The Fate of Federalism

Daniel thinks small-country regionalism is no laughing matter, whereas large-country republicanism may still be impossible to take seriously:

In the end, the federal republic was consolidated because it came to pass that an extended republic that was not consolidated would break up along regional or sectional lines according to the political differences between blocs of states. Madison’s sleight-of-hand about factions is an amazing piece of work, and he is rightly acclaimed for the clever argument he makes about this, even though it turned out to be almost entirely wrong. In a small republic, factions would be too dangerous, so you needed to have a larger republic that would allow these factional forces to balance each other. The trouble is that they have a centrifugal effect, which causes the center to exert more and more control to hold the entire system together up to and including the use of force, which from the old-fashioned republican perspective would mean the death of republicanism and the beginning of something else.

A ‘new birth of liberty’, I presume? I’m not sure we can get away with blaming Madison for the failure of the Bell campaign, but it is true enough that even a well-oiled Federalist machine will involve a steady amount of tension, even conflict, between capital and country. Yet I want to emphasize the difference between American and European sectionalism or regionalism — which is marked out by the historical and political relationship among the States and the Union. I’m sure I’m in agreement with Daniel that this relationship was much healthier prior to the Civil War (or even Incorporation). But when, in a rare show of hopefulness, Daniel argues that European regionalism “hints at the possibility that the success of decentralism here is not so much of a matter of if as it is of when,” I worry that decentralism as such is being championed instead of federalism, which I take to be much less dangerous. And I suspect that Daniel, in opposition, thinks that decentralism is the real, organic deal, whereas federalism is a “clever” but “almost entirely wrong” artificial construct.

All well and good except for the sovereignty of the American states, which simply lacks any parallel in Europe. When South Carolina considers nullification or secession, it is (or was) a constitutional crisis. When one discovers at Barcelona soccer matches that Catalonia is not Spain, something else is afoot. I’m not going to plunge into an argument about the Spanish Civil War other than to note that the question of decentralism in Europe has been almost perpetually tied to questions of not just political but cultural autonomy — ethnic, linguistic, religious, etc., etc. These issues never made it onto the table in America. And these are the sorts of issues which federalism, a mere political arrangement, is not disposed to settle. So if federalism has a centrifugal effect, as Daniel observes, decentralism has a centripetal effect.

Which is worse? Conflicts within federal systems have a fund of legitimacy from which to draw, the better to prevent recourse to force. Conflicts within decentralizing non-federal systems appear to lack such a fund. Rather than deriving primarily from a reference to their residual or inherent political sovereignty, greater (or total) independence for non-federal localities derives largely from blood and soil. Whereas federalist arguments are about the distribution of power, decentralist arguments are about the distribution of respect. And when the choice comes down to fighting over interests versus fighting over passions, I’m inclined to choose the former; and for that reason federalism strikes me as far less dangerous than decentralism. In this way, I side with Hobbes — it’s precisely our organic local loyalties that make us dangerous to stable, durable political order. But Hobbes is a problem, in turn, precisely because he presents us with the all-or-nothing style of order that’s all too often been Europe’s only recourse. Madison’s creation of federalism is indeed impressive, but it’s not vain philosophy; it would have been impossible without the substrate of state sovereignty on which he relied. Europe’s problem has always been the top-down imposition of political order. America’s hasn’t.

Postscript: I do agree with Daniel that decentralism in Europe suggests some tentative promise for the future of the EU, but really the main attraction is that Europe might for the first time really be able to establish a political order from something resembling the bottom up. Unfortunately, this process is hamstrung by absurdities: the treaty designed to streamline the cumbersome EU bureaucracy is over 200 pages long. Under such circumstances it’s easy to applaud Ireland for torpedoing the thing. But it may well be the case that the regionalist problems in Europe’s nation-states can never be resolved without a more formal European Union. What remains to be seen is whether Europe can fashion a Union that isn’t just another absolutist government. To that end, I look hopefully on a chaotic complex of overlapping sovereignties, with some member states in a close political union and others not.

(Map of the good old days courtesy Flickrer woloh.)