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Daniel Elazar Papers Index

Federalism


Three Federal-type Solutions in Dealing with
Multi-ethnicity: Confederal Examples

Daniel J. Elazar


What we today call federalism began in ancient times in two forms: one, federal union under a common law and constitution whose constituent units were recognized as what we would today refer to as "governments" as distinct from "authorities," but were perpetually bound by the union covenant, constitution, and laws. Ancient Israel, as described in the Bible, is the first recorded example of that kind of federal arrangement which, after the American constitution became known as federation.

Parallel to it were unions of basically independent tribes or cities that banded together in a perpetual treaty that provided for their union for limited but lasting purposes, usually having to do with common defense and the maintenance of a common religion. Today we would refer to those kinds of federal unions as confederations. The earliest recorded historical references to such confederations come from the ancient Hellenic world, both Greece proper and the Greek areas along the west coast of Asia Minor.

In the long period from the sixth century BCE until the eighteenth century of our era, confederal arrangements were the dominant forms of federalism in the world, so much so that the term "confederation" itself was the first political use of a word containing a federal reference in European languages in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, with the term "federal" confined to theological usage to describe relations between man and God.

Thus, we could project back to the earliest history of federalism to describe federalism as a political genus and federation and confederation as two of its species, even though that formulation itself would be anachronistic, a reflection of deepened contemporary understanding of the complex characteristics of federalism.


Confederations and Federations

In fact, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the modern idea of the centralized, homogeneous nation-state led to a conventional definition of federalism as the loose linkage of such states in confederations. In the end, modern statism contributed greatly to the disappearance of confederations or confederal arrangements during the second half of the modern epoch, between the late eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, as the idea of the nation state became the norm.

From the time of the adoption of the United States Constitution in 1787-1789 to the founding of the European Community in 1958, the historical trend in the world for those seeking federal solutions to their regime problems was federation, that is to say, the establishment of a strong general government to serve as a framework uniting constituent polities and their governments, usually intended to contain a single nation, all subject to a common constitution as supreme law of the land. Federations gave important functions, including foreign affairs, defense, management of the economy and taxation, among others, to a federal government that exercised the powers granted it directly upon the citizenry of the federation.

The post-World War II revival of the confederal option as a serious one is a major expansion of the use of federal principles and arrangements and potentially has enormous consequences as we enter into an era of globalization when exclusive state sovereignty is rapidly giving way to constitutionalized connections between polities, whether sovereign or constituent states, in a wide variety of functional spheres out of necessity. This paper will look briefly at three examples of confederations and confederal arrangements to deal with both ethnicity and statism under a variety of conditions and at various stages of development. The examples to be considered here are the European Union, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the Caribbean Community.

As a rule, modern federations were designed to establish new national entities and to diminish previous loyalties. The United States, for example, is a country built upon the migration of individuals and families from many different ethnic, religious and racial groups from around the world. America was, for them, new territory and they spread across it from sea to sea to sea. Hence the United States has never had a convergence of its political boundaries with different ethnic or racial identities. Consequently, in the United States, federalism helps diffuse the pressures of ethnicity and race, and vice versa.1

In Germany, by contrast, confederation proved inadequate because of the basic sense of ethnic unity of the German people, partly cultural, partly linguistic, and partly ethnic despite their one-time division into many identifiable subgroups (Saxons, Hessians, Prussians, Bavarians, etc.) and independent polities. Federation, as in the U.S., has served the cause of democratic republicanism.2

In Canada the existence of two territorially grounded founding nations or ethnic communities, British and French, has led to periodic constitutional crises in our time. The British also were divided into English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and Cornish but, forced to confront the French, for most purposes united into one group. This also has led to the maintenance of the ethnic identity of later arrivals (e.g., Jews, Italians, Ukrainians) in a formally multicultural context as a crosscutting pressure, for better or worse.3

In Switzerland, linguistic and religious differences rest on what once were ethnic differences between Allemanians, Burgundians, Italians, and Rhaetians. Over time, political, geographic, and religious changes have made those differences crosscutting rather than reinforcing, maintained only within a sense of common Swiss nationhood.4

Throughout the nineteenth century, democratic republics, large and small, found federation a useful way to achieve democratic unity, a trend that continued through the immediate aftermath of World War II. A major reason for the triumph of federation was the need to reconcile constitutionalized power sharing with the overpowering thrust of statist nationalism for external purposes. A federation could appear to be a single state in the international arena and could satisfy the aspirations of a common nationalism, while inside it maintained its diversity.

The fact that federalism was preserved at all as a device for political organization in the modern years of statism and nationalism, to better allow the democratic organization of political power through the combination of self-rule and shared rule, was due to the great invention of the American founding fathers. Their task was made easier by the fact that the people of the United States saw themselves as sharing a common American nationality that increasingly superceded local ties, but even the United States had to fight a civil war before the issue was deemed settled and a common American citizenship given preeminence.


"Community": An Interim Stage

The excesses of statism and nationalism revealed by the Fascist and Nazi movements in the twentieth century weakened the Western worlds commitment to nationalism as an ideal per se and raised questions about the kind of exclusivist statism that had been a dominant feature of the modern epoch. As the world moved into a postmodern epoch, the states of Western Europe, exhausted by two world wars, sought new forms of unity in diversity, beginning tentatively with a set of treaties establishing economic linkages through "communities" so that they could better compete in the world market. Over the next 40 years those communities developed into a European Union, a new-style confederation, as much a new political invention as the U.S. invention of federation in 1787.5

The European Community essentially became a confederation in a formal way when it became the European Union on January 1, 1994. It is by far the most advanced and comprehensive example of the new phenomenon of confederal linkages but is by no means the only one. In many ways it is the pacesetter for the others. Indeed, just as the United States of America under its Constitution of 1787 became the model for modern federation, we may expect the European Union under its various treaties to become the model for postmodern confederation. Many studies of the European Union, especially under its previous name, the European Community, explore and document the evolution of the EU from functionalism for economic purposes to confederation.6

From the first, the vision for European unification was a federal one. The conventional expectation of those who sought it originally was federation, a United States of Europe. When Western European efforts at federation failed in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the federalists were replaced by the so-called functionalists who developed a system of linkage of functions, piece-by-piece, through the establishment by treaty of unifying authorities for specific but limited purposes. It is they who laid the foundation, wittingly or unwittingly, for the new-style confederal arrangements that emerged and the reinvention of confederation, while strenuously denying that they had any federalistic intentions, for strategic reasons. Thus, the development of a new-style confederation has been overlooked by many. Until very recently, the EC continued to be understood by functionalists and federalists alike as a way to avoid federal solutions.

It hardly need be said that the failure of the United States of Europe movement and its replacement by a functionalist approach was the result of the still intense nationalism of the states of Western Europe. Every Western European state was seen as serving a particular nation. This was particularly true of those continental European states that formed the core of the EEC at its beginning. The inventors of the Westphalian system, they were still its strong adherents. At the same time they had come to recognize that old enemies, particularly France and Germany, had to be linked somehow in a golden net that would keep them from warring with one another. They also realized the economic need for extending that net to include at least certain basic functions. Thus, without giving up their nationalist ideals, they were ready for limited but very real functional linkages.

Three principal features stood out and marked the EC as a new-style polity: One was a general admission requirement to full membership that admitted member states into the governing councils and gave each an appropriate share of the bureaucratic machinery of the EC on a more or less equal basis. The second was the transfer of powers to the EC on a functional basis, whereby specific and limited functions came within the purview of the Community institutions on a far more substantial basis than in any of the old confederations. Where the EC was explicitly granted authority and powers, its institutions could, at least in part, work directly with the citizens of the member states, although in all cases it had to work through the individual states themselves. Third was a constitutional court that was empowered to make far-reaching decisions within the limited sphere of EC authority.

It was this mixture of reliance upon the member states by the EC in order to act and the authority to reach out directly to the people on a limited basis, with each particular combination determined by separate agreement among the member states, that gave the new confederation form. Moreover, the new confederation quietly insisted upon democratic republicanism as the required regime for member states, a step that became particularly visible in the cases of Greece, Portugal and Spain, which passed from dictatorship to democracy as a condition of their entrance into the European Community.

After a period in the 1970s when it seemed that the Community itself would fail, it took on new vigor in the 1980s and there began to be talk about further union. That led to the Single Europe Act which took effect on January 1, 1993 and to the Treaty of Maastricht which took effect January 1, 1994 which, despite abjuring that goal, was designed to move the EC toward federal union. Both have subsequently run into problems. The Single Europe Act is now in effect on paper but has not been immediately effective in practice. While the Maastricht Treaty was ratified in the end by all twelve member states as it had to be, the ratification came with such reservations and revisions that it is more likely to strengthen the confederal aspects of the new European Union than to move it in the direction of federation. By now it is clear that the nations of Western Europe, realizing the necessity to do so, are committed to the EU, but they are not willing to give up their national identities expressed through states that retain substantial independence even while seeking limited union.

While some, including this writer, have been arguing that the European Union had been in the process of reviving confederation as a form of government at least since the 1970s and that by the time of the Single Europe Act, adopted in 1987, the EC had moved from being a confederal arrangement to a confederation, the Maastricht Treaty affirmed and constitutionalized the confederation beyond any doubt. The formalization of the change was reflected in the change in name from the European Community, a functionalist choice, to suggest the low profile of the original treaties, to the European Union, a name that seemed to promise more than confederal linkage and that could satisfy federalists as well as confederalists.


The Maastricht Treaty

Both the writing and the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty essentially involved a struggle between federalists and confederalists: the former proud to claim the name and the latter, led by Britain, reluctant to identify themselves with federalism in any way, following the well-known style of British pragmatism. The federalists succeeded in giving the EU a new overall structure while the confederalists succeeded in limiting its application, thereby keeping the confederal mode of operation.

The treaty finally negotiated was constructed on the basis of three pillars: the first embracing the original economic community, an intergovernmental pillar dealing with foreign and security policy, and a second intergovernmental pillar dealing with the Union's internal affairs. The first is embodied in Titles II, III, and IV of the treaty that amend the EEC, ECSE, and Euratom treaties and formally name them the European Community. The second is embodied in Title V. The third is embraced in Title VI which covers justice and home affairs. All three are bound together through Titles I and VII, the Preamble and final provisions that bring them together to establish the EU.

This complicated arrangement was designed to satisfy the anti-federalists fears. Originally those fears seemed to be an expression of the UK government only, but as the difficulties that emerged in the ratification process indicated, the peoples if not the governments of most of the other Community member states shared many of the same feelings and were reluctant to go even as far as the treaty as finally concluded, went, causing a major reassessment in the minds of the EU leadership. The treaty did not even use the term federal, but ever closer union. Even though British Prime Minister John Major accepted many federalist elements of the treaty, including subsidiarity, he attempted to define the new way without using the term confederation. As he put it, At Maastricht we developed a new way, and one much more amenable to the institutions of this country cooperation by agreement between governments, but not under the Treaty of Rome.7

The final product was, when consolidated with the existing EC treaties upon which it rests, hundreds of pages in length. The result has been described as not so much a constitution as a collection of basic laws. Lister lists seventeen functions that fall within the confederal dimensions of the EU:8

  1. Elimination of customs duties between member states (Articles 12-17);
  2. Setting of the common customs tariff (Articles 18-29);
  3. Elimination of quantitative restrictions in the trade between member states (Articles 30-37);
  4. Common agricultural policy (Articles 38-47);
  5. Free movement of workers (Articles 48-51);
  6. Right of business establishment (Articles 52-58);
  7. Right to provide services (Articles 59-66);
  8. Free movement of capital (Articles (67-73h);
  9. Common transport policy (Articles 74-84);
  10. Rules to ensure free competition (Articles 85-94);
  11. Harmonization of national taxation laws (Articles 95-99);
  12. Approximation of national laws (Articles 100, 100a and b, 101 and 102);
  13. Common visa requirements (Articles 100c and d);
  14. Convergence of economic policies (Articles 102a-104c);
  15. Common monetary policy (Articles 105-109m);
  16. Common commercial policy (Articles 110, 112, 113, 115);
  17. Consumer protection (Article 129a).

Lister lists another ten in which the EU functions more as a governmental organization:

  1. Social provisions (Articles 117-125);
  2. Education, vocational training, and youth (Articles 126-127);
  3. Culture (Article 128);
  4. Public health (Article 129);
  5. Trans-European networks in transport, communications, and energy (Articles 129b-d);
  6. Industrial cooperation (Article 130);
  7. Economic and social cohesion (Articles 130a-c);
  8. Research and technological development (Articles 130f-130p);
  9. Environment (Articles 130r-t);
  10. Development cooperation (Articles 130u-y).

To these ten areas must be added the two areas of foreign affairs and security and justice and home affairs. In most of these 27 activity sectors, the member states are also entitled to carry out many functions on their own.9

Most observers see the treaty's main achievement as the establishment of the objective of economic and monetary union along with a timetable for its achievement. The EMU is designed, according to Article II of the treaty, to:

promote throughout the Community harmonious and balanced development of economic activities, sustainable and uninflationary growth respecting the environment, a high degree of convergence of economic performance, a high level of employment and social protection, the raising of the standard of living and quality of life, and economic and social cohesion and solidarity among Member States.

Most of this was already embodied in earlier Community treaties. The goal of currency union, however, was established precisely in treaty form. Indeed, the treaty gives the Community exclusive authority over money, superceding any independent activity by the member states in that field.

The European Central Bank is to be established by 1999. Its precursor, the European Monetary Institute, began operation on January 1, 1994, prepared by the Committee of Central Bank Governors of the member states that had existed sine 1964. In all of this, coordination of exchange and inflation rates and deficits of the member states needs still to be developed appropriately and properly. There yet have to be developed ways in which the member states collectively govern the Community's central bank, yet share their powers with the institutions of the EC.

The second pillar, designing a common policy in the fields of internal and external security and foreign affairs, is built on the experience of the European Political Cooperation Procedure (EPC) and the new Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) provisions of the treaty. The CFSP remains intergovernmental in character and is not within the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. It must pursue its objectives through common positions and joint actions. This can be translated into the current practice of EPC or into new initiatives worked out through an elaborate procedure involving qualified majorities if there is no proposal before them from the Commission, which means that they must gain a majority of at least 54 out of a possible 76 votes cast by at least eight countries. Ultimately, this should lead to a common defense policy, a task whose elaboration and implementation is entrusted to the Western European Union, at least until 1996.

The third pillar, relating to justice and home affairs, is an effort to go beyond the ad hoc machinery handling technical cooperation in fields such as law enforcement policy, customs, asylum, extradition, deportation, visa policy, and immigration. These introduce EC institutions into the process directly. Administrative costs for increasing coordination are to fall within the EC budget. The Council of Ministers is responsible for the overall program and a new body, the K4 Committee, has been established to undertake coordination between the different intergovernmental activities. Both the European Parliament and the Court of Justice continue to be largely excluded. Most decisions are to be by equal vote of the member states.

The treaty provides that the EU is to be served by a single institutional framework presided over by the European Council made up of the heads of state or government and the President of the EC Commission. The powers of the European Parliament, still the weakest of the EU institutions, are also expanded. Draft laws now need to be brought before it for two readings, not merely for consultation. Five specific innovations have been introduced by the treaty which otherwise simply codifies precedents and practices already developed by the European Community:

  1. The incorporation of the principle of subsidiarity; namely, what can be done at a lower level should be, and not raised to a higher level.
  2. The establishment of a limited European citizenship.
  3. The introduction of a co-decision procedure between Parliament and Council.
  4. The involvement of Parliament with the Council in the appointment of the Commission.
  5. The setting up of the Committee of Regions to better deal with the substate governments of the members.10

Subsidiarity has been taken to heart as a federalist concept by the EU leaders although it is, in fact, a very anti-federalist idea. It was originally a Catholic doctrine designed to modify the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church, originally for enhancing the role of the lower or smaller orders in the Church. The Founding Fathers of the European Community, so many of them coming from the Catholic tradition, lit upon this device, and applied it as a civil one to the Community. It first surfaced in the Tindemans Report on European Union of 1975 and was first formally used in European constitutional legislation in the European Parliaments 1984 draft treaty drawn up by Altiero Spinelli, one of the foremost ideologists of the Community. It was written into the Treaty of Maastricht with the encouragement of the Commission and the insistence of the Germans as a basic guideline for future activity, to control the flood of single market legislation since 1985 which member states and various interests were opposing on the grounds of too much interference in the minutiae of daily life. The German government was particularly interested in protecting the constitutional position of the lander within the Community and the German federal system. The British also insisted on subsidiarity to retain greater independence and freedom of action. As Duff says, "unsurprisingly, it is defined ambivalently."11

The great advantage of including the principle of subsidiarity in the treaty will be to establish the principle of states rights within the EU. How that will play out remains to be seen.

The introduction of EU citizenship is a major step. As introduced in the treaty, it will be limited to citizens of the member states and confined to electoral rights, i.e., voting and standing for office in local and European elections, confirming the right of citizens to petition the European Parliament, the establishment of an EU ombudsman, and the possibility of sharing consular services outside the EU. It does not provide greater protection for other civil or human rights and only nationals of member states are included.

What the citizenship provision does do is strengthen the European Parliament as the voice of European citizenship, require the adoption of a uniform electoral procedure, and recognize trans-European political parties for the first time.

Introduction of the co-decision procedure which grants the right of legislative partnership with the Council to the European Parliament is potentially a major step. It does not make the Parliament a co-equal partner of the Council, but does give it a larger say in reviewing draft acts, as in the case of the annual budget of the EU. The treaty prescribes co-decision procedures for matters relating to the internal market, free movement of workers, trans-European networks, environmental policy, R&D, and cultural policy. Co-decision is a step beyond cooperation, the previous definition of the Parliaments power. Procedures in all of these areas will have to be developed through usage.

The Parliament has also been given a role in the selection of the Commission President and is required to approve the Commission as a whole. It has always had the power to dismiss the Commission as a whole, which it has never dared to use. Now, by simple majority it may block the nominations to the Commission by the member states governments.

The establishment of a new Commission of the Regions by the treaty potentially confronts a major problem in the evolving EU, namely, how do constituent states of member federations express themselves within the Union. To date, regionalism in the Community has treated all regions equally, whether German lander and Spanish autonomous communities on one plane, Scotland and Wales on another, and Greek municipally-based regions or English planning regions on yet another. The Commissions powers are mostly the powers of consultation. A solution has not yet been found for distinguishing between federated states and other kinds of regions in relations with the EU, but new arrangements will be developed with the German lander and the Spanish regional governments who are expected to assert themselves in the new body, while pressure for further decentralization within non-federal member states should grow.

Perhaps the social protocol is the weakest aspect of the new treaty since the UK is not included in it, by the latter's choice. What is surprising is that the other eleven states went ahead even without the UK. The social protocol is a new initiative. The fact that it is also asymmetrical will also make a difference in its application. Asymmetricalism is becoming more widespread in the Unions governance. Denmark has followed Britain by opting out of stage three of the EMU and the single currency, and it has gone further to opt out of the defense activities of the Western European Union. The Western European Union included only ten of the twelve member states in 1994 (it may now include thirteen out of the fifteen). On the other hand, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg are united as Benelux and those three plus France and Germany are united in the Schengen Agreement.

In the end, the Maastricht Treaty has enlarged the powers of the Community and transformed it into a Union, but it is a confederation of commonwealths, not a federation. The treaty was written in that spirit and was further interpreted in that way even before it went into effect. In addition, on January 1, 1995, three new states Finland, Sweden, and Austria joined the EU after their peoples voted to do so in separate referendums. Norway, however, again rejected membership. How this will play out under Maastricht also remains to be determined.


The Commonwealth of Independent States

Elsewhere in Europe, a second confederal arrangement, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), was formed from the residue of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It is at least as relevant to use the term "confederal" as the EL/EU was in its early days. The USSR was formally a federation based on the various ethnic/nationality groups within it, but in fact it was a consolidated empire under Communist dictatorship. Hence when the empire disintegrated, there was no will to retain the federation. Quite to the contrary, each ethnic-based union republic sought to escape the overweening power of Russia and to become independent. For that matter, most of the ethnic groups within Russia proper wanted to become independent and were limited only by the practical need to recognize that Russia would require them to remain within a Russian federation.

On the other hand, these newly independent republics also recognized that they had certain arrangements and needs in common. All were part of a common ruble area and were affected by the economic fallout from that. Their security needs were at least partly provided under a Russian umbrella formerly provided by the USSR. Certain other formerly imperial transactions had to be preserved, at least in a weakened way. So the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was established to be formally something less than a confederation but in fact considerably more than merely a league or treaty.12

As in Western Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States consists of several joint authorities where agreement has been reached among the ex-Soviet republics, excepting the Baltic states,, with two departures from the model of the European Community. The first is that, while general membership forms the basis of the CIS, not all states are members of the same functional authorities. Also, some functional authorities extend beyond the general membership. The second is the existence of agreed-upon sharing arrangements that have not been formally constitutionalized. Most are survivals from the previous regime, for example, the role of the ex-Soviet, now Russian, army in the various republics, or the existence of a common currency, or other shared economic arrangements. In some cases, these are destined, at least in the short term, to decline, but, in others, new constitutional arrangements are likely to emerge in due course, each on an individual basis.

The role of the Russian army, for example, has become important in two ways. One is to guard the borders of CIS countries against outside intervention. This is particularly a problem in Central Asia where the CIS republics bordering on Iran have been threatened with infiltration from that country. The other cases are where internal civil wars within the newly independent republics have gotten out of hand and the Russian army has intervened to halt the conflict, as in Moldova and Georgia. Since it is not clear that the Russian leadership has made its peace with the breakup of the old Russian empire, it may be that in some of these latter cases Russian intrigues have led to the crises in the first place and then Russian intervention conditioned upon the formal adherence of those republics to the CIS has followed. There is evidence to this effect with regard to Georgia.

What is particularly interesting is that while there are civil wars taking place within the CIS, they are within the newly independent republics and between ethnic groups within those republics. Only in one case (Armenia and Azerbaijan) is a war being waged between two independent republics over territory within Azerbaijan taken from Armenia during the Soviet years. Despite charges and counter-charges about Russian involvement, with the latter exception, these do not involve major inter-republic conflicts.

One potential conflict may be in the offing between Russia and Ukraine over the Crimean peninsula. When the USSR was at the heyday of its strength, the Soviet leadership transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine. Under Communist dictatorship, this was merely a nominal transfer. Subsequently, when Ukraine became independent and it was still heavily Russian, Crimea pressed for autonomy which was granted to it but in a less than satisfactory (to them) way so that the Crimean majority has continued to press for their territory to be returned to Russia. Ukraine, of course, adamantly refuses. To date, both sides have indicated that whatever the problem, it should be settled by peaceful means, and have refrained from any kind of armed intervention, but the matter is a volatile one.

The one case where there has been an effort to actually secede from Russia itself is Chechen, Russia has failed in its efforts at military intervention, and now must use negotiation and internal subversion to bring the Chechens back into line. This situation remains even more volatile than any of the others, but it, too, is an internal Russian rather than a CIS problem.

Most recently, Russian President Boris Yeltsin has announced that Russia sees its "near abroad," that is to say, the former territory of the USSR, most of which is now in the CIS, as within its special sphere of influence. This may portend additional movement either for strengthening the CIS or for reunification with Russia itself.

Meanwhile, a few of the independent member states of the CIS have felt the necessity to resort to federalism in some form to deal with certain of their internal ethnic problems with varying degrees of reluctance since in no case can there be found a federal political culture to make federalism attractive as an option and not just as a tactical or strategic necessity. Russia, by far the largest of the CIS states, is a full-fledged federation, but one which seems to be trying to impose ever greater centralization with very mixed results. Other states such as Georgia, Tajikistan, and Ukraine have made provision for the constitutional autonomy of regions within them with ethnic minorities, three in Georgia and one each in Tajikistan and Ukraine. Belorus, on the other hand, which reluctantly accepted independence and whose people see themselves as Russians, seems to be seeking even closer ties with the Russian Federation.

The CIS represents a new departure in postmodern confederal arrangements in several ways. It is concerned with security as well as economics. Indeed the security card has been one of the strongest cards that the Russian Federation has been able to play to get its sister republics to join the CIS. For example, Russia forced Georgia into the CIS after Georgia had refused to join. In 1993, Georgia was faced with two substantial revolts within its territory, one ethnic and one based on political rivalries. The Russians maneuvered the legitimate Georgian government under Shevardnadze into a position whereby it needed Russian military assistance which the latter provided at the price of Georgia joining the CIS. Georgia did and thereby Shevardnadze and his government were saved.

The Russian presence in the central Asian republics, to the extent that it exists, also rests on Russian provision of military security against Islamic fundamentalists from Iran and Afghanistan. On the basis of that service, Russia is demanding that the ethnic Russian citizens of those republics be allowed dual citizenship.

The precise character of the CIS is not yet clear. The Baltic states, for example, have refused to join. Belorus, now an independent state, still preserves the closest of ties with Russia through the CIS because its people feel themselves to be Russian. The government of Ukraine, on the other hand, has been resisting Russian involvement with it, even in the economic sphere, rejecting the ruble zone and its joint currency insofar as it has been able to do so. But Ukraine itself is sharply divided between its western regions that are more purely Ukrainian ethnically and were not even part of the Soviet Union until after World War II, its eastern regions which have large ethnic Russian populations settled in them by the Soviets in an effort to consolidate their hold on Ukrainian territory; and the Crimea, a Russian territory inhabited by ethnic Russians that was only attached to the Ukrainian union republic after World War II. The latter has been given autonomous status as a region within Ukraine but is struggling to make that status more than a formality. The 1994 election in both brought to power leaders reflecting a popular desire to move closer to Russia. The consequences of their victory are yet to unfold.

The CIS continues to have its ups and downs. In March 1996 the Russian Parliament, turned nationalist after the 1995 elections, enacted a resolution unilaterally disqualifying the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, a resolution with no immediate practical effect since President Yeltsin rejected it out of hand, but a sign as to which way the wind was blowing in Russia. Three weeks later, the leaders of Russia, Belorus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan signed an agreement providing for further integration and cooperation while promising to keep their respective states sovereign. The essence of the agreement was to create a tighter community within the CIS, one that would allow freer movement of people, services, goods, and capital, and might even lead to the introduction of a single currency. On the signing of the agreement, Yeltsin said, "The person who does not regret the dissolution of the Soviet Union does not have a heart, but the one who wants to reproduce it in full does not have a head."

The four-state pact calls for closer political, economic, trade, and cultural ties, and envisages a common market of goods and services, unified transportation and communication, and a common currency. These goals are hardly different than the stated goals of the CIS, but whereas the twelve CIS members cannot agree to the steps required to reach that, the four inaugurated a new inner circle. It also leaves open the door for other CIS members to join. Three days later, at the beginning of April, Russia and Belorus signed an even more far-reaching agreement providing for even greater integration of the two countries while proclaiming that each will keep its sovereignty and independence.13


The Caribbean Area

Perhaps the second most developed confederal arrangement, after the EU, is the Caribbean Community, embracing islands in what were formerly the British West Indies. They tried federation in the 1960s as the West Indies Federation, while they were still under British rule, under pressure from Great Britain. It failed, perhaps because islands are by definition insular.14

However, as the West Indies Federation failed, those same islands retained, established, or preserved a congeries of functional authorities that united them for the purpose of economic development (e.g., CARICOM, the Caribbean Common Market), education (a common University of the West Indies), currency, administration of justice (a common supreme court), defense, and foreign relations. These are slowly evolving into a new-style confederation in that region. These important confederal elements survived because the same islands, however insular, could not support a full range of governmental institutions nor could such institutions effectively serve such small territories by themselves. The best known of those institutions is CARICOM, an economic community that was to be like the EC. It also has been perhaps the least successful. Far less well known and far more successful have been the common university, the common supreme court, and the common monetary system.

As the islands became independent one by one or group by group, these and similar links between them were strengthened so that today the Caribbean Community is a confederation in all but name and even CARICOM is gaining in strength. Here, too, security concerns have been in the hands of outsiders, first Great Britain and then the United States, although there has been inter-island cooperation in security matters at least nominally, as in the case of the U.S. invasion of Grenada at the request of other member states of the region.15

The treaty establishing the Caribbean Community included the establishment of CARICOM with a common external tariff. It was signed by the prime ministers of Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago in Trinidad in July 1973 and entered into force at the beginning of August of that year. In April 1974, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucie, and St. Vincent and Montserrat signed the treaty, and in July 1974 Antigua and the Associated State of St. Kitts-Nevis-Angula joined. The Bahamas became a member of the Community but not of the Common Market in July 1983. The Caribbean Community is concerned with economic cooperation, foreign policy coordination, and functional cooperation in various fields including health, education, culture, sports, science and technology, and tax administration. The Common Market has been slow to develop, but cooperation in other areas has progressed in various ways.

The principal organ of the Community is the Conference of Heads of Government. Second to it is the Caribbean Community Council of Ministers, with each government designating its minister member. In January 1993 the Bureau of Heads of Government was established with a secretary general and the chairman rotating on a six-month basis. The Community also has a secretariat, a conference of health ministers, and standing committees on education, tourism, labor, foreign affairs, finance, agriculture, energy, mines and natural resources, industry, science, technology, transport and legal affairs. The Caribbean Development Bank, Caribbean Examinations Council, Council of Legal Education, University of the West Indies, University of Guyana, and the Caribbean Meteorological Organization are associate institutions. The Community also has its own flag.

These arrangements embrace the English-speaking islands. The French-speaking islands have gone in a very different direction, to become self-governing departments of France, and as such are parts of the European Union. The Dutch-speaking islands developed in a third way, as separate self-governing entities within a common Kingdom of the Netherlands that is formally federal and further linked by informal political and economic connections.


New Constitutional Techniques

The revival of confederation as a viable option seems to have been made possible by the development of a new constitutional technique. Federations and confederations alike must rest on written constitutional agreements that establish the terms of the federal bargain and the rules of the game. In the past, founders of both have written single comprehensive constitutional documents to do just that.

New-style confederations, on the other hand, have been established through limited constitutional agreements among the partners on specific topics. The European Union pioneered this technique, beginning with the various Treaties of Rome, first establishing a coal and steel community, and then adding other areas of first economic and then political integration, culminating so far in the Single Europe Act and the Maastricht Treaty. Thus, the constituting states needed only to agree on which functions they wanted to provide in common as they reached consensus, enabling them to maintain more reserved powers than in a federation.

The same arrangement holds true for the Caribbean Community. The ex-Soviet republics have embarked on the same course, initialing an agreement on economic union that now has to be fleshed out constitutionally, and entering into multilateral and bilateral negotiations and agreements with regard to some kind of defense or military union as well. On the other hand, Yugoslavia, which tried to build confederation without establishing the necessary constitutional arrangements in this manner, has slid into civil war and again has dissolved into its original form. Senegambia dissolved without war and Canada has been seeking to avoid dissolution by political means. All of the other leagues and common markets can be found to have some arrangements that seem confederal, but all are at the early stages of the confederal linking process.

These functional techniques seems to resolve the first problems of constitutional design in confederations. We have yet to see whether it can solve the problem of governance. While there is even less in the way of set institutional designs for these confederations or incipient confederations, we are beginning to note patterns. In the first place, the principal institutions tend to be collegial rather than executive or parliamentary. Councils of ministers of the member polities are the most prominent institutions. This is true in the European Community, on one end of the spectrum. On the other end, as Canada has moved in the direction of confederalizing its federation, the First Ministers Conference, consisting of the federal prime minister and the premiers of the provinces, became the most significant policy-making body for that country. Obviously, where confederal arrangements are even more limited than in the EU, councils of ministers or their equivalent have an even greater share of the authority and powers vested in the confederal entity.

The other institutions can be seen to be more developed, the more integrated the confederal polity becomes. Thus, for example, there are executive institutions with varying degrees of importance, ranging from secretariats with relatively little power to the European Commission that represents the executive power for the European Union. By and large, these are mainly bureaucracies manned by professional civil servants, presumably with little discretionary decision-making power beyond the strictly administrative. In the case of secretariats this is normally true. In the case of a body such as the European Commission which presides over a massive and powerful bureaucratic structure, it is less so. That is why as the executives of the confederal polities are strengthened, an appropriately confederal policy-making structure headed by political figures is added to them. In the case of the European Union, the European Commission constitutes the plural political executive that is meant to control the bureaucracy. It includes political representatives of every member state and is headed by a president elected by the commission as a whole from among its members who, while not a full executive president, does have certain executive powers.

A parliamentary arm is one of the last additions in these new style confederal arrangements, since it requires a much higher degree of political integration of the confederal polity and its member states. Often, it is established as an advisory body, and even if it becomes an elected parliament as in the EU, its powers are very limited and its role is more advisory or modificatory than original or initiatory. It becomes more of a forum for the various member-state parties to coalesce with their equivalents from other member states into accepted parliamentary blocs, i.e., social democratic, conservative, liberal, green, fascist, or whatever. In essence, there is a competition between the council of ministers and the parliamentary body for the same powers.

It is particularly important to note the expanded role of constitutional courts in these new-style confederacies. The reliance on constitutional courts is a federal device originally developed for the United States of America under the Constitution of 1787. (Although judicial review was not explicitly authorized by that constitution, it was asserted by the Supreme Court within fifteen years of the constitutions adoption.) The reliance upon constitutional courts to settle disputes within the spheres of competence of the confederacy is one of the principal inventions or adaptations in new-style confederations. Hence, constitutional courts often are second in power only to councils of ministers. Normally, they, too, are constituted on a confederal basis with judges appointed from all of the confederal units.

Normally, federations are designed on a tripartite basis the classic legislative, executive, judicial division of powers and on a tri-arena basis federal, state, and local. New-style confederations, on the other hand, are more likely to be based upon a quadripartite and quadra-arena structure. The EU is a good example. The Council of Ministers has the primary legislative function, the Commission the primary executive function, and the Constitutional Court the primary judicial function, but there also is a Parliament which has a consultative-advisory function.

With regard to arenas, there is the state arena consisting of the national states that are members of the EU. The EU constitutes another arena that embraces those states. Within those states are the federated states/regional arenas the lander of Germany, the federated regions of Belgium, the autonomous communities of Spain, the four countries of Great Britain, etc., and within them are the local arenas. The national state arenas are the least flexible, the EU arena more so because new members can be added (or in theory members can secede), the federated states/regional arena has about the same degree of rigidity and flexibility as the EU, while the greatest flexibility exists in the local arenas.

The governance of the EU is predominantly collegial, rather than single-headed or parliamentary, that is to say, in the hands of small groups of individuals with equal standing because of whom they represent. This has advantages and disadvantages, but may very well be one of the hallmarks of confederations and confederal arrangements. As a result, institutional functions differ between federations and confederations nearly as much as they do between confederations and modern-style states.


The European Community as a Matrix

The other difference between earlier and contemporary confederations is that the primary purpose of earlier confederations was military security, while in postmodern confederations it is economic. This shift from a concern with peace to a concern with prosperity reflects the change in the worlds security situation whereby security umbrellas are provided through separate leagues and alliances led by dominant great powers, in most cases, which themselves may embody certain confederal arrangements, though, because they are not perpetual, are not confederations. The CIS experiment may be the exception to this. Even there, the economic issue has been placed first in the confederation process, with security second.


The New Paradigm

It is still too early to predict whether these confederations and other confederal arrangements will succeed as such, but the chances are that the development of worldwide, multilateral, overlapping, linking institutions embracing formally sovereign states, to which all nations will have to be attached in one way or another, offers the opportunity for and will place demands on smaller nationalisms and localisms to find their place in the sun through confederal political arrangements of one sort or another. These may still be called statehood and sovereignty, but with a very different meaning than those terms had during the modern epoch. The modern terms may survive, but implicit within them will be federal limitations of one kind or another, somewhere between the constituent states of federations and the sovereign states defined and recognized by modern international law.

Even international law is beginning to reflect this paradigm change. Modern international law was born in the years following the Treaty of Westphalia to embody the new statist system and to anchor it juridically and philosophically as well. In time, it became one of the greatest barriers to the introduction of a federalist paradigm because practitioners in the international arena were trained, formally or informally, to think and talk in terms of state sovereignty as defined by international law and to insist on those terms for their states.

Now this is changing. Students of jurisprudence are beginning to note how many provisions for combining self-rule and shared rule are finding their way into international law and are embodied within it in the formalistic ways that law requires. To give but one example, the Vatican is a politically sovereign state in international law and, indeed, was given that status after the unification of Italy and the annexation of the medieval Papal States by the latter, so that the pope would not have to be under the temporal sovereignty of anyone else. However, police powers in Vatican City are, by international law, in the hands of the Italian government, as are the provision of most ordinary domestic functions of government, making Vatican City an associated state. There is an interesting twist in this. In most similar arrangements, associated states retain full or very substantial powers over their domestic affairs but are bound to larger states for their foreign affairs and defense but in the case of the Vatican its foreign affairs are precisely its major powers, while domestic and police powers are in the hands of the Italian state. The growing expression of these new arrangements in international law with all their complexity is just beginning to be recognized.16

While the ties that increasingly bind the nations of the world are not yet confederal, it is becoming increasingly difficult for any of the existing states to think of withdrawing from the international bodies in which they are united and going it alone, whether we are speaking of the International Postal Union, the World Trade Organization, or the United Nations itself.17 Indeed, once the bi-polarization of the world evaporated in the wake of the collapse of the Communist Bloc, the United Nations began to acquire an ever greater role and may some day become the basis for a new world order. This will probably be a slow process and, in the process, may require the strengthening of such regional bodies as NATO or bodies of especially powerful states such as the G-7 Group. In many respects, the growth of regional trading blocs in recent years are counterbalances to the United Nations and other worldwide international organizations.18

The Communist Bloc collapsed in 1989, making it possible for the UN to expand its ability to make decisions on worldwide peace-keeping efforts. The result was that, by 1993, the United Nations had 80,000 troops seconded to it by its member states serving in peace-keeping missions under the UN flag in various parts of the world and talks were underway that could involve somewhere between 50,000 and 75,000 more in the near future.19

By 1994 the more powerful of states of the world began to see the UN as overreaching itself in its peace-keeping efforts. Together they halted this trend and instead either took responsibility upon themselves to intervene directly (as France did in Rwanda in the summer of 1994) or took the lead in securing troops from various countries under UN authorization (as the United States did in the case of Haiti in the fall of 1994). In some cases, such as Bosnia and other parts of ex-Yugoslavia, national, regional, and UN peace-keeping forces all intervened, leading to jurisdictional disputes between them from time to time. To date, these have been kept under control, but the potential for greater problems remains.

There are real dangers in this trend as well as much promise. Political and institutional arrangements should not progress faster than agreement on the norms and values underlying them. Moreover, it is not at all clear that such agreement is desirable, given the present state of the world. The idea of confederal arrangements is that they do not require the same level of agreement on values or basic moral principles that more far-reaching linkages of people and peoples do, but they still require some.

Experience should teach us that concentrations of potentially coercive power, where they exist, can be brought to bear against dissidents dissident polities as well as individuals whether justified or not, and that great care must be taken before entrusting power to anybody to secure control over its invocation, exercise, and consequences. We have already heard echoes of this problem in the specific debates over the changes that have taken place. Does NAFTA help Canada, Mexico, and the United States to advance economically or does it help make a few corporations wealthier at the expense of many workers who lose their jobs in the name of economic progress? Will Mexico become more democratic as a result? Will Quebec be encouraged to secede from Canada because it will have an alternative economic umbrella? Will the U.S. federal government further preempt state powers to fulfill NAFTA agreements?20

Are Western standards of human rights always applicable to non-Western peoples no matter what their customs and cultures call for? Are the premises of radical individualism that underlie so much of the new international efforts at influence, if not control, of the domestic policies of states and peoples always appropriate? Is there a place for group rights? Conversely, how do group rights affect the liberty of individuals to be themselves and how much should a massive set of multinational orders impose group authority on deviant individuals?

These are all very serious questions, indeed, that strike at the very heart of what seems to be happening on a piecemeal basis without advanced strategic planning. That is probably to the good since the good things that are happening in this sphere probably would not have, had advanced strategic planning been required from the first. Nevertheless, it may be asked, when does ad hoc-ery and its results reach its limits and strategic planning become necessary.

In essence, the Maastricht Treaty bringing into existence the European Union is an example of a step beyond ad hoc-ery into an effort at strategic planning, but it was an effort already limited by the facts established through ad hoc developments. What does that tell us about the limitations of humans, including human institutions, to develop and grow? The federal convention that wrote the United States Constitution in 1787 also can be seen as a form of strategic planning. Its members assumed that the existing confederation had to be scrapped and that an entirely new edifice had to be erected. Americans are used to celebrating the virtues of that choice. Now we need to look at its drawbacks and misassessments as well.


Failures and Partial Efforts

This record of movement to new-style confederation is not unidirectional or unblemished. One precursor of new-style confederation, the East African Community, developed in the twentieth century under British colonial rule to link Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, collapsed after each of those colonies became independent states, despite the fact that it had tangible functions such as the East African Railroad, that were useful to all three. As we know, almost any irrational political ambitions and passions can overcome even the most sensible and rational political behavior, in a very wide variety of ways, anywhere.21

Another confederal effort that failed more recently was that of Senegambia, the formal confederation of Senegal and Gambia, which is almost dictated by geography and which was tried for all of the classic reasons for confederal arrangements, principally security. It was based upon a comprehensive confederal government and the transfer of, at least on paper, substantial powers to it by the constituent states in one fell swoop. It was disbanded in 1989. Nevertheless, confederal arrangements more along the lines of the postmodern experiments still link Senegal and Gambia. Indeed, faithfulness to classic models may have been why the original confederation did not succeed. It had too little of the new-style confederal arrangements in its composition and purposes so it may have aspired to be too comprehensive. Now, in the wake of its collapse, the two states are trying to form joint authorities to handle those tasks that must be shared.22

Yugoslavia, established by Josef Broz Tito after World War II as a Communist-dominated federation, drifted from federation to de facto confederation after Titos death. The combination of Slovenian and Croatian demands to formally constitutionalize this shift and the unwillingness of the Serbs to acknowledge the change and embody it in a new constitution led to the present crisis in that polity (or congeries of polities) whose seceding republics all indicated initially that they were prepared to remain linked confederally, but not by federation. Slovenia and Croatia seceded, apparently encouraged by Germany, their old ally. Serbias ex-Communist leaders, seeking to hold onto their power as Communism dissolved, used deeply entrenched Serbian national grievances to initiate a power play to unite all Serbs in one Serbian state through invasion and ethnic cleansing of the neighboring republics, leading to a bloody ethnic-based civil war.23

Yugoslavia survives as a kind of greater Serbia and even survives formally as a federation, linking Serbia and Montenegro, with the possibility that the Serbian-occupied sections of Bosnia and Croatia will be federated with the other two as separate republics as well. Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia have become independent states. As of this writing, Bosnia is the principal battleground in the civil war, with Serbs and Croats contesting with the Bosnian authorities for control. Proposed solutions revolve mainly around the establishment of a federation or a confederation in Bosnia that would give the Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims each a piece of the former republic as political entities of their own. At this writing, Croatia and Bosnia formally have established a two-state confederation.24

At the same time, there may be other decentralizing developments in existing federations that may lead to more confederal arrangements. Quebec has been demanding a special status in Canada that it has called sovereignty-association and, while English Canada has been standing fast in opposition to that arrangement in principle, in fact, a certain recognition of Quebec's special place in Canada has been granted on an issue by issue basis, even as sovereignty-association has been rejected as a general principle. In the United States, where no such open demands have been made, the six states of New England and the thirteen states of the South have developed institutionalized interstate ties that may, in time, point in the direction of sectional confederal arrangements within the larger Union.25

In sum, confederal arrangements seem to be here to stay and likely to increase, both in texture and in spread. This does not mean that they do not have their problems, as every system government does. What it does mean is that such arrangements make possible the continuing shift of the world's political paradigm from statism to federalism, which is likely to prove the only means for constitutionalizing the globalization that is upon us all.


Notes

1. Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1987); Forsyth, Unions of States, op. cit.

2. Andrew C. McLaughlin, (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1961); Donald Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

3. Raymond Breton, Cultural Boundaries and the Cohesion of Canada (Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy, 1980); idem., The Governance of Ethnic Communities: Political Structures and Processes in Canada (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991); Ivo Duchacek, Antagonistic Cooperation: Territorial and Ethnic Communitites, Publius, vol. 7, no. 4 (Fall 1977).

4. Jurg Steiner, Gewaltlose Politik und Kulturelle Vielfalt (Bern: P. Haupt, 1970).

5. Derek Urwin, The Community of Europe: A History of European Integration Since 1945 (London: Longman, 1991); David Weigall and Peter Stirk, eds., The Origins and Development of the European Community (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992).

6. Michael Burgess, ed., Federalism and Federation in Western Europe (London: Croom Helm, 1986); Urwin, ibid.

7. House of Commons Debate, 4 November 1992, column 288.

8. Frederick K. Lister, The European Union, the United Nations and the Revival of Confederal Governance (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 85-86.

9. Ibid., p. 86.

10. Andrew Duff, The Main Reform, in Andrew Duff, John Tinder, and Roy Pryce, Maastricht and Beyond (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 26-27.

11. Duff, p. 27.

12 Timothy J. Colton and Robert Legvold, eds., After the Soviet Union: From Empire to Nations (New York: Norton, 1992); John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

13 "Russia and Three Ex-Republics Seal Closer Ties," International Herald Tribune, March 30-31, 1996, p. 2.

14. Amitai Etzioni, Political Univication (New York: Hold, Rinehart and Winston, 1965); Robert D. Crassweiler, The Caribbean Community (London: Pal Mall Press, 1972); Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

15. William C. Gilmore, The Grenada Intervention (New York: Facts on File, 1984); Anthony Payne, Paul Sutton and Tony Thornkike, Grenada: Revolution and Invasion (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984).

16. Sergio Minerbi, "Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: The Vatican, The Jews and Israel," unpublished research paper, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 1993.

17. Margaret P. Karns and Karen A. Mingst, eds., The United States and Multilateral Institution (London: Routledge, 1992).

18. Leland Goodrich, The United Nations (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1959); Even Luard, A History of the United Nations (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982-1989), 2 vols.

19. Philippe Manin, L'Organisation des Nations Unis et la Maintien de la Parix (Paris: Libraire Generale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1971); James M. Boyd, United Naitons Peace-Keeping Operations (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971).

20. Conrad Weiler, "GATT, NAFTA and State and Local Powers," in Daniel J. Elazar, ed., American Confederal Experiences, Past and Present (forthcoming). 21. Christian P. Potholm and Richard A. Friedland, eds., Integration and Disintegration in East Africa (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1980); Arthur Hazelwood, Economic Integration: The East African Experience (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975).

22. Lucie Gallistel Colvin, "Theoretical Issues in Historical International Politics: The Case of Senegambia," in Daniel J. Elazar, ed., Community and Union: The Rebirth of Confederal Arrangements in Europe and Beyond (forthcoming); Robert Fatton, The Making of a Liberal Democracy: Senegals Passive Revolution, 1975-1985 (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1987); Robert N. Bates, Patterns of Uneven Development: Causes and Consequences in Gambia (Denver: University of Denver, 1974); Arnold Hughes, "The Collapse of the Senegambian Confederation," Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, vol. 30, no. 2 (July 1992); Halifa Sallah, The Sene-Gambia Confederation: Facts, Fears, Myths, Doubts and the Truth (Banjul, Gambia: n.p., 1985).

23. Jonathan Eyal, Europe and Yugoslavia: Lessons From a Failure (London: Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, 1993); Frederick B. Singleton, A History of the Yugoslav People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Leonard J. Cohen, "The Disintegration of Yugoslavia," in Daniel J. Elazar, ed., Community and Union, op. cit.

24. Cohen, ibid.; Jim Seroka, "The Dissolution of the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav Federations: Comparisons and Contrasts," in Daniel J. Elazar, ed., Community and Union, op. cit.

25. Michael K. Oliver, The Passionate Debate (Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1991); Daniel Latouche, "Problems of Constitutional Design in Canada: Quebec and the Issue of Bicommunalism," Publius, vol. 18, no. 2 (Spring 1988); Peter M. Leslie, "Bicommunalism and Canadian Constitutional Reform," Publius, ibid.; Pierre Fournier, A Meech Lake Post-Mortem (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1991).


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