The Territorial Dimension of Politics: Within, Among, and Across Nations by Ivo D Duchacek & Helena Duchacek

Author:Ivo D Duchacek & Helena Duchacek [Duchacek, Ivo D & Duchacek, Helena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Terrorism, General
ISBN: 9781000270310
Google: b6yhDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 49788921
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

Contemporary Relevance of Old Concepts

It is always tempting and occasionally rewarding to read new relevance into old documents such as the Articles of Confederation and the records of the debates that preceded as well as followed the belated ratification of the Articles on March 1, 1781. There are, of course, some serious analytical risks involved when we intermingle eighteenth-century Massachusetts with twentieth-century France, old Virginia with modern India, and Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania with Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania. When major confederal themes are extrapolated from the political and social turmoil of postcolonial America and projected onto the current world scene, some particular hazards should be noted.

One hazard—and a constant compagnon de route, so to speak—is the tendency to engage in predetermined thinking, either wishful or Cassandra” like. Under its spell, a researcher may unwittingly, though sometimes deliberately, rearrange the past—or the present—to make it fit his or her thesis. Thus, the researcher may look for and therefore selectively find those encouragements or caveats in the past that he or she hopes or fears the present or future may require. In this connection, it is useful to recall that during the period of the Marshall Plan and its explicit encouragement of European unification, some U.S. leaders and even scholars tended to urge their West European counterparts to imitate as speedily as possible the successful model of the U.S. federal unification as anchored in the federal constitution of 1789. Conveniently overlooking the disheartening lesson of the 1860s, these federalist sermons directed at the West Europeans were sometimes glib and, what is worse, based on false analogies.

With regard to the more applicable U.S. confederal model, there is another potential hazard: the tendency to view any contemporary “consociation of homelands” as a prologue to a full federal union that will follow as speedily as it did in the case of the original American states in the 1780s. Jones rightly reminds us that in the United States, the confederation has usually been evaluated as “a way-station on the road to American federalism” rather than a “self-contained episode.”13

The U.S. experience with the “confederal-federal” scenario is a frequent cause of wishful thinking about the European Communities and other confederal frameworks. If, in the United States, confederation was the second act of a political drama whose first act was the Declaration of Independence and whose third act was the federal constitution of 1789, it certainly does not follow that this sequence will occur elsewhere. The most promising and most advanced confederal associations, such as the European Economic Community, may have no federal future. Some confederal associations may remain self-contained episodes of either much longer or much shorter duration than confederal America. Still other associations may never move beyond their planning stage. Conceivably, instead of being a prologue to federal union, a confederal system may be its epilogue or even close-to-last act: a federal state (Bundesstaat) may devolve into an association of states (Staatenbund) to be then followed by the last act of the drama, the dissolution of the system into secessionist components.

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