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between Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick in the British
North America Act (1867). Similarly, the shadow of the Soviet Union played a
major role in shaping the way Germany emerged after the Second World War.
To be sure, both the allies and the post-war German political elites had in mind
the lessons emerging from the collapse of the Weimar Republic throughout
the process leading to the Constitution of 1949. In particular, the legacy of
Weimar weighed heavily on specific constitutional provisions directly bearing
on the organization of fiscal structures, as well as the adoption of a more
centripetal, consensus-oriented, architecture of representation. But again those
concerns do not explain the decision to form two countries, one under the
influence of Moscow, the other under the allies' supervision.
Geopolitical motives also help explain both the origins of European inte-
gration and the highly centrifugal system of governance adopted by its early
members (Rosato 2011 ), a system whose fundamental traces remain despite
the large steps made toward the parliamentarization of the Union (Rittberger
2005). Put briefly, “the construction of European integration is best understood
not as an effort to foster peace and prosperity, but as an attempt by the major
West European States to balance against the Soviet Union and one another”
(Rosato 2011 : 6). The latter, the need to balance against one another, ulti-
mately explains the highly restrictive unanimity requirement imposed on any
major decision concerning the economic union as designed by the European
Coal and Steal Community (1951) and the European Economic Community
(1957) treaties. 2 The preeminence of geopolitical concerns underpinning the
formation of these four unions suggests that none of them resulted from bar-
gains driven by mutually beneficial distributional advantages. As a result, there
is no risk of circularity.
No such risk exists in the case of Spain either. The process of democrati-
zation in Spain resulted from the new sociopolitical conditions generated by
economic development, the fragmentation of the coalition supporting Franco's
regime, and a favorable international environment, both in Europe and across
the Atlantic (Maravall 1997 ; Przeworski 2001). In this context, the origins
of the Estado de las Autonomias (EA) reflect less distributive pressure on its
constituent members and more a political strategy to accommodate, in a con-
text of democratization, contending national identities. Centralism had been a
2 Rosato's view stands as an alternative to what is conventionally seen as the standard theory of
European integration, Moravcsik's “liberal intergovernmentalism.” His core proposition holds
that “European integration was a series of rational adaptations by national leaders to constraints
and opportunities stemming from the evolution of an interdependent world economy, the relative
power of states in the international system, and the potential for international institutions to
bolster credibility of interstate commitments.” (2011: 472) The debate seems to be about the
relative weight of geopolitical vs. economic motives. The point to note though is that the latter
do not refer to internal distributional conflicts, but to the need to seize new opportunities in a
more integrated world economy. As a result, the controversy is orthogonal to our concerns. Even
if geopolitical motives were less dominant than Rossato suggests, the sort of economic motives
Moravcsik's account privileges do not necessarily violate condition one above.
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