Multinational countries live in a state of permanent trouble, all the more so if economic anxiety makes solidarity an issue and ideologues and politicians dream of cultural homogeneity. Federalism has proved to be the most viable way to satisfy both the need for union and the desire for autonomy; it decentralizes sovereign power and civil society alike. My concern here, however, is not with discord within multinational states, but with the sentiments of disunion arising within countries marked by cultural and political unity. Perhaps an army forced them together, or ambitious or idealist intellectuals fostered their national feelings. Whatever their history, now these people display common characteristics even if they are also locally distinct. Political institutions contribute to constituting a nation no less than language, religion, and literary and folkloric traditions. A people that has been living under a unitary political system for several generations is, after all, a people without memories of federation. Today this elementary fact is acknowledged even by those intellectuals who dream of a federal Italy. “It is not easy”, Gianfranco Miglio (a former leader of the Northern League) wrote, “to construct a federation in a country that does not have a 'federal culture'”. Nothing is more illogical than a Jacobin federalism. To impose a federation is like trying to bottle wine in the wrong season or shield it at the wrong temperature. Sooner or later the bottle will burst. As one cannot force the art of making wine, so one cannot force mutual trust. A federation needs both a strong sense of peripheral autonomy and an equally strong sense of national sympathy: these are the two souls of a “federal culture”. The rationale of federalism is “subsidiarity”, which denotes a system within which the units maintain the autonomy they need to deal with the spheres of action that pertain to them, but cede authority to a higher level in pursuit of common goals (security, peace, freedom, well-being). The retention of local autonomy may foster sympathy for the larger society. Neither autonomy nor sympathy, however, can be imposed by decree. My main concern here is with European single-state federalism. But in Europe today domestic and international dimensions are so intertwined that notions of “inside” and “outside” are increasingly blurred. The road to single-state federalism crosses the highway of supernational federalism.

Both the unitary modern state and the idea of federation thrived in the age between the dynastic and religious wars of the sixteenth century and the two world wars of the twentieth. Two years after the St. Bartholomew Day massacre, Jean Bodin published De la république, a classic text celebrating the indivisible, unlimited and centralized power of the state as the mighty guardian of domestic order. In the midst of the wars that followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, William Penn wrote An Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe, in which he argued that only a European confederation could guarantee a durable peace. Many of the men and women who fought against Nazism and Fascism belonged to the tradition of Penn. Despite their different political allegiances and mutual isolation they reached similar federalist conclusions. The leviathan-state had put an end to social anarchy, but opened the door to a no less frightening international anarchy. The federalists of the 1940s interpreted World War II as a European civil war, and blamed the conflict on absolute state sovereignty. Attempts to unify Europe were not new, and they did not necessarily guarantee peace. After all, both Napoleon and Hitler were universalists. They sought to create a great Europe unified under the respective banners of Rationality (and Christianity) and Aryan civilization. The Napoleonic wars destroyed the myth of the territorial state as the guarantor of domestic and international order; World War II ended the nightmare of a continental leviathan. The two myths were complementary expressions of the hegemonic project of the nation-state. Napoleon's Europe was an expanded France; Hitler's, a vast Germany. Most World War II partisans saw continental federation as the only feasible alternative to the state's power vocation, domestic and supernational. They spoke of a new European order composed of a “network of local voluntary associations, vehicles of direct democracy, united within a European federation”. Local autonomy and transnational co-operation would, in James Wilkinson's words, get rid of the “old nation-states [which were] bellicose and unresponsive to the needs of their citizens”. All federalists prized political and cultural pluralism. Their models were the medieval city-republics and the guilds. Harold Laski thought the modern theory of sovereignty was intrinsically statist and portrayed himself as a “frank medievalist”. Fragmenting sovereignty was a way of lightening its burden. Carlo Rosselli complained that the state gained power by expropriating from civil society all of its “numberless forms of association, as rich in their content as they were free and limited in extension”. The many versions of federalism are all set against rationalist political ambition: to create a “mortal God” with an indivisible and irrevocable power over all its subjects. Modern right- and left-wing federalism were born in reaction to Jacobin democracy. Both shared David Hume's admiration for the United Provinces and their ability to keep a people “from uniting into large assemblies” by dividing them “into many separate bodies” so that they could “debate with safety” and prevent “every inconvenience”. Hume's preoccupation was shared by the authors of the Federalist Papers – a text that, notwithstanding its nationalist orientation, became a manifesto of latter-day European federalists.

Federalism fights on two fronts: the supernational and the domestic. On the one hand, it seeks to limit the power of each state in order to reach not a “mere suspension of hostility” but a condition of mutual trust. On the other hand, it advocates a division of sovereignty and rejects the principle of one-nation – one-state. The architects of the European Union saw the new order not as a way of dissolving and weakening national identities, but as the only legitimate way “to preserve them and allow them to flourish vigorously in all their diversity”. Their aim, Altiero Spinelli wrote, was not “one single European state, designed to become a European Nation, but a Federation of Nations in which citizens will jealously guard their own traditional home country while becoming at the same time citizens of the Community”. The European Union is not likely to become another United States, where one defines oneself first as an American and then as someone who comes from Illinois. In the United States, identity goes from general to local. In Europe, things are different: one is first of all Italian, then European. Generally speaking, Europeans share multiple loyalties, which need not be a source of conflicts. Hence the role of the European Supreme Court, to which European citizens – both as individuals and as members of cultural groups – can appeal against their own states. Institutions of this kind are meant to generate the habit of multiple belonging while fostering a democratic culture of rights. Although the domestic and supernational strategies of federalism go together logically, historically they have been pursued separately. Until the last century, the federation remained a project of national unification. Carlo Cattaneo advocated a United States of Europe along with the United States of Italy, but his political commitment was to the latter. He thought one could construct a large federation by beginning with small ones. In the nineteenth century, the primary goal was political liberty rather than peace. The enemy was mass democracy and unlimited majority rule. The first generation of federalists were the Girondins, the second the Proudhonians, who opposed Mazzini's democratic nationalism as vehemently as their ancestors had opposed Rousseau's (and Robespierre's) republicanism. The horrors of world wars led federalists to switch their focus from the domestic to the supernational. Their main goal became peace and democracy. In his inaugural speech as the first president of the High Authority of the European Assembly (1950), Robert Schuman declared that the “essential political objective [of the federative process is] to make a breach in the ramparts of national sovereignty which will be narrow enough to secure consent, but deep enough to open the way towards the unity that is essential to peace”.

Altiero Spinelli, one of the spiritual fathers of the European Union, provided a very simple and convincing rationale for a supernational federalism. He thought that a European federation would open the door to domestic federations. He inverted the political strategy pursued by the federalists of the previous century: after almost a century of unitary statism, regions and local communities had lost the vigor to fight for a federation, but the federal enterprise could acquire new strength through Europe. Once the states begin to release portions of their traditional sovereign functions to the European Community, decentralization might “give birth again to a free local political life”. The European motto would then be ex uno plures, because the proliferation of peripheral autonomies proceeds from the very process of continental unification. Jurists and political scientists rightly insist on the “democratic deficits” of the European Union, which they trace to Jean Monnet's “functionalist” approach. Monnet's policy of dealing with prime ministers, while leaving the people temporarily outside, rested on the conviction that the union had to be prepared by transforming the habits of ordinary men and women in dealing with each other. Europeans had to be “persuaded” by practice that they could approach problems in “the same way” as nations that were different and divided but co-operating. As Spinelli had foreseen, the more the peoples of Europe perceived themselves also as Europeans, the more the centralized state would relax its ties. A supernational federation promoted one of the most interesting contemporary phenomena: a process toward autonomy and regionalism within the European nation-states. Until the early 1970s, only Germany was a federation among the states that became part of the European Community. Today other states have reached a stage of quasi-federation. The movement toward decentralization is particularly strong in those countries that have both a nondemocratic legacy and a strong centralist tradition. Italy implemented a system of regional government in 1970, Spain in 1978, and France in 1982. This process, however, began in the name of national unity, not federalism. The Italian, Spanish, and French constitutions proclaim the respective states to be “one and indivisible”. They promote a certain degree of regional autonomy while assigning to the central state the task of redressing socio-economic disparities among the regions. Regional autonomy can be seen as a de facto federation, a physiological evolution of the unitary state once it becomes democratic and is no longer surrounded by potential enemies. Freedom and the loosening of fear encourage the expression of difference. A supernational federation unites what the territorial state had separated (internationally) and dissociates what the territorial state had unified (domestically). The novelty introduced by the European Union consists in the fact that, whereas federalism has traditionally been a process of unification (within a single state or among several states), today it can be both a unifying and a divisive force. Since its emphasis on autonomy and pluralism tends to re-open the arguments about national aggregations, in the short term decentralization may create instability. In the long term, however, it could bring former partners closer and even promote new kinds of associations. Historically, federalism designated a process of union. The United States became a country when its people united into a federal pact. Germany and Switzerland went from loose confederation to federal union. Until now the reverse process, a unitary state becoming a federation, has never happened without the state's falling apart. When federalism is used as a divisive tool, its natural conclusion is the dissolution of the state. Thus, Czechoslovakia became a federation shortly before it disappeared. This is the reason why regional autonomy may be seen as a safer form of decentralization than a full-blown federalism. But perhaps this is not necessarily so.


This article was originally published in the fall 1996 issue of Dissent