From the foundation of the EU, the polity has been haunted by the enigma concerning ‘the nature of the beast’. Was it to be a state or an international organisation? At a 1957 conference in Stresa, nearly 500 scholars and politicians discussed the question for 10 days without solving the enigma. As host of this blogpost, Hugo takes pride in announcing that the deadlock has been broken by a regular user of the Peace Palace Library.
Blog written by Hugo.
UNHCR
Library user Jaap Hoeksma entered the premises of the Peace Palace for the first time in 1977. As a legal officer at the Office in The Netherlands of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees he became a regular visitor of the old reading room. He vividly recalls how the newspapers like Le Monde, which he wanted to consult, were brought to him in a wooden holder. In the years, in which the Summer Course of the Hague Academy were devoted to refugee law, he was more often in the Peace Palace than in the UNHCR-offices.
Photo: Presentation of the EU27 definition to MP Bontenbal in the Dutch parliament (photo Marc Mulder)
Eurocracy
After the unvoluntary termination of his employment with UNHCR [1], Jaap returned in 1992 to the PPL with a board game about European democracy. He had invented and produced the game EUROCRACY with the view to convey his view on the recently founded European Union [2]. The entire staff of the Library played Eurocracy and Jaap explained that the game gave expression to his conviction that, if 12 democratic states agreed to share the exercise of sovereignty in ever wider fields with the view to attain common goals, their organisation had to be democratic too. ‘At the time’, he recollects, ‘scholars were focused on the democratic deficit of the EU. American authors like the late Robert Dahl asserted that it was impossible for international organisations to function democratically [3]. So, I made a board game to prove them wrong!’
Beyond zero sum-game The game touched a nerve [4]. During the discussions after the numerous playing events he organised, Jaap learned that the EU was outgrowing the traditional Westphalian system of International Relations. He started writing books about the process of European integration, in which he suggested that ‘the desire to create an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’ was the trigger behind the EU’s departure from the traditional template. ‘The peoples of Europe wanted no more war’, he explains, ‘and their political leaders translated that wish into the determination to create an ever closer union’. Like a born educator he continues: ‘From the philosophical perspective, the founders of the European Communities replaced Hobbes with Spinoza. They substituted the intention to create a common future for the Hobbesian state of lawlessness between nations. So, European integration is not a zero sum-game, in which my gains are your losses but the participants all benefit from their common effort’.
Civic freedoms
‘The Library was indispensable in those formative years’, Hoeksma recalls with a smile. He divided his time between game lectures on European democracy in the classroom and studying the classics on European integration and international law in the new reading room of the Peace Palace Library. ‘For me, the contrast between the old and the new reading room epitomises the difference between the 20th and the 21st century. But I also stumbled upon a gap between the theory of European integration and the real world as experienced by my students. The classical theory stuck to the Westphalian paradigm and stressed the inevitability of the State or IO-frame [5], whereas students regarded it as self-evident that, as they were living in a democratic country and were enjoying constitutional freedoms, the EU should offer them the same civic guarantees.’
Paradigm change
In the wake of the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, Hoeksma wrote the discussion paper for a seminar about the nature of the EU in the 21st century, held in the Academy Hall on 28 June 2011 with the participation of judges, professors and politicians [6]. The seminar proved to be decisive for his endeavour to explain the functioning of the EU as a European democracy. ‘The clash between the traditional Westphalian approach and the constitutional perception could not have been more clarifying! I realised in the aftermath of the debate that the conundrum concerning the nature of the beast could only be solved if the traditional Westphalian template of states and diplomats was replaced with the constitutional paradigm of human rights, democracy and the rule of law [7].’
EU27 Definition
Hoeksma shared his findings with his fellow users of the Peace Palace Library through a series of blogposts on the EU. In hindsight, his ongoing blogs can be appreciated as an unprecedented effort to break the deadlock in the debate about the nature of the EU [7]. The books he published bear titles like ‘European Democracy’ and ‘The Democratisation of the European Union’ [8] and are available for lending. Alarmed by the rise of extreme parties after the 2024 elections for the European Parliament, Jaap realised that the EU will only be able to defend its constitutional achievements if it leaves the traditional ambiguity concerning its nature behind. Solving the EU-conundrum became imperative for the protection of the Union as a democratic polity of states and citizens. Returning to the classroom, he organised his EU27 tour, which culminated in the presentation of a definition of the European Union in 27 words, symbolically one word per member state.
The European Union is neither a state nor an ordinary international organisation but forms a union of democratic states which also constitutes a democracy of its own.
His decisive move was to present the definition in Luxembourg to Mr Koen Lenaerts, in Brussels to the House of European History and in The Hague to the Dutch Parliament, represented by Mr Henri Bontenbal.
Looking back on his remarkable journey, the game maker/philosopher reflects: ‘The conundrum concerning the nature of the EU beast had to be clarified. I may have used unconventional means to solve it, but we could not burden future generations with an outdated academic problem. Moreover, solving conundrums brings science forward. Once it has been observed that the distinguishing hallmark of the EU in relation to other international organisations consists of its model of constitutional democracy, it becomes possible to identify the EU in terms of global governance as a democratic international organisation and to define that new subject of international law as a union of states and citizens in which the union has to comply with similarly stringent standards of respect for human rights, democracy and the rule of law as the member states are required to meet.*
*For an academic elaboration of the new concept, look here.