The European Community as a Federal State

Master's Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: European Union grade: A-Grade with Distinction South Bank University London (Faculty of Art and Human Sciences) language: English abstract: The thesis of this work is that the European Community is a self-standing federal state with inadequate political power as the Member States keep essential core competences in the fields of Foreign Defence and Monetary Policy to themselves or limit them to the intergovernmental pillars of the European Union. Although it is not yet adequately filled with political competences the structural shell of the European Community is suitable to fulfil all tasks that should in the best interest of all Member States be fulfilled on the federal level. Today's European Community has developed the three elements of a state (Territory Original Power and Permanent Population). The European Community has outgrown the former restrictions and limitations of e.g. the direct effectiveness of the legal order the originality and quality of legisla-tive executive and judiciary power and of the self-standing quality of the Citizenship of the Union. A comparison with the structural legal and legitimistic elements of the German and the Canadian federations shows that the Community's system has adopted very similar sometimes even almost identical features. The state quality which is regarded as a given when it comes to Germany or Canada should there-fore no longer be denied to the Community. Still not vanished but very much reduced is the Community's traditional democratic deficit. The competences of the Euro-pean Parliament have been significantly expanded and the Community also found other ways of civil society's participation. Besides that it adopted the doctrine of checks and balances of separated state powers. The transfer of political powers and competences has however not kept pace with the structural development. Es-sential area