Federalism: Political Identity and Tragic Compromise

Chapter 2. Why Federalism? The Tragic Aspect of Politics

chapter two why federalism? the tragic aspect of politics It is one thing to de‹ne or demarcate a political concept; it is another thing to describe its purpose. Labels can be attached to all sorts of political arrangement. One could have a term for a regime with a ruling military junta, a bicameral legislature, and a constitutional court, for example , but the practical value of such a term is open to doubt. The null sets that frequently appear in one or two cells of the four-, six-, or eight-box grids that political scientists construct to describe different types of governmental structures are a reminder that our ability to create categories can outrun their application to reality. Federalism appears to be a useful concept, however. Scholars regularly characterize many contemporary regimes as federal, and the term federal is widely used by political participants to describe their own government and personal commitments. The question that must now be answered is the why of federalism. Under what circumstances does federalism appear? What are the reasons for its creation and its continuation? What policy arguments favor organizing a regime as a federal one? What arguments counsel against it? As stated at the outset, this book presents a theory of federalism based on the concept of political identity, and it answers many of the preceding questions in those terms. The basic reason that nations adopt a federal regime or maintain a federal regime that was adopted in a prior era, we argue , is to resolve con›icts among citizens that arise from the disjunction between their geographically based sense of political identity and the actual or potential geographic organization of their polity. When these conditions are absent—that is, when the great majority of a nation’s citizens share a po38 litical identity or where their con›icts regarding political identity are not geographically based—federalism will not arise or, having arisen in the past, will become vestigial. This thesis needs to be assessed, we further argue, in light of the de‹nition of federalism presented in the previous chapter. A signi‹cant number of the regimes that are conventionally described as federal are not federal at all but consociational, decentralized, or simply democratic, and many of the arguments that are advanced to demonstrate the virtues of federalism actually refer to these other governmental structures. The reason arguments for other governmental structures tend to be attached to federalism, especially in American political science and legal scholarship, becomes apparent once the basis for federalism and the policies that favor it are identi‹ed. Con›icts in political identity are a misfortune when viewed from the perspective of the nation as a whole or its component parts. In other words, federalism is connected with the tragic aspect of politics. The other structures of governance described in chapter 1 are more optimistic; consociation , decentralization, and democracy can all be plausibly viewed as part of the effort to achieve political optimality under particular sets of circumstances . Their creation and elaboration serve as positive steps toward the achievement of this much-desired goal. Federalism, in contrast, belongs to a world where there are no optimal solutions, where con›icts are irreconcilable , where political conditions are more likely to get worse than better. It is a grim expedient that is adopted in grim circumstances, an acknowledgment that choices must be made among undesirable alternatives. The instinct to con›ate it with other features of government is understandable, for these optimistic strategies obscure the tragic character of federal solutions and provide them with a patina of optimality and optimism. Understandable though it may be, such con›ation breeds conceptual confusion, and the discussion that follows is designed to strip away these appealing but unrelated arguments and confront the real purposes of federalism . The ‹rst section discusses the role of federalism in the creation of political regimes; the second discusses its role in a regime’s ongoing existence . The third section then steps back from these descriptions and assesses the necessity of federalism in either context. It asks how we would know whether federalism is really needed to maintain a political regime or whether less unfortunate mechanisms can serve that purpose. Because our focus is on political identity, we do not here present a full analysis of factors external to attitudes of individuals. There is a vast literaWhy Federalism? 39 ture devoted to the question of whether federalism produces...