Federalism: Political Identity and Tragic Compromise

Chapter 1. What is Federalism?

chapter one what is federalism? In order to discuss federalism (at a theoretical level at least), it is necessary to de‹ne it. This immediately raises a number of the complexities that beset this subject and that mechanistic discussions of it tend to ignore or obscure. In fact, the problem is suf‹ciently complex that no mere de‹nition will suf‹ce. However clear one tries to be about such an emotionally charged political term, its varied usages will tend to seep through the verbal boundaries one has established. Any effort to provide real clarity must therefore distinguish the term federalism from related terms and attempt to map the conceptual topography of the entire underlying issue. That issue is the relationship between the center of a political regime and its constituent parts, however those parts are conceived—a relationship that implicates the foundational matter of political identity. The ‹rst section of this chapter offers de‹nitions of the two central concepts that motivate our theory, political identity and federalism. The second section distinguishes the concept from related but different concepts of consociation , decentralization, and democracy, both local and general. two basic concepts: political identity and federalism Political Identity Identity is one of modernity’s most contested concepts, not only on its own terms, but because it implicates our theories of the self. In fact, one de‹nition of modernity is that it begins with Descartes’ declaration that the isolated self is the starting point of knowledge.1 His notion of cogito is a declaration of the self’s independence from both God and tradition, its 7 ontological priority over any pregiven structure, whether transcendent or empirical.2 This notion is central to Kantian philosophy, where the self not only possesses ontological priority but projects its inherent understandings on the perceived structure of the universe.3 It has been carried forward by both political liberalism and analytic philosophy and is probably the dominant view of educated people in the Western world. In Continental philosophy , the issue of the self’s independence serves as the battleground between Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s existentialism, with Husserl a self-declared Cartesian and Heidegger granting priority to Dasein , or being.4 But there are actually large areas of agreement between the two—most relevantly, for present purposes, the idea that the self is socially constructed. For Husserl, the self is an irreducible internal consciousness that integrates experience, but all its content, all a person’s ideas and ways of interpreting the world, are the product of social, or intersubjective, processes. For Heidegger, those social processes create the self and de‹ne its boundaries, with Dasein present only as a primordial substrate. Most modern social scientists premise their work on this notion of a socially constructed self. Identity can be understood as the self’s interpretation of itself.5 This would be true for the Cartesian, Kantian, Husserlian, and Heideggerian self, although it would have different ontological signi‹cance in each case. Descartes and, more particularly, Locke and Kant urge that the self develop an identity as an independent, morally responsible agent.6 In contrast , modern Continental philosophers, such as Husserl and Heidegger, following Hegel, argue that this is impossible in the ordinary course of life, where socially constructed conceptions of identity prevail, conceptions that can only be escaped if the self sheds its identity through either a transcendental epoché or a reconnection with the essence of Dasein. This is why the insights of Continental philosophy have seemed so useful—and so convincing —to English-speaking as well as Continental social scientists, although Continental philosophy itself has remained far less popular than analytic philosophy among English-speaking scholars.7 From a social science perspective , identity is best regarded as an empirically observable production of social systems that vary in their complexity and interrelationships.8 Thus social scientists, without necessarily becoming involved in philosophical debates about the ontology of the self, can explore the ways that people decide who they are, where they belong, and what their lives are all about. Once identity is treated in social science terms, it becomes clear that 8 federalism people’s identities are powerfully affected and perhaps determined by their community or social group. Descartes, Locke, and Kant may urge us, from a philosophical perspective, to view ourselves as isolated individuals, but the social science based on phenomenological or existential concepts recognizes that identity is constructed by the...