The European Concert

The European Concert is the supranational union of the European monarchical order, founded by the Treaty of Straßburg, signed on 18 January 2027 and in force from 1 July 2027. It binds seventeen seats, among them the German Empire, the French Empire, Great Britain, the Socialist Kingdom of Italy and the Scandinavian Union, into a single union with a directly elected Parliament, a Commission, a Council of governments, a Court whose rulings override national law within the union’s competences, and a common market. It is the youngest of the world’s great institutions and the least proven.

It was built for one purpose above the others. As the long cold war against the Russian Republic faded, the suspicions that the common enemy had kept in check began to stir again among the European powers, and the governments that remembered where those suspicions had led twice before resolved to bind themselves while the peace still held. The Concert is therefore the inverse of a postwar reconciliation. It does not reconcile a defeated Germany with a victorious France. It binds a victorious Germany and a rehabilitated France before a war, and that inversion runs through every part of its design, from the treaty France signed renouncing Alsace and nuclear weapons to the Parliament that sits on German soil at Straßburg.

Its institutions are spread across three powers so that no one capital holds the union: the Parliament at Straßburg, in the German Empire; the Commission and the Council at Brussels, in the Benelux Union; the Court at Vienna, in Austria-Hungary. Its first President, Annelies Verhoeven of the Netherlands, was elected by the Parliament in July 2027. Its first real test is before the Court in the Brunswick Motor Works case, in which the union’s freedom of capital meets a German state’s constitutional duty to keep a viable works open, and in which a court of nine judges may tell the greatest power in Europe that it is wrong.

Name and identity

Name

The union is named for the Concert of Europe, the system by which the great powers managed their disputes in congress after 1815, and the borrowing was deliberate. A concert, in that older sense, is an agreement among powers that remain powers. It implies harmony among sovereigns rather than authority above them, and the negotiators chose the word because it reassured the states it bound. The names set aside at Straßburg included the several forms built on union and community, all of which were thought to suggest a state raised over the members, and one delegation’s proposal of the European Settlement was dropped when it was pointed out that every member had a different settlement in mind.

The word carries its musical sense as well, and the union’s own publications lean on it: powers kept in tune, playing one piece, each on its own instrument. The Concert’s critics use the same image the other way and ask which capital holds the baton. In ordinary speech across the continent the institution is simply the Concert, its adjective is Concert used attributively, as in Concert law and Concert institutions, and the press and diplomats name the whole union for its parliamentary seat, so that “Straßburg says” means the Commission at Brussels as often as it means the Parliament. The members’ languages each render the name literally, and the treaty texts are equally authentic in all of them.

Motto, flag and anthem

The motto is a single Latin word, Concordia, chosen in Latin for the reason English became the working language: it belongs to no member in particular.

The flag is a ring of twelve gold stars on a deep blue field, enclosing a gold circle within which stands an eight-pointed compass rose whose longer points cross the circle. The twelve stars stand for the completeness of Europe and not for the members, so that the design does not change when a state accedes or departs, and the count was already wrong on the day of signature, since the union had seventeen seats. The rose was adopted on a similar reasoning: a union of states that had spent a century fighting one another wanted a device about bearing and direction rather than territory. One delegation objected at the drafting that a compass points somewhere and that the union had not agreed where, and the objection is recorded in the minutes and has never been answered. The flag flies beside the national flag on the union’s buildings and at its ceremonies and never above it, a rule of precedence the members wrote down.

The anthem is the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, played without words, since a text in any one of the members’ languages would have favoured that member. It was chosen as the one piece of music every delegation could already hum. That the union built to manage German power should be announced at every ceremony by a German composer was observed in Paris on the day of the decision, and the French delegation’s answer, that Beethoven had dedicated the Eroica to Napoleon before he scratched the name out, is quoted at Concert dinners more often than it is believed.

Concert Day

Concert Day is 18 January, the anniversary of the signature at Straßburg, and the date was France’s choice before it was the Concert’s. On 18 January 1871 the German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, and the day has been the imperial national day ever since, as well as the anniversary of the Prussian coronation of 1701. The French government asked during the negotiation that the treaty be signed on that day, so that the anniversary of France’s deepest humiliation would become the anniversary of its equality, and the German government, whose national day it is, accepted. The treaty was therefore signed on Alexander I’s thirteenth birthday, a year before he came to the throne.

When the Concert’s own day was chosen, the Parliament preferred 1 July, the day of entry into force and of its first sitting. The Council settled on the signature, and the first Concert Day was kept on 18 January 2028, at Straßburg, with the flag raised beside the flags of the seventeen seats and a speech by Verhoeven that ran to nine minutes. Concert Day is not a public holiday in any member. In Germany the day already belongs to the Empire, and the Concert’s flag is raised that morning beside the imperial one.

Languages

Every national official language of every legal member is an official language of the Concert, which makes about twenty-five, Irish and Icelandic among them, and every regulation, judgment and Official Journal appears in all of them. The interpretation and translation service is among the union’s largest administrative undertakings. The corridors, the committees and the drafting are nevertheless in English almost throughout, because English is the language of neither Germany nor France and so favours neither of the two rivals at the union’s heart. Its being the language of Britain, and of the American patron outside, was raised at Straßburg and treated as the lesser objection.

History

The Concert of Europe

The name comes from the Congress of Vienna of 1815, at which the powers that had defeated Napoleon agreed to manage the continent by meeting rather than by fighting. For a generation the congresses worked, and for most of the nineteenth century the habit of conference among the great powers kept their quarrels local. The Concert of Europe had no treaty, no secretariat and no court. It was a practice, sustained by the powers’ shared interest in the order they had made, and it decayed as that interest decayed: the wars of Italian and German unification were fought outside it, the alliances of the 1890s replaced it, and in 1914 it failed altogether.

The modern union takes its name from the practice and its design from the failure. Its founders were explicit that the old Concert had worked while the powers wished it to and had offered nothing when they ceased to, and that a union built to outlast the goodwill of its members needed what the old Concert lacked: a treaty, institutions and a court.

Berlin, the League and Mitteleuropa

The settlement of 1919 at Berlin made no European union. It made the League of Nations, whose interwar Council managed European disputes with mixed results, and it made Mitteleuropa, the German system of trade agreements, currency arrangements, transport conventions, technical standards and development finance that bound the Empire to the Habsburg lands, the buffer states, the Balkan monarchies and the eastern kingdoms as the economic dimension of a security guarantee. Mitteleuropa brought capital, railways and market access to countries that had little of any of them, and it locked several of them into supplying German industry on terms set in Berlin. It was for two generations the nearest thing the continent had to a common market, and it was German.

France stood outside both arrangements for most of the interwar period, excluded from the League in 1919 and admitted only in 1926, and the fascist regime that took power in 1934 regarded Mitteleuropa as the instrument of the German victory it meant to reverse. The Second Great War of 1939 to 1945 was in part a war about whether Europe would be organised from Berlin or from Paris, and its answer was neither.

1945 and the long cold war

The settlement of 1945 rebuilt France as a Bonapartist constitutional empire and bound its forces with the Versailles limits, reconstituted the League under the San Francisco Charter, and launched the Realm’s Marshall Programme of reconstruction, which required the European recipients to allocate its aid jointly and so taught them to plan together. The habit of cooperation the programme forced is counted in every history of the Concert among its roots, though it created no institution above the governments.

What followed was half a century of cooperation without union. The Atlantic Treaty Organization of 1949 organised the continent’s defence against the Russian Republic under American leadership. The Scandinavian Union of 1949 bound the five Nordic states into a confederation, and the Benelux Union bound the three Low Countries into another. Mitteleuropa grew a common currency arrangement around the German mark, to which the eastern currencies were pegged. The League’s agencies wrote the rules for aviation, shipping and health. Each of these did part of what a European union does, and none of them was one.

The reasons were the same reasons that later made the Concert possible, seen from the other side. The common enemy made a union unnecessary, since the ATO held the continent together and the cold war disciplined its rivalries. Germany, the victor of both wars, had Mitteleuropa and did not need a union to give it reach. France was on probation, its forces limited by treaty, and could not propose one without seeming to seek a release from the limits. Britain looked across the Atlantic. Every European state could see the use of a common market, and none could see a reason to pay the political price of a common court while the Russian Republic stood on the Finnish border.

Aachen, 2004

The first proposal came from the two states that had the most reason to make it and the least standing to make it alone. On 9 May 2004, at Aachen, the old capital of Charlemagne on the German side of the frontier, the French and German governments issued a joint declaration proposing a European union with institutions of its own: a parliament, a commission, a court and a common market. The declaration was the work of ministers, issued under Friedrich V in Berlin and Napoleon VII in Paris, and neither sovereign signed it, which was the first statement of the principle that the union would be the act of governments.

The declaration’s argument was the one the Concert still makes. The cold war had cooled, the Russian Republic was turning inward, and the discipline the common enemy had imposed would not outlast it. Germany would remain the continental hegemon; France would remain the power it had twice beaten; and the two of them, it said, had a choice between binding themselves while they were friends or discovering, as their grandfathers had, what they became when they were not.

Luxembourg and Vienna, 2005 to 2016

Two conferences followed and both failed.

The Conference of Luxembourg sat from 2005 to 2009 and ended without a text. It agreed on a common market and on very little else. Britain would not accept a court above its own; the smaller states would not accept a union of the large states’ design; the Scandinavian Union could not decide whether to join as one or as five; and France, still under the Versailles limits, could not commit to anything touching defence without reopening them.

The Conference of Vienna sat from 2012 to 2016 and ended with a text that Britain would not sign. It had settled most of the institutions and the decision rule, and it foundered on the Court: the draft gave a European court power to bind a member to a rule it had voted against, and no British government of those years could carry that through the Commons. Without Britain the Franco-German project would have looked like a Franco-German project, and Paris and Berlin let the text lapse rather than proceed without London. Vienna kept something from the failure. When the Court was finally created, it was seated there.

The relaunch of 2023

The text lay in the archives for seven years. What revived it was the event its authors had predicted. By the early 2020s the cold war was effectively over, the Russian Republic had fallen into a flux that nobody in Europe could read, and as the enemy receded the old suspicions stirred: German primacy unsettled its neighbours, France carried the long memory of its humiliation, Italy and the Scandinavian Union guarded their independence, and Britain kept one foot out. None of this was war or near it. It was the beginning of the pattern that had produced two catastrophes, and the governments of 2023 included ministers whose parents remembered both.

A Franco-German summit at Straßburg in 2023 relaunched the talks on the Vienna text, and the relaunch succeeded where Vienna had failed because Britain had changed. A new British government accepted a court confined to competences listed in the treaty, on the argument, which the British debate has never quite forgiven, that Britain had better shape Europe from within than be shaped by it from without and no longer had the weight to do the second thing alone. Annelies Verhoeven, then Prime Minister of the Netherlands, was among the heads of government who carried the relaunch through the European capitals in its first months, and the Low Countries’ part in brokering between Paris and Berlin is the origin of her later office.

The Straßburg negotiation

The negotiation sat at Straßburg from 2023 to the end of 2026 and was harder than either of the failed conferences, because this time everyone meant it. Four fights nearly broke it, and France’s renunciations ran through all of them.

France’s price. France joined on equal terms, as a founding power beside the Germany that had beaten it, and paid for the equality twice. It renounced its claim to Alsace, which no French government had pressed since 1945 but which the settlement of that year had left formally open and which had lived in French politics ever since; and it signed a treaty renouncing nuclear weapons, replacing the ban Versailles had imposed with an obligation France gave itself. The remaining Versailles limits on its forces fell away with the treaty. The Alsace article was the hardest to negotiate and is the one the Concert’s French opponents cite.

The Court’s reach. Britain, Switzerland and several national parliaments resisted a court that could bind a member to a rule it had voted against, as Britain had resisted it at Vienna. The settlement confined the Court to the competences the treaty lists, wrote subsidiarity into the treaty in terms the founders acknowledged came out of Catholic social teaching, and left national constitutional courts the question of what happens if the Concert acts beyond its competences, which the German court at Karlsruhe has since reserved in terms that were read very carefully in Brussels.

The veto list. Which fields should keep a national veto was argued clause by clause. France wanted a veto on agriculture and lost it, taking instead a protocol that fixed the common agricultural support for the union’s first seven years. The small states wanted more vetoes than the large would give them, and settled for a veto on treaty change and on the admission of new members, which every seat holds, and for a decision rule counting seats rather than population.

The defence clause. The United Baltic Duchy and Poland-Lithuania pressed for a clause binding the members to one another’s aid, on the argument that the states on the Russian frontier needed more than a market. The ATO powers refused to duplicate the alliance, and the founding settlement excluded a defence competence deliberately.

Who sits. The two confederations posed a problem no union had faced. The Scandinavian Union is a confederation of five sovereign states and the Benelux Union of three, and each wanted both a collective voice and its members’ standing. The settlement made every name a legal member and gave each confederation one seat: the Scandinavian Union and its five states cast a single Council vote, as do the Benelux Union and its three, while each state elects its own members of the Parliament. The large states had feared that the confederations would cast six and four votes; the confederations had feared being reduced to delegations; and the solution satisfied both by giving them one vote and many names.

Two further instruments were negotiated beside the treaty. Switzerland, whose electorate can strike down any federal law by petition and which therefore cannot promise that its law will conform to anybody else’s, negotiated an instrument of its own. Liechtenstein, which has a customs and currency union with Switzerland, negotiated a protocol that let it join as a full member without breaking that union.

Signature and ratification

The Treaty of Straßburg was signed in the city on 18 January 2027, the anniversary of the German Empire’s proclamation at Versailles, chosen at France’s request, by the heads of government of the seventeen seats, with the heads of the confederations’ member governments signing beside their unions, and it brought the union into being with its institutions substantially complete rather than sketched for later. It established the Parliament, the Commission, the Council and the Court, listed the union’s competences, fixed the decision rule and the vetoes, created the customs union and the single market, took over Mitteleuropa’s currency arrangements as a voluntary exchange-rate mechanism, provided for the phased opening of free movement, left defence expressly outside, and wrote in both the right of further states to accede and the right of a member to leave.

Ratification was by parliaments, with referendums only where a member’s constitution required one, and it was complete within the year, in several members narrowly.

• Germany ratified through its amendment procedure, the largest transfer of competence in its constitutional history: three-fifths in both chambers and ratification by all twenty-seven constituent states, four of which ratified late and two of which attached formal declarations. The Constitutional Court held the treaty compatible on referral and reserved the question of acts beyond the competences conferred.
• Britain ratified by Act of Parliament. Caroline Pembroke, the Prime Minister who signed at Straßburg, carried the bill through the Commons by a narrow majority after a debate in which her own backbenches supplied most of the opposition, and the argument was won, in the British phrase, by the people making the smaller claim.
• Switzerland voted twice. Full membership was rejected outright, by a wide margin and by every canton but four. The negotiated instrument was then put to a second vote and carried by under three points, with the cantonal majority secured narrowly.
• Ireland and Denmark held the referendums their constitutions require, and both carried.
• The Portuguese Cortes used its ratification debate to resolve against surrendering the escudo, which nobody had asked it to surrender.

Not every territory that could have come in did. Malta, a self-governing British territory, decided by a vote of its House carried across both parties that a territory with a shipping registry, a corporate registry and a financial sector had more to lose from the Concert’s regulatory competence than to gain from its market, and stayed out, to London’s irritation. Gibraltar’s position was decided by Britain, and it came in. Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man came in through Britain and negotiated opt-outs from parts of the financial standards adopted in the treaty, and the Faroe Islands were exempted from the Concert’s arrangements to protect their fisheries, although Denmark is a member.

The first election and the first sitting

The Parliament was elected in June 2027, before the treaty entered into force, so that the union would begin with all of its organs at once. Turnout was about 60 per cent, which the Parliament cites and which few expect to see again, since a founding election is a novelty and a novelty is voted in once. The Christian Democrats came first and Verhoeven, their leading candidate, was elected President of the Concert by the new Parliament in July with the support of the Liberals and the assent of the Council.

The treaty entered into force on 1 July 2027, with France holding the first six-month presidency of the Council. The Parliament’s first sitting at Straßburg that day was attended by sovereigns as guests of the French presidency, among them Christina II of Sweden, who said nothing, which the Concert’s own record notes as the most useful contribution of the day. The Commission took up its work at Brussels in the same month. The Court was convened at Vienna in the autumn, and Karl III opened it in a speech of four sentences that was reported everywhere as adequate.

The first year

The union’s first year has been one of institution-building: a Parliament seated, a Commission staffed, a Court convened, and the machinery of a customs union assembled out of the members’ own administrations. Several of its first acts were fights over where things would go. Warsaw won the seat of the eastern agency against the Baltic Duchy. The protocol office spent three months on where the United Principalities of Romania should sit in an alphabet that had never had to place them. The exchange-rate mechanism was moved from Berlin, where Mitteleuropa had kept it, to Luxembourg, which fooled nobody.

The first large industrial act of the Concert era was signed at Straßburg in November 2027: a memorandum between the Realm’s government, the French Empire and the Commission funding the study of a supersonic successor to Concorde, with Airbus as the Concert members’ consortium. Nothing has been ordered. The press calls the aircraft the second Concorde, and the obvious name, given the Concert’s motto, is used by nobody official.

The German presidency of the Council opened in January 2028 under the shadow of the Empire’s own succession. Heinrich I, in whose reign the treaty was made, died suddenly on 12 February 2028, and the accession of the fourteen-year-old Alexander I added a personal dimension to the German question without changing German policy; the new Emperor has since described Germany’s proper part in the Concert as that of a stabilising federal power, strong enough to protect the smaller states and restrained enough not to absorb their judgement. The Court gave its first judgments in the spring, in a group of cases applying the Concert’s competition law to Italy’s publicly held firms, and upheld most of their conduct. In Britain, Pembroke’s party removed her in favour of Alistair Rennie, for reasons that had little to do with the Concert, which survived the change without a debate.

The Benelux Union took the presidency in July 2028, so that the chair has been in Low Countries hands for the two events of the union’s second half-year. When Ernest V, King of Great Britain among his other crowns, was found unconscious in the King’s crisis, Verhoeven and the Benelux presidency sent a message the same night, and that was the whole of the Concert’s part: Britain’s seat is a government’s seat and was unaffected. And in the Brunswick Motor Works case the Court at Vienna has heard argument and has not ruled.

Membership

The seventeen seats

The Concert has seventeen seats in the Council and twenty-five legal members. Fifteen seats belong to single states. Two belong to confederations, whose members hold legal membership beside their unions and share the union’s one Council vote. The Parliament’s seats are shared out by population, with the larger members receiving proportionally fewer per head than the smaller, between a minimum of six and a maximum of ninety-six.

Every seat joined in 2027. There has been no enlargement, no application is pending, and no member has left.

The founding powers

Five powers drove the Concert into being and are reckoned its founders: the German Empire, the French Empire, Great Britain, the Socialist Kingdom of Italy and the Scandinavian Union. That these five built it is the measure of its purpose, for they are exactly the powers whose mutual suspicion most needed managing: the hegemon, the old enemy, the semi-detached island and the two proud middle powers. The distinction between a founding power and a member that joined at the founding confers nothing in law, since every seat has one vote, and it is noticed far more in the commentary of the other members, Spain’s most of all, than in the Concert’s institutions.

The confederations

The Scandinavian Union holds its seat with its five states, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland, and the Benelux Union with its three, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Every one of these names is a legal member of the Concert. Each state elects its own members of the Parliament and speaks in its own name in the Concert’s committees and before its Court, and each confederation casts one vote in the Council, instructed by the confederation’s own procedure: the Stockholm councils for the Nordic seat, and the negotiated consensus of the three governments for the Benelux. Each confederation nominates one member of the Commission, chosen among its states in turn.

Membership is tied. The treaty attaches each state’s Concert membership to its membership of its confederation, so that no Nordic or Benelux state can leave the Concert without leaving its union, and a state that left its union would leave the Concert with it and have to apply again. Norway’s coastal and fishing constituencies, which argue for a more tightly instructed Nordic delegation, cannot argue for leaving the Concert without arguing for leaving the Scandinavian Union, and none of them does.

Switzerland and Liechtenstein

Switzerland holds a seat on terms no other member holds. Its instrument gives it the customs area and the single market and a part in the technical and regulatory machinery, requires it to contribute to the budget, and leaves it outside the political competences, outside the Court’s jurisdiction over Swiss domestic law and outside the federalising provisions altogether. Its seat votes in the Council on the market and the technical machinery and on nothing else, and since the Parliament is among the federalising provisions, the Swiss elect no members to it. Free movement applies to Switzerland on a bilateral basis with its own safeguard clauses. Every enlargement of the Concert’s competences reopens the arrangement and requires a fresh Swiss vote.

The arrangement is resented by several other members, who describe it accurately as selection among the parts of the union that suit, and the Swiss answer is that they were offered membership, said no, and negotiated something they could ratify, and that a Concert unable to accommodate a state with genuine popular sovereignty would be telling the continent something about itself.

Liechtenstein is a full member in its own right, with its own seat, its own commissioner and the Parliament’s minimum of six members, and it is the only member whose currency and customs territory belong to a state that is not fully inside the union. A protocol to the treaty keeps its customs and currency union with Switzerland intact, which is easier than it sounds, since Switzerland is inside the Concert’s customs area and single market. The protocol’s real work is on the political competences, which bind Liechtenstein and not its partner, so that a law can apply on one side of the Rhine bridge at Vaduz and not on the other. It is the most intricate arrangement in the Concert’s law for the smallest of its members, and the Concert’s lawyers say that it works because the people who have to apply it are very few.

Constituent nations and territories

Constituent nations of the members hold no separate seat, and the rule is applied strictly, since a union of seventeen seats would become a union of many times that number if every historic nation inside them were admitted in its own right.

• The German states take part only through the Empire. Brunswick may send ministers, officials and university experts inside the German delegation when transport, industry or regional administration is at issue, without a vote of its own. Saxony keeps an office at Brussels, not a legation, and Bavaria uses the Concert as a second forum with an activity its formal standing does not explain.
• The British nations take part only through Britain. Wales and Kernow hold no seat, observer status or vote, and take part in the programmes the Concert opens to subnational bodies.
• The Crown dependencies are inside through Britain’s treaty, with opt-outs. Jersey and Guernsey opted out of the financial standards, and the Commission wants the opt-out removed; the Isle of Man opted in on tax transparency and out on beneficial ownership. The Channel Islands keep a joint office at Brussels.
• Gibraltar is inside by Britain’s decision, so that the customs area, the single market and the phased free movement apply across a frontier whose line Britain and Spain, both members, still dispute; sovereignty sits behind the national veto and outside the Concert’s competence.
• The French duchies are represented through France. Brittany has no observer seat of its own; Normandy holds observer status (below).
• The Faroe Islands are exempted from the Concert’s arrangements by a protocol that protects their fisheries.

Observers, associates and partners

The Concert distinguishes those who attend from those who trade.

• Observers attend and speak without a vote. The Duchy of Normandy may attend sessions, submit technical material, sit on committees within its competence and speak when recognised; France remains the member and answers for Normandy’s obligations, and the Concert records whether France, Normandy or both bear responsibility for implementing a decision. The Holy See observes on the arrangement it prefers everywhere, with standing to speak and no obligation to take a side, and the Concert’s founders have acknowledged that the subsidiarity written into the treaty came out of Catholic social teaching.
• Associates attend the Council without a vote on listed subjects. The Kingdom of Arabia is the only one, attending on the Mediterranean, energy, security and the major economic rules, and it does not accept European direction of Arabian constitutional affairs.
• Association agreements are trade and market treaties without attendance. Algeria, the Concert’s strategic gas supplier by pipeline to Spain and Italy, and Morocco hold them. Neither is eligible for membership, since the treaty admits European states only.
• Partnerships are cooperation treaties. The West Indies Federation holds one, on trade, research, education, climate and regulation, which gives the Concert’s institutions no authority over West Indian law.

Outside

Three kinds of European state stand outside.

The Russian Republic is excluded so long as it remains the authoritarian republic against which the Allied order was built, and the exclusion is conditional rather than permanent: a seat is kept pointedly empty for a Russia that liberalises. In the spring of 2028, under the German presidency, the Council went one step further and offered the Republic an association agreement on stated conditions on elections and the independence of the courts. Moscow did not answer until the night of 23 to 24 October 2028, when President Pavel Yermolov decreed a free election and announced that Russia would open talks on the offer. The Council had not replied by the following morning. On the evening of 25 October, after Russia voted for a constitutional crown, it said that the offer stood and that a constitutional Russia might one day take the seat, and before midnight the Republic became the Russian Empire. The empire is outside the Concert as the Republic was, the offer standing, and the conditions on elections and the courts have a constitution still to be written to be measured against. On 26 October the Council went further than its spring offer. It named a special envoy, Tomasz Wierzbicki, a former Foreign Minister of Poland-Lithuania, answering to both the Commission and the Council, on a mandate every seat agreed without conditions, to negotiate Russian associate status: attendance at the Council without a vote on energy, on trade and the major economic rules, and on cross-border transport and frontiers, but not, at first, on security. The talks opened that evening at St Petersburg, with no timetable.

Malta declined, by its own decision, and remains a British territory outside the union Britain founded.

The microstates, Monaco, Andorra and San Marino, are inside the customs area through their neighbours’ arrangements and hold no seats. The Holy See observes.

The United Kingdom of America is not a European state, has never sought membership and would not be offered it, and stands outside as the union’s closest friend and patron, which is described below.

Accession and withdrawal

The treaty admits European states that accept the whole body of the union’s law. Admission requires the agreement of every seat, which is one of the vetoes the small states won at Straßburg. A member may lawfully leave on notice, a right written into the treaty and not yet used; the members of the two confederations may leave only with their unions. An independent Estland, if the Baltic Duchy’s separatists ever won one, would leave the Concert with the Duchy’s membership behind it and have to apply as a new state, since membership belongs to the Duchy.

Institutions

For a union a year old, the Concert reached at once for a deep and genuinely supranational structure, and the boldness is its defining feature. Rather than build slowly, as unions usually do, its founders gave a new body real authority over sovereign great powers from its first day, partly because Luxembourg and Vienna had shown what happened to a slow design: it never arrived. Its organs are four.

The Parliament

The European Parliament has 750 members, directly elected for five years by the citizens of every member except Switzerland, and it sits at Straßburg. It legislates jointly with the Council within the union’s competences, adopts the budget with the Council, elects the President of the Concert, confirms the Commission and may dismiss it by a vote of censure, which it has not done.

Seats are shared out by population, with a minimum of six and a maximum of ninety-six, so that the German Empire and the Byzantine Federation hold ninety-six each and Liechtenstein and Iceland six each, and a member of the Parliament from Liechtenstein represents about seven thousand people and one from Germany more than a million. Each state of the two confederations elects its own members.

There is no common electoral law. Each member elects its members of the Parliament under a system of its own choosing, and most have chosen some form of proportional representation by party lists. Britain has not: it elects its seventy-two members in single-member constituencies, as it elects its Commons, and the result of June 2027, in which one party took a majority of the British seats on well under half the British vote, is cited in every argument about whether the Parliament is one assembly or seventeen.

The members sit in groups by political family rather than by nationality. The Christian Democrats are the largest, with about a third of the seats, followed by the Social Democrats, the Liberals, the Greens and a sovereigntist group opposed to any deepening of the union and a few of its existing competences, with a scatter of unattached members beside them. The Christian Democrats and the Liberals together hold a narrow majority, and the Parliament’s first year has been governed by that majority and by its habit of looking for Social Democratic votes whenever the majority is too narrow to risk.

The Commission

The Commission is the union’s executive and its public face, the standing body that proposes legislation, administers the common law and enforces it against the members. It sits at Brussels and has seventeen members, one for each seat, the confederations each nominating one from among their states in turn. Commissioners are bound to act for the union rather than for the governments that nominated them, a duty easier to write into a treaty than to enforce, and the Parliament confirms the College as a whole after hearings on each member.

It is headed by the President of the Concert, who is elected by the Parliament from among the leading candidates the groups put forward at the election, with the assent of the Council, for the Parliament’s five-year term. The office carries the Commission’s initiative and the union’s voice abroad where the union has one, and it does not carry a vote in the Council.

The first President is Annelies Verhoeven, a Christian Democrat who was Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 2017 to 2025. She was among the heads of government who carried the relaunch of 2023 from capital to capital, the Low Countries being the states with the most to lose from a Franco-German quarrel and the most experience of standing between the two, and she led the Christian Democrats into the election of June 2027 as their candidate for the office. The Parliament elected her in July 2027 with the votes of the Christian Democrats and the Liberals, and her term runs to 2032. She is the only official of the Concert whom its own publications name as a matter of course, which is a small sign of how much of the union is still being built.

The Council

The Council of the member governments sits at Brussels, sets the union’s direction, legislates with the Parliament and guards the interests of the states. It is the organ in which the members are most plainly themselves, and it is where the decision rule matters, since it is there that majorities are counted and vetoes exercised.

Each seat has one vote. A qualified majority is two-thirds of the seats, twelve of seventeen, with no test of population, so that the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania is the formal equal of the German Empire in every count, which its diplomats regard as the most valuable fact in the treaty. The large states accepted the rule only because the vetoes protect them on the things they cared about, and because any six seats can block: the five largest, Germany, the Byzantine Federation, Austria-Hungary, Britain and Italy, need only one partner to stop anything, and they always find one.

The presidency of the Council passes among the seats in six-month turns, beginning with France, which held it from July to December 2027 and prepared the first sittings; the German Empire followed from January to June 2028, and the Benelux Union holds it from July 2028. The presidency chairs the Council’s meetings, sets their agenda and represents the Council to the Parliament, and the order of the turns was fixed at Straßburg so that no two founding powers hold it in succession after Germany’s.

The Court

The Court at Vienna enforces the treaty and the union’s law, decides disputes between the members and the institutions, hears references from national courts, and may, within the union’s competences, override national law that conflicts with them. That last power, the authority of a European court to bind a sovereign great power to a rule it voted against, is the sharpest edge of the design and the provision the union’s sceptics cite first.

It has nine judges. They are chosen on merit by a panel of former judges and senior jurists drawn from the members’ highest courts, and appointed by the Council on the panel’s list, for single terms of nine years, and there is no national quota: no member is entitled to a judge, and on the first bench eight of the seventeen seats have none. The small states resent this more than any other rule in the treaty, since it was the one place where the large states agreed with the Court’s own champions, and Ireland raises it whenever the composition of anything is discussed. The judges elect their own President.

The Court was convened in the autumn of 2027 and opened by Karl III, and its first judgments, in the spring of 2028, were a group of cases applying the Concert’s competition law to the publicly held firms of the Socialist Kingdom of Italy. The Court held that the treaty is neutral on who owns a firm and strict on how the firm behaves, and upheld most of the Italian firms’ conduct, and being the first judgments of the union they are already the most cited. Its docket since has been mostly the single market, with two cases of larger consequence pending, the Brunswick Motor Works case and the segregated schooling of Roma children in Romania, and a standing complaint before the Commission against the fixed price of books in Germany, which Saxony defends with the vigour of a state defending an industry rather than a principle.

Other bodies

• The eastern agency at Warsaw administers the cohesion and transport money for the eastern members: the motorways, the rail lines and the Danube works. Warsaw won it against the Baltic Duchy in 2027, in a contest the two states treat as one more round of their century-old competition to be Germany’s first partner in the east.
• The exchange-rate mechanism is run by a small board of the participating central banks at Luxembourg (see below).
• The competition directorate of the Commission investigates cartels, mergers and state aid, and has opened and closed two inquiries into British Airways in its first year.
• The protocol office of the Council keeps the union’s precedence, its seating and its alphabet.
• Arbitration under the treaty is available for disputes between a member and a constituent nation by joint consent, which France and Brittany have written into their own compact and have not yet used.

The seats

The institutions are spread deliberately across the continent, so that no one capital holds the union. The Parliament sits at Straßburg, the union’s symbolic seat; the Commission and the Council at Brussels, in the Benelux Union; and the Court at Vienna, in Austria-Hungary. That the Parliament’s home is on German soil is balanced by seating the executive and the judiciary elsewhere, a small architecture of reassurance in the placement of the buildings.

Straßburg lies in Elsaß-Lothringen, the territory Germany took from France in 1871 and held through both Great Wars, now a grand duchy of the Empire. It is the ground on which the Franco-German quarrel was fought, and to seat the union of European peace there is to plant it on the fault line it exists to heal. Yet it is German soil, and that is the second edge. The choice was French in origin and German in acceptance, and both governments understood the symbolism precisely: France chose to put Europe’s assembly in the city it had renounced, and Germany accepted a European capital inside its most contested province, which has given Elsaß-Lothringen an unexpected second career and changed the local argument in ways nobody predicted, since a European capital has interests of its own.

The habit of naming the whole union for Straßburg is universal and not quite accurate. Missions to the Concert, including the Realm’s, are accredited to the Commission and sit at Brussels, as do the members’ permanent representations and the offices the German and British constituent states keep; the inspections of the Channel Islands’ finance are the Commission’s and are run from Brussels; and the empty seat kept for Russia is a seat in the Council. “Straßburg” in a headline means the union, and in a diplomatic despatch it usually means Brussels.

The majorities

Competences and law

What the union holds

The Concert’s competences are listed in the treaty rather than general, and the list was the price of Britain’s signature. The union holds the customs union and the single market in goods, capital and services; the competition and common market law that go with them, including the rules on state aid and public guarantees; the common agricultural arrangements and the cohesion funds; the phased opening of free movement of persons; common rules for aviation, consumer protection, product standards, fisheries quotas, emissions and the digital platforms, which follow from the market; and the political coordination of the members’ diplomacy and of their quarrels with one another. Within those competences the union’s law is supreme over the conflicting law of a member, and it is the Court that says so.

What it does not hold

Defence and arms are expressly outside and remain with the Atlantic Treaty Organization. A common currency has not been adopted. A single foreign policy is an aspiration written into the treaty rather than a fact. Taxation, the criminal law, education, the constitutional forms of the members and the succession to their thrones are untouched, and the treaty says so in terms because several ratifying parliaments insisted on it. Sovereignty over territory is outside the Concert’s competence, so that a frontier two members dispute, like Gibraltar’s, is a Concert frontier for goods and workers and a national question for everything else.

Ownership and conduct

The treaty is neutral on ownership and strict on conduct. It leaves to each member the question of who owns its firms, so that the Socialist Kingdom of Italy’s socially owned sector was never in question at Straßburg, and it applies its rules on competition, state aid and public guarantees to every firm alike, so that a publicly owned firm may exist but may not be favoured. The distinction is easy to state and hard to apply, and it is applied every week: the German public and cooperative banks have lost ground on their public guarantees and kept the territorial principle that confines each savings bank to its own district; the Saxon state holdings are argued over clause by clause; and the Italian firms that were the Court’s first defendants were held to be lawful owners behaving, mostly, lawfully.

Supremacy and its limits

Within its competences the Concert’s law prevails over national law, and national courts must apply it. What happens when the Concert acts beyond its competences is not settled. The German Constitutional Court held the treaty compatible with the German Constitution while reserving that question in terms that every lawyer in the union has read, and several other constitutional courts have since said the same thing more briefly. The Court at Vienna holds that it alone decides the limits of the union’s competence. Both positions are coherent and they cannot both prevail, and the Concert’s first year has been spent, deliberately, avoiding a case that would make one of them do so.

The treaty’s answer to the problem is subsidiarity: the union acts only where the members cannot achieve the end as well alone. The principle came out of Catholic social teaching, the founders acknowledged the debt, and the Holy See, which observes, has been pleased to hear it acknowledged.

The vetoes

Each seat keeps a veto on treaty change, on the admission of new members and on the constitutional questions the treaty reserves, which include the forms of the members’ states, their crowns and their territory. Everything else within the competences passes by two-thirds. The hardest cases are those in which a measure of plainly economic character carries a plainly constitutional consequence, and it is the Court that decides on which side of the line such a measure falls. The Brunswick case is such a case.

Money and the market

The customs union and the single market

The Concert’s economic core is a customs union and a single market: a common external tariff, a single set of market rules, and the free movement of goods, capital and services across seventeen seats, policed by the Commission and the Court. It is the union’s most solid achievement and the part that touches ordinary life most directly. The internal borders are crossed without formality for goods, and the common external frontier, in the Strait, on the Finnish border and along the eastern belt, is everybody’s rule and the frontier members’ problem. Most of the Court’s first year was market law, and most of the Commission’s work is the slow conversion of seventeen sets of national rules into one.

The budget

The budget is about one per cent of the members’ combined income, raised from the customs duties collected at the common frontier and from the members’ contributions, and spent mostly on agriculture and cohesion. The agricultural support is fixed for the first seven years by the protocol France took in place of its veto. The cohesion money goes to the interiors and the south of the Iberian kingdoms, to Romania and Serbia, and through the eastern agency to the motorways and rail lines of the eastern belt. The German Empire is the largest net contributor, and the Scandinavian Union and Switzerland contribute more than they receive. Germany has resisted every proposal for common borrowing, on grounds that are constitutional as much as fiscal, and has so far won.

No combined total

The Concert publishes no combined economic total, and the omission is deliberate. A customs union is not an economy: it has no treasury of its own, no common currency, no power to tax and no single labour market yet completed, and a figure summing its members would describe a thing that does not act. The union measures itself by what it can say it governs, which is a market of about 670 million people across seventeen seats. The largest of its members, the German Empire, is richer per head than any other large economy in the world, and the poorest, Romania, has the worst child poverty in the union and the largest share of its people working abroad.

The exchange-rate mechanism

The Concert has no common currency. The members keep their own monies: the mark, the franc, the pound, the lira, the crowns and the krone, the peseta, the escudo, the zloty, the leu, and the rest. What the treaty created instead is a voluntary exchange-rate mechanism, anchored on the German mark, under which participating currencies hold narrow bands against the mark and their central banks defend them together.

The mechanism is older than the Concert. Mitteleuropa kept currency arrangements around the mark for most of the twentieth century, to which the eastern currencies were pegged, and the treaty took them over and opened them to every member. The board of the participating central banks was moved from Berlin to Luxembourg, a neutral seat in the Benelux deliberately away from the German central bank, which fools nobody, since the bands are set around a currency whose policy is made in Berlin.

Inside are the German Empire, the Benelux states, the United Baltic Duchy, whose Baltic mark has stood at par with the German mark since 1946, and Poland-Lithuania, whose zloty was pegged to the mark before the union existed. Denmark pegs its krone narrowly to the mechanism without full membership of it, which delivers most of the stability and none of the say, and the Nationalbank’s whole monetary policy consists of defending the peg; Danish voters twice declined to join the old Mitteleuropa arrangement formally, in 2000 and in 2015, and Danish economists describe the result as a currency union in which Denmark has no vote. Outside are France, Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Austria-Hungary, the Byzantine Federation, Romania, Serbia, Sweden and the other Nordic states, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. The mechanism therefore reads, accurately, as a German currency zone with a European name.

The currency argument

Whether to go further, to a common currency, is the great economic argument of the union’s future, and it was kept off the table at Straßburg because it would have broken the negotiation. The Baltic Duchy supports one. Bohemia is for it and Hungary against it, Austria has not said, and Illyria would like to know who would pay. Portugal’s Cortes has twice resolved against surrendering the escudo. Sweden keeps the krona and has no intention of joining even the mechanism. France will not put the franc inside a German band, and Germany will not put the mark at the service of any other state’s debts. The Scandinavian Union’s own experience, five currencies floating over one integrated market, is cited by both sides and settles nothing.

Free movement

The union has not yet completed the free movement of persons. The treaty opens it by category: students and the professions, with posted workers, from 2027, and all workers, with the right of residence that goes with work, from 2030. Until then the movement of ordinary labour between the members runs on the older bilateral agreements, which is why the Romanian and Serbian labour that works the German and Bavarian harvests arrives on permits and not by right. Switzerland applies free movement bilaterally with its own safeguards. The timetable is a standing item of the Council’s business, the frontier members want it slowed and the eastern members want it kept, and nobody has proposed to change the date.

The members in the Concert

The Concert is a machine for managing several old tensions at once, and each of its members brings its own to the table. None of the quarrels below is a crisis. That is the point: the Concert exists to keep them from becoming one.

The German Empire

The German Empire is the largest member by economy and by net contribution and, with the Byzantine Federation, by population; the anchor of the exchange-rate mechanism; the host of the Parliament; and the power the whole design exists to manage. German primacy is the problem the Concert was made for, and German weight is inescapable even in the making of the cure, a paradox the Parliament’s seat on German soil states more plainly than any of the union’s documents.

Germany is simultaneously the Concert’s engine and its principal brake. Its case for joining was made in three registers: to the security establishment, that the Concert binds a rehabilitated France into a structure France helped to design, which is a better guarantee than any treaty of restraint; to industry, that the market removes the last frictions in its largest export destination; and to the public, that the Concert completes the settlement of 1945 rather than departing from it. Its resistance is as consistent. It has defended its public and cooperative banks against the rules on guarantees, its sectoral wage agreements against the rules on competition, and its constitutional borrowing rule against every proposal for common debt. Its partners’ complaint is the surplus: a union whose largest economy restrains its own wages and investment exports its adjustment to everyone else, and the exchange on the subject at Brussels has become ritual.

Mitteleuropa, the older German system in the east, now nests inside the Concert. What survives of it is a development bank, a set of technical bodies and a habit of consultation, and the mark-anchored currency arrangements the treaty took over. German officials call the nesting the natural evolution of a regional order into a European one. The smaller members’ officials call it the moment the arrangement acquired a court Germany does not control.

The German constituent states take part through the Empire, some with more energy than others: Hamburg is the most Concert-minded city in Germany, Bavaria uses the union as a second forum against Berlin, and Saxony defends its state holdings and its book trade at Brussels clause by clause. Under Alexander I the Empire’s policy has not changed, and his description of Germany as a stabilising federal power in the Concert, protecting the smaller states without absorbing their judgement and keeping a democratic Russia’s entry possible, is the official one.

The French Empire

The French Empire grips the Concert more tightly than any other member, because membership on equal terms with the Germany that beat it is the most concrete form French rehabilitation has taken. The Concert is the place where France sits as Germany’s partner rather than its defeated enemy, and France means to keep the place.

France paid for it at Straßburg with the renunciation of Alsace and of nuclear weapons, and the price is the core of the French opposition’s case: that France bought equality by surrendering the last two things that made it unequal in its own favour. The relationship with Germany, cold in feeling and close in practice for most of the postwar period, has grown warmer since 2027, which the French right detests. Napoleon VII, who signed the treaty’s instruments and the nuclear renunciation, set out after the founding to learn German, and does not pretend to speak it well. France is outside the exchange-rate mechanism, and will not put the franc inside a German band.

The French duchies take part through France: Normandy as an observer, Brittany without one.

Great Britain

Great Britain is the founding power whose commitment surprised the continent. Tied across the Atlantic to the Realm by a shared Crown and a century of alliance, and semi-detached from Europe by temperament and geography, it was expected to keep one foot out of the Concert as it had kept one foot out of every continental arrangement for two centuries, and its refusal to sign at Vienna in 2016 seemed to confirm the expectation. It did the opposite. The British judgement of 2023 was that Britain had better shape Europe from within than be shaped by it from without, and the reasoning was made easier by the fact that Britain no longer had the weight to do the second thing alone.

The argument was British politics in miniature and was won, narrowly, by the people making the smaller claim. A country that joins a union because it can no longer afford to stand outside one has made a decision that is correct and is not the decision its rhetoric describes. Caroline Pembroke carried the ratification through the Commons and was removed by her own party in 2028 for other reasons; Alistair Rennie has kept the policy without making a speech about it.

Britain is outside the exchange-rate mechanism, elects its members of the Parliament in single-member seats, and carries its territories in by a variety of routes: Gibraltar inside, the Crown dependencies inside with opt-outs, Malta outside by its own choice. Its airline is bound by the Concert’s single aviation market while the old personal-union open-skies arrangement with the Realm erodes beneath it.

The Socialist Kingdom of Italy

The Socialist Kingdom of Italy joined because a customs union and a single market threatened nothing its own constitutional settlement protected. The Concert has no competence over ownership, so the socially owned sector was never in question, and its competition law, which applies to publicly held firms as to any others, produced the union’s first judgments. The Italian cases held that the treaty is neutral on ownership and strict on conduct, and they are the most cited body of Concert law because they were the first. Italy sits at the same table as the France whose western provinces it holds, keeps the lira outside the mechanism, and with the Scandinavian Union is one of the two proud middle powers among the founders, determined that the union should balance the giants rather than be captured by them. Its relations with Germany are correct and marked by a persistent mutual incomprehension about economic policy.

The Scandinavian Union and the Nordic states

The Scandinavian Union holds a founding seat and casts one Council vote for its five states, each of which is a legal member and elects its own members of the Parliament. Membership has sharpened the Union’s own argument rather than settled it, since a confederation that guards the independence of five sovereign states does not surrender it lightly to a deeper union still. On several of the Concert’s arguments the Union is Germany’s most reliable ally, since both are net contributors with strong domestic institutions they are reluctant to see harmonised away.

Inside the seat the five states differ. Sweden is the largest and carries the Union’s position in most debates, and keeps the krona outside the mechanism. Denmark has always been the Union’s advocate of looseness, pegs its krone to the mechanism without joining it, and protects the Faroes with an exemption. Norway’s coastal and fishing constituencies, whom the Concert’s fisheries rules reach, argue for a Nordic delegation more tightly instructed by its members. Finland holds the Concert’s northern frontier with Russia, which was the front line of the cold war in the north. Iceland, with six members of the Parliament for four hundred thousand people, is the most over-represented state in the union after Liechtenstein, and has never held a national vote on membership because there has never been a national accession to hold one about.

Austria-Hungary

Austria-Hungary hosts the Court at Vienna, which is the monarchy’s largest diplomatic asset, and its role in the Concert is specialised: it is the union’s authority on minorities. Every European state with a stranded people, a bilingual province or a language quarrel consults the monarchy’s experience, and its statute of 1920 is cited from Ireland to the Byzantine lands. Nobody copies it, since its arrangements assume a state with no majority nationality and a sovereign above four legal systems, and the monarchy is consulted constantly and imitated never.

The Concert is also, quietly, a problem for the monarchy. A supranational union with a directly elected parliament is an argument, standing in Straßburg, that peoples can be governed in common by an assembly they elect, and the Austro-Hungarian citizen who votes for the European Parliament is voting directly for a body above his kingdom, which is precisely what he may not do for the joint affairs of his own monarchy. With Germany it sets the Concert’s agenda more often than the other fifteen seats combined. Its quarrel with Serbia is now pursued through Concert machinery rather than around it.

The Byzantine Federation

The Byzantine Federation, the Greek and Ottoman federation across the southern Balkans, the Aegean and Anatolia, is the keenest of the large members. It sees the Concert as proof that it belongs to Europe, which a state with its capital on the Bosporus and most of its territory in Asia has never been able to take for granted, and it presses harder than anyone for the completion of free movement and for cohesion money for its Anatolian interior. It holds the Straits, ninety-six members of the Parliament and the eastern end of the union’s reach, at the junction of German, Russian and Levantine interests, and its enthusiasm is the clearest answer the Concert has to the charge that it is a Christian union by another name.

The Benelux states

The Benelux Union holds one seat for Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, hosts the Commission and the Council at Brussels and the exchange-rate mechanism at Luxembourg, and gave the union its first President. The Low Countries occupy the ground that was Germany’s central strategic anxiety in the 1930s, and they are the states with most to lose from a Franco-German quarrel and most experience of standing between the two, which is why Verhoeven’s part in 2023 came naturally. Brussels now carries a second layer of continental administration in a city that already carried one. All three Benelux currencies are inside the mechanism, and the Benelux presidency of the Council from July 2028 has been the union’s busiest.

Spain and Portugal

Spain joined at the founding as a member and not as a founding power, a distinction Spanish commentary notices more than the Concert does. Membership is popular, and the Concert is trusted in Spain more than most national institutions, as is common among members that entered a European order after a dictatorship. Its priorities are the southern frontier, agriculture and water, and cohesion money for the interior and the south, and its persistent difficulty is that the Concert’s external border in the Strait is Spain’s problem and everybody’s rule. Its old dispute with Britain over Gibraltar has gone quiet inside the union, which governs the frontier and not the sovereignty.

Portugal is small in the Concert and listened to in one place, which is anything touching the Atlantic, Africa or Brazil, and the Concert uses Lisbon as its channel to all three. It keeps the escudo, which the Cortes has twice resolved not to surrender, and is one of the reasons the common currency was kept off the table at Straßburg.

Ireland

The Kingdom of Ireland takes the Concert seriously in the way small states do. Its positions are consistent: for the union’s development, for a Concert defence competence because that is a capability Ireland, outside the alliance, could actually join, and permanently attentive to anything that might dilute a small member’s vote, the Court’s lack of a national quota above all. Its customs union with Britain predates the Concert and is kept as a separate arrangement beside it, as the common travel area is kept beside the Concert’s free movement, and its position outside every military bloc is an asset in a union whose eastern members want one.

Poland-Lithuania and the Baltic Duchy

The Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania is a founding-generation member and the one that values the decision rule most, since the Concert is the one forum in which it is Germany’s formal equal, holding one seat as Germany holds one seat. It won the eastern agency for Warsaw, pressed with the Baltic Duchy for a defence clause and lost, and remains the most consistent and least successful advocate of a Concert defence competence. It raises the treatment of its people in the German eastern provinces in the Concert’s institutions, which it regards as a considerable improvement on raising it in Berlin. The zloty is inside the mechanism.

The United Baltic Duchy is a founding member among the smaller states of the eastern belt. It lost the defence clause and the eastern agency, supports a common Concert currency, which its Estonian separatists oppose, and finds that the Concert’s climate rules threaten the oil shale around Narva, its largest polluter and the largest employer of its Russian speakers. Its membership belongs to the Duchy as a whole, so that an independent Estland would have to apply on its own.

Romania and Serbia

The United Principalities of Romania acceded in 2027 after a decade of preparation in which courts were rebuilt and standards imposed from outside that the country had been unable to impose on itself. Their federation was the hardest administrative problem of the accession, since the Concert deals with states and this state has three governments, and the solution was a federal law under which only the Common Minister-President sits in Council, which the kingdoms resented and accepted. Romania’s grain and wine have gained from the market; its smallholders have lost; its labour waits for 2030; and the segregated schooling of its Roma children is before the Court.

Serbia is a member since 2027 and the Concert’s quietest seat. Its quarrel with Austria-Hungary, the oldest in the Balkans, is now argued through Concert procedure, and it shares with Romania the old Danube dam at the gorge, whose upkeep the eastern agency now helps to pay for.

Switzerland and Liechtenstein

Switzerland is in the Concert’s market and outside its politics, on the instrument its voters carried by under three points after they rejected full membership, and Liechtenstein is a full member beside it, by a protocol that keeps their customs and currency union intact. The pair is the Concert’s demonstration that a union can accommodate a state that will not be bound and a state that will, on opposite banks of one river.

Relations

The United Kingdom of America

The United Kingdom of America is not a member, has never sought membership and would not be offered it, since it is not a European state, and it stands outside as the union’s closest friend and patron. The Realm supports the Concert and does not join it, and regards it with the goodwill of a patron who has never been asked.

The relationship has a mission and no framework. The Realm keeps a mission accredited to the Commission at Brussels, headed since 2027 by Catherine Ainsley, a trade negotiator from the Commonwealth of Cascadia who led the Realm’s side of the first trade round with the Commission. It signs ordinary agreements with the union, of which the supersonic memorandum of November 2027 was the first and the trade agreement under negotiation is the largest. It has no framework treaty, no observer status and no standing joint committee: the Foreign Office has worked through all three and recommended none, on the argument that the shape of a union a year old cannot yet be known.

The Realm’s attention is not idle. Its economy is larger than any member’s and its currency is the one the Concert’s members hold in reserve; the Concert economies are among its principal trading partners; and the trade round has already produced the argument both sides expected, the Concert pressing for cultural exceptions and the Realm for its farmers. The Concert has complained more than once about the separate personal-union channel through which sister-realm subjects clear the Realm’s airports, which to a European traveller is a visible hierarchy of welcome.

The Atlantic Treaty Organization

The Concert has no defence of its own, and the hard business of arms and war remains with the Atlantic Treaty Organization, of which most of its members are part and which was built with the Realm at its head. The founding settlement excluded a defence competence deliberately, so that the union would not duplicate the alliance, and the division is simple: the alliance keeps arms, the Concert keeps the market, and neither trespasses. The ATO’s headquarters and the Concert’s Commission both sit at Brussels, which makes the division easy to observe and easy to blur. The members outside the alliance, Ireland among them, and the eastern members inside it who want more than it offers, are the two constituencies for a Concert defence competence, and they want different things from it.

The League of Nations

Above the Concert sits the League of Nations, the frame of the whole world, in which the Concert’s members hold their seats individually and not as a bloc. The Concert coordinates its members’ positions at the League and does not vote there, and Germany, Britain and the other European members vote with their Concert partners more often than not. Normandy and Brittany, which hold League seats for their own purposes, sit at the League in their own right and at the Concert through France.

Russia

Russia is the reason the Concert’s members once needed no union and the reason they now have one. Its exclusion is conditional, its seat is kept empty, and the association agreement offered in the spring of 2028 on conditions about elections and courts went unanswered until 24 October 2028, when President Yermolov, decreeing a free election and confining the army to its barracks, announced that Russia would open talks on it. Inside the Concert the question divides the members along the old line: the eastern belt wants the conditions kept hard; the German business interest in the Russian market, which is substantial and politically organised, wants them kept open; and Alexander I’s hope of an eventual democratic Russian entry is a German position, not a Concert one. The talks that opened at St Petersburg on 26 October 2028 settled the first of these arguments for the moment: the eastern belt, which had wanted the conditions kept hard, agreed the envoy’s mandate without any, and the envoy is one of its own. If they succeed, Russia will be the Concert’s second associate, after Arabia, and the first the union was founded in part to keep out. Since 25 October 2028 the state on the other side of the question has been the Russian Empire, a constitutional monarchy under the house of Romanov whose constitution is still to be written, and the question has become less whether Russia will change than whether the change will hold.

The wider world

The Concert is a large market with rules, and the rules travel. The Empire of China is institutionally distant, does not seek association and cooperates with the members through the League. The Federation of Malaya quarrels with the Concert’s palm-oil import standards, which the United States of Indonesia accepted in the union’s first year, and Indonesian nickel feeds the battery works the Concert’s emissions rules have created. Algeria’s gas reaches the union by pipeline through Spain and Italy, and the Concert’s dependence on it is why Algeria has never needed a patron. The Kingdom of Arabia attends as an associate, the West Indies Federation cooperates as a partner, and the Concert’s aviation, emissions and product rules reach airlines and manufacturers on every continent that wants to sell into Europe.

Failings

A union a year old has had little time to fail, and its failings are mostly in its design. Four are named by its own members.

A union at German weight. The Concert was built to bind German power and is built around it. The Parliament sits on German soil, Germany is the largest net contributor, the exchange-rate mechanism is a German currency zone with a seat in Luxembourg, Mitteleuropa’s institutions nest inside the union, and Germany, with Austria-Hungary, sets the agenda more often than everyone else together. None of this is concealed and most of it was unavoidable, since a union of Europe that did not rest on its largest economy would not stand. But the founders promised a cage and the smaller members fear a frame, and until the Court has held against Germany on something that matters, there is no evidence in the union’s record that would tell the two apart.

Membership à la carte. The single market was sold as one set of rules for everyone, and it has been made with exceptions from the first day: Switzerland’s instrument, outside the politics and the Court’s reach; Liechtenstein’s protocol; the opt-outs of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man from the financial standards; the Faroes’ exemption; Malta’s refusal inside the British family. Each exception had a reason and each was the price of a signature, and the members who took none describe the result accurately as a market whose members choose their obligations. The Commission’s campaign against the Channel Islands’ opt-out is the union’s attempt to stop the list growing, and it has not yet succeeded.

The southern frontier. The Concert’s external border runs through the Strait and across the Mediterranean, and its rules are common while its burdens are not. Spain and Italy receive the people who cross, bear the cost of receiving them and are judged by the union’s rules on how they do it, and the deaths at sea in the union’s first year were counted by the Spanish and Italian authorities and not by any Concert body, since the union has no frontier service and no common asylum law. The northern members have written the rules for a frontier they do not hold.

Seventeen ways to vote. The Parliament is directly elected under seventeen different laws, so that the same vote is worth different things in different members and a British party can take a majority of the British seats on a minority of the British vote. The Council counts seats and not people, so that Liechtenstein and Germany weigh the same and six seats of any size can block the rest. Neither defect was an accident: the first was the price of Britain’s signature and the second of the small states’. Together they mean that the union’s legitimacy rests on its usefulness rather than on its arithmetic, and the sovereigntist group in the Parliament has built its case on exactly that.

Assessment

The European Concert is the most ambitious institution built in Europe in a lifetime and the least tested. In its first year it has done what its founders asked of it: it has seated a Parliament, staffed a Commission, convened a Court, opened a market and kept seventeen governments in one room, and it has been broadly welcomed, greeted across the members with the ordinary national grumbling rather than real hostility. Its first judgments were well received. Its first crisis has not come.

Its achievement so far is the founding itself. That the German Empire and the French Empire, of all the states in Europe, proposed together at Aachen a union of European peace, failed twice, and carried it at the third attempt is the whole meaning of the thing in a single fact: the quarrel that made the twentieth century’s two great wars is the quarrel the Concert exists to end, and its two parties built the cure with their own hands, before a war rather than after one. Whether the cure works is the union’s whole future, and the Brunswick case will be the first evidence either way.

What the Concert has not settled, and cannot settle by itself, is whether Russia can come in. The union was made possible by the fading of the Russian enemy and defines itself by the exclusion of an authoritarian Russia, and it keeps a seat empty and an association offer on the table for a Russia that changes. If the Republic liberalised, the Concert would face the question of whether a union built to manage Germany could absorb a second power of comparable weight on its eastern edge, and its eastern members, who joined in part to be protected from Russia, would face the question of whether they wanted Russia inside the room. If the Republic does not liberalise, the empty seat will become what its critics already call it, an ornament. The Concert’s founders wrote the seat into the treaty as a promise, and whether it is one was a question only Moscow could answer. On the night of 23 to 24 October 2028 Moscow began to: President Pavel Yermolov decreed a free election and announced talks on the association offer. Whether the Concert has an answer of its own is the question its Council took into its meeting the next morning. The next day Russia elected Dmitri Gromov President in its first free election since 1922, on a promise of a constituent assembly, and the conditions of the offer, on elections and on the courts, began for the first time to look as though they might be met. The same evening Russia voted for a constitutional monarchy under the house of Romanov, and the Council said that its offer of association stood and that a constitutional Russia might one day take the seat kept empty for it. Before midnight Grand Duke Paul was proclaimed Emperor at St Petersburg, and the promise in the treaty now waits on a constitution that the restored empire has not yet written. The next day the Council opened talks at St Petersburg on more than it had offered: not an association agreement but associate status, a place at the Council table without a vote, which is the nearest thing to the empty seat the treaty allows short of membership.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The German Empire, the continental hegemon and patron of Mitteleuropa, the power the Concert most exists to manage
• France, the Bonapartist empire, the rehabilitated old enemy that grips the union tightest
• The United Kingdom of Great Britain, the surprisingly committed island founder
• The Socialist Kingdom of Italy, a founding power and the defendant in the Court’s first cases
• The Scandinavian Union, a founding power that holds one seat for five states
• The Benelux Union, which hosts the Commission, the Council and the currency board, and gave the union its first President
• Austria-Hungary, the Dual Monarchy that hosts the Court at Vienna
• The Byzantine Federation, the keenest of the large members
• Switzerland, in the market and outside the politics
• The Duchy of Normandy, the Concert’s observer duchy
• The Russian Empire, the Russian Republic until October 2028, excluded while authoritarian, with an empty seat and an offer that stands
• The Atlantic Treaty Organization, which keeps the arms the Concert does not
• The League of Nations, the global frame above the European one
• The Foreign Office, which keeps the Realm’s mission at Brussels

The European Concert · World Institutions · Europe · International Organisations · Nations of the World