Federalism

The Multiethnic Challenge

Graham Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317893080
• Subtopic: Constitutions
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a comprehensive and detailed examination of the successes and failures of federalism in a diverse range of multi-ethnic polities and societies. It offers excellent coverage of the experiences of a wide range of contemporary states with specially commissioned contributions from established authorities. An introductory chapter introduces the reader to the nature of federations, the political philosophies that underpin federalism, the characteristics of federal formations, and highlights some of the theories as to why this system of government has failed in some cases to provide ethno-regional stability. A concluding chapter draws upon the findings and examines the prospects for federalism in the light of the acceleration towards greater economic interdependency and local political fragmentation, in the post-Cold War world.

CHAPTER ONE

Mapping the Federal Condition: Ideology, Political Practice and Social Justice

Graham Smith

Federalism has emerged as a major issue on the political agenda of the post-Cold War world. That it has been propelled into occupying a more central place owes much to the resurgence of both nationalist and ethnic tensions which have paralleled, if not taken sustenance from, the end of the Cold War and the accompanying search for how best to organise our national and ethno-regional communities so as they can live with difference. Such world-historical changes have seen the demise of socialist federations and the subsequent but only too painful search by some of their successor states, notably Russia and Bosnia, to experiment with new forms of federation as ways of living (or not) with cultural diversity. In Western Europe, not only is federalism considered as a project for re-negotiating the political boundaries of sovereignty and citizenship but for many ethno-regional communities – like the Catalans, Scots and Flemish – as a way of refocusing a politics of identity by going simultaneously local and continental. For Canadians, long since used to living with federalism, the issue of sovereignty association, first mooted by the Parti Québécois a generation ago, is back on the table questioning not only Quebec’s relationship to the rest of Canada but whether a federation living with so many other claims to cultural difference can continue to be defined by its linguistic dualism alone. And in the post-colonial world of the South, where federalism was a belated and often imposed import, ethnic and national differences challenge its utility to manage communities with often limited respect for recognising the rights of others while also offering the possibility, as in post-apartheid South Africa, of constructing more socially just polities.

It would seem that there has never been such a time as the late twentieth century in which the idea and practice of federalism has rendered old certainties about the geopolitical landscape so uncertain. Whether however this constitutes, as Elazar claims, ‘a federal revolution sweeping the world’ (1991:7) remains debatable. Yet federation and the possibilities and opportunities that it may offer for constructing more democratic and possibly less nation-state-bound communities raises questions about its appropriateness as a form of governance in multiethnic societies to effectively respond to the economic, social and political conditions offered by the late twentieth century. In this regard, three challenges seem particularly apposite.

Firstly, there is the challenge of what can be loosely labelled as globalisation. There is a sense that as a consequence of the impact of globalising processes – the internationalisation of capital, the greater mobility of labour, the growth in continental trading blocs – the territorial boundaries of the nation-state are becoming increasingly blurred and less appropriate. Localities are being reshaped in more direct ways than ever before by these processes, in which the regulatory role of the state has become increasingly marginal to structuring the localities and peoples under its territorial jurisdiction. Thus in a late modern federal democracy like Canada, there is more than just a sense that its provinces have gone simultaneously ‘local’ and ‘global’. On the one hand, Such localities have become more autonomous, questioning the centre’s capacity to act as the most appropriate arena for expressing and integrating regional views or for defining a national interest that transcends locality. On the other hand, the greater global interdependency of its regions has been accompanied by more globally-conscious and assertive local identities. In the case of Quebec, for instance, provincial elites have been instrumental in redefining its relationship to the global market place, in which ‘crucial to such entrepreneurs is their nationalist sense of self, their notion that they have overcome the odds and they can now move internationally, their culture intact’ (Breton and Jenson, 1991). Quebec is not unique: both globalisation and the challenges that it represents to the nation-state have prompted other sub-national governments to chart their own particular ways within the global geopolitical economy linked in part to a realisation that such intervention is increasingly central to their provincial well-being (Fry, 1988). Nor are such activities confined to the economic sphere: federated communities have become increasingly engaged in promoting cultural relations with other provincial units within the global arena based often upon their shared limits to sovereignty, contributing to a more general trend in transnational politics which has been labelled ‘globalisation from below’ (Camilleri and Falk, 1992; Smith, 1994b).

Secondly, there is the challenge of SLib-state or locally-based nationalisms to federalism. Nationalism in effect tests the proposition that a federation can actually fashion a sense of identity in which sub-state national identities are not, to use Anderson’s (1990) phrase, ‘imagined as ultimately sovereign’ but rather as possessing multiple and overlapping communities of imagination. Federalism’s success in this endeavour necessarily hinges upon whether federations constructed on the basis of ethno-regional markers facilitate the establishment of a dual identity or, as their critics maintain, reinforce, even reify, ethnic, tribal, linguistic and religious divisions, making inter-communal tensions and even fragmentation that much more probable. Judged on these conflicting interpretations, some federations have been successful (Switzerland), others failures (Pakistan, Soviet Union, Yugoslavia), while some still hang in the balance (Canada, India, Nigeria). It may well therefore be, as Habermas (1994) argues, that it is only through constructing our political communities on the basis of ‘a constitutional patriotism’ that respects all forms of cultural difference and therefore reflects the wishes of all groups within civil society – ethnic, religious, linguistic or gender-based – to live as they wish, and to compete politically by soliciting the voluntary choices of individuals, that federation will act as an antidote to nationalism. Much however will depend upon the nature of the particular federal arrangement and of the symbolic meanings behind the identific boundaries upon which federalism is constructed.

Finally, despite the surprisingly limited reference to federalism among theorists of social justice, federation as a peculiarly territorial and non-majoritarian form of organising the political and cultural life of citizens in multiethnic societies challenges the defensibility of such a form of political organisation. Two such issues are paramount: the idea that citizens have rights to representation on a regionally differentiated basis; and whether ethno-regions have rights to be culturally different through constitutional and other means of public policy protection. Both these components – representation and difference – have implications for social justice, particularly whether federalism so contravenes the rights of the majority as to question its claim to be the handmaiden of democracy. Specifying which citizens are entitled to particular rights, and by what measure, are issues which affect all federal formations, nascent or otherwise.

The purpose of this scene-setting chapter is to examine some of the central questions concerning federalism and its relationship to multiethnic societies whose cultures, politics and identities are undergoing profound change. In keeping with the overall scope of this book, this chapter focuses on political communities whose ethno-regional divisions provide both the template and the strains of federation and on others where federation is viewed as a possible means to managing difference. In so doing the chapter raises basic questions about the politics of ethno-regional identities and rights and of whether such identities and rights can and should be accommodated within a multilayered political architecture designed through spatio-jurisdictional delimitation to facilitate both unity and diversity. The first section explores interpretations of federalism, clarifying in particular the relationship between federalism as ideology and political practice. In the second section we examine the strains and tensions inherent in multiethnic federations, especially the utility of the federal idea as an effective form of conflict management. The final section considers from the standpoint of social justice the implications of federalism for protecting the rights of minorities.

FEDERALISM, IDEOLOGY AND POLITICAL PRACTICE

The term ‘federalism’ has been subject to differing meanings and applied to many different situational contexts, and identifying its defining features can be as controversial as evaluating them. It is therefore important to begin by distinguishing between federalism as political ideology and as institutional arrangement and to probe the contested nature of these conceptual linkages.

In its most general and commonly conceived form, federalism can be considered as an ideology which holds that the ideal organisation of human affairs is best reflected in the celebration of diversity through unity. Reflected in the attainment and maintenance of such a prescriptive ideal are the values and beliefs of particular interests who see in working towards such a goal recognition of its political validity. Yet beyond this very general conception, it is difficult to defend federalism as a free-standing ideology comparable to or separate from liberalism or socialism. A purely self-referential theory of federalism, unlike that of liberalism or socialism, is unable to answer crucial questions about the human condition: about desire, happiness, justice, value, etc. Rather, federalism as ideology is best considered as an amalgam of doctrines, beliefs and programmatic considerations reflecting the very paradoxes and tensions inherent in thinking about the politics of modernity. So rather than considering it as an ideology that has developed and exists autonomously from the main traditions of political thought or as Burgess and Gagnon note as ‘a doctrine which trumpets universal a priori truths’ (1993:112), federalism is best treated as traversing a broad range of what we can more usefully call programmatic orientations.

Most straightforwardly, federalism as ideology can be conceived as both universalist and particular in scope. Its universalism is reflected and draws upon a long tradition of normative thought about a desire for ultimate unity of the human condition based upon the assumption that it is only through global democratisation and of working towards embracing world citizenship that the chaotic dangers of political fragmentation and uneven economic development will be overcome. Such universalist thinking is also often found in calls for the creation of larger regional political units as expressed in the notion of European union. More commonly, however, federalism has become bound up with nationally-specific projects in which its advocates have concerned themselves with a particular polity or set of polities. Manifested in calls for the greater devolution of power towards self-governing units, such nationally-specific projects are often linked to pragmatic projects designed to secure, within deeply-divided societies, social unity and political stability.

Federalism has been represented as a centralising and decentralising ideology as well as a doctrine of balance. As a centralising ideology it does not necessarily entail the promotion of centralisation of an unqualified and illimitable kind but it can, particularly when viewed from the localities, invoke the fear of a centralising authority imposing limits on the liberties of its constituent members. Conversely, there is a long established communitarian tradition, represented particularly in the anarchist works of such classical federalist writers as Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin, who were concerned mainly with the state’s abolition and replacing it with a form of socio-economic federalism which would secure local autonomy, territorial decentralisation and the greater fragmentation of power. For Kropotkin, whose ideas on federalism formed one of the basic factors in his geographic writings, the state was evil incarnate, equatable with bourgeois interests and xenophobic nationalism; the only path to democracy and to the liberation of the individual lay in the abolition of the state and its replacement by freely federated entities organised along various lines (communities, communes, associations of workers), including that of nationality (Cahm, 1978). More commonly, however, federalism has been conceived as a doctrine of balance. For Proudhon, often described as the founding father of modern federalism, a loose federal state was to provide the only effective solution to the key problem of socio-political organisation: the reconciliation of authority and liberty. Dicey (1908) broadens this in identifying the federal idea as bound up with the goal of finding an equilibrium between forces of centralisation and decentralisation, of reflecting the societal desire for union but not unity. The federal idea, in short, is generally conceived as a compromise, conveyed by the image of checks and balances between unity and diversity, autonomy and sovereignty, the national and regional.

Justifications for federal projects also differ in orientation and emphasis. For many federalists, geopolitical concerns are paramout as in the case of using federalism as a way of preempting inter-communal violence in former multiethnic colonies or simply as a basis for providing an overarching regional security architecture based on mutual self-protection. For Saint-Simon (1814), one of the earliest visionaries of a European Union, it was only through the establishment of common institutions in tandem with preserving the national independence of each of its peoples that the recurrence of European war could be avoided and an enduring peace established. Economic motives also loom large as in the case of the European Union where the benefits of a larger single market are reinforced by a recognition by many Europeans that in the post-Cold War world an enlarged regional trading bloc is central to securing a substantive control of shares in a competitive world economy. For other federalists, emphasis has been placed on its libertarian qualities. For communitarianists, federated communities were thought to be not only compatible with individual liberty but a necessary condition of it. In the federative social contract that Proudhon proposes, rather than the citizen giving up a greater measure of freedom and authority than the part s/he reserves, the citizen retains more power over her/himself than s/he cedes, an end stage, which Proudhon argued, could only be achieved through a federal community (Proudhon, 1863; Hyams, 1979).

Federalism in its orientations can also be conceived as both a territorial and a non-territorial project in multiethnic societies. In the former, ethno-regional communities are considered as most appropriately represented through their spatial compartmentalisation (states, cantons, provinces, communes), predicated on the belief that ethno-regional or national communities should receive due territorial recognition. This is reflected in what is often meant when commentators talk of a federal society (Stein, 1968; Livingston, 1956), in which the boundaries between components of a federation match the boundaries of its ethnic, religious or linguistic communities. Thus for Livingston, without territoriality, a ‘society cannot be said to be federalism … It becomes functionalism, pluralism, or some form of corporatism’ (1956:2). Less commonly, federalism has been conceived as non-territorial, often associated with dispersed ethnic communities. For the Austro-Marxists, Karl Renner and Otto Bauer, who were among the first federalists to address the question of how to reconcile ethnic dispersal with cultural rights, the solution to democratising the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire lay in securing the cultural rights of geographically scattered ethnic groups by providing non-territorial-based institutional supports in combination with a non-territorial form of political representation. In many polities, however, both territorial and non-territorial conceptions of federalism have often been argued for and to varying degrees attained, as in the case of present-day Belgium.

What the foregoing remarks emphasise is the pluralistically programmatic nature of federalism as promulgated by federal visionaries. And despite the often very different projects and philosophies held by federal builders – Lenin’s Soviet Union, Nehru’s India, Tito’s Yugoslavia, Trudeau’s Canada or even Delors’ European Union – what federalists commonly aspire to is securing and ensuring the reproduction of a particular form of political institutionalisation which reflects and acknowledges diversity. We can refer to this end stage as federation. It is above all an organising principle, containing institutions and structures and legitimised on the basis of providing for and celebrating both unity and difference. Although it is generally acknowledged as a particular type of political formation, federations are not easily distinguishable from other state forms, leading one eminent federal theorist to go so far as to conclude that federation in political practice is a myth (Riker, 1975). Certainly self-ascription offers little in the way of clarification; of the one in ten of the world’s present-day polities that claim to be federations, closer scrutiny reveals that it is often difficult to distinguish many of them from unitary state structures. King however provides us with one way out of the self-ascriptive quagmire by defining federation as ‘an institutional arrangement, taking the form of a sovereign state, and distinguished from other such states solely by the fact that its central government incorporates regional units in its decision procedure on some constitutionally entrenched basis’ (1982:77). In elaborating upon this definition in his 1993 writings he advocates a conception of federation containing four essential features:

1. Its representation is preponderantly territorial

2. This territorial representation is characteristically secured on at least two sub-national levels (wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Maps and Diagrams
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Chapter one Mapping the Federal Condition: Ideology, Political Practice and Social Justice, Graham Smith
• Part I: Federations in Crisis?
• Part II: The Break-Up of Socialist Federations
• Part III: Federations in the Making?
• Index