Problems in ethnofederalism and quasi-federalism

There are a few possible outcomes for today's election in Britain that would be of especially great interest for students of ethnofederalism and quasifederalism.

1) If the Tories gain a plurality but not a majority-- and could get over the top with the help of a Celtic party. It's improbable that they would get such help-- except for the UUP, whose candidates are standing as part of the Tory caucus this year, the gulf between the Tories and the non-English parties is substantial.

But this would also mean that Lib-Lab plus one or two Celtic parties would add up to a majority.

Imagine a hung Parliament in which the Tories have two more seats than Lib-Lab-- but Tories + SNP would be a majority, or Lib-Lab + SNP + Plaid Cyrmu would be a majority.

SNP and PC, like the Bloc Quebecois, are generally committed to not being in the business of deciding who runs the whole state. But at that point (like in the aftermath of the last Canadian election) the pressure on them to pick a side could be ratcheted up. So could the inducements offered to them to do so.

If you're David Cameron under these circumstances, do you open negotiations with the SNP? Or do you rely on the pious hope that they can be left out of the calculations, because Lib-Lab won't do a deal with them either?

Now imagine if Tory seats = Lib-Lab seats precisely. If you're the SNP, can you really resist the chance to play kingmaker, to start a bidding war, to name your price?

2) If the Tories gain a plurality, but Lib-Lab together gains a very slim majority, a different set of problems arise that has nothing to do with the Celtic partiesand everything to do with the West Lothian question. This outcome would mean that the Tories had won a majority of seats in England, given party distributions elsewhere. But the government would be Lib-Lab.

Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland-- but not England-- have and regional self-government of varying degrees. England is still ruled directly from Westminster. There has been contention over whether Scottish MPs should be able to vote on individual pieces of legislation that affects England (or England and Wales) but not Scotland. But I think this election result would put the problem in a new, sharper, light. A government that has authority over English-- but not Scottish-- domestic policy would have been decisively chosen by Scottish votes, in the face of an English majority in the other direction.

I could imagine that result being inflammatory; it might finally succeed in igniting widespread English interest in the West Lothian question. That would, I think, pose more dangers for the Tories than it would offer advantages-- as a generation of conflict over Europe showed, identity questions can fracture the Conservative Party, and its leadership has little skill in finessing them. But this outcome would offer a very powerful incentive to the Tories to start playing the Little England card.

See also Chris Lawrence.

Update

We're right in the thick of condition (1)-- and it's amazing how invisible the SNP and PC are. The Bloc Quebecois doesn't enter into governments in Canada-- but it's willing to negotiate its price for tacitly supporting minority governments.

In Britain, the only choices are:

Tory-LibDem coalition, or at least arrangement to keep LibDem from voting down a Queen's Speech;

Tory-Labour grand coalition, which is never going to happen;

a minority government that could be brought down with a sneeze or a stiff breeze, whether Conservative or Labour or Lib-Lab;

or that somebody talks to the SNP and Plaid Cymru and gets their agreement not to vote down a minority government (the SNP, at least, will not take part in government.)

Thisarticle says that the SNP has begun talks with Labour. But that fact isn't being reported anywhere else, and it has the potential to be decisive.

Superseding reparations

This slightly mad Henry Louis Gates op-ed (apparent thesis: the history of slavery has responsibility that's widely distributed and hard to disentangle across North America, Europe, and west Africa, so thank goodness we now have a President whose half-east African, half-white ancestry gives him magical historical-responsibility-apportioning powers) made me, possibly, realize something.

Gates hints that, if reparations are owed to the descendants of slaves, they might be owed in part by [some] west Africans whose ancestors were involved in the slave trade.

I think this is finally a case that lets my moral intuition click into the patterns set by Jeremy Waldron's famously controversial article Superseding Historic Injustice. Waldron argues that forward-looking demands of distributive justice and the welfare of the poor trump backward-looking rectification. There's much more to it, but that's one of the key moral ideas. As applied to the indigenous land rights cases that he talks about, I've never found this even slightly compelling. But: I can't imagine the fact pattern or historical evidence that would make me think taxing west Africans in 2010 to make payments to African-Americans in 2010, when the latter have a standard of living between 20 and 50 times higher than the former. Liberia has a per-capita income of just over a dollar a day. Extracting even millions, to say nothing of tens or hundreds of millions, of dollars (and in dollars, that is, exhausting-and-then-some the foreign exchange reserve capacity of west African states) from people many of whom are among the poorest in the world just can't be what justice demands.

I could just fall back on the following, which is part of how I think about reparation cases anyways: the United States government and the government of the several states within it are historically and institutionally continuous with those that perpetrated slavery. There's been no repudiation of the national debt in the US since that time. So those governments are corporate actors that could still be liable for "their" misdeeds of a century and a half ago (and more recent misdeeds as well, since I think much of the case for reparations rests on the Jim Crow era). No west African state and probably no west African collectivity or corporation has that same demonstrable intergenerational continuity. The relevant actors have ceased to exist. So there's no one who could be held responsible today in west Africa, although there is in the US.

That seems plausible to me. But it also seems unnecessary to reach the conclusion. Forward-looking distributive and welfarist considerations alone would, it seems to me, trump any backward-looking evidence of continuity one could find. That's not a comfortable view for me, and maybe my intuition is still entangled with other facts about the case. But at least I can now see Waldron's point on a basic level that I've never managed before, even though I can follow the argument just fine.

(Hat tip Melissa Harris-Lacewell on twitter.)

Le fédéralisme multinational en perspective : un modèle viable ?

Colloque organisé par Michel Seymour à l’Université du Québec à Montréal

25-26-27 septembre 2009, salle D-R200 de l’UQAM (Pavillon Athanase-David, 1430 Saint-Denis)

Qu’est-ce que le fédéralisme multinational ? Quels sont les enjeux soulevés par la présence de plusieurs peuples au sein d’un État fédéral ? Est-ce que le fédéralisme apparaît tout indiqué pour gérer la diversité nationale ? Ces questions se posent au Canada depuis toujours, mais elles se posent aussi dans plusieurs autres sociétés. Des États fédéraux multinationaux tels que l’URSS, la Yougoslavie et la Tchécoslovaquie n’existent plus. La Belgique vacille face au défi d’accommoder la diversité nationale en son sein. Aussi, même si d’autres États multinationaux fédéraux ou quasi-fédéraux tels que l’Inde, l’Espagne et le Canada existent encore, la question de la viabilité de l’État fédéral multinational doit être soulevée.

Des questions plus spécifiques peuvent aussi être posées qui mettent en relation les expériences de sociétés particulières avec la problématique générale du fédéralisme multinational. Quelles sont les promesses du fédéralisme multinational canadien ? Que penser de la reconnaissance du Québec comme nation, de la résolution possible du déséquilibre fiscal, de la limitation du « pouvoir fédéral de dépenser », du rôle international que joue ou que pourrait jouer le Québec et du fédéralisme asymétrique ? S’agit-il d’éléments qui composent le fédéralisme multinational ?


More information is here.

Kymlicka interviewed about Canadian multiculturalism...

in the Globe and Mail. Includes some discussion of the Tamil community's distinctive political profile, as well as discussions about the Canadian high-skill immigration model.

Elsewhere

At Lawyers,guns, and Money, djw and commentators discuss the choice of "Bombay" or "Mumbai" as a name, with some reference to some things I wrote about it some time ago. I still do say "Bombay," for the reasons I describe in the passage quoted in djw's post. As John says in the comment thread, "I'd rather side with Rushdie than with Shiv Sena."

But as a usage matter, "Mumbai" has stuck, and now has almost ten more years in use than it had had when I wrote Multiculturalism of Fear. I think I correctly described what happened then, and that the general point I was using the case to illustrate is right, but I do also recognize that in linguistic matters, eventually "long usage is a law sufficient." I'm not sure at what point my resistance to Shiv Sena becomes the cranky old Bircher in the corner saying "Peking" or Grandpa Simpson refusing to recognize Missourah.

I've got nothing else new to add, though of course I was pleased that djw found my discussion of the case useful.

Book launch: For Kin or Country: Xenophobia, Nationalism and War

Wednesday, November 19, 5-7 pm, McGill Bookstore: Book launch for Stephen Saideman and R. William Ayres, For Kin or Country: Xenophobia, Nationalism and War, Columbia University Press, 2008.

State size follow-up

I speculated last week that the way the financial crisis swamped Iceland and seems to show the need for deep pockets and deep capital reserves within a financial system ("seems"-- I have no view about whether that's an economically true lesson to draw) probably did some damage to small-nation secessionists such as Quebec or Scottish nationalists.

From yesterday's Washington Post:

The massive bailout of banks has been widely received as welcome and necessary across the United Kingdom. But it has not been lost on Scots that the largest shareholder in Scotland's two largest banks is now the British government.

[...]

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a native Scot but an outspoken advocate of keeping Scotland in the U.K. fold, seemed to go out of his way Tuesday to tweak advocates of independence, especially the SNP.

Brown said the $65 billion bailout of the Royal Bank of Scotland and the bank formed by the merger of Lloyds TSB and the Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) proved that the United Kingdom was "stronger together."

"We were able to act decisively with 37 billion pounds; that would not have been possible for a Scottish administration," said Brown, whose own political fortunes have been boosted by his handling of the crisis.

Others have pointed out that the bailout for eight major British banks -- including capital for banks and government loan guarantees -- is worth a total of almost $700 billion, which is about five times Scotland's annual gross domestic product.

Brown particularly seemed to taunt Alex Salmond, the SNP chief and head of the Scottish government, who has said he wants an independent Scotland to be part of an "arc of prosperity" stretching from Iceland to Ireland to Norway.

The SNP Web site speaks admiringly of Iceland as "the sixth most prosperous country in the world," words that were written before last week's massive banking and economic crash, which nearly bankrupted the country.

"We've seen the problems in Iceland; we've seen the problems in Ireland. We were able to put the whole strength of the United Kingdom's resources behind these two banks" in Scotland, Brown said, provoking an irritated response from Salmond. [...]

The financial crisis and secession

Since 1990, the world has seen something of a proliferation of new independent states: 15 from the old Soviet Union, 2 from Czechoslovakia, 6 or so from Yugoslavia, plus Eritrea and East Timor. This has not ben caused by, but has certainly been aided by, a sense that the minimum size for state viability wasn't very large in an era of peace and free trade. The Baltics couldn't militarily survive the late 30s/ early 40s, but that's not our world anymore; the Czech and Slovak Republics had no economic need to stay unwillingly joined if they could trade across an international boundary almost as easily as within a common one. Regional defense organizations and regional trade unions-- prominently NATO and the EU-- made a huge difference here.

The Russia-Georgia war perhaps marks the end of the "peace" described above. Being in line for NATO membership someday is nice and all, but it's not remotely the same as being part of a great power that protects you as part of its own territory.

And the financial crisis may-- may-- mean that minimum viable state size ratchets back up on the economic side as well. Being Singapore or Switzerland or Luxembourg or a banking haven in the Caribbean has been a pretty good deal in an age of easy trade in goods and easy capital mobility. But now: Iceland gets caught in the financial crisis having to bail out a bank with assets many times its GDP, and without the deep capital or foreign currency reserves that a place like the US or Germany or Japan or Britain has.

This suggests great trouble for Quebec nationalism as a project, maybe somewhat less for Scottish or Catalan-- Iceland has a separate currency that's taking a beating; Scotland and Catalonia would be in the EU and probably in the euro zone. But the lack of capital depth would have hit Iceland now even if it were inside the EU and the euro zone.

Small-country wealth within free trade has been one of the virtues of the broadly liberal era we've been living through. When states are dominant economic actors, it's far more important what state (and how strong a state, and how big a state) you live in.

McGill political science finding of the day

Ethnic conflict stoked by government economic intervention, not globalization: McGill researchers

Economic globalization and liberalization have been blamed for numerous social ills over the last two decades, including a sharp rise in interethnic violence in countries all over the world. Not so, say the results of a study conducted by researchers from McGill University and published in the current issue of the journal International Studies Quarterly.

In fact, according to Dr. Stephen Saideman and his former McGill Master’s student David Steinberg – now pursuing his doctorate at Northwestern University – the more government intervention there is in the local economy, the more likely interethnic violence and rebellion becomes. Conversely, the more economically open a society is, the less likely such violence becomes.

“Our study counters the idea that a liberalized economy is worse for ethnic groups. Minorities are more likely to be on the outside of the political system,” explained Saideman, associate professor and associate director of graduate studies in the Department of Political Science, and Canada Research Chair in International Security and Ethnic Conflict. “So, if the government is involved in the economy, minorities are more likely to be affected by the whims of the state than by the whims of the market.”

Utilizing their own original research, along with the Minorities at Risk dataset compiled by their colleagues at the University of Maryland, Steinberg and Saideman’s results show that government intervention in the economy leads to a spiral of political competition among groups to gain control of the state and the economic spoils it distributes.

“Thus groups on the outs feel threatened because they have no control, which can lead to open rebellion,” Saideman said, “while those who are in power become terrified of losing control, as occurred in Serbia. Before the war the Serbs controlled a large hunk of the Yugoslav political system and it was their fear of losing it that led to war.”

Moreover, the researchers said, their results were reasonably consistent in virtually every society they studied, regardless of political system.

“We’re not just talking about command economies like the old Soviet Union or Yugoslavia,” he said. “We control for regime type, so whether a country is a democracy or not, statistically and probabilistically, the more government involvement there is in the economy, the more likely ethnic conflict is.”

Though interethnic violence is somewhat more likely to occur in less-developed economies, Saideman said, similar interventions even in the industrialized world have the potential to sow serious intergroup tensions.

“Ironically, look at how the government of the United States is now in the process of buying up a large hunk of the economy to bail out Wall Street,” he said. “In the future this will give people who are denied loans or who have other economic grievances an incentive to blame the government. They won’t consider factors like oil shocks and housing bubbles, it will all be laid on the government’s doorstep.”