European federalism
Urbinati, Nadia
Multinational countries live in a state of permanent trouble, all the more so if economic anxiety makes solidarity an issue and ideologues and politicians dream of cultural...
...But a balance between the richest and the poorest regions of a democratic federal state can be achieved only if the regions themselves act according to a co-operative spirit...
...World War II ended the nightmare of a continental leviathan...
...Interviste sull'Italia deljitturo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1994...
...Allen Buchanan recently defined the threat of secession of the better off as "exclusion" from "their obligation of distributive justice to the have-nots...
...Bartholomew Day massacre, Jean Bodin published De la republique, a classic text celebrating the indivisible, unlimited, and centralized power of the state as the mighty guardian of domestic order...
...They spoke of a new European order composed of a "network of local voluntary associations, vehicles of direct democracy, united within a European federation...
...Carlo Cattaneo advocated a United States of Europe along with the United States of Italy, but his political commitment was to the latter...
...Regional autonomy can be seen as a de facto federation, a physiological evolution of the unitary state once it becomes democratic and is no longer surrounded by potential enemies...
...The first sentiment would sustain liberal institutions...
...This is the crucial moral and political justification for local self-government and federation...
...On the one hand, it seeks to limit the power of each state in order to reach not a "mere suspension of hostility" but a condition of mutual trust...
...This reasoning was shared by all republicans and even by some liberals...
...Jurists and political scientists rightly insist on the "democratic deficits" of the European Union, which they trace to Jean Monnet's "functionalist" approach...
...Belgium was born in 1830 as a centralized unitary state...
...Mill described sympathy as the sentiment that makes it possible, in the extreme case of war, to "fight on the same side...
...Since its emphasis on autonomy and pluralism tends to re-open the arguments about national aggregations, in the short term decentralization may create instability...
...In order to provide a fairer distribution of FALL • 1996 • 31 Politics Abroad tax revenues among the Lander, the German federal government provides for "horizontal fiscal equalization...
...In Europe, things are different: one is first of all Italian, then European...
...eds...
...A federation needs both a strong sense of peripheral autonomy and an equally strong sense of This is a revised version of a paper delivered to the "USAEUROPE, 2nd Locamo Seminar on Politics and Society," promoted by the Biblioteca Cantonale of Locamo, May 25-26, 1995...
...In the name of the liberal principle of responsibility and democratic decision-making, they opposed the centralized protectionist policy of supporting the industrializing North at the expense of the rural South...
...Germany provides a good example of the way in which autonomy and sympathy can coexist in a co-operative kind of federal state...
...They describe themselves as victims of redistributive discrimination and oppose the central state primanly because of its aim to correct social inequality...
...it should be the guardian of sympathy, not the detached umpire of a race among competitors "trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels...
...Multinational countries live in a state of permanent trouble, all the more so if economic anxiety makes solidarity an issue and ideologues and politicians dream of cultural homogeneity...
...In the United States, identity goes from general to local...
...The disagreement between the state and the Lander over the government's enforcement of fiscal reforms (which could have had disadvantages for the weaker regions) led the Lander to draft a "solidarity pact" that will require the federal government to provide an annual transfer to the Eastern regions for the next ten years, along with other economic and fiscal resources...
...Thanks to Article 23 of the Unification Treaty (1990), they can now join in the German government's EU decision making, and they have also won the right to represent Germany in the European Union Council of Ministers when their own authority is involved...
...The federalists of the 1940s interpreted World War II as a European civil war, and blamed the conflict on absolute state sovereignty...
...In the long term, however, it could bring former partners closer and even promote new kinds of associations...
...national sympathy: these are the two souls of a "federal culture...
...He thought one could construct a large federation by beginning with FALL • 1996 • 29 Politics Abroad small ones...
...A people that has been living under a unitary political system for several generations is, after all, a people without memories of federation...
...It needs consensus and practice, and, as Robert Putnam has shown, local self-government can nurture it...
...Even before federalism became a party ideology, the mayors of large cities advocated a broader local autonomy in the name of democratic participation and the restoration of national solidarity...
...The many versions of federalism are all set against rationalist political ambition: to create a "mortal God" with an indivisible and irrevocable power over all its subjects...
...The moral and political (as well as economic) costs of this policy have been high, mainly in terms of increasing Northern racism and discriminatory behavior...
...rom a liberal or left-federalist perspective, the relaxation of centralist constraints can be a way of restoring the sense of union...
...Europeans had to be "persuaded" by practice that they could approach problems in "the same way," as nations that were different and divided but co-operating...
...Although the domestic and supernational strategies of federalism go together logically, historically they have been pursued separately...
...The honors of world wars led federalists to switch their focus from the domestic to the supernational...
...As one cannot force the art of making wine, so one cannot force mutual trust...
...Political institutions contribute to constituting a nation no less than language, religion, and literary and folkloric traditions...
...Carlo Rosselli complained that the state gained power by expropriating from civil society all of its "numberless forms of association, as rich in their content as they were free and limited in extension...
...John Stuart Mill described two preconditions for a federation to work: (1) a "feeling of identity of political interest" among ethnic groups and (2) this same Humean "sympathy...
...My main concern here is with European single-state federalism...
...The novelty introduced by the European Union consists in the fact that, whereas federalism has traditionally been a process of unification (within a single state or among several states), today it can be both a unifying and a divisive force...
...If not, then no matter how much regional autonomy there might be, they would perceive federation as another and perhaps better way of living together, not as a means of division...
...Within a European federation articulated on many levels, from the regions up to Brussels via the states, autonomy and sympathy can work as complementary forces, to mitigate both the tendency toward centralization (of the states and the European Union alike) and the tendency toward a selfish localism...
...In 1970 Italy began its regional experiment, which Robert Putnam considers "one of the few recent attempts to create new representative institutions in the nation-states of the West...
...If sympathy is so important for federation, then it is also the test for whether a federation endures...
...A supemational federation promoted one of the most interesting contemporary phenomena: a process toward autonomy and regionalism within the European nation-states...
...What distinguishes federalism from separatism (and confederalism) is the sense of belonging to a larger community than a city or a region—a sense that in politics means that one is willing to pay, if needed, for fellow citizens living in other regions...
...He inverted the political strategy pursued by the federalists of the previous century: after almost a century of unitary statism, regions and local communities had lost the vigor to fight for a federation, but the federal enterprise could acquire new strength through Europe...
...the second, national union...
...Mazzini dreamed of a united republic, but one with a large decentralized system of local governments...
...The retention of local autonomy may foster sympathy for the larger society...
...In the past, however, federalism was advocated mainly by Southern intellectuals...
...Qualejederalismo...
...the Northerners, because they perceive themselves as victims of an injustice perpetrated by a political class that enriched itself more than it helped those for whom the help was meant...
...Neither autonomy nor sympathy, however, can be imposed by decree...
...Hence the role of the European Supreme Court, to which European citizens—both as individuals and as members of cultural groups—can appeal against their own states...
...In Italy, centralist policy facilitated corruption insofar as the state retained not only the responsibility of redistributing fiscal resources, but also the power of organizing social services...
...The principle behind these ideas is that one learns to respect humanity first by respecting one's neighbors...
...Disagreements among contemporary federalists over the precise meaning of federalism and the threat of secession in countries like Italy should be read as quarrels over where to stop the former and how much to strengthen the latter...
...On the other hand, it advocates a division of sovereignty and rejects the principle of one-nation–one-state...
...Until now the reverse process, a unitary state becoming a federation, has never happened without the state's falling apart...
...It performs the kind of redistributive function that the United States government does not...
...Napoleon's Europe was an expanded France...
...Perhaps it is moving toward a different and more stable union—without following Czechoslovakia's destiny...
...National sympathy can be seen as a continuum from a maximum of undisputed unity to a minimum where the ties composing a nation are broken or not sufficiently spontaneous to hold the union...
...Gunlicks, Arthur B., "German Federalism After Unification: The Legal/Constitutional Response," Publius, 24 (1994), pp...
...I am pleased to see that this federalism is now on the agenda of the newborn center-left Italian government led by Romano Prodi...
...Burgess, Michael and Gagnon, Alain-G...
...The call for federalism as a way of solving problems of material inequality is not new in Italy...
...Their models were the medieval cityrepublics and the guilds...
...Many of the men and women who fought against Nazism and fascism belonged to the tradition of Penn...
...Sabella, Marco and Urbinati, Nadia (eds...
...A supemational federation unites what the territorial state had separated (internationally) and dissociates what the territorial state had unified (domestically...
...This process, however, began in the name of national unity, not federalism...
...Freedom and the loosening of fear encourage the expression of difference...
...Yet it can be taught...
...Monnet's policy of dealing with prime ministers, while leaving the people temporarily outside, rested on the conviction that the union had to be prepared by transforming the habits of ordinary men and women in dealing with each other...
...The rationale of federalism is "subsidiarity," which denotes a system within which the units maintain the autonomy they need to deal with the spheres of action that pertain to them, but cede authority to a higher level in pursuit of common goals (security, peace, freedom, well-being...
...The United States became a country when its people united into a federal pact...
...They sought to create a great Europe unified under the respective banners of Rationality (and Christianity) and Aryan civilization...
...The road to single-state federalism crosses the highway of supernational federalism...
...Attempts to unify Europe were not new, and they did not necessarily guarantee peace...
...Fderalism fights on two fronts: the supernational and the domestic...
...The leviathan28 • DISSENT Politics Abroad state had put an end to social anarchy, but opened the door to a no less frightening international anarchy...
...In the midst of the wars that followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, William Penn wrote An Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe, in which he argued that only a European confederation could guarantee a durable peace...
...they want to participate in Europe's new politics but do not want to delegate all power to Bonn...
...Today the richest regions of the North call for federation (or confederation...
...Most World War II partisans saw continental federation as the only feasible alternative to the state's power vocation, domestic and supernational...
...But in Europe today domestic and international dimensions are so intertwined that notions of "inside" and "outside" are increasingly blurred...
...Despite their different political allegiances and mutual isolation they reached similar federalist conclusions...
...It gradually adopted bilinguism and created a truly national-cantonal autonomy...
...The two myths were complementary expressions of the hegemonic project of the nation-state...
...Sooner or later the bottle will burst...
...They promote a certain degree of regional autonomy while assigning to the central state the task of redressing socio-economic disparities among the regions...
...Historically, federalism designated a process of union...
...When federalism is used as a divisive tool, its natural conclusion is the dissolution of the state...
...they demand a cutback on social policies and reject intergovernmental cooperation in order to protect the prosperity of their own regions...
...Hume's preoccupation was shared by the authors of the Federalist Papers—a text that, notwithstanding its nationalist orientation, became a manifesto of latter-day European federalists...
...The state should change the form of its intervention, not stop intervening...
...After all, if the nation is a pure artifact constructed by the state, then the argument of national sympathy becomes meaningless...
...The first generation of federalists were the Girondins, the second the Proudhonians, who opposed Mazzini's democratic nationalism as vehemently as their ancestors had opposed Rousseau's (and Robespierre's) republicanism...
...Both shared David Hume's admiration for the United Provinces and their ability to keep a people "from uniting into large assemblies" by dividing them "into many separate bodies" so that they could "debate with safety" and prevent "every inconvenience...
...Until the early 1970s, only Germany was a federation among the states that became part of the European Community...
...Burgess, Michael, Federalism and European Union (London and NewYork: Routledge, 1989...
...Today no one is happy: the Southerners, because a centralized system of redistribution has meant bureaucratic power and endless corruption...
...The enemy was mass democracy and unlimited majority rule...
...Comparative Federalism and Federation: Competing traditions and future directions (New York-London-Toronto: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993...
...Italy has been a highly centralized state since its political independence in 1860...
...Today this elementary fact is acknowledged even by those intellectuals who dream of a federal Italy...
...As a consequence, the mayor of Bologna complained, "even the decision to institute roads reserved for cyclists has to be approved by the central Minister...
...Institutions of this kind are meant to generate the habit of multiple belonging while fostering a democratic culture of rights...
...The Lander want to deal directly with the Euopean Union, independently of the federal German state...
...Local autonomy and transnational co-operation would, in James Wilkinson's words, get rid of the "old nation-states [which were] bellicose and unresponsive to the needs of their citizens...
...All federalists prized political and cultural pluralism...
...Unlike nationalists, federalists seek to unite, not to unify...
...Today, however, secession may have another motivation: economic pluralism...
...Wilkinson, James D., The Intellectual Resistance in Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981...
...Sympathy cannot be imposed...
...The socialist mayor of Barcelona, one of the promoters of the federalist campaign in Spain, commenting upon the 1978 constitution, said that for the first time the state recognized that "public resources belong to all the public sector, not just the central administration or to the one that collects and distributes them...
...The root of Mill's idea of "mutual sympathy" is the republican conviction that the little homeland can fortify the sentiment of belonging to the large homeland...
...The German case proves that, if and when the state transfers some of its traditional powers to a supemational federation, it will still retain others, primarily those related to social justice and the rectification of economic disparity among the parts of the nation...
...Putnam, Robert D., Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992...
...FALL • 1996 • 33...
...Undoubtedly the sympathy that citizens feel for their own people is stronger than that they feel for other peoples...
...Transition from fascism to democracy did not alter its vocation nor its bureaucratic structure...
...As the mayor of Bologna said, "It is the restitution of governmental responsibility to local communities that can offer to the citizens the possibility of overseeing their representatives" and participating in decisions on how fiscal resources should be used...
...Whatever their history, now these people display common characteristics even if they are also locally distinct...
...Generally speaking, Europeans share multiple loyalties, which need not be a source of conflicts...
...Sympathy Hume thought sympathy to be the most remarkable "quality of human nature" because it makes possible communication among individuals, however different their opinions and personal characters...
...Harold Laski thought the modern theory of sovereignty was intrinsically statist, and portrayed himself as a "frank medievalist...
...Their main goal became peace and democracy...
...If union is not mistaken for unity, the federalization of unitary states can become not a road to secession but to a national rebirth...
...Altiero Spinelli, one of the spiritual fathers of the European Union, provided a very simple and convincing rationale for a supernational federalism...
...The Italian, Spanish, and French constitutions proclaim the respective states to be "one and indivisible...
...it decentralizes sovereign power and civil society alike...
...Fragmenting sovereignty was a way of lightening its burden...
...Once the states begin to release portions of their traditional sovereign functions to the European Community, decentralization might "give birth again to a free local political life...
...Buchanan recognizes that in this case secession is morally objectionable, but he also argues that the better off may have some reason to feel victimized, because the excess of justice is another form of injustice—here expressed as a kind of reverse discrimination...
...The European Union is not likely to become another United States, where one defines oneself first as an American and then as someone who comes from Illinois...
...This is the reason why regional autonomy may be seen as a safer form of decentralization than a full-blown federalism...
...Spinelli, Altiero, Machiavelli nel LY secolo: Scritti del confino e della clandestinita...
...For them autonomy and sym32 • DISSENT Politics Abroad pathy are mutually exclusive forces...
...But perhaps this is not necessarily so...
...The sharing of both responsibility and decision-making power between state and local governments is the basic condition for democracy...
...Their job, says Michael Burgess, is much more demanding and subtle because they have to support a movement "in a unitary direction without seeking a unitary state...
...My concern here, however, is not with discord within multinational states, but with the sentiments of disunion arising within countries marked by cultural and political unity...
...Hitler's, a vast Germany...
...As the German case shows, a co-operative federalism would restore the legitimacy of political institutions while shaping a new pact of democratic citizenship...
...Until recently, secession has been the banner carried by ethnic groups in the name of the nationalist principle one-nationonestate...
...Yet, as the founders of the European Union thought, it is possible to educate sympathy...
...Italy implemented a system of regional government in 1970, Spain in 1978, and France in 1982...
...Are Italians as indifferent toward the problems and needs of Calabria as they are toward those of, say, Switzerland...
...Germany and Switzerland went from loose confed30 • DISSENT Politics Abroad eration to federal union...
...There are tensions between the Lander (regions) and the state, and between the Lander and the European Union...
...Mill saw participation in local government as a school of "civicness" and sympathy...
...A federation is a delicate combination of two equally strong forces: one centrifugal, the other centripetal...
...Thus, Czechoslovakia became a federation shortly before it disappeared...
...Quite paradoxically, however, three years later the Italian Parliament passed a new tributary law that was even more centralist than the previous one...
...Until the last century, the federation remained a project of national unification...
...As Spinelli had foreseen, the more the peoples of Europe perceived themselves also as Europeans, the more the centralized state would relax its ties...
...A centralized state freezes "civicness" because it separates citizens from political institutions and weakens their public spirit...
...It is not easy," Gianfranco Miglio (a former leader of the Northern League) recently wrote, "to construct a federation in a country that does not have a 'federal culture.'" Nothing is more illogical than a Jacobin federalism...
...In the gospel, duties towards humanity are called duties towards neighbors: diliges proximum tuum...
...81-98...
...Modern right- and left-wing federalism were born in reaction to Jacobin democracy...
...What the state must do is to guarantee that all citizens have an equal access to the basic social services (such as health, education, and housing) by supervising the regions's performance and balancing their resources...
...He thought that a European federation would open the door to domestic federations...
...Two years after the St...
...Not surprisingly, the threat of secession or confederation is made in the name of libertarianism...
...1941-1944 (Bologna: 11 Mulino, 1993...
...But its centrifugal trajectory doesn't make it a former state...
...To this quality, more than to the influence of soil and climate, he attributed the main power holding people together and giving individuals the feeling of sharing something in common...
...In his inaugural speech as the first president of the High Authority of the European Assembly (1950), Robert Schuman declared that the "essential political objective [of the federative process is]: to make a breach in the ramparts of national sovereignty which will be narrow enough to secure consent, but deep enough to open the way towards the unity that is essential to peace...
...Their target is national solidarity, not simply centralism, bureaucratic corruption, or waste and inefficiency...
...The European motto would then be e uno plures, because the proliferation of peripheral autonomies proceeds from the very process of continental unification...
...The German case also exemplifies the new role the state can play within a European federation...
...Selected Bibliography Buchanan, Allen, Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec (Boulder -San Francisco-Oxford: Westview Press, 1991...
...The Lander are not anti-European...
...In the nineteenth century, the primary goal was political liberty rather than peace...
...Perhaps an army forced them together, or ambitious or idealist intellectuals fostered their national feelings...
...Northerners do not simply criticize the centralist method of redistribution and its corrupt consequences...
...Federalists thought federation would encourage union because it would foster mutual sympathy...
...For these sentiments come only with practice...
...Spinelli, Altiero, The European Adventure: Task for The Enlarged Community (London: Charles Knight, 1972...
...The architects of the European Union saw the new order not as a way of dissolving and weakening national identities, but as the only legitimate way "to preserve them and allow them to flourish vigorously in all their diversity...
...To impose a federation is like trying to bottle wine in the wrong season or shield it at the wrong temperature...
...The movement toward decentralization is particularly strong in those countries that have both a nondemocratic legacy and a strong centralist tradition...
...Federalism has proved to be the most viable way to satisfy both the need for union and the desire for autonomy...
...Their aim, Altiero Spinelli wrote, was not "one single European state, designed to become a European Nation, but a Federation of Nations in which citizens will jealously guard their own traditional home country while becoming at the same time citizens of the Community...
...After all, both Napoleon and Hitler were universalists...
...Today other states have reached a stage of quasi-federation...
...The former feel betrayed...
...the latter feel expropriated...
...As a counter-example to this ideal balance of autonomy and sympathy, consider the case of Italy—especially the Italian debate over federalism and secession...
...The Napoleonic wars destroyed the myth of the territorial state as the guarantor of domestic and international order...
...Moreover, centralization spoiled the regional "affirmative action" policy which the Italian state adopted since World War II...
...Autonomy Both the unitary modern state and the idea of federation thrived in the age between the dynastic and religious wars of the sixteenth century and the two world wars of the twentieth...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
