On Building the American and the European Empires

Josep M. Colomer

LEQS – LSE 'Europe in Question' Discussion Paper Series from European Institute, LSE

Abstract: The processes of building the United States of America (USA) during the nineteenth century and the European Union (EU) since mid-twentieth century are among the major claims for the possibility of a vast, ‘imperial’-size political unit based on democratic principles. The crucial period for the consolidation of the USA was between the Civil War and the First World War, when it established clear territorial limits and completed its internal institutionalization as a federal democratic union. While the EU has achieved higher levels of economic integration on some issues than the USA did one hundred years ago, it still recognizes a number of additional candidates to become member-states and has not attained a stable constitutional framework. As it was the case for the USA about a century ago, for the current European Union putting an end to the process of territorial expansion and fixing neat external frontiers seems to be a necessary condition to achieve internal institutional stability and robust federal formulas.

Date: 2010-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lse.ac.uk/europeanInstitute/LEQS/LEQSPaper6Colomer6.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.lse.ac.uk/europeanInstitute/LEQS/LEQSPaper6Colomer6.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.lse.ac.uk/europeanInstitute/LEQS/LEQSPaper6Colomer6.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: On building the American and the European empires (2009)
Working Paper: On Building the American and the European Empires (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eiq:eileqs:06

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LEQS – LSE 'Europe in Question' Discussion Paper Series from European Institute, LSE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Katjana Gattermann ().