Multinational Federations

Michael Burgess, John Pinder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134120857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is the first comparative volume available on multinational federations, bringing together an international range of experts on federalism.

Multinational federations are federal states intended to provide a framework that can accommodate, manage and resolve some of the most intractable political conflicts of our time that emerge from identity politics: those that stem from competing national visions, whether within or between established states.

Featuring key experts in the field such as Michael Burgess, Alain Gagnon and Ronald Watts, this unique book draws on a wide geographical range of country studies including Belgium, Canada, India, Malaysia, Spain, Russia, Cyprus, India, Switzerland and the EU in order to illustrate the pivotal relationship between federalism and nationalism. In so doing, it addresses the practical relevance of federalism to the new political recognition of difference and diversity in the specific form of national minoritarianism.

Multinational Federations will be of strong interest to students and researchers of federalism, democracy and nationalism.

1 Multinational federations

Introduction

John Pinder

Multinational federations are intended to provide a framework that can accommodate and as far as possible resolve some of the most intractable political conflicts of our time: those that stem from competing national visions, whether within or between established states. Yet although experience of the working of relevant political systems has accumulated in recent decades, it has not been the subject of comparative study that the importance of the subject requires. The aim of this book is to respond to this need.

One reason for the lack of attention paid to the subject may be the intellectual, institutional and emotional capital invested in the nation state and the idea of its sovereignty. That has deep roots: in France, from Bodin, through the Jacobins’ ‘nation une et indivisible’ and with strong influence to the present day; in Britain, from Hobbes’ absolute monarchical sovereignty through Austin’s, then Dicey’s, doctrine of indivisible parliamentary and national sovereignty, likewise influential up to the present. In the nineteenth century the doctrine was supported by many internationalist liberals, because of their sympathy with the Greek, Hungarian, Italian and Polish struggles for national independence. John Stuart Mill, in his essay on nationality published in 1861, was not untypical in preferring a unitary national state;¹ and the frontiers drawn under President Wilson’s influence in Central and Eastern Europe after the First World War followed in that tradition. The doctrine became embedded in the language with terms such as nation state and national sovereignty.

Intellectual traditions of federalism: Hamiltonian and Proudhonian

While the doctrine of the centralised unitary and sovereign state became particularly deep-rooted among the British and the French, events in the past century have pressed them towards a new view of sovereignty and its indivisibility: in France, following the Second World War, with its leading role in the establishment and development of the European Union (EU) and the accompanying constraints on national sovereignty; in the United Kingdom, with its participation, albeit reluctantly, in the EU, then the creation of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. Such political developments too had their intellectual antecedents, from Althusius and Locke in the seventeenth century, through Montesquieu in the eighteenth, from whom the American Founding Fathers drew intellectual sustenance for their remarkable innovation of democratic government at two levels, of both the federation and the states. The US constitution in turn gave rise to the Hamiltonian tradition of federalist thought, named after the most politically influential of the authors of The Federalist,² which emphasises the institutional requirements for the establishment of a federation of states.

Almost concurrently with Mill’s essay, the liberal historian Acton expressed an opposing view of federation, seeing it as ‘the most efficacious and the most congenial of all the checks on centralised oppression of minorities’, with the ‘coexistence of several nations under the same state’ as ‘the best security of its freedom’;³ and he was to take issue with Mill over the idea that the state must be congruent with the ‘national unity which is the ideal of modern liberalism’.⁴ Acton’s view was not without influence. He was Gladstone’s adviser over the question of Irish home rule in the 1880s and 1890s; and the concept of a federal Britain attracted considerable support as a way of treating the running sore of Irish discontent in the United Kingdom until the issue was resolved by Irish secession after the First World War.⁵ Acton’s federalism extended to relations among, as well as within, existing states, enabling ‘different nationalities . . . to exist in harmony side by side’, and as such, he envisaged it would be capable of ‘unlimited extension’.⁶

Other distinguished British scholars who, like Acton, wrote favourably in the second half of the nineteenth century about the federal principle were James Bryce, Edward A. Freeman, J.R. Seeley and Henry Sidgwick; indeed, among those who gave their attention to it, only A.V. Dicey was hostile.⁷ Spurred by the European and world crisis of the 1930s, this tradition was revived in a literature by authors of the stature of William Beveridge, Ivor Jennings, Lord Lothian and Lionel Robbins; and the horrors of the Second World War led Beveridge to return to the subject in 1945, while K.C. Wheare’s classic study of federal government was published in the following year.⁸ But subsequent rejection by the British political class of the idea of a federal Europe, together with entrenched opposition to formal systems of devolution, was reflected until the latter part of the twentieth century in the scant academic attention paid to the subject in Britain. Meanwhile English-language literature on the subject was to come mainly from Canada and the United States.

Following the influence of Montesquieu on the American Founding Fathers and French support for American independence, the US Constitution in turn influenced French thinking in the period up to 1791. But the Jacobins who then seized power regarded the federalism of their opponents, the Girondins, as akin to treason and treated them accordingly, thus establishing a remarkably durable tradition of unitary centralisation. Alexis de Tocqueville’s great book on American democracy was nevertheless the first influential study of the American federal system.⁹ But it was not until Proudhon’s du Principe Fédératif was published that a specifically French tradition of federalism emerged. The date of Acton’s first published work on the subject was not the only similarity, for Proudhon’s main interest in federalism was likewise its decentralising aspect.¹⁰ Whereas Acton had, however, like most other English-speaking writers, concentrated on the dimension of political institutions, Proudhon cast his net wider, to embrace decentralised economic institutions in particular. His ideas, which inspired the Proudhonian tradition of federalism, strongly influenced the French labour unions until displaced by Marxism in the early twentieth century. But interest in them was to revive in the personalist movement, which was subsequently to influence Jacques Delors.¹¹

It was, however, in order to set in train an incremental process of constructing a European federation on Hamiltonian lines that Jean Monnet in 1950 drafted the Schuman declaration which launched the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community designed to ‘build the first concrete foundation of a European federation which is essential to the preservation of peace’.¹² The result has been the creation of a federal political system through a series of steps over the past half-century, which has, as Monnet envisaged, gone far towards becoming a federation.

The EU is a particularly interesting example of the integration of a group of states into a federal system through a series of steps which may well lead to a federation and from which lessons can be drawn for other groups of states that may wish to embark on a similar course. Some scholars have indeed defined federalism as a process rather than relating it to a completed state.¹³ As the federations studied in this book demonstrate, there is also a process of development in the relations between the centre and the states inside existing federations, particularly to accommodate the demands of nations within them, which may be of particular interest with respect to newly established federal systems such as Belgium and Spain, or to states such as the United Kingdom that may be moving in that direction.

Discussion of federations and federal systems is, however, so bedevilled by misunderstandings about words, that before passing on to the studies of particular cases, we need to consider the meaning of relevant concepts such as nations, sovereignty, federal political systems, federal states and multinational federations.

Nations, sovereignty, federations, federal political systems, multinational federations

Nations and sovereignty

Ernest Gellner famously defined a nation as people who ‘share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating’ and who ‘recognise each other as belonging to the same nation . . . nations are the artefacts of men’s convictions and loyalties and solidarities’.¹⁴ He warned against paying too much attention to definition on the grounds that neither the cultural nor the voluntaristic criterion is adequate and that definitions of culture are themselves difficult and unsatisfactory. Given this wise advice, we shall not probe deeper into definitions, save to note that various combinations of linguistic, cultural and ethnic characteristics as well as shared history are to be found in the ‘nations’ which are the subjects of succeeding chapters, and that they ‘see themselves as distinct societies and demand various forms of autonomy or self-government to ensure their survival as distinct societies’ (see Chapter 12 by Ronald L. Watts, ‘Multinational federations in comparative perspective’, p. 357).

Where groups that share such characteristics are not geographically concentrated, they may form part of a multi-ethnic rather than a multinational state. Austria-Hungary before the First World War was an example of such a state, which though hardly a democracy devised some means to satisfy the desire of ethnic minorities for autonomy through measures of self-government in fields such as education and culture;¹⁵ and the Belgian federal constitution has applied a similar principle in providing for an allocation of powers for the ‘communities’ of the Dutch-, French- and German-speakers, with respect to linguistic, cultural and educational functions, separate from that for the territorial regions.

These arrangements are relevant, if peripheral, to the theme of this book, which concerns nations that relate to a particular territory and which demand autonomy or self-government within a state, or take part in a federalising process among independent states, thus causing tension or conflict regarding sovereignty, in the sense of ‘legal or political freedom from external control’.¹⁶ In principle, sovereignty is usually regarded as legally absolute, even if limits are in practice accepted. But the terms national sovereignty and nation state often carry the connotation that such limits are aberrant and should as far as possible be avoided, which raises a semantic problem regarding national component parts of a multinational state. Switzerland, where the citizens of the cantons, though not comprising nations, are likewise extremely sensitive about their sovereignty, has dealt with it by affirming in Article 3 of the Constitution that ‘the Cantons are sovereign in so far as their sovereignty is not limited by the Federal Constitution and, as such, they exercise all rights which are not transferred to the Federal power’. Thus sovereignty has been divided between the cantons and the federation, each being sovereign within its own fields of competence; and this can be seen as generally valid in a federation, although the delineation between the fields of competence can be changed by constitutional amendment, usually by a qualified majority of states or citizens or both. The ultimate test of whether the system was federal or confederal was resolved in the USA only at the enormous human and economic cost of the Civil War. In 1998, however, the Supreme Court of Canada issued a judgment that secession could be legitimate if negotiated respecting procedures which, however, remain subject to political definition.¹⁷ It is surely reasonable for practical purposes to regard sovereignty as divided between a federal centre and its constituent parts, recognising that whatever the definition of sovereignty, it remains possible that the circumstances which the word reflects may not endure for ever.

Federations and federal political systems

That article in the Swiss Constitution reflects the desire to establish shared rule for some purposes while retaining the historic self-rule of the cantons for others. Following a brief and almost bloodless civil war, the Swiss had in 1848, drawing on the example of the USA, reformed what had hitherto been a confederal association into a federal state. They thus created a federation in the sense defined by Ronald L. Watts as ‘a compound polity combining constituent units of government and a general government, each possessing specific powers delegated to it by the citizens through a constitution’ (see page, Chapter 12).

Watts explains the concept more fully in Chapter 12. Here we need only note that a federation has government at two (or more) levels, each with a direct relationship with the citizens, including through elections of their representatives. The distribution of powers between the centre and the states¹⁸ has to be guaranteed by the constitution, each having a sufficient proportion of the legislative, administrative and taxing powers to give it the capacity to be a viable polity. Thus the effective operation of the states is not dependent on the centre, so there is a ‘shield for minority groups that would otherwise feel threatened’;¹⁹ nor, in order that there can be effective shared rule, is the centre dependent on the individual states. The constitution is defended by an ‘umpire’, usually a federal judiciary, to rule on disputes between governments, often with respect to the division of powers between the centre and the states. Constitutional amendment is not usually majoritarian, in the sense of being decided by a simple majority of the citizens or the states, but nor is it usually subject to veto by a single state, though the Canadian parliament resolved in the late 1990s that the constitution would not be amended against the will of the province of Quebec; and the Supreme C...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Multinational federations: Introduction
• 2 Democratic multinational federalism under scrutiny: Healthy tensions and unresolved issues in Canada
• 3 Multinational Federations: Reflections on the Belgian federal state
• 4 Federalism and competing nations in India
• 5 Multinational federation: The case of Malaysia
• 6 Federalization in multinational Spain
• 7 Russia’s multinational federation: From constitutional to contract federalism and the ‘war of laws and sovereignties’
• 8 What is to be done? Bicommunalism, federation and confederation in Cyprus
• 9 Federalism, nationality, statehood: The problem of the European Union
• 10 Federation and managing nations
• 11 India and Switzerland as multinational federations
• 12 Multinational federations in comparative perspective