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EU membership and parliamentary sovereignty. The Schuman Plan and supranationalism. The United Kingdom's early attempts to join. The 1972 debates. The 1975 referendum. The Single European Act and its incorporation into domestic law. Factortame and the destruction of parliamentary sovereignty.

This chapter focuses on the empowerment of the federal judiciary from the Compromise of 1850 (admitting California into the Union as a free state and unofficially signifying the beginning of the political crisis leading to the Civil War) to the Compromise of 1877 (settling the disputed 1876 presidential election between Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes and representing the formal end of Reconstruction). The chapter asks why judicial institution building was pursued, how it was accomplished, and what it achieved within the context of mid-nineteenth century American politics. It examines the role of Republicans in Civil War and Reconstruction era institution building and how it resulted in a significant expansion of federal judicial power. It also considers the four stages in which the substantial empowerment of the judiciary occurred during the period, including the consolidation of a Republican-friendly Supreme Court through ameliorative reforms aimed at specific problems of judicial performance.

Polk's purpose in securing the speedy annexation of Texas had been to expand plantation slavery into that vast domain. But this was not his aim in provoking war with Mexico; instead, Polk's principal purpose was continentalist — to expand the American empire — an aim he shared with many Northerners. Nevertheless, the Mexican War was as dangerous to the American Union as if slavery expansion had been the president's purpose. This was because Polk believed that the federal government must recognize Southern rights to extend slavery at least south of the Missouri Compromise line, even if it should prove impracticable to establish slavery very vigorously anywhere in the arid Southwest. Polk felt slavery could not be secure in the Southern states unless the right to take slaves into some of those territories were to receive federal recognition.

How was agricultural policy reform possible in a context of almost unchanged institutional rules that provided ripe conditions for inertia and gridlock? This chapter argues that the original joint-decision trap argument presented an analytical model of EU policy-making that corresponded most closely to pre-1990 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and sets out to elucidate the puzzle of reform in this area. Beyond the high politics of CAP reforms, the analysis highlights the evolution of the day-to-day policy business, which is captured by contrasting ideal-types of CAP policy-making: ‘hegemonic policy-making’ and ‘competitive policy-making’. Change took place, it is argued, through a combination of exogenous pressure, social and cognitive learning, and institutional manoeuvring, leading to what one might call ‘punctuated evolution’. In spite of recent changes, however, the CAP will continue to be one of the most controversial policy areas in the EU for reasons that are both material and ideological.

This chapter examines the reorganization of the federal judiciary from the beginning of Thomas Jefferson's second term as president in 1805 until just prior to the Compromise of 1850. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the government faced a new set of challenges, many of which were the result of the vast territorial expansion. Territorial expansion and the politics of statehood admission intertwined with judicial reform attempts focused primarily on arranging states in circuits and ensuring regional geographic representation on the Supreme Court. The chapter considers the four stages in which the history of judicial institution building unfolded in the eras of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy: the Judiciary Act of 1807, the stalemate over the National Republicans' attempts to extend the circuit system to the West in the mid-1820s, the Whigs' failed consolidation plan of 1835, and the triumph of reform in the Judiciary Act of 1837.

This chapter initiates the discussion of the legal-historical effort to translate elements of the postwar constitutional settlement into supranational form over the last half-century. The focus here is on the establishment of national executive leadership over the integration process. This development ran contrary to efforts by Jean Monnet to construct, purportedly on the New Deal model, a system of supranational technocratic autonomy in the High Authority of the European Coal and Steal Community. Monnet was ultimately curtailed significantly by the creation of the Council of Ministers in the Treaty of Paris of 1951. The institutional role of the Council of Ministers grew as a consequence of the Treaty of Rome of 1957, which established the European Economic Community. The crises of the 1960s further marginalized the Commission as an autonomous technocratic policy maker. But these crises also brought to the fore differing conceptions of national leadership that would play themselves out in the ‘empty chair’ crisis and the Luxembourg Compromise at mid-decade. France, under de Gaulle, favored control by particular national executives exercising a veto over supranational policy making; the remainder of the national executives favored shared oversight via consensus politics in the Council of Ministers. This later position prevailed, and found further expression in the creation of a dense bureaucracy of nationally dominated committees (COREPER, comitology). This process of national-executive ascendancy and shared oversight culminated in the creation of the European Council in 1974, which was to become the central institution of plebiscitary leadership in the process of European integration over the remainder of the century.

This chapter examines the Compromise of 1877 between Republicans and Southern Democrats involving railroad subsidies that would extend Thomas Scott's Texas and Pacific Railroad into their districts in exchange for making Rutherford Hayes president. Initially documented by C. Vann Woodward in Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (1954), the Compromise of 1877 involved not only the removal of federal troops from the South but also promises of federal aid to railroads. The compromise collapsed after Hayes became president and refused to provide railroad subsidies to the South. This chapter considers how the collapse of the Compromise of 1877 led Texas Democrat John Reagan to introduce a bill that culminated in the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission. It also explores the ramifications of railroad regulation championed by Reagan for American state formation.

When Millard Fillmore signed the Compromise measures in September 1850 and the New York Democratic state platform endorsed them, William Henry Seward's New York allies instructed Thurlow Weed that the Whig party's state platform must demand revision or repeal of every prosouthern concession Congress had made. Fillmore's pro-Compromise stance must be publicly repudiated. Five days after New York's Whigs met, Daniel Webster penned the administration's response to this declaration of war. He understood why many northern Whigs opposed the compromise measures in Congress. These salvos opened a battle between Fillmore's administration and its northern Whig critics that lasted from the fall of 1850 to the Whigs' national convention in June 1852. Fundamentally, however, it revolved around a dispute over how to carry elections, about whether the campaign needs of local Whigs should be placed ahead of intersectional comity within the nation and the national party and of support for the national administration.

Developing tremendous momentum during the winter of 1850–1, the Union party movement challenged Millard Fillmore's hope of saving the Whig party as much as did the defiance he encountered from northern anti-Compromise Whigs. Their defection would abdicate control of northern Whig organizations to anti-Compromise men and possibly drive them into an explicitly anti-southern alliance with Free Soilers that could provoke the disunion he sought to avert. To Fillmore, therefore, the dangers from the South included both the secession movement and the Union party movement formed to prevent it. To demonstrate that neither secession nor a new party was necessary, he set out to prove that the Whig party was reliably pro-Union and could win elections on those grounds. This course enormously enhanced Fillmore's popularity among southern Whigs, who by 1852 clearly wanted him as the party's presidential nominee.

On most challenges confronting Millard Fillmore's administration, Daniel Webster and Fillmore saw eye to eye. They cooperated brilliantly to extinguish the fire over the Texas-New Mexico boundary and to secure passage of the Compromise. They shared a commitment to its finality. On two matters of critical political importance, however, Webster and Fillmore parted company, so much so that Webster's portrait of unanimity was disingenuous, if not wantonly hypocritical. This patient, tolerant stance sorely exasperated Webster. Rather than conciliating anti-Compromise Whigs, he advocated total war against them. Webster lusted for the presidency. Webster, with his single-minded pursuit of the presidency during 1851, inflicted as much damage on the northern Whig party, especially in New England, as any one individual possibly could.

If 1852 inevitably resembled other presidential years, Truman Smith concluded that the Whig party confronted “exactly the same situation” as they had in 1848. Once again, Whigs required a military hero to win. Every consideration requires that they should go for Winfield Scott now. In 1848, Zachary Taylor's appeal to the vital votes by Native Americans in Pennsylvania helped him secure nomination and election; in 1852, nativists there and elsewhere vehemently opposed Scott. In 1848, most southern Whigs zealously sought, and most northern Whigs vigorously opposed, Taylor's nomination; in 1852, northern Whigs led the drive for Scott, whereas almost all Southerners tried to derail him. Suspicious of Taylor's No Party tactics, northern Whigs in 1848 demanded concrete evidence of his fidelity to Whig principles. In 1852, in contrast, Southerners insisted upon irrefutable proof from Scott that he deemed the Compromise measures a final settlement of the slavery controversy.

More than any presidential election since 1836, the 1852 campaign focused on the character and reputation of the opposing presidential candidates rather than on alternative public policies. Southern Democrats' campaign tactics, northern Whigs' disgust with their platform, and the Democrats' selection of Franklin Pierce, a man particularly vulnerable to personal attack, all contributed to that focus. Their indistinguishable positions on the Compromise and the irrelevance of economic issues because of prosperity forced them to appeal for votes by contrasting their nominees. Despite the considerable problems faced by the Whig party, many Whig leaders, especially the party's high command who orchestrated the campaign from Washington, convinced themselves that victory was certain. Although some prescient Whigs had long predicted defeat in 1852, even a few of the previous naysayers converted and remained optimistic until the votes were cast. For the historian blessed (or cursed) with hindsight, explaining that confidence is far more difficult than explaining the outcome itself.

In 1963, General Charles de Gaulle issued his first veto of Britain's application to join the European Community (EC), the Common Market. Britain had declined to join the original six founders of the EC. In the early 1950s, it had been the British ‘functional’ versus the Continental ‘federal’ approach. It was not until January 1973 that Britain was able to join the EC. Money was a troublesome issue facing the British government in its relationship with the rest of the EC, but it was not the only one. There also was a great goal of political unification: the European Union. Subsequent arguments and negotiations split the EC, soured Margaret Thatcher's relationship with her fellow Heads of Government, and led some of them to conclude that Britain was a ‘bad European’.

Chapter forty-eight examines Hodge’s politics and his tripartite commitment to God’s sovereignty, property rights and the need for religion to be tied to political action for the good of the nation. Through an examination of Hodge’s Repertory review of Moses Stuart’s Conscience and the Constitution, one finds that Hodge had a firm commitment to believing that humanity’s common moral sense would bind the nation together. This belief was unsettled by the Civil War. Hodge also shifted political party allegiances during this life from the Whig party to the Republican party, but he always considered himself a Federalist at heart.

Chapter forty-nine examines Hodge’s early engagement in the events surround the beginning of the Civil War. Hodge was strongly pro-Union, and wrote early about the need to keep the Union intact. In this effort, he wrote one of his most famous and widely read Repertory articles: “The State of the Country.” Once it became clear that Lincoln’s election would lead to succession, Hodge attempted to keep Southern and Northern Old School Presbyterians united. This effort also failed as James Thornwell and Benjamin Morgan Palmer led Southern Old School Presbyterians to form their own denomination. Hodge had little sympathy for the South, who he saw unlawfully seceding as it turned its back on the Constitution, but he worked hard to attempt to avoid the breakup of the Union.

This chapter tells the story of a genuine war hero in the mold of Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry Harrison. Zachary Taylor was selected as the Whig candidate for president because, like Harrison, he was a former general. Unfortunately for the Whigs, who elected only these two presidents, Taylor's term in office lasted only sixteen months. Taylor was most obviously a Whig in his aversion to the use of the presidential veto, which he had often denounced “as a tool of presidential tyranny.” Notwithstanding his opposition to the use of the veto, he was more than happy to threaten a veto of the Compromise of 1850, and believed in the use of the veto against constitutionally suspect legislation.

Chapter abstract: This chapter discusses the era of reform into the 1860s. Government by bureaucrats is an expensive prospect. Austria could not solve its financial difficulties and secure necessary loans without parliamentary assistance and institutions of self-government. The Austrian state experimented with federalism, the development of local institutions of self-government, and parliamentary government during the 1860s, never fully replacing one system with the other. By the time Hungary had become its own constitutional entity and the Habsburg monarchy became the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy in 1867, the Austrian side of the monarchy had developed institutions of federalism, centralism, local government, and a strong, interventionist bureaucracy. A key feature of Austria's political development, and one which made the state all the more complicated, was that Austria had become a multinational state, with representative institutions, a monarch who continued to wear the military uniform, and a largely independent bureaucracy.

This profile of the lawyer and planter William R. Davie illustrates the relative decline of North Carolina’s conservative, political elite in the post-Revolutionary era. Educated at Princeton, Davie served as a cavalry commander and as state commissary general during the Revolution. As a member of the North Carolina assembly in the 1780s, he favored modernization of the state court system and the lenient treatment of Loyalists while opposing paper money. As a delegate to the federal Constitutional Convention,Davie supported the Connecticut Compromise, which resolved the issue of congressional representation, and was an outspoken advocate of the Three-Fifths Compromise regarding the counting of slaves. He played a more influential role in championing the ratification of the Constitution in North Carolina. Davie also sponsored legislation creating the University of North Carolina, served as a university trustee and briefly as governor, and helped negotiate a settlement of the Quasi-War with France. But public opinion soon turned against Davie’s aristocratic leadership style, and after losing a race for Congress in 1803, he left North Carolina in disgust.

In the year leading up to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Jefferson, now serving as American minister to France, grew increasingly frustrated with Congress’s inability to retaliate against nations that discriminated against U.S. trade. Madison believed an unfavorable balance of trade drained specie out of the United States and created a demand for debt relief, paper money, and the postponement of tax collections, which left the states unable to support Congress financially. Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts reaffirmed his view that the preservation of republican government required a much stronger central government. At the Philadelphia convention, Madison supported giving Congress broad powers, including the right to veto state laws, and he proposed that representation in Congress be based on population. His fellow delegates rejected the so-called congressional negative, and small state delegates forced Madison to accept the Great, or Connecticut, Compromise in which in the House of Representatives would reflect a state’s population, but each state would have an equal vote in the Senate. When the convention adjourned, Madison feared the new federal government might still be too weak to survive, while Jefferson, viewing events from Paris, worried the Constitution did too little to protect the people’s liberties.

Connecticut delegates to the Federal Convention of 1787 fashioned what has come to be known as the “Connecticut Compromise,” a plan that broke a deadlock over how many representatives each state may elect to the U.S. Congress. The compromise earned Connecticut the nickname the “Constitution State.” Connecticut is also known as the Constitution State for another reason: its Fundamental Orders of 1638/9 was, as one historian concisely put it, “the first document written by a representative body setting up a framework for government.” This chapter shows that Connecticut did not lead the way to judicial independence. In fact, it was not until the Connecticut Constitution of 1818 that the Connecticut judiciary became a separate branch of government, the same year in which Congregationalism was disestablished in the state.