TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081390/0813640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.2 KB | 132 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 76

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.