Alexander Hamilton and the Articles of Confederation: Euro Crisis Prophecy!
Now I don’t know about you, but nobody in my classroom (including me) had ever read through the A. of C., and it turned out to be a damned interesting experience. …To begin with, it’s good to remind oneself from time to time that our first experiment with “republican government†was a colossal failure – a self-proclaimed “perpetual Union†(!) that lasted for less than a decade.
But beyond that bit of humility inducement, on the substance of it it’s pretty easy to identify – in hindsight! – the many flaws of the government of the United States of America as they appeared in, say, 1787 or thereabouts. You read through the A. of C. and you realize, as one of my students nicely put it, that it has “no provision for executive power, legislative power, or judicial power.†The trifecta of constitutional deficiencies. It doesn’t really set up a “government†at all – it’s more like a “league†of sovereign States, in which those States promise each other certain things (mostly, to treat an attack on one as an attack on all and to contribute men and money to the common defense at the direction of the Congress). ….
All very interesting late 18th century stuff, beautifully articulated. But even more interesting is what came next, immediately after class. As it happened, we had a lecture scheduled that day by Isabella Bufacchi, the financial reporter at one of the daily newspapers in Rome (Il Sole24Ore), on the developing Euro crisis. At her lecture, she starts talking about the fundamental problems, in her opinion, afflicting the structure of the European Union and the Eurozone that have contributed to (and become the focus of attention because of) the current Euro crisis. And damned if her list didn’t look a lot like Hamilton’s list! It was actually quite astonishing – a couple of students asked me afterwards if it had all been planned out that way (it hadn’t)….
–David Post, The Dismal Failure of Union, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Articles of Confederation at the Volokh Conspiracy. Emphasis mine.
The Articles of Confederation remind me of the (never well articulated) political structure of the Galactic Republic in Star Wars.
There’s a Senate, but how many Senators per world? Unicameral legislatures are not unheard of but the possibilities for imbalance are legion. Someone gets to be Chancellor, but nobody knows how they’re chosen. Sometimes the Senators are also prepubescent Queens, and some very large corporations *also* have Senators. And apparently you can be a moronic cross between a frog and an Irish Setter with a badly articulated Caribbean accent, and be a Senator as well. And there’s a group of quasi-religious monks with a really nonsensical set of moral and temporal rules that exercise an enormous amount of back-room political muscle.
This sounds more like a Galactic Banana Republic to me…