September 1, 2022 • 15 mins
Should a vision of global democracy be based on a model of a federation or a confederation? Learn about the great differences between the two, and why it’s world federalism that could better balance global diversity and unity.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:09):
In these lectures we talk a lot about world federalismas the most simple and straightforward form of global democracy.
Today I’m going to have a closer look at the concept of ‘federalism’.
What is it?And why is it interesting to consider applying it to the whole world?
So, what is federalism?
Federalism is a form of political organisationwhere governance is split into at least two levels.
(00:35):
It’s a form of what we can call ‘multi-level governance’.
So instead of having one centralised state, federal systems have a power-sharing arrangement
between at least two different levels of government:
The central state, which governs the entire countryin relation to issues of importance to everyone.
(00:55):
And regional states, or provinces, which govern certaintypes of policy, usually of immediate relevance to the people who live there.
So the central state might make policy about, say,international trade, or defence or citizenship, for example,
while the provincial states might control local health policy,or education policy, or matters of cultural significance.
(01:21):
So all federations are different
and arrange the different policies,or 'competences', as they tend to be called,
that exist at different levels according to their own needs.
So for example, in the US and Germany,there is one main language spoken across the whole federation,
while in Switzerland and Ethiopia,different languages are spoken in different regional states.
Or another example (01:45):
environmental protection is mainly controlled by the central government in Malaysia,
while in Nigeria it is mainly controlled by the regional states.
There is no ‘one size fits all’.
As a very general rule of thumb, when it comes to economic policy,
left wing politicians tend to wantmore of this controlled at the central, federal level,
(02:08):
as this allows more redistribution between states and thus fosters greater economic equality,
while those on the right tend to wantmore economic policy controlled at the local level,
because this means more economic matters stay within the local state
and then there is no redistribution from richer states to poorer states.
Most federations operateaccording to the principle of subsidiarity,
(02:32):
meaning that power to decide on an issue
is given to the lowest level that is able to appropriately deal with that issue.
This is because federal systems are against the centralisation of power,
and they prefer to have as much power as possible at the lower levels.
But as the previous example about economic policy shows,
(02:53):
it is not always the case that devolving powerto lower levels will allow issues to be governed better.
For some issues, it is important that they are governed at the central level.
Federations will usually have a constitutionwhich says which things are governed at the central level,
and which things are governed at the local or regional level.
So as a general framework it is very flexibleand can be adapted to all sorts of different contexts and situations.
(03:20):
And obviously, when designing a federation it is really, really important to look at all the details carefully
and decide on the design in a democratic way,
because which competence you put at which level will have a huge impact.
Now it is interesting to have a quick lookat the history of the idea of federalism, and how it emerged,
(03:40):
because this can give us some useful insightsinto what kinds of problems federalism solves
and why it might be worth consideringas a possible future political structure for the whole world.
The idea of federalism first arose in Europe in the 18th century,
around the same time as the ideaof the centralised state was beginning to emerge.
(04:02):
Before that the political organisation of Europe was completely different to what we know today.
There were no states in the modern sense.
Instead there was a complex systemof many different kinds of governance arrangements,
which overlapped at different scales and in different areas.
Power was divided between feudal lords,empires, free cities, the Catholic church, and others,
(04:24):
and there were often competing claims to authority in any one place.
Somehow this complicated system lasted for many hundreds of years
and only began to change after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648,
when the idea began to emerge that it wouldbe better to have separate, fully sovereign states,
where the central government controlled all the power within that state.
(04:48):
Over the next hundred or so years modern states evolved,with strong centralised governments, like we know today.
In many cases large, strong, states were createdby joining together several smaller states or kingdoms.
For example, the modern states of Italy and Germanyemerged after the unification of several smaller states and kingdoms.
(05:11):
Now it was around this time, and indeed during this process,that the idea of federalism began to emerge,
as a critique of the centralised state modeland as a more flexible alternative.
In many cases, small states and citiesdid not want to be swallowed up into a larger states,
but instead wanted to retain some of their autonomy.
(05:32):
They wanted to preserve local cultures and languages.
During this period there were many discussions about the pros and cons of different scales of governance,
and the pros and cons of unification or separation.
And for many people the idea of federalism offered a good balance:
some unification and some separation,
(05:53):
some governance at a higher level, and some at a lower level.
It seemed to combine the advantagesof uniting into a big and strong state,
while also allowing a fair degree of local autonomyand the ability for local culture and local languages to flourish.
However, despite all these discussions, no federations were actually created in Europe at this time,
(06:16):
and instead centralised statesdominated the new political landscape.
But not very long afterwards,the first federation was indeed formed,
not in Europe,but in the newly independent United States of America.
The US Constitution of 1787 created the first federation,uniting the 13 former British colonies into one overarching political unit,
(06:42):
whilst allowing each individual state to retain significant power and autonomy.
Seeing the success of the American model, many other countries soon followed suit.
Argentina became a federation in 1853,
Canada in 1867,
Brazil in 1889,
Australia in 1901,
(07:03):
Austria in 1920,
India in 1949,
and so on and so on.
Now you might have heard of the term ‘confederation’
and you might be wonderingif federation and confederation are the same thing?
The answer is that they are not.
There are some very important differences between the two.
(07:24):
A confederation is a union of equal, sovereign statesthat have signed a treaty to give some very limited power to the centre.
All decisions must be agreed unanimously, everybody must agree,
and the member states can leave the union at any time.
Furthermore, a confederation unites the states as collective actors, as a country as a whole.
(07:50):
It does not give any rights or responsibilities to individuals, and they remain citizens of their particular state,
but they do not become citizens of the confederation.
A federation, in contrast, is one over-arching political unit
in which there is a system of divided powers,
such that a central government and local provinces or stateseach have different policy responsibilities.
(08:14):
A federation is a more permanent structure than a confederation,
and it will have a constitutionthat determines which decisions are taken at which level.
And in a federation, decisions are takenby a democratic majority, like in any kind of state.
And very importantly, a federation isnot only a union of states, it is also a union of individuals.
(08:38):
Citizens of a federation have certain rightsand responsibilities granted to them by the central federal level.
These might include voting rights,the requirement to pay taxes, citizenship rights, and so on.
And therefore, while confederations haveonly one legislative chamber, where all the states are represented,
(08:58):
federations always have two chambers,one where states are represented and one where individuals are represented.
So before the US became a federation,it initially tried to be a confederation.
The Continental Congress of 1781 elaborated Articles of Confederation
that gave only very limited power to the central government,
(09:21):
to declare war, make treaties, and maintain an army and a navy,
while the states remained largely separate and sovereign.
But this system did not work very well.
In particular there were many economic problems concerning differences of economic policy between the states
which made it really difficult to support one common currency
and therefore to make debt repayments that they needed to make after the war.
(09:44):
And so after only a few years, in 1787,
the Americans changed their mindsand decided instead to unite more deeply and form a federation.
Other confederations that have existed in historyhave also failed to survive into the modern era,
such as the United Provinces of the Netherlands,which collapsed at the end of the 18th century,
(10:07):
the Swiss Confederation,which collapsed in the middle of the 19th century,
and the very short-lived German Bund,which also collapsed in the middle of the 19th century.
The European Union, or EU, is currently an unusual hybrid,
with elements of both federation and confederation.
(10:27):
It started off as an economic confederation, but over time has added elements that are typical of federations,
such as a constitution and individual rights.
But it still retains many elements of a confederation,
such as the right of exit, the system of making treatiesbetween the states, and the need to make major decisions unanimously.
(10:50):
Maybe over time it will evolve fully into a federation? It's not clear at the moment.
In the meantime it is an interesting political laboratory
for those of us who are interestedin looking at different ways that states can integrate.
So if we turn back to federations….
Today, around 30 of the world’s 195 countries are federations.
(11:12):
This may not sound very many, but since many of these federations are very large countries,
together they account for some 40% of the world’s population.
In other words, almost half of the world’s peopleare today governed under a federal political system.
Furthermore, when we look at which stateschoose a federal structure and which choose a centralised structure,
(11:36):
we find overwhelmingly that the larger the country, the more likely it is to be a federation.
In fact, 7 of the 8 largest countries by area are federations,
the United States, Canada, Brazil,Australia, Russia, India, and Argentina.
The only exception is China, the third largest state by area,and the only one organised as a centralised unitary state.
(12:03):
Now the reason that large countries choose federalism
is because federalism is an excellent formof political organisation for large and complex societies,
because on one hand it offers a good balancebetween centralised governance and local autonomy,
and on the other hand, it also enables different peoplesand ethnic groups to live side by side as equal citizens.
(12:25):
This is also a reason that federalismmight be a good political structure for the world as a whole.
If we indeed look at the world as a whole, at the global level,
we see that today it is basically organisedas a very weak confederation, with the United Nations at the centre.
Member states retain their full sovereignty
(12:45):
and can choose, if they want, to enter into treaty-based agreementswith regard to common global problems, such as peace and human rights.
However there is no power above the states to enforce their compliance with the treaties
and indeed states can pull out of treaties at any time.
So, as other confederations have found throughout history,it is virtually impossible to make and enforce common decisions.
(13:12):
Furthermore, while states are represented in the General Assembly and other UN bodies,
there is no chamber that represents individuals and the UN is not able to grant individuals any rights or responsibilities.
So the UN is rather powerless and remote from most peoples’ lives.
The global confederal system has also provedquite ineffective in solving common global problems,
(13:37):
such as climate change, biodiversity loss,and economic inequality, amongst many, many others.
And that is why many of us think that the way forwardis to move from a global confederation to a global federation.
The vision of World Federalism is federation both up and down.
(13:57):
The world would come togetheras a federation of states, with a constitution, a parliament,
and individual rights and responsibilitiesgranted from the global level.
And at the same time, member states would be ableto re-organise themselves into federations of mini-states.
So power would shift both upwards and downwards.
(14:19):
And crucially, there would be no centralised, all-powerful, world government.
Instead there would be a few key issues that would be governed at the global level.
Climate policy seems the most obvious example.
But we could also consider human rights
and certain aspects of economic policy, and health policy, and perhaps others.
(14:41):
Putting these at the global level would enable usto improve redistribution from richer states to poorer ones,
to reduce inequalities, and to create a more just world.
Things like education policy,religious matters, language and cultural policy
would most likely stay at the state level,
or perhaps devolve even furtherdown to the sub-national state level.
(15:05):
But would be very unlikely to be at the global level.
So world federalism would allowa very high degree of cultural diversity,
while bringing us togetheron certain key matters that affect us all,
and enabling us to make decisionsabout them in a just and democratic way.
In these lectures we talk a lot about world federalismas the most simple and straightforward form of global democracy.
Today I’m going to have a closer look at the concept of ‘federalism’.
What is it?And why is it interesting to consider applying it to the whole world?
So, what is federalism?
Federalism is a form of political organisationwhere governance is split into at least two levels.
(00:35):
It’s a form of what we can call ‘multi-level governance’.
So instead of having one centralised state, federal systems have a power-sharing arrangement
between at least two different levels of government:
The central state, which governs the entire countryin relation to issues of importance to everyone.
(00:55):
And regional states, or provinces, which govern certaintypes of policy, usually of immediate relevance to the people who live there.
So the central state might make policy about, say,international trade, or defence or citizenship, for example,
while the provincial states might control local health policy,or education policy, or matters of cultural significance.
(01:21):
So all federations are different
and arrange the different policies,or 'competences', as they tend to be called,
that exist at different levels according to their own needs.
So for example, in the US and Germany,there is one main language spoken across the whole federation,
while in Switzerland and Ethiopia,different languages are spoken in different regional states.
Or another example (01:45):
environmental protection is mainly controlled by the central government in Malaysia,
while in Nigeria it is mainly controlled by the regional states.
There is no ‘one size fits all’.
As a very general rule of thumb, when it comes to economic policy,
left wing politicians tend to wantmore of this controlled at the central, federal level,
(02:08):
as this allows more redistribution between states and thus fosters greater economic equality,
while those on the right tend to wantmore economic policy controlled at the local level,
because this means more economic matters stay within the local state
and then there is no redistribution from richer states to poorer states.
Most federations operateaccording to the principle of subsidiarity,
(02:32):
meaning that power to decide on an issue
is given to the lowest level that is able to appropriately deal with that issue.
This is because federal systems are against the centralisation of power,
and they prefer to have as much power as possible at the lower levels.
But as the previous example about economic policy shows,
(02:53):
it is not always the case that devolving powerto lower levels will allow issues to be governed better.
For some issues, it is important that they are governed at the central level.
Federations will usually have a constitutionwhich says which things are governed at the central level,
and which things are governed at the local or regional level.
So as a general framework it is very flexibleand can be adapted to all sorts of different contexts and situations.
(03:20):
And obviously, when designing a federation it is really, really important to look at all the details carefully
and decide on the design in a democratic way,
because which competence you put at which level will have a huge impact.
Now it is interesting to have a quick lookat the history of the idea of federalism, and how it emerged,
(03:40):
because this can give us some useful insightsinto what kinds of problems federalism solves
and why it might be worth consideringas a possible future political structure for the whole world.
The idea of federalism first arose in Europe in the 18th century,
around the same time as the ideaof the centralised state was beginning to emerge.
(04:02):
Before that the political organisation of Europe was completely different to what we know today.
There were no states in the modern sense.
Instead there was a complex systemof many different kinds of governance arrangements,
which overlapped at different scales and in different areas.
Power was divided between feudal lords,empires, free cities, the Catholic church, and others,
(04:24):
and there were often competing claims to authority in any one place.
Somehow this complicated system lasted for many hundreds of years
and only began to change after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648,
when the idea began to emerge that it wouldbe better to have separate, fully sovereign states,
where the central government controlled all the power within that state.
(04:48):
Over the next hundred or so years modern states evolved,with strong centralised governments, like we know today.
In many cases large, strong, states were createdby joining together several smaller states or kingdoms.
For example, the modern states of Italy and Germanyemerged after the unification of several smaller states and kingdoms.
(05:11):
Now it was around this time, and indeed during this process,that the idea of federalism began to emerge,
as a critique of the centralised state modeland as a more flexible alternative.
In many cases, small states and citiesdid not want to be swallowed up into a larger states,
but instead wanted to retain some of their autonomy.
(05:32):
They wanted to preserve local cultures and languages.
During this period there were many discussions about the pros and cons of different scales of governance,
and the pros and cons of unification or separation.
And for many people the idea of federalism offered a good balance:
some unification and some separation,
(05:53):
some governance at a higher level, and some at a lower level.
It seemed to combine the advantagesof uniting into a big and strong state,
while also allowing a fair degree of local autonomyand the ability for local culture and local languages to flourish.
However, despite all these discussions, no federations were actually created in Europe at this time,
(06:16):
and instead centralised statesdominated the new political landscape.
But not very long afterwards,the first federation was indeed formed,
not in Europe,but in the newly independent United States of America.
The US Constitution of 1787 created the first federation,uniting the 13 former British colonies into one overarching political unit,
(06:42):
whilst allowing each individual state to retain significant power and autonomy.
Seeing the success of the American model, many other countries soon followed suit.
Argentina became a federation in 1853,
Canada in 1867,
Brazil in 1889,
Australia in 1901,
(07:03):
Austria in 1920,
India in 1949,
and so on and so on.
Now you might have heard of the term ‘confederation’
and you might be wonderingif federation and confederation are the same thing?
The answer is that they are not.
There are some very important differences between the two.
(07:24):
A confederation is a union of equal, sovereign statesthat have signed a treaty to give some very limited power to the centre.
All decisions must be agreed unanimously, everybody must agree,
and the member states can leave the union at any time.
Furthermore, a confederation unites the states as collective actors, as a country as a whole.
(07:50):
It does not give any rights or responsibilities to individuals, and they remain citizens of their particular state,
but they do not become citizens of the confederation.
A federation, in contrast, is one over-arching political unit
in which there is a system of divided powers,
such that a central government and local provinces or stateseach have different policy responsibilities.
(08:14):
A federation is a more permanent structure than a confederation,
and it will have a constitutionthat determines which decisions are taken at which level.
And in a federation, decisions are takenby a democratic majority, like in any kind of state.
And very importantly, a federation isnot only a union of states, it is also a union of individuals.
(08:38):
Citizens of a federation have certain rightsand responsibilities granted to them by the central federal level.
These might include voting rights,the requirement to pay taxes, citizenship rights, and so on.
And therefore, while confederations haveonly one legislative chamber, where all the states are represented,
(08:58):
federations always have two chambers,one where states are represented and one where individuals are represented.
So before the US became a federation,it initially tried to be a confederation.
The Continental Congress of 1781 elaborated Articles of Confederation
that gave only very limited power to the central government,
(09:21):
to declare war, make treaties, and maintain an army and a navy,
while the states remained largely separate and sovereign.
But this system did not work very well.
In particular there were many economic problems concerning differences of economic policy between the states
which made it really difficult to support one common currency
and therefore to make debt repayments that they needed to make after the war.
(09:44):
And so after only a few years, in 1787,
the Americans changed their mindsand decided instead to unite more deeply and form a federation.
Other confederations that have existed in historyhave also failed to survive into the modern era,
such as the United Provinces of the Netherlands,which collapsed at the end of the 18th century,
(10:07):
the Swiss Confederation,which collapsed in the middle of the 19th century,
and the very short-lived German Bund,which also collapsed in the middle of the 19th century.
The European Union, or EU, is currently an unusual hybrid,
with elements of both federation and confederation.
(10:27):
It started off as an economic confederation, but over time has added elements that are typical of federations,
such as a constitution and individual rights.
But it still retains many elements of a confederation,
such as the right of exit, the system of making treatiesbetween the states, and the need to make major decisions unanimously.
(10:50):
Maybe over time it will evolve fully into a federation? It's not clear at the moment.
In the meantime it is an interesting political laboratory
for those of us who are interestedin looking at different ways that states can integrate.
So if we turn back to federations….
Today, around 30 of the world’s 195 countries are federations.
(11:12):
This may not sound very many, but since many of these federations are very large countries,
together they account for some 40% of the world’s population.
In other words, almost half of the world’s peopleare today governed under a federal political system.
Furthermore, when we look at which stateschoose a federal structure and which choose a centralised structure,
(11:36):
we find overwhelmingly that the larger the country, the more likely it is to be a federation.
In fact, 7 of the 8 largest countries by area are federations,
the United States, Canada, Brazil,Australia, Russia, India, and Argentina.
The only exception is China, the third largest state by area,and the only one organised as a centralised unitary state.
(12:03):
Now the reason that large countries choose federalism
is because federalism is an excellent formof political organisation for large and complex societies,
because on one hand it offers a good balancebetween centralised governance and local autonomy,
and on the other hand, it also enables different peoplesand ethnic groups to live side by side as equal citizens.
(12:25):
This is also a reason that federalismmight be a good political structure for the world as a whole.
If we indeed look at the world as a whole, at the global level,
we see that today it is basically organisedas a very weak confederation, with the United Nations at the centre.
Member states retain their full sovereignty
(12:45):
and can choose, if they want, to enter into treaty-based agreementswith regard to common global problems, such as peace and human rights.
However there is no power above the states to enforce their compliance with the treaties
and indeed states can pull out of treaties at any time.
So, as other confederations have found throughout history,it is virtually impossible to make and enforce common decisions.
(13:12):
Furthermore, while states are represented in the General Assembly and other UN bodies,
there is no chamber that represents individuals and the UN is not able to grant individuals any rights or responsibilities.
So the UN is rather powerless and remote from most peoples’ lives.
The global confederal system has also provedquite ineffective in solving common global problems,
(13:37):
such as climate change, biodiversity loss,and economic inequality, amongst many, many others.
And that is why many of us think that the way forwardis to move from a global confederation to a global federation.
The vision of World Federalism is federation both up and down.
(13:57):
The world would come togetheras a federation of states, with a constitution, a parliament,
and individual rights and responsibilitiesgranted from the global level.
And at the same time, member states would be ableto re-organise themselves into federations of mini-states.
So power would shift both upwards and downwards.
(14:19):
And crucially, there would be no centralised, all-powerful, world government.
Instead there would be a few key issues that would be governed at the global level.
Climate policy seems the most obvious example.
But we could also consider human rights
and certain aspects of economic policy, and health policy, and perhaps others.
(14:41):
Putting these at the global level would enable usto improve redistribution from richer states to poorer ones,
to reduce inequalities, and to create a more just world.
Things like education policy,religious matters, language and cultural policy
would most likely stay at the state level,
or perhaps devolve even furtherdown to the sub-national state level.
(15:05):
But would be very unlikely to be at the global level.
So world federalism would allowa very high degree of cultural diversity,
while bringing us togetheron certain key matters that affect us all,
and enabling us to make decisionsabout them in a just and democratic way.
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