Federalism[1] has a lot to do with nationalism.[2]
Federalism as a way of uniting different states into a supra-state
The concept of federalization is in theory first of all connected with the idea of peace, but also with common economic interests and attempts to preserve different regional peculiarities in a state. But in reality the rise of federalism is very often connected with the experience of war and the threat of war by external enemies of the uniting states. Thus, the first modern federation was created after the war of thirteen confederated American states against the British Empire in 1789, with the perception that the United States of America could face in future the aggression of European colonial powers. The confederation and later the federation of the small Swiss states in 1848 was also based on the central motivation to defend their common liberal and constitutional freedoms against potential external enemies, while keeping the peculiar characteristics and interests of the uniting states. Although the unification of Germany in 1871 was connected with the imperial interests of Prussia too, it was first of all motivated by a common interest of the uniting states and princes of most members of the German Confederation of 1815, which wanted to preserve the essence of their traditional regional characteristics and to defend themselves against external threats. Differently from temporary military alliances, federalism has predominantly defensive military functions.
Federalism as a way to prevent the dissolution of a state
The central motive of uniting states to defend the existence and peculiarities of the constituting member-states within a common supra-state, by transferring limited sovereign competences to it for defending them against foreign threats, can be seen also in the creation of a federation by the transformation of a unitary state into a supra-state with new federated sub-states. Thus the idea of the federation is to preserve the unity of a state by creating federated sub-states, and meeting the will of many citizens who have peculiar regional interests and collective identities, based on former historical autonomy or independence, or first of all on linguistic-ethnic differences. Federalization can be not only the result of the integration of several states, but also of a controlled and limited decentralization of a state. This happened for example in several historical stages of decentralization in Canada since 1867 and in Belgium since 1980.
The common historical force behind the integration as well as the disintegration of states, in many cases of unitary states, but also in some cases of federations, is nationalism. Nationalism is here not understood, as in popular language, as a specific kind of aggressive, xenophobic, intolerant, radical, mostly right-wing political attitude and behaviour, but as the general concept of a state that is based on the will of a people to live in a common state and thus becoming a nation. The idea of nationalism is, therefore, a result of the idea of the sovereignty of a people or a nation. The American and French revolutions created the first modern nation states, assuming that a government is only legitimate when it is constituted by the governed according to laws that are guaranteeing individual rights and limiting the powers of the state. Thus nationalism was at first a liberal and democratic concept. But since a nation or a demos is not always liberal and democratic in their political attitudes and aims, the sovereignty of the people may also lead to very undemocratic and illiberal nation states, like France was already a few years after the revolution of 1789. In the age of nationalism, not only did liberal and democratic nation-states arise, but also many demotic (based on the will of the people) dictatorial, illiberal nation-states did, which are inclined to national imperialism substituting the old-fashioned dynastic imperialism. This is the reason why the term nationalism is nowadays very often understood only in its pejorative understanding, although the idea of the nation-state is still the founding principle of democracy and the present international system. Since a nation can be a multi-linguistic and polyethnic community of people of any size, the European Union, should it develop into a federal state – at present it is only a confederation with some federal elements -, would be nothing else but a larger nation-state, like India or Canada.
The spread of nationalism and the creation of nation-states was, in the time from 1848 to 1971 in Central Europe, connected with the idea of uniting states in a federation (Switzerland, Germany, not Italy), but on the whole it is a history of disintegrating states, i. e. continental and colonial empires. Since 1878, we can observe a constant increase of nation-states in Europe and the world, only interrupted by a short period of neo-imperialism between 1922 and 1945, which led to the temporary disappearance of 14 states. In 1900 there existed 22 states in Europe, and 50 in the world. In 2000, we had 48 and respectively 192 states. On the average, every nine months a new state has been born.
The discredit of federalism after the demise of communist rule
Traditional federalism has a multi-regional character, especially in mono-linguistic states like the U.S. and Germany. The Swiss federation is also first of all a multi-regional federation, although cantonal diversity is also related to different language groups. But there are also some bi- or tri-lingual cantons, in which a high degree of communal self-government guarantees the language borders between the linguistic regions of the country. Canada became also a predominantly multi-regional federation, after starting as a federation between two different-language territories. Today, it is seen by many observers as a binational (by others as a multinational) state, consisting first of all of a French-national federal province and nine English provinces (and some ethno-national autonomous entities).
The principal alternative to a multi-regional federation (with states within a state) is a multinational federation (with nations within a nation). The idea of a multinational state was for the first time postulated by the Social Democrats in the Habsburg Monarchy, but put into practice in a substantially deteriorated way by the Communists in Soviet Russia, and then in the Soviet Union. The Austro-marxists wanted a multinational restructuring of the Habsburg monarchy, with not only national territorial units, but also with national personal associations or corporations which should have state functions. It was also seen as a model for a future worldwide unification of all nations and states. Differently from this Social Democratic view, the Bolsheviks did not accept the democratic association of (linguistic-ethnic) communities as national corporations, but only territorial national republics and other units within the International Soviet Republic as a future world state, which was restricted in reality more or less to the realm of the former Russian Empire. Communist federalism was conceived only as a tactical and provisional organization of the state under the rule of a non-federated unitary party, which gave up very quickly all elements of a democracy of councils (soviets) and became a new type of oligarchic party dictatorship, and in the era of Stalin also of personal autocracy. Nevertheless, Soviet federalism contained some elements of an institutionalization of linguistic-ethnic diversity, and of social privileges for linguistic-ethnic communist elites in their respective national territorial units, but did not allow any form of a democratic expression of special interests and wills. So, in reality, a federal, multinational state can have a completely non-democratic, autocratic character. Federalism is not per se liberal and democratic.
When communist rule broke down, a new political party system evolved, which was in essence based on liberal and democratic nationalism. The national democrats did not just want to transform the existing three multinational communist states (Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia) into multinational liberal-democratic states within the existing borders, but to dissolve them into 23 and more separate nation-states, based on linguistic-ethnic foundations. The multinational communist federations were no longer interpreted in terms of socialist internationalism, but in terms of a national imperialism of the dominating Russians, Serbs and Czechs. In addition, the necessity of accepting a Czechoslovak and a Yugoslav state was no longer seen as a security insurance of the small Slav nations against German-Austrian, Hungarian and Italian national revisionist imperialism, like after 1918. The expected integration into NATO and into the EU as mere confederations was a sufficient guarantee for the security and the prosperity of the new independent nation-states.
The world-wide effect of the dissolution of the communist multinational federations was disastrous, because since 1991 the argument became very strong in many states, that federalism can be only a prelude for the dissolution of a state; instead, federalism has been a way of uniting different states, or of saving a state from dissolution by accepting a high degree of self-governance of the federated sub-states within a federation. Federalism became associated with the political and social weakening of a state, and not with the strengthening of a state and its constituent federated sub-states.
Of course, in cases like Canada and Belgium, where the unity of the state has been saved by federalization, there were always politicians who were suspicious, that federalization is only a tactical manoeuvre of opponents of the existing unitary state to gain better institutional instruments for a future complete disintegration of the state, whereas the proponents of federalization hoped to discourage secessionism by giving substantial rights to the linguistic nations or regional groups with an historical tradition of their own, who feel discriminated in the existing unitary state. But since the breakdown of the communist federations, although they were not real federations, politicians who are afraid of risking the unity of an existing state, tend to refer to the historical experience of state failure by federalization. Thus we can observe strong reservations against a federalization in countries like Ukraine, Spain, Great Britain, Iraq.
The future of national secessionism and of post-war federalism
The process of successful national secessionism did not come to an end at the beginning of the 21st century. But the speed of the building of new nation-states will probably decrease, since the number of bigger ethno-national groups unsatisfied in their aspirations for an own state has decreased considerably. But there are still several states which are falling apart into linguistic, ethnic or sectarian regions, which perhaps can be saved and made stable by a regional division of powers via autonomy or federalization. In many cases, these are states where a dictatorship resting on the historically-generated power privileges of ethnic-sectarian minorities lost their authority due to economic inefficiency, social injustice, elite corruption and cultural discrimination of a majority of the people. In recent years, this has been the case in Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq and Syria, and to some degree also in Ethiopia, Myanmar, Bosnia-Herzegovina and many other states. External national irredentism and imperial influence-seeking may also play an important role in the disintegration of states.
In all these cases, the federalization of the failing state is still a preferable option of international politics for two reasons. In most historical cases, nationalism succeeded only by the use of violent, military means of internal and usually also external actors. Peaceful national secession succeeded only in a few cases, when the involved nations and national movements were rather liberal and democratic and the common border of the new states could be accepted by the involved nations, because it was a rather clear dividing line between the linguistic-ethnic nations, or rested on long historical traditions like in the cases of Norway seceding from Sweden, or Slovakia from Czech dominated Czechoslovakia. In addition, international law as a law of states has a clear preference for the conservation of existing states and their territorial integrity, not for revolutionary democratic or demotic national secession on the basis of the right of self-determination of nations and peoples. Under this condition, the transformation of disputed unitary states like Iraq, Syria and Somalia into federations is still a preferable option not only to end disastrous civil wars by compromise between the domestic war parties as well as between the involved foreign states, since the alternative option is a long-lasting war, which will end in a dictatorship of the old minority or of the formerly discriminated majority, who probably will not accept to grant minority rights to the ethnic-sectarian groups that dominated them before. Such a post-war federalization may in some cases be imposed by an international protectorate, like in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
[1] This is a short summary of my studies on federalism. See the texts on Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada/ Quebec, China, Cyprus, Darfur, Finland/ Åland Iraq, Kashmir, Mali, South Caucasus, Ukraine, and the European Union (Lisbon Treaty) in: Egbert Jahn, Political Issues Under Debate (Heidelberg and Berlin: Springer, 2015. 3 vols.). See also the texts of the author on Switzerland and the European Union, in: Egbert Jahn, ed., Nationalism in Late and Post-Communist Europe, vol. 1 and 3 (Baden-Baden: Nomos 2008).
[2] My recent studies on nationalism: Egbert Jahn, “The state-transformation in the East of Europe. ‘Second national rebirth’. Nationalism, national movements, and the formation of nation-states in late and post-communist Europe since 1985”, in: Egbert Jahn, ed., Nationalism in Late and Post-Communist Europe, vol. 1 and 3 (Baden-Baden: Nomos 2008), 19-81. Three texts on Nationalism in: Egbert Jahn, World Political Challenges. Political Issues Under Debate (Heidelberg and Berlin: Springer, 2015. vol. 1), 1-53.