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Daniel Elazar Papers Index

Federalism

The European Community:
Between State Sovereignty and Subsidiarity

Or
Hierarchy Versus Colegiality in the
Governance of the European Community

Daniel J. Elazar


1992 is both the anniversary of a momentous date in world historyand is likely to be a momentous date in its own right. Five hundred years after Columbus effectively discovered America and opened the Age of Exploration which led to the settlement of new worlds in the western and southern hemispheres, an act which transformed the globe, the countries of Western and Southern Europe are about to take a momentous step forward toward federal unification. The European Community is a centrifugal force in European history which has emerged after 500 years of centripetal pulls that developed as a result of Europe's great frontier and most particularly its colonialist expression.

For 500 years, Europe pursued the twin courses of colonization overseas and centralized state-building at home. The two went hand-in-hand. The rejection of medieval or any other form of pluralism or power-sharing on behalf of the centralized state, hierarchical or parliamentary, was paralleled by the acquisition of colonies overseas by those new states as part of their muscle-flexing. World War II wrote finis to both of those drives, initiating an era of decolonization abroad and federal integration at home for the states of first western and then southern Europe. Today as the twelve community members draw closer together, they are separating themselves further from their ex-colonies and further decentralizing within their own territories. Thus the demetropolitanization of Europe is accompanied by a rethinking of the European state system. Together they are part of the formation of a new worldwide matrix of regional communities and polities which will be increasingly federal in character.

For Europe, the modern epoch, from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, featured, among other things, a struggle between two approaches to nation-building, one, resting on a combination of medieval corporatism and American revolutionary ideas, sought national integration on a federal basis -- in Germany, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Italy, in Switzerland, in the Low Countries, in Scandinavia, and to a lesser extent in Spain. Opposing that approach was the French ideal of the centralized state which gloried in the location of sovereignty in one, central point, whether monarchic or republican. Portugal and all the other states except Switzerland, and to a lesser extent Germany, followed the French lead, either consolidating into a single centralized state or dividing into a number of smaller centralized states.

The history of Europe has been written as if state-building of the latter kind was inevitable. In fact there was a struggle, philosophically, ideologically, and practically in almost every case.

The rise of fascism and Nazism brought about the collapse of the modern epoch in Europe's Gotterdammerung which affected the whole world. The postwar world brought with it the opening of the postmodern epoch which in Western Europe featured a turn in the direction of federal solutions. The European Community, whose first tentative steps took the form of treaties between sovereign states, slowly began to evolve into a confederation, in the process reviving the possibilities of confederal solutions as realistic ones.

By now it is clear that federalism has resurfaced as a significant political force in the world just as it did in the transition from the late medieval to the modern era which took place from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

Federalism has resurfaced because it serves well the principle that there are no simple majorities or minorities but that all majorities are compounded of congeries of groups, and the corollary principle of minority rights, which not only protects the possibility for minorities to preserve themselves, but forces majorities to be compound rather than artificially simple. Furthermore, it serves those principles by emphasizing the consensual basis of the polity and the importance of liberty in the constitution and maintenance of democratic republics. BOTH principles are especially important in a world increasingly complex and interdependent, where people and peoples must live together whether they like it or not and even aspire to do so democratically. Hence it is not surprising that peoples and states throughout the world are looking to federal solutions to the problems of political integration within a democratic framework.


Federalism and the Origins of the Polity

Since its beginnings, political science has identified three basic ways in which polities come into existence: conquest (force, in the words of Federalist No. 1), organic development (for the Federalist, accident), and covenant (choice). These questions or origins are not abstract; the mode of founding of a polity does much to determine the framework for its subsequent political life.

Conquest can be understood to include not only its most direct manifestation, a conqueror gaining control of a land or a people, but also such subsidiary ways as a revolutionary conquest of an existing state, a coup d'etat, or even an entrepreneur conquering a market and organizing his control through corporate means. Conquest tends to produce hierarchically organized regimes rules in a authoritarian manner; power pyramids with the conqueror on top, his agents in the middle, and the people underneath the entire structure. The original expression of this kind of polity was the Pharaonic state of ancient Egypt. It was hardly an accident that those rulers who brought the Pharaonic state to its fullest development had the pyramids built as their tombs. Although the Pharaonic model has been judged illegitimate in western society, modern totalitarian theories, particularly fascism and nazism, represent an attempt to give it a certain theoretical legitimacy.

Organic evolution involves the development of political life from its beginnings in families, tribes, and villages to larger polities in such a way that institutions, constitutional relationships, and power alignments emerge in response to the interaction between past precedent and changing circumstances, with a minimum of deliberate constitutional choice. The end result tends to be a polity with a single center of power organized in one of several ways. Classic Greek political thought emphasized the organic evolution of the polity and rejected any other means of polity-building as deficient or improper. The organic model is closely related to the concept of natural law in the political order.

The organic model has proved most attractive to political philosophers precisely because at its best, it seems to reflect the natural order of things. Thus it has received the most intellectual and academic attention. However, just as conquest tends to produce hierarchically organized regimes ruled in an authoritarian manner, organic evolution tends to produce oligarchic regimes which at their best, have an aristocratic flavor, and at their worst are simply the rule of the many by the few. In the first, the goal is to control the top of the pyramid, in the second the goal is to control the center of power.

Covenantal foundings emphasize the deliberate coming together of humans as equals to establish bodies politic in such a way that all reaffirm their fundamental equality and retain their basic rights. Even the Hobbesian covenant -- and he specifically uses that term -- which establishes a polity in which power is vested in a single sovereign, maintains this fundamental equality although, in practice, it would not be able to coexist with the system of rule that Hobbes requires. Polities whose origins are covenantal reflect the exercise of constitutional choice and broad-based participation in constitutional design. Polities founded by covenant are essentially federal in character, in the original meaning of the term -- whether they are federal in structure or not. That is to say; each polity is a matrix compounded of equal confederates who come together freely and retain their respective integrities even as they are bound in a common whole. Such polities are republican by definition and power within them must be diffused among many centers or the various cells within the matrix.

As the European Community moves further into the postmodern epoch, it is confronted more directly with echoes of the European past. It is now commonplace to recognize the emerging federal character of the European Community. Already a loose confederation, it is likely to become an even stronger one after 1992.

Confederation was the only form of federalism found in premodern Europe. Many of the early modern efforts at federal solutions in Europe rested on the attempt to modernize earlier confederal arrangements. None succeeded. Confederal principles could not be made compatible with the drive for centralized statehood. (The American invention of modern federation, which created the illusion of national statehood became the only successful modern vehicle for expressing federal principles.)

The founders of the European Community developed a new-style confederation, avoiding the problematics of establishing a single, overarching general government in favor of a number of single and multi-purpose authorities serving its member states. These are gradually linking them together through common institutions, emphasizing administrative and judicial institutions with clearly limited spheres of competence over more comprehensive legislative ones. The more grandiose and comprehensive idea of a United States of Europe was set aside -- as the Americans would say, placed on the back burner -- in favor of a more original invention designed to fit European realities.

A decade ago most Europeans were bemoaning the imminent demise of the European community. They were waiting for the first member state to pull out. A decade later, Europeans are discussing, properly, problems of over centralization, of building a single state, and of the state model for Europe.

There are several paradoxes to be considered in reviewing this change. The first one is the degree to which the European Community was essentially built, both in its positive and negative aspects, by Frenchmen. The movement for European unity began in Catholic Europe among the Resistance leaders in Italy and France. Its great proponents and architects were Catholics, including Robert Schumann, Jean Monet and the great Catholic chancellor of postwar Germany, Konrad Adenauer. It a sense it is ironic to see this Catholic turn toward federalism. For France, it is the triumph, even the revenge, of that strand of French political thought that runs from Montesquieu to Tocqueville and Proudhoun to Aron and Marc to Servan-Schreiver over French Jacobin and hierarchical centralism. In a sense, it is the victory of the French federalist tradition over French Jacobin tradition. Yet in the end it may be Jacobinism that wins out in a united Europe.

This is a very important aspect of the struggle for the European Community because the sense of a philosophy of Europe is being formulated without being 'formulated'. It is bubbling up from the process. The nature of that philosophy needs to be expose, in the best sense: it needs to be made visible, made understandable, so that it can be tested as to whether it is an appropriate philosophy or not.

A second striking fact is that the European community is the federalism of the Catholics, in the cultural more than the religious sense. In the past federalism has done best in the continent's Protestant countries, especially those influenced by Reformed Protestantism, often known as Calvinism. Perhaps ironically, the new European Community is essentially a product of Catholic Europe. Seven of its members are Catholic countries in the sense that well over 90 percent of their citizens are Catholics. Two are almost evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants and in both the Catholics have played the leading roles in the development of the EC, Greece is Greek Orthodox, leaving only two -- Great Britain and Denmark -- as Protestant countries, one predominantly Anglo-Catholic in its background and the other overwhelmingly Lutheran. Therefore the philosophic struggles of the Community come out of the Catholic historic experience.

A case in point is the new-found popularity of the term "subsidiarity" in the European Community's lexicon. This term, derived from the system of governance of the Catholic Church, reflects efforts within the Church to modify the effects of a totally hierarchical pyramid radiating from the pope downward by providing that, in certain matters, it is the obligation of the higher levels to allow lower levels to take the lead. The Catholic church is the oldest existing power pyramid in the western world. For 1500 years or so it has been a power pyramid which ha had to accommodate itself to the realities of a more complex world than mere pyramids alone can handle. Given the Roman Catholic pyramid, subsidiarity is an advance. For the European Community it would be a retreat, a movement toward such great centralization that the EC would become no more than a superstate capable of stamping out all vestiges of liberty wherever it was so inclined. Indeed, for those who come out of a different tradition, subsidiarity is a notion that implies a prior concession to hierarchy that they are not willing to make. Try to tell the Canadian provinces that their relationship to the federal government in Ottowa is one of subsidiarity. Try to tell this to the American states.

If anything, federalists have been struggling with such terms as "non-centralization" and other ways to explain the multi-centered charter of federal politics in which there is no hierarchy. Therefore, however valuable subsidiarity maybe to moderate hierarchies, the European Community has to take the difficult step of breaking out of that philosophic tradition, toward which it can gravitate so easily, so as not to think in those hierarchical terms from the beginning.

Looking at the European Community of today, one is sometimes uncertain as to whether its drive for unity is but a modified version of the ancient Catholic dream of a united European Christendom. That drive, so poorly achieved under the feudal and autocratic Holy Roman Empire, is so much more likely to be achieved fairly and justly under conditions of democracy. Are we are seeing the triumph of those forces that advocated federalism at the threshold of the development of modern Europe and which lost to the modern nation-state? They are now coming into their own after three catastrophic centuries of unceasing wars, the result of that centralized state system which fostered bloody interstate conflict for reasons of presumed "national interest."

But even here there is a paradox. What is this Catholic federalism? It is a civil reformation of the Catholic countries, let us say a breaking down of their hierarchies, by bringing them together to be part of a larger structure, or is it the revival of the old dream of a Catholic Europe; of a universal European state within a secularized power pyramid?

This is a question worthy for us to examine and to address directly in order to better understand where we are going. There is a great deal of statism in the common academic discourse of European public figures, scholars, and intellectuals. Hence, it is easy to talk about the "state" as the starting point for discussion of the future of the European Community because that is the language that Europeans have known for so many centuries. With that perspective, it is very difficult to avoid seeing the European Community as a anomaly; something that has to be turned into a state, even a decentralized state, as soon as possible. Already, we see the massive intervention of the EC bureaucracy into the affairs of member states in the name of regulation for health, safety, and welfare. Already there are efforts to curb the inevitably unrestricted appetite of the Eurocrats who, like all bureaucracies, always find reasons to impose more regulations and thereby to grow bigger and more powerful. Those who think that subsidiarity is the means to resolve this problem are either fooling themselves or have still not managed to emancipate themselves from the hierarchical thinking of their religio-political tradition.

Jacques Delors, the leading force for European unity in the Community today has done wonders to popularize "subsidiarity." France's latest contribution to the Europeanist phalanx, he gives every indication of being a Jacobin in Montesqeuian clothing. Even his principal opponent, Margaret Thatcher, has used subsidiarity positively in her arguments against him. (Not surprising considering how centralist she was during her tenure as British prime minister.) The Economist claims that it was first used by Pope Pius XI in his 1931 encyclical "Queadragesimo Anno" (The Economist 9 December 1989, p.32). It also provides us with a definition of the term in Eurospeak and a description of its implications:

The church's aim was to define the principle that decisions affecting people's lives should be taken as far down the chain of command as possible, ideally by individuals or in families. In Eurospeak, Mr. Delors's adopted tongue, subsidiarity means that the Community should do only those things that member-states cannot do better. The S word stands out in Delors report on economic and monetary union, and in the pro- posed social charter, prompting cynics to suggest that the commission uses it most readily when trying to increase its power.

Two other issues confronting the EC are co-operative federalism and citizenship. Co-operative federalism which was imported from the United States as an idea -- an idea with which I had some connection in its spread in the U.S. more years ago than I care to remember -- has become a theory; it is not. Co-operative federalism is a technique. It is a mechanism that opens the door to a proper theory. But it is no more than that and it should not be elevated beyond what it is.

Co-operative federalism makes it possible for federalism to exist in a highly interdependent world where, if we relied upon earlier notions of federalism as the separation of governments, there would be no function that would not be seized by the larger, stronger, government in the course of time. Co-operative federalism is valuable beyond that, since it gives us a vision of human co-operation, which is a good thing, but always within a framework within which real differences are recognized. For example, I have argued that co-operative federalism existed in the 19th century United States even when people talked in a different language. It was a kind of federal relationship in which the primary responsibilities for policy and action were in the hands of the states. The federal government provided certain supplementary assistance principally in the realm of infrastructure and national policy and no more.

Co-operative federalism, when the term became popular in the United States in the 1960's, became an excuse for federal government coercion. It still seemed to involve all governments, and did, but it represented a slogan, a phrase that the federal government could employ against the states that did not want to accept some federal policy prescription -- they were denounced as not co-operating. Both kinds of intergovernmental relations fall within the parameters of co-operative federalism. In the 1950's and early 1960's co-operative federalism really worked with the roles of all arenas of government in balance. Even later, co-operative federalism prevented a constitutional shifting of powers to the federal government. Consequently, in the 1970's and the 1980's, the power could shift back, within the co-operative framework, to the states -- as it has. Nevertheless, Europeans must understand that different forms of behavior can exist within the framework of co-operative federalism and plan for the desired one.

A word with regard to citizenship. In any federal system or confederation, people have a kind of dual federalism. Many confederations in the past were destroyed by conquest -- many of the Greek leagues, for example, continued until they were conquered by the Romans. To be destroyed by conquest is a matter of the balance of power in international relations and is not necessarily a reflection on the quality of internal self-government. Other confederations that collapsed for internal reason were those which did not recognize the dual dimension of citizenship. Thus, even if they maintained the basic premise of a confederation, namely that the general overarching institutions work through the constituents, there still must be some notion of dual citizenship. In a federation that is certainly true. The dual citizenship may flow from the smallest arenas through the intermediate to the largest arena as in the Swiss federation/confederation -- which really is based on triple citizenship, communal first, then cantonal and only then federal.

In the European Community, citizenship is likely to flow from the intermediate arenas in both directions. To safeguard its federal/confederal character, it should not be established first and foremost by the largest arena, nor ever singly by the largest arena. There is a constitutional advantage to maintaining the focus of dual citizenship. (I use the term "dual" to include "multiple" as well.) Citizenship flowing from one of the smaller arenas is simple a way to protect those arenas against the claims which the largest arena inevitably will have that it is protecting the rights of its citizens by intervening into the smaller ones.

On the other hand, without the largest arena [e.g. the Community] being able to protect the rights of its citizens, Europeans lose some of the most important benefits of federal arrangements. I am not trying to suggest that it is not a task for the EC or that it is not an important role for the Community to play. But to give citizenship as an exclusive power to the largest arena is to weaken the other arenas. I think in a democracy, where citizenship is a key, that would weaken them irreparable.

There are other issues to be discussed as well. One of them is the issue of language. A second is the matter of foreign affairs and defense. Until recently the European Community has concentrated on internal and domestic questions, generally ignoring foreign affairs and defense. At the very least, this suggests that the American umbrella is still the critical factor in European defense. This suggests that NATO is as much a part of the European Community (while separate from it institutionally) as any of its other mechanisms. This will not remain true forever, but each problem needs only to be confronted at its time: there is no reason to advance the confrontation of issues and problems before their time. Nevertheless, silences are often as important as what is said and they should at least be mentioned.

A proper federal framework involves non-centralization or multiple centres of power. The model that the EC needs to have before it is a matrix or a mosaic and not a power pyramid or a centre-periphery model that is much beloved by many political scientists and sociologists these days. Those other models suggest that power is naturally concentrated and is only deconcentrated by the good will of those at the top of the pyramid or those in the centre of the circle.

This model has a marked effect on how Europeans conceptionalize and conceive of the institutional framework that they are building and the consequences of those conceptions. For example, to the extent that there is a power pyramid, politics will be the politics of a court; between those who seek to get close to the rule or rulers on the top of the pyramid and who jockey for power among themselves as members of that court to see who will succeed. Under such conditions, the "lower levels," so to speak, no matter how much power is formally decentralized, will remain the lower levels and the most talented people will always strive to get into that court and to become part of its politics. Beyond that, the nature of power pyramids is that they end up resting on the people underneath. That is hardly the model for a democratic order for Europe or for anybody else.

It is well to recall that it was pharahonic Egypt that built pyramids as ultimate monuments to its rulers. It was the best possible symbol they could have selected for the power system which they constructed.

Similar limitations apply to the centre-periphery model. There the politics in the centre are the politics of the club; somewhat more equal than the politics of a court, but still the closed politics of a club. Those who are admitted to the club can participate in its politics; those who are not are still at the periphery. And while the club might be more open that the court, not everybody can be admitted to the club. So it is also an inappropriate model since what is passed to ar left to the peripheries in such a model is always at the mercy of the members of the club.

That model worked only when the member of the club spent most of their time in the peripheries and then came to the centre once in a while to do business. For example, in England before industrialization the members of the club were the country squires who came to London every so often to take care of their common business and then went back home to sit as justices of the peace in their local parishes. But that passed some time ago and it is unlikely in the industrial age or even in post-industrial age that such clubs will be like that in the future even less they are built constitutionally to be that way as is the case with the councils of ministers that lead the EC today.

So, the only appropriate model is a matrix or a mosaic in which the largest arena is a framing institution, itself comprised of a number of different arenas all constitutionally protected. The existence of multiple arenas is the real test of a federal organization and distribution of power. Moreover, we need not only think about two or three arenas, quite the contrary. Europe, appropriately, is made up of more than two or three arenas', there must be a proper place for the constituent states, lander, provinces, cantons, whatever they are called, within the European Community framework. One of the most important steps that can be taken is to have them assert their place and active involvement in the European Community. They should not wait to ask permission, but they must assert that involvement as part of the overall restructuring of Europe which is taking place. This becomes a possibility because federalism breeds federalism. Once, a polity embarks on the course of integration in the federal rather than in the hierarchical or the centre-periphery mode, it is possible to extend the application of the federal principle in many different ways and that of course is the great possibility and the great hope.

I began my comments by talking about the fact that the European Community is a civil or secular extension of Catholic Europe. But in fact, sitting as we are here in Bruges -- in the heart of Belguim and Flemish Belguim at that -- we have to be cognizant of the fact that we are sitting on one of the great cultural fault lines of Europe. The point where protestants and Catholics divided; the point where the Germanic and Latin traditions met. It is a cultural fault line which has always played a special role in Europe.

In trying to study, as I have tried to do over the last number of years, the expressions of the federal idea -- the covenant idea in its original form and the federal idea in its political form -- within the European political tradition, one comes back again and again to that cultural line. That line of development which goes from Switzerland, up the Rhine valley, through Belguim, the Netherlands, across the North Sea and into Scotland, is the line of where the covenant idea in theology and political philosophy, and the federal idea in practice (whether it was called that or not) has constantly bubbled forth and reasserted itself whenever and wherever local populations have been allowed to express themselves. Possibly the line continues even further southwards, maybe it even extend into northern Italy, because it would be on the same fault line. Although we do not entirely know the reasons why this is so, one of the reasons clearly must be because where different cultural groups come together and where one can not conquer the other or suppress the other, they must ultimately make agreements with each other. And sooner or later, albeit it may take centuries, they acquire certain habits of negotiated cooperation. They get into the habit of giving up conquest and of trying instead to make their decisions and to organize their lives through peaceful arrangements.

It is no accident, that in our time, this cultural borderlands has become the heartland of the European Community. Europe will do well, to explore the history of this heartland and to utilize that history and to utilize the peoples of the heartland to the fullest to build the federal Europe of the future.

Europe should be moving into a glorious new age and it should be an age of federalism. Unlike hierarchical structures, federal structures do not constitute pyramids. In cybernetic terms, they are organized in the form of matrices of self-governing cells that combine self-rule with shared rule to gain the advantages of joint action. Out of necessity, European unity was born within such a matrix, if only because of the prior existence of the individual member states with their strong traditions of independence and self-rule.

In another irony, the fact of the existence of these nation-states has enabled Europe to take a federalist start toward unity. It would be a tragedy for Europe and for all humanity if what the European Community was to borrow from its member states was the statism which has served them so poorly for the last several centuries and led to the catastrophic wars of our own century.


Madisonian and Althusian Federalism

Modern federalism, invented by the United States, operates essentially on a Madisonian model which, although itself derived from a variety of sources, draws its conception of civil society from Lockean individualism. Hence Madisonian federalism is based on the idea that polities are comprised first and foremost of individuals who combine themselves into peoples out of choice, establishing political institutions in the process by means of political covenants and constitutions. While the Madisonian model has much to teach all those embarked on federal experiments, particularly with regard to how a polity should be modeled in the first place as a matrix of substantially independent cells linked through a common communications network rather than as a power pyramid or a polity with a power center and periphery, it has its limits in addressing the European experience.

The European federal experiment, on the other hand, is built upon pre-existing states with strong identities which are, in turn, compounded of primordial groups. Indeed, it is the persistence of those primordial groups which contributed mightily to the failure of the modern European state system. The modern state system was to be centralized because each state was to be a nation-state, a state of a single nation. Unfortunately for the theory, the reality was such that the primordial groups refused to disappear, often in the face of the most extraordinary pressures directed against them by the state builders.

The collapse of the old state system has reawakened popular ties to those groups throughout Europe. Hence, they too must be considered in developing European federalism. Indeed, the European Community has made it a point of considering many of them, especially those located in what are known as the peripheral regions of the community, in effect developing a de facto alliance with them to balance the power of the member states.

In sum, with all of Europe's new concern for the individual and his or her rights, Europeans do not come to polity-building culturally naked. Thus any successful political solution for Europe needs to be built on a more complex model than that of the United States. Such a model may indeed be available in the federal theory of Johannes Althusius, the first great European theorist of federalism who was one of those on the eve of the modern epoch who tried to foster federal as distinct from statist solutions on the Continent.

Althusius must be considered a figure located at the intersection of the major trends of Western culture. One of the Protestant Christian grand designers, he straddled the Reformation and the opening of the modern epoch. Accordingly, he made an effort to synthesize and somewhat secularize Reformed Protestant thought on the ideal polity and to push it in concrete, practical directions.

The road to modern democracy began with the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, particularly among those exponents of Reformed Protestantism (later rather mistakenly referred to as Calvinism) who developed a theology and politics that set the Western world back on the road to popular self-government, emphasizing liberty and equality. While the original founders and spokesmen for Reformed Protestantism did much political writing, their writing was either theological or polemic in character. Only at the end of the first century of the Reformation did a political philosopher emerge out of the Reformed tradition who built a systematic political philosophy out of the Reformed experience by synthesizing the political experience of the Holy Roman Empire with the political ideas of the covenant theology of Reformed Protestantism. That man, Johannes Althusius, presented his political philosophy in a classic work, Politica Methodice Digesta, first published in 1603 and revised in final form in 1614.

Althusius' Politics was the first book to present a comprehensive theory of federal republicanism rooted in a covenantal view of human society derived from, but not dependent on, a theological system. It presented a theory of polity-building based on the polity as a compound political association established by its citizens through their primary associations on the basis of consent rather than a reified state, imposed by a ruler or an elite.

The Althusian model directly addresses the complexities of the European situation, taking into consideration families and primordial groups as well as formal political institutions, corporations as well as territorial units. In his classic work Politica Methodice Digesta, he methodically constructs a federal system that is both territorial and consociational. Moreover it is one that accommodates the European reality of four or five arenas of territorial governance instead of two or three, the accepted number in modern federations. Several of the EC member states, indeed an increasing number, are themselves federations, with three (or four) arenas of governance (Table 1-1). For them the European community is a fourth (or a fifth).


Table 1-1

CONSTITUTIONAL POWER-SHARING IN EC MEMBER STATES

FederationsDecentralized UnionsAutonomy / Federal Arrangements Unitary States
Belgium
GFR
Spain
Denmark
Netherlands
UK
France
Italy
Portugal
Ireland
Luxembourg
Greece


Althusius had the misfortune of publishing his great work at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, just at the time when his compatriots were turning towards statism. In the ensuing struggle over the direction of European state-building in the seventeenth century, the Althusian view which called for building of states on federal principles, as compound political associations, lost to the view of Jean Bodin and the statists who called for the establishment of reified centralized states where all powers were lodged in a divinely-ordained king at the top of the power pyramid or in a sovereign center. While Althusian thought had its exponents until the latter part of the century, after that it subsequently disappeared. It remained for the Americans to invent modern federalism on the basis of modern individualism and thus reintroduce the idea of the state as a political association rather than a reified entity.

In the nineteenth century, one party of German thinkers seeking the unification of Germany on federal principles and led by Otto von Gierke, rediscovered Althusius. There, too, however, Germany's movement toward reified statehood and finally totalitarianism left Althusian ideas out in the cold.

Althusian ideas remained peripheral even to students of modern federalism since modern federalism, was so strongly connected with the principle of individualism that there was no need to consider the Althusian effort to deal with the problems of family, occupation, and community along with individual rights in establishing political order. Only recently, as we have come to see the limits of unrestrained individualism, both philosophically and practically, have political scientists begun to explore problems of liberty in relation to primordial groups -- families, ethnic communities and the like. Here it was discovered that Althusius had much to offer contemporary society.

Martin Buber was perhaps the first to suggest how Althusian ideas could serve twentieth century man, in part basing his political works on Althusius. At the very beginning of his classic study of the Israeli kibbutz as a model for the reconstruction of society along cooperative lines, Buber described the proper social order as a consociatio consociationum, deliberately selecting Johannes Althusius' formulation as the starting point from which to develop his own realistic utopia.

Carl Friedrich, the great academic exponent of German liberalism, revived academic interest in Althusius with his publication of the Politics in its Latin version with an extensive introduction. More recently, various scholars such as Frederick Carney (a student of Friedrich's who translated part of the Politics into English), Patrick Reilly and Thomas Heuglin have explored Althusius' ideas. In his native Germany there has been a renewed interest in Althusian ideas as a foundation for German federal democracy. In Yugoslavia Althusian influence has been a powerful counterweight to Communism as the basis for introducing a measure of republican liberty.

In 1973, I interviewed Professor Jovan Djordjevic, the doyen of Yugoslav political scientists, a close associate of Marshall Tito, and author of the various Yugoslav and republic constitutions during the first three decades of the present Yugoslav regime. In our discussion, Professor Djordjevic indicated how much the construction of that regime had been influenced by Althusian ideas and models.

Somewhere between Buber's utopian vision and the effort to concretize Althusian models in Yugoslavia is the theory of consociationalism developed by Arend Lipjhart, Gerhard Lembruch, and others. Borrowing that distinctively Althusian term, the consociational theorists attempted to explain what is in effect a non-territorial federal division of powers that constitutes a democratic alternative to either Jacobin or majoritarian democracy and to demonstrate how that model has been applied in countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and Israel, among others. Studies of consociational democracy in action have repeatedly demonstrated that consociational arrangements work best and are longest-lived where they are combined with territorial federalism, in other words where both dimensions of the Althusian solution grand design are present.

There is some dispute among scholars regarding the relationship between Althusius and federalism. Otto von Gierke, the first scholar to try to restore Althusius to his rightful place in the history of political thought, saw him as essentially a medievalist, seeking to reconstruct medieval corporatism for a post-medieval and changing time. Carl Friedrich, on the other hand, the most important figure in the twentieth century Althusian revival, viewed Althusius as the forerunner of modern federalism. Today, Patrick Reilly and to some extent Thomas Heuglin follow the Gierkian approach, while Frederick Carney and this writer follow that of Friedrich.

As a student of federalism in all its forms and a federalist, I would suggest that it is necessary to look to Althusius not only in historical perspective as a transitional figure from medieval corporatism to modern federalism, but as a source of ideas and models for a post-modern federalism. Pre-modern federalism had a strong tribal or corporatist foundation, one in which individuals were inevitably defined as members of permanent, multi- generational groups and whose rights and obligations derived entirely or principally from group membership. Modern federalism broke away from this model to emphasize polities built strictly or principally on the basis of individuals and their rights, allowing little or no space for recognition or legitimation of intergenerational groups.

A post-modern federalism must reckon with one of the basic principles of post-modern politics, namely that individuals are to be secured in their individual rights, yet groups are also to be recognized as real, legitimate, and requiring an appropriate status. Althusius is the first, and one of the few political philosophers who has attempted to provide for this synthesis. Needless to say, his late-medieval thought cannot be transposed whole into the post-modern epoch in the latter part of the twentieth century. But in part because he wrote in a period of epochal transition from the late-medieval to the modern epoch, much of his system, its ideas, and even its terminology, may be adaptable or at least form the basis for a post-modern federalism.

Here we can only outline some of the salient points in Althusius' thought.

1) The foundations of Althusius' political philosophy are covenantal through and through. Pactum is the only basis for legitimate political organization. More than that, Althusius develops a covenantal-federal basis that is comprehensive. Not only is the universal association constructed as a federation of communities, but politics as such is federal through and through, based as it is on union and communication (in the sense of sharing) as expressed in the idea that its members are symbiotes.

Althusius' dual emphasis on federalism as a relationship and on sharing as the basis of federal relationships has turned out to be a basic axiom of federalism. While there can be different forms of a federal relationship and sharing can be expressed in different ways, federalism remains essentially a relationship and sharing its guiding principle.

The polity, then, is a symbiotic association based upon symbiosis and constituted by symbiotes.

2) Althusius deals with the problem of sovereignty, then becoming the critical juridical problem for modern federalism, by vesting it in the people as a whole. On one hand this is what makes the good polity a res publica or commonwealth. On the other it also makes it possible to be a consociatio-consociationum, a universitas composed of collegia, since the people can delegate the exercise of sovereign power to different bodies as they please (according to their sovereign will).

The problem of indivisible sovereignty raised by Jean Bodin became the rock upon which pre-modern confederation foundered. The modern state system was based on the principle of indivisible sovereignty which in an age of increasingly monolithic and energetic states became a sin qua non for political existence. Thus the medieval world of states based on shared sovereignty had to give way. It was not until the American founders invented modern federalism that a practical solution to this problem was found enabling the development of modern federation as a form of government. Althusius provided the theoretical basis for dealing with the sovereignty question over 175 years earlier (no doubt unbeknownst to them) and gave it the necessary philosophic grounding.

Although Althusius himself does not develop a theory of confederation per se, his particular kind of federal thinking in which he sees his universal association as constituted by comprehensive organic communities has clearly had something to contribute to an emerging post-modern theory of confederation. Althusius further understands political sovereignty as the constituent power. This is at once a narrower, more republican definition of sovereignty whose plenary character is harnessed as the power to constitute government -- a power which is vested in the organic body of the commonwealth, i.e., the people. Moreover, once the people act, the sovereignty is located in the jus regni, the fundamental right/law of the realm or the constitution.

This Althusian concept has important implications in contemporary international law which is grappling with the problem of how to mitigate the effects of the principle of absolute and undivided sovereignty inherited from modern jurisprudence in an increasingly interdependent world. Even where the principle is not challenged, the practical exercise of absolute sovereignty is not longer possible. There are an increasing number of situations in which even the principle cannot be applied as it was. One way out in such cases has been to vest sovereignty in the constitutional document itself, that is to say, in what Althusius would refer to as the jus regni. Vesting sovereignty in a constitutional document is entirely consonant with a covenantal federalism.

3) Althusius serves as a bridge between the biblical foundations of Western civilization and modern political ideas and institutions. As such he translates the biblical political tradition into useful modern forms. In this he must be contrasted with Spinoza who a few years later in his Theological Political Tractate makes the case for a new modern political science by presumably demonstrating that the biblical political tradition applied only to ancient Israel and ceased to be relevant once the Jews lost their state (unless and until the Jews were restored). Althusius confronts the same problems of modern politics without jettisoning or denying the biblical foundations. In part this rendered him less useful during the modern epoch when his unbending Calvinist emphasis on the necessary links between religion, state and society, we encounter the development of the modern secular state.

The Althusian version of the Calvinist model of the religiously homogeneous polity is not likely to be revived in the post-modern epoch. We are beginning to recover an old understanding that no polity civil society can exist without some basis in transcendent norms which obligate and bind the citizens and establish the necessary basis for trust and communication. The connection between the decalog and jus as both law and right, while hardly original to Althusius, may offer possibilities for renewed development in our times. Althusius adopts a conventional understanding of the two tables of the decalog of his time, namely that the first table addresses itself to piety and the second to justice, both of which are necessary foundations for civil society.

4) Very important in this connection is Althusius' development of the concept of jus regni, which he derives explicitly from the biblical mishpat hamelukhah (law of the kingdom), enunciated in I Samuel 10, to serve as constitution of the universal association, at one and the same time establishing the constitution as a civil rather than a religious document, yet one which has its source in or at least is in harmony with divine and natural law. While contemporary political scientists emphasize the secular character of modern constitutionalism, examination of most contemporary constitutions reveals that they reflect the same combination of claims, namely linkage to transcendent law, more often divine than natural, yet human artifacts that are civil in character. While in recent years we have made considerable advances in developing an understanding of constitutional design, in doing so we have neglected this linkage and its implications for right law that Althusius calls to our attention.

5) While Althusius was clearly a product of his times and the ideal state of his design is one which reflects the class and reference group structure of sixteenth century German society, it is significant that Althusius leaves open the possibility for democracy as we know it, including female participation in public life and office-holding, and a more classless and egalitarian basis for participation generally. Since I do not have a sufficient command of the Latin text to properly explore the issue, I cannot say whether Althusius has an esoteric as well as an exoteric teaching, but this suggests that there may be a hidden dimension to be explored in the Politics and Althusian thought generally. Nor is the federal aspect insignificant here. Althusius suggests different forms and extents of participation in the different arenas of government as one possible way to extend participation in public life to groups heretofore disenfranchised in the world that he knew.

A contemporary Althusian politics should address itself to the same possibilities; for example, somewhat indirect democracy for county institutions and republican or representative government for what Althusius would have called provincial and we would call state land or cantonal institutions, and for the universal association or general government.

6) Althusius recognizes the modern distinction between public and private realms, yet also preserves the connection between them. In this respect, he, like the moderns who were to follow him, breaks with classic nations of the all-embracing polis to recognize the legitimacy of a sphere of private activity that is constitutionally by right, thereby preventing totalitarianism. Yet he recognizes the connection between the simple and private dissociations of family and collegium and the mixed and public associations of city, province and commonwealth. Indeed the relationship between private and public spheres and associations is a major concern of his as it is increasingly to those of us who must reckon with the realities of the post-modern epoch in which everything is tied into everything else.

One of the advantages of the modern epoch was that it was possible to more sharply separate the public and private spheres because the modern epoch was one in which increased distance between them was possible. This is no longer the case as the new communication requires more Althusian communication, that is to say, as everything impinges upon everything else, more sharing is necessary. Althusius' emphasis on the existence of both natural and civil associations in the private sphere reflects his emphasis on what we would call the natural right of association. The family is a natural association based on two relationships: conjugal and kinship. Since the nuclear family is a conjugal relationship, even it is covenantal. Naturally the collegium or civil association in both its secular and ecclesiastical forms is covenantal.

Mixed and public associations are equally covenantal with the city as a covenantal republic formed of a union of collegia, the province a covenantal union of cities, and the commonwealth a covenantal union of provinces (this is so even though Althusius talks of the rights of the province as an arm of the commonwealth and not simply a union of cities). Covenant for Althusius are the ways in which symbiotes can initiate and maintain associations. They are products of both necessity and volition.

7) Althusius' definition of politics as the effective ordering of communication (of things, services and rights) offers us a starting point for understanding political phenomena that speaks to contemporary political science. This leads us to the second half of Althusian thought: that dealing with statesmanship, prudence and administration. It would be possible to say of the second half of Althusian teaching that it is general to all of politics and not specifically to federalism, except that this would do violence to the first half of Althusian teaching which sees all politics as federal politics. Nevertheless, an examination of that dimension will await another occasion.


The EC and the Contemporary Federalist Revolution

What is happening in the European Community is part and parcel of the federalist revolution sweeping the world. Today over 70 percent of the world's population lives in one way or another under federal arrangements. A third live in formally federal systems and approximately 40 percent in systems that have not proclaimed themselves federal but which must use federal arrangements to accommodate internal divisions.

Look at the world's great powers. Federalism is vital in the United States political system. There could be no United States of America without federalism. For much of this century this truth has been ignored by those who sought to foster class warfare and a remaking of American civil society as a welfare state, but today it has become widely recognized again as the states have taken the governmental initiative within the U.S.A. Moreover, for the first time American federalism is no longer tainted with America's original sin of racism, manifested progressively in slavery, racial segregation, and discrimination, which while not a product of federalism, used the mechanisms of federalism for protection for nearly two centuries.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is now being forced to discover the meaning and possibilities of federalism. For many years even those who counted it among the formally federal systems understood full well that Soviet federalism was almost without meaning, that is was a Leninist device to maintain a multinational empire under Communist rule. Its meaning was confined to allowing the non-Russian nationalities of the USSR to preserve something of their identity and heritage. The situation is now changing day by day with the new Communist leadership hoping that they can introduce real federalism fast enough to outpace the secessionist tendencies of the non-Russian nationalities. It is not unfair to say that the only hope for survival of the USSR lies in the introduction of authentic federalism.

India, the largest democracy in terms of population, is a soundly established federal system in which strong centrifugal and centripetal forces compete with each other constantly. China, on the other hand, has tried to use federal arrangements as window dressing to hold its peripheral regions in place in the Communist mode. Several years ago, it began to seriously consider decentralization of administration throughout the country. Today, of course, all of that is in doubt.

Federalism has survived the crises of the 1960s and 1970s in both Australia and Canada. In Australia, once again it has come to be valued and in Canada the Quebec crisis has more or less been resolved by federalist means. In both cases a new respect for the federal principle as a practical means of governing has developed.

Federalism has become more important than it ever was in Latin America, even if it has always survived there with mixed results. Democratization in Argentina and Brazil has been accompanied by a strengthening of federalist institutions, especially in Brazil where the new constitution attempts to increase the power of the states vis-a-vis the federal government in the name of democracy. Venezuela has moved to strengthen its states through the direct election of the state governors, and in Mexico the political opposition finds the states the principal vehicle for securing any share of political power.

In Europe, the former totalitarian systems of the right such as Germany and Austria, Spain and Italy have found their way back to democracy through federalism, in full or in part. Germany and Austria early on became fully functioning federal systems. Spain has become a very successful federal system in the past ten years, and Italian regionalism has moved in that direction, especially with the decline of the Communist threat in that country.

At the other end of the spectrum, the microstates of the Caribbean, while rejecting federation -- islands, after all, are insular by definition -- are in the process of developing a confederal framework that will provide them with the common institutions they require to serve their needs.

In Asia, Japan, which adopted a system of constitutional decentralization under postwar American occupation, is now considering extending that system further, while ASEAN, presently a league, may be on its way to becoming more of a confederation in the future.

Only in Africa is the future of federalism unclear. Nigeria remains faithful to the present federal principle in words but seems to be unable to avoid military government indeed. Senagambia is the only confederation on the continent and there is some question as to whether it is working. All other attempts at federalism in black Africa or North Africa failed early on. On the other hand, federal solutions for South Africa are widely discussed and federalism will probably be part of any resolution of the conflict there.

As the colonial system has disintegrated, the small territories that remained linked to former colonial powers have been transformed into self-governing polities through asymetrical federal arrangements. These take two forms: federacies, in which the constitutional arrangement between the federate power and the federate state can only be altered by mutual agreement as in the case of the United States and Puerto Rico, or associated state arrangements where the constitutional arrangement can be changed by one or the other unilaterally under specified conditions, as in the case of the United States and the republics of the Marshall Islands.

Significantly, once a polity has embarked on a federal course, it can extend the operation of federal principles in different directions with relative ease. The United States, for example, began as a two-arena federation involving the federal government and the states. Even at the time of union, some states understood themselves to be unions or federations of towns and the idea of constitutionalized local home rule spread throughout the United States in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, faced with the problem of decolonization of its island territories, the United States developed what it calls commonwealth status for Puerto Rico and the Northern Marianas, what we refer to as federacy, and adopted associated state arrangements for the Marshall Islands republics. After the revival of native American demands for greater governmental powers for their tribes, the United States began to treat the surviving tribes as "domestic dependent nations," a felicitous phrase coined by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1835 but honored in the breech for 100 years thereafter.

As I indicated at the outset, the same process is occurring in Western Europe with federalization going on simultaneously in several directions in the European Community and with regard to overseas territories attached to the Community's member states.

Capping all of this is the growing merger of the world's two state systems: the international system of politically sovereign states and the system of federated or constituent states. This interaction has progressed most fully in the economic realm where the constituent states of federal systems including those of the older federations, the United States, Canada, and Australia, now are actively engaged in economic development activities in the international market. This interaction is slowly being extended in other spheres as well, diminishing the differences between the two kinds of states. As the international system further limits the sovereignty of even the nominally sovereign states and requires the involvement of the federated states to achieve any semblance of international order, the differences between the two are being progressively diminished.


Federalism and Democracy

Federalism, like constitutionalism, is a rich and complex thing, a matter of formal constitutional divisions, appropriate institutions, patterns of political behavior, and, ultimately, of political culture. Moreover, federal democracy offers a complete and comprehensive theory of democracy which stands in sharp contrast to the theories of democracy regnant in Europe until now -- Jacobin democracy and parliamentary democracy on the Westminster model -- not to speak of that monstrous development referred to as totalitarian democracy.

Democracy addresses the great questions of sovereignty and powers (competences), the relationships between power and law or right, and the great issues of centralization and decentralization. It does so by vesting sovereignty in the people who constitute the body politic and requiring them to constitutionally allocate competences or powers among the governments of their creation. They must do so in a noncentralized manner which provides for both centralization and decentralization as needed, but always within a noncentralized framework whereby all exercise of powers is governed by law and related to the rights of the constituents.

Even with the federalist revolution in full swing, there will be those states for whom federal structures will remain inappropriate. Federalism is not a catch-all solution for all problems. Nor should it be looked upon in that way. It is certainly not a panacea. On the other hand, there is one way in which federalism applies to all and that is in the appropriate definition of liberty, properly one of the great demands of our democratic age. There frequently is confusion about what constitutes liberty, a confusion which, when boiled down, consists of a confrontation between federal and natural liberty.

The theory of natural liberty is based on the assumption that every person basically should be free to do whatever he or she pleases, limited only by the forces of nature and the problem of direct interference with the rights of others. In its present formulation, people are at liberty to pursue boorish or self-destructive courses of action. That is their privilege, as long as they do not directly harm others. Contemporary pop culture preaches a gospel of natural liberty.

True partisans of liberty, on the other hand, since the beginning of the modern epoch have consistently emphasized federal liberty, that is to say, the liberty to enter into a covenant with one's fellows and then live according to the terms of that covenant, whether we are talking of Hobbes' limited covenant of peace or John Winthrop's Puritan Christian notion of an all-embracing covenant in which federal liberty consists of pursuing the right way to salvation. The possibilities between the Hobbesian minimalist covenant and Winthrop's maximalist one are great. It is within that range that we find true liberty. In the last analysis, this may be the greatest contribution of federalism to the development of a peaceful, prosperous, free and happy world.


Note

1. No adequate discussion of the federal dimension of the biblical world view is presently available. Two of the best available treatments of this point are to be found in the works of Althusius and Buber. See, for example, Johannes Althusius, Politics, trans. Frederick Carney (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964) and Martin Buber, Kingship of God (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). This writer has treated the subject in "Government in Biblical Israel," Tradition (Spring-Summer, 1973) and "Covenant as the Basis of the Jewish Political Tradition," Jewish Journal of Sociology (June, 1978). The Israel-based Workshop in the Covenant Idea and the Jewish Political Tradition sponsored by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and the Bar-Ilan University Department of Political Studies and its American-based counterpart, the Workshop on Covenant and Politics sponsored by the Center for the Study of Federalism, are probing that issue among others. The principal work on the former is available in Daniel J. Elazar, Kinship and Consent, The Jewish Political Tradition and its Contemporary Manifestations (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America and Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 1983). The principal work of the latter is available in Daniel J. Elazar and John Kincaid, eds. Covenant, Polity, and Constitutionalism (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America and the Center for the Study of Federalism, 1989).


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