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326 6 Political Communities If the religious and economic origins of the koinon and the state’s ongoing engagement with those spheres of social action highlight its complexity and suggest that it was more multifaceted than what we tend to think of as a federal state, its political structures are indubitably akin to those we recognize in modern federal states. We need now to turn to this arena, where the label “federal” is more immediately applicable than it has been until this point in the argument. At the heart of the Greek koinon, as in all federal political structures, lies a pair of dilemmas. First, if the central government has enough power to rule over the member states, what prevents it from overawing them and subordinating them as mere parts of a unitary state? Second, if the member states have enough power to govern themselves, what prevents them from undermining the koinon by refusing to cooperate with one another and with the central government? If a federal state is to survive, it must solve both dilemmas.1 And this is particularly difficult, for the resolution of one tends only to exacerbate the other. Rules and practices that restrict the power of the central government tend to do so by strengthening member states, with the result that federal structures are undermined by fragmentation and the failure of member states to cooperate. Restrictions on the power of member states, on the other hand, tend to yield an increase in the capacities of the central government, with the result that federal structures are undermined by the centralization of power. For this reason federal states tend to be highly unstable— unless their institutions are self-enforcing, configured in such a way that they 1. Riker 1964: 7–8; Weingast 2005: 149–50. 9780520272507_PRINT.indd 326 9780520272507_PRINT.indd 326 03/05/13 4:42 PM 03/05/13 4:42 PM Political Communities 327 provide incentives for both member states and central government to remain within the circumscribed limits of their power.2 Federal institutions are by necessity the result of a compromise, for they provide the rules and structure according to which sovereignty is divided among member states and the central government, and represent attempts, whether conscious or not, to resolve the twin dilemmas of federalism.3 In order to complete our analysis, we need to ask how these two dilemmas were resolved by the poleis and koina of Boiotia, Achaia, and Aitolia, which involves looking carefully at the terms of the federal compromise in each state, developing as full a picture as possible of the competencies and powers of each level of government. Yet a simple survey of the distribution of authority in these states would fail to capture the essence of the problem, for it would necessarily take the institutions of each koinon as static entities, as analytical givens. We need to understand how and why these institutions emerged in the first place, how they responded to changing pressures and opportunities presented over time by both exogenous and endogenous developments , and how they interacted with one another. The previous two chapters gave partial answers to this question. Chapter 4 considered the religious and economic contexts in which communities interacted, giving them a sense of shared identity and material incentives for cooperation. We saw that as the koinon emerged as a state, religious and economic interactions among its member communities continued to be of tremendous importance, so much so that formal institutions were developed to protect and promote those interactions. The tension between integration and differentiation that characterized these institutions is a hallmark of Greek federalism. It played out in the sphere of religion in the form of festivals sponsored by the koinon and including all of its member states, which participated in the rituals not as individuals but as poleis; and in the appointment of individuals to represent their communities in religious acts undertaken by the koinon as a whole, such as sacrifice, dedication, and the enactment of sacred laws. We see the same basic tension in the koinon’s economic institutions. The economic gains to be captured by the pooling of resources, the promotion of regional mobility, and the facilitation of regional trade by the production of a common coinage all certainly contributed to poleis’ willingness to join a koinon. But a view of federalism seen through a purely fiscal lens is certainly too rosy to be entirely correct—“a Candidian view of institutions as ‘the best of all possible worlds...

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