No Laughing Matter
Posted on June 19th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Would James laugh at regionalism in Greece? Actually, he might laugh loudest about this, but I thought his remark about small-country regionalism was a little odd. He wrote:
Spanish regionalism seems absurd because the regions in question are almost laughably small and self-sufficient, from a large-country perspective, only in a petty and dissatisfying way. Back in the old days, Western political theorists worried that a large republic was impossible. De Maistre joked that in all history’s rolls of the regime dice, the side marked LARGE REPUBLIC [his caps] never came up. Not even once.
At the time De Maistre told his joke, he was correct, and one might ask whether it is still true. The Antifederalists, after thumbing through their Montesqieu, kept insisting that the Constitution centralised too much power and attempted to create what they liked to call an ”extended” republic whose size would invite, indeed demand, increased power at the center to govern effectively. In the end, the federal republic was consolidated because it came to pass that an extended republic that was not consolidated would break up along regional or sectional lines according to the political differences between blocs of states. Madison’s sleight-of-hand about factions is an amazing piece of work, and he is rightly acclaimed for the clever argument he makes about this, even though it turned out to be almost entirely wrong. In a small republic, factions would be too dangerous, so you needed to have a larger republic that would allow these factional forces to balance each other. The trouble is that they have a centrifugal effect, which causes the center to exert more and more control to hold the entire system together up to and including the use of force, which from the old-fashioned republican perspective would mean the death of republicanism and the beginning of something else.
The survival of regionalism and cultural diversity and their expression through political autonomism even within small, largely homogenous states is a reminder that the centrifugal effects of regional difference are the natural forces that keep resisting the drive to centralise power in a national government. They are reminders of how many existing political and cultural identities had to be suppressed and homogenised to create even relatively small nation-states. To the extent that regionalism in Europe is effectively an ally of supra-national consolidation into the E.U., I’m not sure that it will ultimately survive, and it may simply be a symptom of the weakening of the nation-state, but for my part I find small-country regionalism reassuring that attempts to consolidate diverse regions under a single national regime on much smaller geographical scale have ultimately been unsuccessful. That hints at the possibility that the success of decentralism here is not so much of a matter of if as it is of when.
Filed under: decentralism, politics
“That hints at the possibility that the success of decentralism here is not so much of a matter of if as it is of when.”
That’s interesting, but it begs a further question: What role, large or small, does mass popular culture play in counterbalancing this trend? Regional and state differences, while still not nothing, are surely less pronounced now then they were 200 or 100 or even 50 years ago, as increasingly we read the same books, listened to the same music, watched the same TV shows and movies. Does whatever cultural differentiation that still exists get buried under a mass produced mass consumed pop culture?
“Spanish regionalism seems absurd because the regions in question are almost laughably small and self-sufficient, from a large-country perspective, only in a petty and dissatisfying way.”
I would quibble with this example, as there is still a very strong linguistic component to Spanish regionalism (Basque, Catalan, etc.) that regionalism in the US does not have (minor exceptions being the French speaking parts of S. Louisiana, Gullah speakers in the Eastern coastal islands). I’m not sure that someone in Bibalo or Barcelona who feels themselves to be culturally Basque or Catalan would laugh at all, or find their cultural identity to be a petty matter.
Inasmuch as he’s not here to defend himself, a word on behalf Madison’s position. First, the center’s slide toward conflict you posit to corral centrifugal factions would not have been contrasted with peacefully coexisting regional entities. Madison worried about the competition among the regional blocs and the warring interventions to which that would have given rise by meddling outside powers.
Second, this matryoshka doll of supra-nation, nation, and region does have other figures, including the individual and minorities whose rights can be better protected by power centered at the national level. In regions they are vulnerable to oppressive local factions and while in the supra-national or any confederated arrangement they may be sacrificed to preserve the inclusion of the intermediate state or region.
There are counter-examples to my view. Some minorities may fare better in empires (though sometimes at the expense of others, the Sunnis in Iraq under the Ottomans being one example.). Despite its national government, African-Americans in the South both before and after the Civil War had their rights suppressed to form the Union, first, and then as a chip in a political bargain for those in other regions to gain national power.
No doubt, as another commenter observed, there’s just more to it than sizing and structuring the relationships. Madison wrote from the frontiers of the science of politics that now has new frontiers. Still, I am ready to credit him with the appreciation of a fuller range of dangers from which protection was needed.