Why Federalism: The Conclusion

This is the final entry in my series on supranational federalism. There were five previous entries:

1. The Problem that Needs to be Solved

2. Creating the Cataracts

3. The Unit Question

4. On Citizenship

5. On the Role of China

In these essays, I sought to provide an account not just of what federalism might mean, but how people might be motivated to commit time and energy to it. Over the course of the series, I highlighted five cleavages:

• A Motivational Cleavage: between pragmatic reasons to federate, i.e., to do with managing threats to security or to the environment, and intrinsic reasons to federate that tap into commitments to freedom and to ambitious forms of love.

• A Procedural Cleavage: between the supranational level, where were need universal cataracts that circumscribe commercial and security competition, and the local level, where citizens need to exercise meaningful control over their form of life.

• An Ontic Cleavage: between ontologies of the liberal individual and ontologies that emphasize ineffable, apophatic abstractions.

• An Epistemic Cleavage: between epistemologies that emphasize educated, technocratic expertise and epistemologies that emphasize common sense and lived experience.

• A Geographic Cleavage: between rich countries that consume more than they produce, and developing countries that produce more than they consume.

These disagreements are rooted in five distinct factors:

• Motivationally, there has been an increasing reliance on pragmatic arguments over time, but a simultaneous decrease in their capacity to be sufficiently motivating.[1]

• Procedurally, the post-war international institutions have developed a reputation for homogenizing localities and depriving citizens of their roles in decision-making, while local and national institutions have demonstrated their inability to navigate both the global economy and global security by themselves.[2]

• Ontically, theological concepts have persisted in modernity to a much greater degree than 20^th century theorists of modernization anticipated, but they have also been unable to overcome liberal individualism.[3]

• Epistemically, the expansion of tertiary education to 30-40% of the population in the rich democracies has partially – but only partially – altered citizens’ commitment to democratic epistemologies.[4]

• Geographically, the industrialization of developing countries and the deindustrialization of the rich democracies has produced persistent imbalances that lead to substantive economic disagreements.[5]

  
  

None of these factors are likely to go away in a politically relevant period of time. To be adequately motivating, a federalist proposal must not only acknowledge the five cleavages, it must be designed in a manner that tarries with them. Too often sources of intractable disagreement are ignored or denied. When they are recognized, people often take the sides they prefer or identify with individually and wait for everyone else to come around. But these cleavages have deep roots. They will not go away on a timescale that is relevant for 21^st century people. If a supranational federal republic (SFR) relies on any one of these sides triumphing over the other, it will not happen in our lifetimes.

A viable SFR must therefore be compelling to people on both sides of all five cleavages. If proposals for an SFR are one-sided in any of these five areas, they will fall short, even if they are persuasive for some non-trivial segment of the population.

It is in this sense that supranational federalism must be suprapluralist – it must be able to make a case to people who persistently disagree not merely about substantive issues, but about epistemology and ontology. Our political proposals have to be able to mediate disagreements in areas where there used to be considerably more agreement.

This results in a substantial level of complexity. Our SFR needs to do and be many different things at once:

No one person can be sincerely committed to all of these things to precisely the same degree at precisely the same time. But it is possible to be committed to a political framework that qualifies the one-sidednesses we each (and together), at any given moment, exhibit.

To help get us started, I offered a concrete procedural proposal. The SFR would have three different types of government:

The supranational federal government would circumscribe the commercial and security competition that would otherwise push regional and local governments to behave in a homogenous way. It would do this through a set of “cataracts,” enabling it to make sensitive interventions into commercial flows. These included:

The high wages and high local tax revenues sustained by these cataracts would give cities and counties the freedom to experiment with new forms of life. Citizens would be able to participate meaningfully in local politics, because local politics would be free to become about something other than attracting jobs and investment. They would be free to create new kinds of roles for themselves, enabling them to benefit more profoundly from the technological and economic growth commercial activity generates. Different cities and counties would use this freedom in different ways, depending on the particular mix of motivations, ontologies, epistemologies, and geographies specific to these places at any given moment.

People would be free to migrate from rural areas into the free cities and counties, or from one free place to another, but this migration would be throttled to make it compatible with the temporal intervals necessary for migrating populations to be effectively absorbed in places with limited space. The regional governments would modulate this migration in exchange for rural development funds. In cases where the gap in standard of living or quality of life between the free cities and counties and the rural areas was especially high, the regional governments would have more leverage to demand larger payments for performing this service. Negotiations between rural governments and the free cities and counties would be overseen by the supranational government, preventing deals from being too one-sided in either direction.

The supranational federal government would initially operate with a bicameral legislature. That legislature would be designed both to consider technocratic claims to expertise and to circumscribe any reliance on such claims:

The leaders of the two houses – the Tribune of Labor and the First Citizen – would then compete in a presidential election. All citizens would be eligible to vote in this race. The winner would become the president, while the loser would be the leader of the opposition for the duration of the term.

The bicameral legislature would be designed to liquidate over time – if either chamber came to represent too small a slice of the population, that chamber would be abolished. In this way, the system would be able to accommodate both conditions in which the labor force participation rate dropped considerably and conditions in which high forms of education become sufficiently common that they no longer confer any special epistemic status.

Because some countries have much higher rates of tertiary education than others, a bicameral legislature designed to mediate across epistemologies would also be substantially able to mediate across geography. Developing countries that produce much more than they consume also tend to have lower rates of tertiary education, and rich democracies that consume much more than they produce also tend to have higher rates. Since both types of countries trade with each other (the excess production facilitating excess consumption, and vice versa), integrating both consumerist and productivist places into the SFR from the start substantially reduces the economic costs and disruption involved in constructing a system of this kind.

Because the SFR would materially empower local governments and because the SFR would explicitly protect the political rights of less educated parts of the population, it would be difficult for anti-federalists to credibly portray the SFR as an elite administrative scheme. By moving to politically include developing countries on an equal footing from the beginning, it becomes much harder to portray an SFR as a colonialist or imperialist project embarked upon principally for the benefit of the already wealthy, consumerist democracies.

But to truly defang these objections and produce sincere motivation, the SFR must be perceived as designed to address the problems that people experience themselves as having. This means those seeking to build an SFR must also be involved in political and social struggles for civil, social, and economic rights that have immediate consequences. In the third entry in the series, I drew special attention to healthcare, an issue that affects broad swaths of the population, but which nation-states seem powerless to effectively address.

To motivate large parts of the population to participate in a struggle for an SFR, it’s necessary to show that the limits of the nation-state cannot be overcome through nationalist unilateralism – they can only be overcome by breaking through the limitations imposed by the nation-state as a form. Indeed, many of the things nationalists want from the nation-state can only be had in so far as the nation-state is overcome. By the same token, many of the things anarchists, libertarians, and socialists want can only be had through political mediation. The political cannot be reduced to security competition among autarkist nation-states, nor can it be abandoned in favor of a purely social ontology. The problem with the existing international system is not that it is too political or too internationalist – it is that it is not sufficiently political or internationalist in character. It rests too much on the assumption that only security competition requires serious political mediation, that social cooperation in the form of commercial competition can have only positive results.

There are too many human values that cannot be lived within the constraints of the existing system. It is easy to point to the negative implications of this – citizens come to resent the ways in which post-war nationalist internationalisms fence them in. This desperation produces retrograde strategies, a return to nationalisms and social ontologies that are no longer fit for purpose. These quixotic strategies not only lead nowhere constructive, they actively threaten to plunge the world back into security competition and war. They do this at a time when we are already struggling to adapt to technological, ecological and cultural changes of so many different varieties.

What is more difficult is to make the positive case, to avoid the nihilism that has too often accompanied such observations. Over the course of this series, I have sought to emphasize that human forms of life continue to have meaning, that it is worthwhile to build a political system that unlocks human capacity and potential. The supranational federal republic described in this series is just one image of how this might be done. It can no doubt be improved upon by others. But regardless of whether you find the specific procedural schema persuasive, my hope and wish is that this series motivates you and all who read it to aim higher and try harder to realize whatever you take to be most precious.

Thank you for reading and thinking with me.

Sincerely,

[1] This is grasped by Theodor Adorno in Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 2007), pp. 373–5, where Adorno says, “As the means usurp the end in the ideology swallowed by all populations on earth, so, in the metaphysics that has risen nowadays, does the need usurp that which is lacking. The truth content of the deficiency becomes a matter of indifference; people assert it as being good for people. The advocates of metaphysics argue in unison with the pragmatism they hold in contempt, with the pragmatism that dissolves metaphysics a priori. Likewise, despair is the final ideology, historically and socially as conditioned as the course of cognition that has been gnawing at the metaphysical ideas and cannot be stopped by a cui bono . . . We despair of what is, and our despair spreads to the transcendental ideas that used to call a halt to despair.”

[2] On “glocalization” – the tendency of global problems to spur localist responses – see David R. Agrawal, Jan K. Brueckner, Marius Brülhart, “Fiscal Federalism in the 21st Century,” Annual Review of Economics 16, 2024, pp. 429-54. On the role nationalism plays in this, see Dirk Jörke & Jared Sonnicksen, “Towards an Antifederalist Theory of the EU: Democratic Federal Lessons for the European Union,” Journal of Common Market Studies 58.2 (2020): 217-234. For a thorough discussion of the spatio-temporal limits of modern governance technologies, see Dirk Jörke & Benjamin Studebaker, “Debilitated Democracy: When the Legs Get Ripped Off,” European Journal of Social Theory. Forthcoming.

[3] Consider, e.g., Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 2013) or Siegfried Van Duffel, “Sovereignty as a Religious Concept,” The Monist 90.1 (2007): 126-143.

[4] There has been a considerable amount of new work published on the education cleavage in recent years. See for instance Miloš Broćić and Andrew Miles, “College and the ‘Culture War’: Assessing Higher Education’s Influence on Moral Attitudes,” American Sociological Review 86.5 (2021), pp. 856-895; Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, “How does the education cleavage stack up against the classic cleavages of the past?” West European Politics (2025), https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2025.2452789; Julian L. Garritzmann, “From educational conflicts to an educational cleavage? The multiple transformations of educational conflicts from medieval to post-industrial times,” West European Politics (2025), https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2025.2512295.

[5] See e.g., Nita Rudra, Globalization and the Race to the Bottom in Developing Countries: Who Really Gets Hurt? Cambridge University Press, 2009; Michael Pettis and Matt Klein, Trade Wars are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace, Yale University Press, 2020; Palma Polyak, “The Silent Losers of Germany’s Export Surpluses: How Current Account Imbalances are Exacerbated by the Misrepresentation of their Domestic Costs,” Comparative European Politics, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-022-00291-8