Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [164]
The Federalist Papers have been required reading for desperate governments seeking to slow the pace of partition and civil disintegration. The Articles of Confederation make far more relevant reading. Article III of the Articles, in conjunction with a revitalization of civil society locally, provides a modest framework for holding rival national fragments together in a loose alliance rather like the one that “united” the three original cantons of Switzerland in 1291 at the Rütli. Article III provides for the full autonomy of the member states and honors their independence (indispensable to those pursuing a politics of identity), but also declares that:
The said states hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade or any other pretense whatsoever.
This would seem to offer a starting place to defend against the depredations both of Jihad and McWorld. The Article assumes a certain root citizenship within each of the states, and probably would be effective only under conditions where civil society had set down such roots. Article IV provides that “the free inhabitants of each” state “shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states, and the people of each state shall have ingress and regress to and from any other state, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce.” Ethnic cleansing and involuntary refugees would be barred, equal citizenship and free movement enjoined.
Similar provisions held together the Helvetic Confederation that made the Swiss such an extraordinary example of democratic association (if not of inclusive citizenship) long before parliamentary institutions elsewhere had found their way to genuine representative government. The splintered factions of many a ruptured nation could do worse than reconceive themselves in terms of a “firm league of friendship” around their common liberties (if they have any!). Quebec and the Anglophone provinces of Canada may well be compelled to such a solution if they are to avoid a costly struggle. Confederalism is no panacea but it may offer a viable alternative to more centralist, coercive, and thus futile solutions to national disintegration. Modeled not on the American Federalist constitution but its confederalist predecessor, which gave the colonies sufficient time to live together to discover the need for more integrative remedies—and to acquire the trust and tolerance on which such remedies depend—this solution offers a gradualist, voluntary, trust-building strategy of supranationality. Like democracy itself, such inclusive forms of confederal association are evolutionary in nature and depend on the success of ties that are initially much looser. The model is Switzerland prior to 1800 rather than the European Union, for Switzerland assured the civic vitality of the parts before crowding them into a larger whole; it took citizenship as a set of local attributes (to become a Swiss one must still acquire communal citizenship first, the national passport comes only afterwards) and by securing them in participatory institutions guaranteed that the confederal whole would be democratic.
The new Europe has in fact seemed most democratic not in its rigid representation of national states and their governments and certainly