as a bloc. The E.U.’s parliament alone knocks out all three of these ideological claims.

The full essay is at "The E.U.: A Political Union."

E.U. Citizens on the Union’s Enlargement

Having recently been presented with an E.U. citizen denying the E.U. has citizens even as he admitted that he could vote for a candidate to represent him in the European Parliament, I had my faith in human rationality restored the following day in reading of a poll of E.U. citizens on whether additional states should be added to the Union; ideology, even of the tribal sort, need not distort rationality beyond recognition. Even in the reporting of such a poll, however, the Euroskeptic, or states’ rights, ideology left its imprint. Even such an auxiliary presence is a sign of the headwind that has been facing the E.U. since its founding.

The full essay is at "E.U. Citizens." 

On Term Limits & Representation in the U.S.: The Anti-Federalist View

In the New York convention for ratifying the U.S. Constitution, Melancton Smith favored having the state legislatures rotating their U.S. Senators rather than keeping the same men in the Senate for life. "It is a circumstance strongly in favor of rotation, that it will have a tendency to diffuse a more general spirit of emulation, and to bring forward into office the genius and abilities of the continent. If the office is to be perpetually confined to a few, other men of equal talents and virtue, but not possessed of so extensive an influence, may be discouraged from aspiring to it"[1] This argument could easily be applied to the people electing U.S. Senators.

The complete essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires.

1. Herbert J. Storing, The Anti-Federalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 348.