Global Political Federalism
Discussion
Benjamin Studebaker:
"This first post lays out the core functions supranational federalism needs to perform, the problem it needs to solve. Subsequent posts in the series will describe how precisely federal institutions can solve these problems and what kind of institutions are necessary to legitimate a functional federal system.
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We are not witnessing the gradual creation of supranational society; we are doing nothing while the world regresses slowly and steadily into nationalist and civilizational thinking. Theorists have discussed this problem using the term “glocalization.”[7] The more global problems intensify, the less interested people become in global solutions to those problems. Instead, they run in the opposite direction, toward localist approaches that are totally inadequate. Economic integration is not producing political integration – it is producing political disintegration. It is not creating a world society; it is annihilating the possibility of any such thing.
This is what I will refer to as “the Contradiction of Commerce". The problem is not simply that nationalist and civilizational approaches lead to war. It’s that without political integration, economic integration leads to nationalist and civilizational thinking. In attempting to escape war through commerce, we come back to war. Federalism is not just a solution to war, it’s a solution to the contradiction of commerce. But because it is a solution to the contradiction of commerce, it cannot be brought about merely by affirming the value of commercial cooperation, by passively waiting for commerce to deliver the social and cultural conditions for federal structures. Left to its own devices, ungoverned economic integration produces political antagonisms that lead to war. Federalism – and, particularly, the “compound republic” – is a political technology for governing, among other things, “interstate commerce.”[8] It therefore is created not simply through an affirmation of commercial society, but also through a critique of it. In this sense, federalism is a dialectical solution to the rewards and challenges of economic integration.
An awareness of the limits of commercial society can motivate people to construct federal systems. But what if there is no organized federalist political movement ready to take up the frustration with commercial society? What if federalists have acquiesced to the idea that social and cultural change will precede political change? If there is no positive alternative to commerce, if federalists appear to be on the side of the internationalist status quo, discontent instead takes the form of pure negation. It becomes nationalist and civilizational. The nationalists and civilizationists penetrate the party system, win elections, and use the nation-state to further run down the legitimacy of all forms of supranationalism and internationalism, including federalism. Over time, this exposes the limits of the international institutions, generates enmity among nation-states, and prepares the way for war.
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Just as the logic of military competition among small states or among traditional and nomadic empires limits the development of human cooperation, so too does the logic of commerce. When money flows very easily across national borders, those who own a lot of money have a lot of political leverage. They have a free choice about where to invest their money, and that means that modern states have to compete with each other for investment. Such economic competition limits the freedom of the individuals living in modern states to adopt forms of life that are “uncompetitive,” that make fiscal demands on rich people that those rich people would prefer not to meet. An overdependence on markets limits the ability of individuals living in modern states to experiment with new forms of cooperation. They are only able to engage in the forms of cooperation that attract flows of money. As soon as they deviate from this competitive logic, they pay a heavy price.
In this way, individuals in modern states face the same kind of problem individuals faced in traditional empires. If reformers in traditional empires went too far, the disorder they created would lead to a successful nomadic invasion. If reformers in modern states go too far, the disorder they create leads to capital flight, bond runs, inflation, and unemployment. Electoral defeat – or worse – is sure to follow. But if reformers do nothing, if they accept the competitive logic as natural and inevitable, they are subjugated by a class of wealthy masters. Those masters will prioritize their families, friends, and frivolous priorities over the needs of ordinary citizens, whom they will regard as strangers. Those citizens forgettable, and before long, forgotten.
In recent years, there have been many arguments that our system is ossifying into a kind of feudalism.[15] That isn’t quite right – this system is still based on trade, on commercial competition, and that is very different from a system based on war, on military competition for agricultural land. But the intensity of our commercial competition is having a stultifying effect. It is reducing the freedom of individuals to experiment with new forms of cooperation. This is making it increasingly difficult to solve problems, particularly problems that stem from commercial activity itself.
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A federal union makes economic integration sustainable, by delivering the political integration necessary to make it work. It “regulates interstate commerce.” It secures the transition from the logic of military competition to the logic of commercial competition. But it doesn’t just do that. By qualifying the logic of commercial competition, it unlocks the possibility of disciplining commerce, of putting commerce into the service of the human soul. A federal union doesn’t just protect us; it empowers us to realize our values in the world.
Other forms of political order can only gesture at these possibilities. We saw a glimpse of them in the post-war era, when there was trade, but not too much. It was possible to build the highways and the airports, the universities and the healthcare systems. There was money for the arts and sciences. There was money for housing, for schools, for the next generation. But it was all built on a flimsy footing.
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Federalism is a mechanism for overcoming interstate conflicts instead of a mechanism for deepening them. When we insist on a fixed political culture or supranational society as a precondition for federalism, we exclude China and many other key partners. By framing these states as fundamentally different, we aid and abet nationalist and civilizational frames. We dump gasoline on emerging enmities. In particular, the trade volume with China – and its positive historical relationship with the United States – merits a concerted effort at inclusion. Elazar made the case that China needs federal structures just as much as any other large state. A well-designed federation does not need to exclude it, and I shall argue further to that effect over the course of this series."
(https://www.streitcouncil.org/post/why-federalism-the-problem-that-needs-to-be-solved)
Governing the Flows
Benjamin Studebaker:
"Without political integration, flows of money and people are powerful and overdetermining. Modern states are pushed into competition with each other to attract money and to repel unwanted migration. Such competition results in tax rates and wages that are too low to support citizens’ projects. It leads to punitive, inhumane immigration policy. An excessive, one-dimensional kind of competition crowds out other ways of thinking and acting, attacking pluralism and limiting the ability of citizens to discover new ways of cooperating with one another. It is lethal to social and political innovation, and it produces nothing but path dependency.
In academic literature, these tendencies are described as “glocalization” and “fiscal federalism.” As economic integration creates political and social problems – as the weak tax base erodes state capacity and poor wage growth undermines the felt security of consumers – citizens tend to become opposed to economic integration and to transnational commerce in general. They demand devolution and localism. But regional and local governments have very limited ability to control mobile flows of money and people. They are, in practice, even weaker than the nation-states and international institutions. While they are good at dealing with problems that begin and end in their territory, they are very bad at dealing with commercial flows. But if citizens cannot find a way to govern the flows – if they feel it is inevitable that they will be subject to the flows – they prefer to have their subjection mediated by more proximate structures.
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Our task is to show that there is a real possibility of governing the flows. We can do more than change the way subjection is mediated. We, as citizens, really can reappropriate the flows to realize our values, understood in our terms."
(https://www.streitcouncil.org/post/why-federalism-creating-the-cataracts)