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St. Thomas Law Review

First Page

141

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Article

Abstract

Thank you for the honor of presenting the 1991 St. Thomas Distinguished Lecture in Law. I accepted your kind invitation with great pleasure. You may not be aware of the fact, but I flatter myself to be one of the closest observers of St. Thomas University School of Law in Germany because I receive regular information about you from my very good friend Professor Siegfried Wiessner, an alumnus of our Law School at Eberhard Karls University in Tiibingen, Germany. Seeing him in the audience, I definitely feel at home. The subject of my lecture is the prospect of European unity in the last decade of this century. Is it a realistic expectation or merely a mirage? Has the more than forty year-old process of European integration, which will take a fresh start at the end of 1991 with two governmental conferences of the European Community countries on Monetary and Political Union, resulted in more than the usual political rhetoric? Is Western Europe developing into a constitutionally stable union of nation- states and a pillar of the New World Order, which we perceive emerging after the breakdown of Communism in Eastern Europe? This is indeed the most important question today regarding the future of Europe and the prospects of American-European relations. I am most thankful for the opportunity to present my thoughts on such a crucial issue. Let me outline first the actual political and constitutional situation of the European Community and how it originated. I would like to call this part "Maastricht and Its Background." This information is essential to answering the second question often asked these days in Western Europe: Is further unification of the Continent still necessary after the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Has the mission of the European Community been more than a reaction against the threat of the Red Army following the Coup of Prague in 1948 and the quelling of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956? If the answer is yes, we may further ask: What is the ultimate goal of the process of European unification? Is it a United States of Europe, the vision first proclaimed by Winston Churchill in Zurich, Switzerland in a famous speech just after World War II? Or is the likely goal something less ambitious, the confederative "Europe of the Fatherlands" that General de Gaulle spoke of in the Sixties? Or is it only a loose club of countries in the sense of Margaret Thatcher's 1986 Bruges speech, in which she envisioned "twelve sovereign states Cooperating closely but voluntarily with each other where they see an interest in doing so, and reserving the right to go their own ways when they don't?" Or is the idea of a "Community" something different from all of these old-fashioned patterns of state relationships?

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