The origins and formation of federal
states
cial and welfare conditions. Forsyth also emphasised that confederations were rarely concerned with defence and security alone; there was an intimate and reciprocal relationship between the goal of security and the goal of welfare and it was impossible to ‘escape the logic of this interdependency’.5 With this complex interdependency in mind, let us turn now to focus sharply upon why and how federations come into existence.
In this chapter I want to re-examine the origins and formation of federations with a view to revising and updating some of the old arguments in the mainstream literature. This task is in some ways quite straightforward while in other respects it presents us with fresh problems and difficulties previously absent or studiously avoided. In order to return to the world of generalisations about the origins of federations, it is necessary first to rehearse some of the earlier arguments about why people choose to unite in the federal form as opposed to any other form of union. To convey the complexity of the subject we will look at the following three sections: first, the old debate on the origins of federations; second, a close look at some familiar and some less familiar case studies about the motives for union that raise important questions about historical interpretation for the purpose of comparative politics; and, third, a conclusion that reassesses and reappraises the influential contribution of William Riker to this intellectual debate together with a new theoretical proposal that revolves around the idea of circumstantial causa- tion. Let us begin by returning to the old debate on the origins of federations.
The intellectual debate about the origins of federations
The debate about the origins of federations, which is most closely associated with Riker, was bound up, as we saw in Chapter 1, with the reassertion of the exclusively political approach to the striking of a federal bargain that created a federal constitution. Consequently Riker sought to identify a series of generalisa- tions about the conditions under which federations are created. While historians stressed the ‘unique historical context’ of each federal bargain, which Riker was happy to acknowledge, the political scientist in him wanted to identify a set of factors common to the origins of every federal state.6This would reveal a consis- tent pattern of behaviour that was empirically verifiable and had significant theoretical implications. His analysis of the ‘bargain invented at Philadelphia’
led him to propose a two fold hypothesis that he sought to test by examining the origins of 18 existing federations together with nine previous federations that had failed.7The conditions that formed the basis of his hypothesis were:
1 A desire on the part of the politicians who offer the bargain to expand their territorial control by peaceful means, usually either to meet an external mili- tary or diplomatic threat or to prepare for military or diplomatic aggression or aggrandizement.
2 A willingness on the part of politicians who accept the bargain to give up some independence for the sake of union either because of some external
military-diplomatic threat or opportunity. Either they desire protection from an external threat or they desire to participate in the potential aggression of the federation.
For the sake of brevity, Riker referred to these two predispositions as (1) the expansion condition and (2) the military condition.8 Moreover, the evidence from his comparative exploration of the other federations led him to state cate- gorically that these two conditions were necessary to the ‘occurrence of federations’.9
The debate on the origins of federations was swiftly engaged. Shortly after the publication of Riker’s two conditions, Antony Birch reviewed Riker’s propo- sitions with reference to developments in Nigeria, East Africa and Malaysia and concluded by revising and expanding these conditions to include (1) the desire to deter internal threats and (2) the willingness to have them deterred.10 Riker readily conceded these revisions a decade later in his mammoth review of feder- alism published in The Handbook of Political Science.11 In his focus upon ‘the immediate political act of federation’, he was always concerned to locate ‘the conditions … most descriptive of reality’ and this undertaking drove him to conduct a survey of the major contributors to the debate about the origins of federations.12 Of necessity this brought him face to face with the theoretical claims of Karl Deutsch, Kenneth Wheare and Ronald Watts, whose respective analyses of the conditions of federalism he examined thoroughly.13His conclu- sions are worth reviewing and reassessing for our purposes because they are now thirty years old and it is pertinent for us to consider how they have stood the test of time.
In retrospect, Riker’s approach to the study of the origins of federations reflected the intellectual turbulence in political science that was characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s. His primary task was to reassert the political; he was convinced that federalism was neither an economic nor a sociological phenomenon but essentially a political affair. Above all, he wanted to theorise about the origins and formation of federations so that political scientists would have what Maurice Vile wanted, namely, a ‘sustained theoretical structure’.14 Where, then, did Riker’s detailed analysis of the origins of federations leave us?
What did his theoretical concerns bequeath us today?
The Rikerian legacy is one that has endured probably because his basic premises were quite simple. He grounded his approach in the assumption that men in politics behave rationally in making bargains that involved mutual bene- fits. This pursuit of self-interest could be applied to constitution-making, which, after all, was participation in a rational political bargain. The conditions that he identified as being necessary to the successful conclusion of constitution-making were pertinent to one particular kind of constitution, namely, the formation of federal constitutions that created federal states. Consequently, for federations to appear it was necessary that there should be some significant threat and that this would be sufficient to compel the participating actors to strike a bargain or compact that would be mutually beneficial. Without these two necessary political
conditions of ‘a desire to expand and a willingness of provincial politicians to accede despite provincial loyalties’, federations could not come into existence.
This set of assumptions and propositions, based upon the theory of rational political behaviour, enabled him to claim at the very least ‘a partially verified’
political theory of their origins.15
The reaction to Riker’s scientific approach to his subject and the bold theoret- ical claims that he made was clinical and uncompromising. S. Rufus Davis left no shred of doubt as to what he thought of Riker’s ‘quasi-scientific style’ that sought to rise above the unique historical and cultural setting of each federal experi- ence. In a scorching attack upon his ‘lab-science mode’ of analysis, Davis refuted Riker’s claims about his two political conditions: they might be highly plausible but they were not proof because they applied in all unions so that his arguments resulted in ‘a mere truism’.16To take just one of these two conditions – the mili- tary condition – security motives were present in the calculations of all communities that sought greater strength through association. The possible vari- ations in the ways in which security or threat might present themselves were endless, and where it was one of a compound of factors it might be dominant, conspicuous and constant, or it might be secondary, negligible, remote, vague and inconstant. Or, finally, what was perceived or what was believed to be a security or a threat situation, and the levels of apprehension or the intensity of the belief, might vary profoundly in the calculations of each party contemplating some form of security association. Davis concluded that it was to be expected that every writer would note the presence of the military-security factor in the list of motives for federal union but that only Riker had attributed such over- riding significance to it. In reality the proposition that these two factors were present at the birth of each federation was to ‘state a commonplace that is hardly worth noting’.17
The second searing indictment of Riker’s theoretical claims came from Preston King, who described his internal-external threat condition as ‘intuitively attractive’ but analytically ‘imprecise’ and ultimately ‘trivial’.18 Rather like Davis, he claimed that since the existence of military-security threats was present in all unions, then so must it prove in any specific case of successful federal union. Indeed, even if it was possible to make the threat criterion more precise, it remained that the number of cases that we could test would be so small that our results could not possibly justify ‘that degree of certainty’ that Riker was disposed to accord them.19 The coup de grâce to Riker’s assertive claims was administered with calm assurance:
In short, it is always possible to play up the case for a threat where a federal entity comes into being, as also to play it down where federation fails. For if a federation is formed from fear of other powers, and formed equally from mutual fear of those states which federate, then virtually any type of fear must provide grounds for federal union. …To stipulate a condition which is not only necessary for a given development, but also for distinctly opposed or contrary developments, is not very enlightening.20
The gist of King’s critique of Riker was that the central case made ‘for a strict correlation between the emergence of federations and the presence of a threat to local units is simply unclear (even self-contradictory) in what it maintains’.
Consequently the very basis of Riker’s theoretical claims was emptied of substance: the arbitrariness, imprecision and circularity of the argumentation viti- ated them at their source.21 These two principal critiques of Riker’s political theory effectively revealed it as having little or no explanatory value and certainly undermined his claim that the existence of military threats served above all to mark the origin of a federal government as distinct from other forms of union.
We can see from this brief sketch of the old debate on the origins of federa- tions, which began with Riker’s original theoretical efforts forty years ago, that the principal purpose was to explain whyfederations are formed rather than how they are formed. Yet it is equally important for us to understand the formation of federations just as much as it is to know why they are formed. Indeed, we need to appreciate more fully than we do just what exactly the nature of the relationship is between these two separate but related questions. Riker certainly broached the subject when he couched his initial arguments in terms of those participants who
‘offer’ the bargain and those who ‘accept’ it, but his flawed reasoning meant that much of what he claimed was superficial and oversimplified. The key that can unlock this particular door lies in the very concept of ‘bargain’ itself. Let us look a little closer at the use of this term.
We will recall that for Riker federation was essentially ‘a constitutional bargain among politicians’.22 However, his elaboration of the concept of bargain meant in practice that it was an agreement ‘between prospective national leaders and officials of constituent governments for the purpose of aggregating territory, the better to lay taxes and raise armies’.23This meant that the former group of actors desired to expand its territorial control and saw in federation ‘the only feasible means to accomplish a desired expansion without the use of force’, while the latter party to the bargain were the officials of the constituent governments who accepted the limitations on their independence either because of a desire for protection from a military threat or as a result of their desire to participate in the potential aggression of the federation.24There are a number of problems with the assumptions built into this construction of the nature of the bargain – of howsuch federations are formed. I have identified them in the following way:
1 There is an implicit assumption that it is possible to distinguish between those who offer the bargain and those who accept it when in practice this is often extremely difficult, if not impossible.
2 It is taken for granted that it is always the ‘prospective national leaders’
who offer the bargain and ‘the officials of the constituent governments’ who accept it when this is not necessarily the case for every federal formation.
3 There is an implicit assumption of a clear delineation on role(s) between the national (central) elites and the subnational (regional) actors when in reality
the ‘prospective national leaders’ are frequently officials of the constituent governments and vice versa.
4 There are very often other links, such as membership of the same political party or of the same religious or ethnic group, that overlap and complicate the picture, serving to undermine the neat demarcation between so-called central and regional actors.
5 The existence of role accumulation makes it impossible in practice to assess in which capacity the delegate to a constitutional bargain is acting.
6 It is based upon an implicit assumption that we know the political convic- tions that motivate the parties and participating actors.25
These caveats to the utility of Riker’s bargain constitute very real obstacles to both historical interpretation and political analysis, and they are factors that we shall have to take into account in the next section when we explore the motives for union. There seems little doubt that any serious analytical discussion of the origins and formation of federations must avoid what Davis observed when he interrogated Riker’s historical version(s) of defining federal moments: ‘it is diffi- cult to resist the impression that Riker translates history with the reductionist zeal of a salvationist, an apocalyptic or materialist historian. Indeed, modified or totally contrary accounts may be and have been given of every instance he discusses’.26 The dangers and pitfalls of the uses and abuses of history could hardly be put more plainly.
The motives for federal union
In the light of the controversies that continue to surround the intellectual debate about the origins and formation of federations, it is imperative that we tread very carefully when we seek to re-examine and reappraise why and how such states come into existence. The following section will be devoted to a brief discussion of historical events and developments in Switzerland, Canada, Australia, India, Malaysia, Austria and Germany in the hope that these case studies will shed some fresh light on the factors involved in the establishment of federations. As we shall see, the motives for union are not difficult to identify in a general sense but it remains very much a matter of conjecture as to how far we can prioritise them. In some cases the political factors might outweigh the socio-economic factors, while in other respects the reverse might be the case.
Certainly it is not possible to reduce the variety of factors impinging on the federal bargain, as Riker contended, to two simple criteria of necessity. The complexity of each historical experience makes this much more difficult than Riker’s bold analyses would have us believe. Moreover, it is important to recog- nise analytically that there is a two-step process involved in the creation of a federation: first, the desire for union and, second, the decision to have a federal union. We will look at each case study in the order in which it achieved the status of federation.
Switzerland
Switzerland became a federation in 1848 but its federal origins stretch back to 1291 when the three tiny rural Alpine communities of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden entered into a league of mutual defence – designated an Eidgenossenschaft(Oath-Fellowship) – to protect themselves against the encroach- ments of the house of Habsburg. Subsequently the old Swiss Confederation grew up gradually in the late medieval period as a process of aggregation, adding new communities to the original nucleus so that by 1353, when Bern joined, the League totalled eight cantons and by 1513 the accession of Appenzell raised it to thirteen. The number of constituent units remained at this figure until the changes induced by the French Revolution swept them away in 1798.
Change followed change and after Napoleon’s experiment with the Mediation Constitution in 1803 – a confederation with a strong centre that lasted until 1813 – it was only in 1815 that the multilingual structure that we recognise in Switzerland today first began to take shape. What had been essentially a Germanic unity was finally broken as a number of French-speaking territorial communities, together with Ticino, the only Italian-speaking area, were admitted to full canton status and re-established Switzerland as a loose confeder- ation of 25 cantons based upon a treaty that guaranteed collective security by mutual assistance. Up until the SonderbundCivil War when the seven seceding conservative Catholic cantons were soundly defeated by the liberal Protestant cantons in 1847, Switzerland had been a league of states. With the introduction of a new constitution in 1848, ratified by a popular vote of both the citizens and the cantons, it became a federation. Revised in 1874 and more recently in 1999, it is the federal constitution of 1848 that contained most of the organisational framework that characterises the Swiss polity today.27
The most pronounced features of this long federal progeniture in Switzerland are its slow, almost organic, accumulation of customs, conventions and political usages built up from below that have informed its political institutions. At the very core of its existence has been the ever-present pulse of the cantons and communes, both rural and urban, that have preserved the vitality of liberty, self- determination and citizen participation in local affairs. An accurate summary of the Swiss federal evolution therefore would have to include a combination of strong American influences, a unique admixture of political institutions and an indigenous political culture rooted in the spirit of Bundestreue – of reciprocity, mutual trust and understanding, tolerance, dignity, partnership and respect for and recognition of minorities – that values consensus, conciliation, compromise and consent above crude majoritarian calculation.28 In short, the notion of Eidgenossenschaftrefers to a covenant, a moral basis, to preserve and promote the politics of difference and diversity.
In hindsight it is clear that the conceptual shift from confederation to federa- tion in 1848 was occasioned by what was in effect a Swiss civil war and to this extent Riker’s military-diplomatic condition is fulfilled. But the creation of a federation in Switzerland cannot be interpreted in so peremptory a fashion without taking into account a host of other factors. In the context of military
affairs the old confederation had suffered no less than four internal religious wars between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and had recovered to re-establish confederal union. There were reasons other than just military conflict that account for the creation of the Swiss federation in 1848. Wolf Linder has identi- fied the following factors: economic reasons, external pressures, democracy and social values and the combination of democracy with the federal idea.29
By the mid-nineteenth century, industrialisation had reached many cantons creating new urban elites with vested interests in removing the boundaries of cantonal markets that were obstacles to economic activities. The federal constitu- tion extended the powers of the centre from security and laid the foundations for a common economic market so that Switzerland became an economic unity.30 An additional reason for a conceptually decisive shift to federation was the external environment that finally persuaded the cantons to reduce their future vulnerability to foreign pressures by buttressing their collective security. It was no accident that the 1848 constitution referred to federal responsibilities to guar- antee the independence of the Swiss nation in ‘unity, force and honour’ as well as to uphold internal security and order.31A third reason for creating the federa- tion must be sought in the long-term process of democratisation that had been fomenting in many of the cantons since the French Revolution of 1789. The spread of democratic ideas interacted with the venerable Swiss cultural heritage that had already familiarised Swiss people with individual self-responsibility and different forms of communalism or collective decision-making. This focus upon an indigenous Swiss political culture of local political practices and customs was elegantly described by James Bryce in his Modern Democracies,first published in 1921:
The internal political institutions of the allied communities varied greatly.
The rural cantons were pure democracies, governing themselves by meet- ings of the people. Of the cities, some, like Bern, were close oligarchies of nobles; in others oligarchy was more or less tempered by a popular element.
…Swiss political institutions have been built up on the foundations of small communities, rural and urban, accustomed to control their own affairs. … the commune was from the earliest times a potent factor in accustoming the whole people to take interest in and know how to handle local affairs, every man on a level with his fellows. It is still the political unit of the nation and the focus of its local public life. … Local self-government has been in Switzerland a factor of prime importance, not only as the basis of the administrative fabric, but also because the training which the people have received from practice in it has been a chief cause of their success in working republican institutions. Nowhere in Europe has it been so fully left to the hands of the people. The Swiss themselves lay stress upon it, as a means of educating the citizens in public work, as instilling the sense of civic duty, and as enabling governmental action to be used for the benefit of the community without either sacrificing local initiative or making the action of the central authority too strong and too pervasive.32