Blest Be the Ties That Bind

By Charles Krauthammer

Federalism is the most boring word in the American political lexicon. Around the world, however, it's a fightin' word. Some countries will break, some blood will flow over it. From Kashmir to Quebec, the world is seething with secessionists who have had enough of the federations to which history and colonial masters have assigned them. They want out.

Eritreans want to be free of Ethiopians. Kashmiris want to be rid of Indians. Even in boring, comfortable old Canada, Quebec is poised to walk. Of course, the problem is most acute in the Soviet Union, where first the Baltics, then Russia, then the Ukraine and a host of other republics have been voting themselves one version or another of independence. Even Uzbekistan -- Uzbekistan! -- demands its freedom.

There is something anachronistic about these secessionist movements. After all, this is the era of unification, not only of Germany but also of a nine- tongued, multisovereign, historically riven Europe into that remarkable new creature, the European Community. (To say nothing of the joining of the two Yemens this May.) Integrationists point to the E.C. as the wave of the future, the only hope for peace and prosperity on a planet already suffering from a surfeit of sovereignty. Self-styled realists like Margaret Thatcher, however, scoff at the notion of multinational union as rank Utopianism, a dangerous deviation from the natural human condition of group homogeneity and ethnic sovereignty.

Who is right? Is the federation of different peoples into superpolitical structures the wave of the future? Or is the breakup of such polyglot structures as the Soviet Union into their ethnic elements the norm?

The answer is that in the age of the fax and the fiber-optic cable, federation is the future. But federation works only under the condition of freedom. Otherwise what passes for federation is really colonialism. And though colonialism had a good 500-year run, it is spent. The only way to turn colonial empires into real federations is to allow them to break up into their constituent parts and hope that in their wisdom they will see fit to knit themselves back together again.

The secessionists in Quebec seem to have this idea in the back of their mind. They want not total independence but what they call "sovereignty- association." They want a sovereign Quebec with its own flag and army, but they then want immediate reassociation with the rest of Canada. They even envision keeping the Canadian dollar. (Whether the rest of Canada will take kindly to Quebec tearing up the flag while retaining its economic privileges is quite another matter.)

It may be that in a postcolonial world, confederal states require divorce before reconciliation. The Baltic republics might have chosen this path, had Gorbachev allowed them to go their own way. After all, it is a natural Baltic interest to retain economic, communications and even military links with the country that will for decades remain the greatest power in that part of the world. The Balts would give up many attributes of sovereignty in return for a flag and an anthem.

Gorbachev's mistake is that he thinks he can indefinitely hold back nationalist movements by threat -- and force -- while making them see the light on the benefits of confederation. There really are benefits to confederation, as Europe is in the process of demonstrating. But people are hardly likely to appreciate these benefits until they can choose them freely.

That is the lesson of the European Community. The only conceivable way to integrate such a polyglot collection of peoples with a long history of mutual hostility is by open and absolute consent. Of course, there is one other way to impose federation, Lincoln's way: total war bringing total victory. Anything short of that -- partial Soviet control over the Baltic republics, for example -- is a temporary solution that endures only so long as the colonial power retains the will and the strength to exert unrelenting repressive force. Remove it and secession follows.

Twenty-two years ago, in his classic Federalism and the French Canadians, Pierre Elliot Trudeau argued that the highest form of political association is the federal association of free peoples in a common political union. "In the advanced societies," he wrote, "where the road to progress lies in the direction of international integration, nationalism will have to be discarded as a rustic and clumsy tool."

Trudeau scorned the pettiness and provincialism of such narrow separatisms. He was right. As the success of the American experiment has shown, federation is the superior political system. It affords not just economies of scale but also, as Madison predicted, a substrate for free government. Before Madison, it had been assumed that democracies had to be small. Madison argued that, on the contrary, a large republic, by multiplying the number of competing interests, makes it more difficult for any single interest to achieve tyrannical power. Two centuries of the American experience have borne his theory out.

But federalism does more than nurture democracy. It may be the only force capable of taming that great nemesis of the 20th century, nationalism. Confederal Europe is being built out of fairly homogeneous national units. It forces Germans and Frenchmen, Italians and Danes, even Britons to accommodate and subordinate their nationalism to something larger. Federation allows them to keep and at the same time transcend their national identities.

But before you can transcend something it helps to have it. West Europeans have had at least a century to enjoy the pleasures, such as they are, of sovereignty. These are pleasures of which Quebeckers and Kashmiris, Uzbeks and Eritreans can only dream.

As Europe has discovered after two world wars, sovereignty is not all it is cracked up to be. But those who have never had it might be skeptical about such a judgment. They may need a taste of the fruit, before giving it up for a higher good.