Taxation, Internal Security, and the Transformation of the State

[From the introduction]. We want to demonstrate that the EU is indeed a multi-level system although it is not federation and unlikely to turn federal any time soon. And we want to explain why the state remains the central unit of political organization in the EU despite being absorbed into this multi-level system. For this purpose, we focus on two constitutive powers of the state, the power to tax and the power to legitimately use force (Tilly 1990; Schumpeter [1918] 1991); (Weber [1922] 1978), and analyse how they are reconfigured in the process of European integration. The structure of the paper is as follows. In the next section (section 2) we give a stylized account of the historical evolution of the power to tax and use force in processes of European state formation. By the mid-20th century, states had secured an undisputed legal monopoly of force and taxation and virtually exclusive decision making authority over these instruments. As we demonstrate in the following sections, the process of European integration leads to a fundamental, if rarely acknowledged, reconfiguration of these powers. This reconfiguration is characterized by two contradictory trends. On the one hand, the legal monopoly of force and taxation remains exclusively national. There is neither a European police force nor a European tax – and it is highly unlikely that there will be any in the near future. The right to impose taxes and mandate the use of force remains an exclusive national prerogative (section 3). On the other hand, the EU increasingly usurps decision- making authority over internal security and taxation: EU institutions decide instead of national governments on issues of tax and internal security policy or, at least, pre-structure national decisions. As we will show, these decisions are not restricted to secondary issues but affect the core of national tax and internal security policy, and they are no longer under tight member state control (section 4). The concluding section (section 5) sketches the emerging new order of European taxation and internal security. It is decidedly non-federal because the European level lacks the power to tax and mandate the use of force – no European taxes or police forces. However, it is multi-level because national tax and internal security policies are increasingly guided, controlled and constrained by European level decisions. The state remains central because the legal monopoly of force and taxation remains national. However, it is broken up as a self-contained unit of decision making on taxation and internal security. These are increasingly co-decided or even pre-empted by European institutions