Die Europäische Union und das Ende der Einheit von Staatsvolk und Staat Die Nation als Club, in den man geboren wird

The European Union challenges the European national state and its idea of the unity of nation and state. It is a transnational union of nation states in which, like in any un-ion, the member states must give up parts of their sovereignty. Regardless of the fact whether the EU is already a federal state or still a confederation of states, it is the return to an older European model of the transnational commonwealth or empire: the EU is supranational and has only limited central power. Since the EU challenges the nation state it seems appropriate to ask what constitutes a nation. The paper discusses two his-torical answers, by Schelling and by Herder. For Schelling, the nations are forms of thought of the absolute spirit, for Herder nations are constituted by their language and the unity of nation and language. The unity of nation and state is derived from the idea that a nation or a people becomes conscious of itself in the state. State and nation are the identity of subject and object. The state is the subject of the nation which is in turn the object on which and on behalf of which the state acts. This identitarian constitution of the nation state is questioned by the EU and by the argument that the identity of the political will of the nation and of the state is usually a fiction. In contrast, the nation must be seen as a club into which one is born, and political representation as temporal delegation without claims to the identity of the citizens and of the political power. The EU is a club of nations, a club of clubs into which its citizens are born. That the EU does not realize popular sovereignty is no flaw. The model of the nations as clubs and of the EU as a club of clubs replaces the national model of the unity of nation and state.