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Statesmen of Independence: The International Fabric of Europe's Way of Political Legitimacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2018

ANTOINE VAUCHEZ
ANTOINE VAUCHEZ*
Affiliation:
Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), 14 Rue Cujas, Paris 75005, France; [email protected]
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Abstract

Scholars generally agree that ‘independent’ institutions such as the European Commission, the European Court of Justice and European Central Bank have created a space and role for themselves that has no equivalent in national political settings. However, we still lack a better understanding of the importance of this independent branch in the EU polity. This article contends that the central relevance of independence is connected to the historically rooted connection between ‘independence’ and ‘international government’ – a relationship the history of which can be traced back to the League of Nations’ foundational period as the inaugural scene for the nexus between power and knowledge in international politics. Ultimately, this article questions the extent to which this specific grammar of international government has been constitutive of the EC polity in terms of valued modes of legitimacy and types of authority.

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Article
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Contemporary European History , Volume 27 , Special Issue 2: Continuity and Change in European Cooperation during the Twentieth Century , May 2018 , pp. 183 - 201
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

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3 With a view to overcome the scholarly fragmentation on the object, I suggest here a broad understanding of the notion of ‘government’, much broader than just the set of ‘political’ institutions but encompassing also judicial, executive and regulatory institutions and their distinct set of elites and specific forms of knowledge.

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13 The admittedly broad notion of ‘international statesman’ proves useful for our purposes since it allows to think about the various figures embodying an international public authority collectively, be they judges, regulators, top civil servants, secretary generals, central bankers, regulators, etc.

14 While there are possible intersections with our present concern for connections between independence and international government, the role of engineers, technological experts and the management of European infrastructures will not be tackled directly in this article. On this see the different volumes of Schot, Johan and Scranto, Phil, eds., Making Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan)Google Scholar.

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18 The emphasis put in the article on the definition of international/European judicial positions and the related legal debates may be considered as a limitation to the broader scope of the article on the genealogy of the international way of political legitimacy. It should be said however, as historians and sociologists of law have repeatedly shown, that legal expertise and institutions have historically been the laboratory from which modern professions and public institutions have emerged. In particular, the model of the knowledge-based professional crafted in Europe by legal professions in the late twentieth century have contributed to shape the other fields of expertise (economic, medical, etc.). See Malatesta, Maria, Professional Men, Professional Women. The European Professions from the 19th Century until Today (Sage, London, 2011)Google Scholar. Interestingly, the creation of the Advisory Committee of Jurists charged with the drafting of the World Court has been one of the very first decisions taken by the Council of the League of Nations in February 1920.

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25 The application of the numerous post-First World War bilateral peace treaties, for instance, rested on the so-called ‘mixed arbitration tribunals’ (MAT), some twenty in all (Franco–German, Franco–Greek, Greco–German, Franco–Turkish MATs, etc.) whose presidents would have to be chosen outside of the contending parties, amongst independent, impartial and disinterested statesmen.

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44 Among other moments: the ECJ Règlement intérieur of 7 Mar. 1953 (and revisions in Apr. and June 1954), the 1 July 1956 Statut du personnel of the High Authority defining the first ‘supranational civil servant’ (and the earlier provisory Statute of 22 Mar. 1954), the drafting of the 1962 Statut unique des fonctionnaires européens and of the 1965 Protocole sur les privilèges et les immunités des Communautés européennes.

45 Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer, former ‘Chef de section’ at the LoN Secretariat, see Ranshofen-Wertheimer, The International Secretariat, 431.

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60 See, for example, the 1952 ‘Avis’ of three international law and government's legal advisers, Reuter (France), Ophüls (Germany) and Rossi (Italy) to the common parliamentary assembly which indicated the ad hoc nature of European law, halfway between international law and national law.

61 Pescatore, ‘Les travaux’, 164–5.

62 To state one international law professor, Malenovski, Jiri, ‘la CJCE, la CIJ, la CEDH ou le tribunal international du droit de la mer se sont largement inspirés, voire laissés guider, par le Statut de la Cour permanente de justice internationale et, plus particulièrement, par les règles relatives au statut de ses juges’, in ‘L'indépendance des juges internationaux’, Recueil des cours de La Haye, 349 (2010), 9–276Google Scholar, here 36.

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70 For a classic example of these theoretical formalisations of the European Communities, see the highly influential doctrinal piece by ECJ judge Pierre Pescatore on the ‘quadripartisme institutionnel’. In this seminal article he claimed that the specific rationale of the European political order could not be boiled down to the ternary principle of the ‘separation of powers.’ Instead, he argued that the four main institutions of the EC (the Commission, the Court, the Council and the Parliament) actually derived their legitimacy from the representation of four types of interests. While the Court and the Commission embodied supranational interests independent from Member States as they represented ‘l'intérêt communautaire’ and the interest of ‘the treaties’, the Council was in charge the interests of the governments and the European Parliament with that . . . ‘the popular forces’: Pierre Pescatore, ‘L'exécutif communautaire. Justification du quadripartisme institué par les traités de Paris et de Rome’, Cahiers de droit européen, 14, 4 (1978), 387–406.

71 On the ‘Rueff case’, see also Cohen, Antonin, ‘Juge et expert. L'affaire Rueff et la codification des règles de la circulation internationale’, Critique internationale, 59 (2013), 69–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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76 See Condorelli-Braun, Commissaires et juges.

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