Governing Globalisation to Overcome Nation-Based Fears: Federalism as the Paradigm of the Contemporary Age

Abstract

The paper recalls the political theory of a group of Italian scholars who led the European Federalist Movement starting from the mid-60s. Their scientific analysis of the globalisation process and their innovative federal state model seems to provide interesting insights into contemporary events. 

Nation-based political paradigms fail to explain or deal with the ongoing global metamorphosis, which has made it impossible to retrace social, economic and military issues to a specific “culpable” State: terrorism strikes both from a generic outside and from within. Hence the collective perception of living in an unstable era of confused and unmanageable disorder and the rising of insecurity-related fears which result in a schizophrenic attitude of micro-nationalism expecting at the same time a protective umbrella from “upper” institutions. This is most tangible in Europe.

The paper highlights with an interdisciplinary approach two features of federalists’ investigation which seem to be particularly relevant today. Their historical analysis underlines how until WW2 European States tried to counteract interdependence by strengthening themselves through nationalism, militarism, autarchy etc. and by leveraging collective fears. Being both symptoms of the collapsing of national States and the tools these States used to preserve themselves, they created a vicious cycle which might still be ongoing today on a more global level. Federalists’ political studies led to the designing of the post-industrial federal State “model”. It is an open multi-levelled institutional schema able to create a new “order” by turning globalisation into a process of both infra-national and supra-national federalisation, and a new global political society by “revolutionising” all political values, notions and lexicon (multi-level governance, pluri-dimensional political loyalty, participatory democracy). Federalism is therefore described as the cultural and political “paradigm” of contemporary age, of which a truly federated Europe might be the first historical implementation.