Emancipation of executive power

Anyone who visits Washington and sees the magnificence of the legislative Congress, with its majestic dome on the axis of the city, and then looks at the White House, built for the president, small by comparison and off to one side, senses what the founders of the American republic at the end of the eighteenth century believed the relationship should be between the main powers: the legislators in charge and the executive power in second place. The 13 newly united states had thrown off the British king, their colonial sovereign, and did not want a citizen-king in his place. Something similar happened in France. After the revolution of 1789 and the fall of absolute monarch Louis XVI, the focus was on the impersonal and all-encompassing authority of the law. As Pierre Rosanvallon shows in Good Government (2018), primacy was given to parliament, as guardian of the sovereignty of the people. France went through a turbulent episode under Napoleon (and half a century later his nephew), but distrust of arbitrary leaders ultimately produced the parliamentarianism of the Third Republic. Like the Americans, the French kept the executive power small.

The founders of the Community similarly drew a line under the past. Just as the young American and French republics had put aside their king, so the new European Community excluded national governments as far as possible.