Where Have All The Leaders Gone? : Federalism Is the Great Healer

When the European Conference on Security and Cooperation convened in Paris last month, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl warned against “retrograde nationalisms” that could disrupt the building of the “common house” of Europe. He was calling attention to one of the many paradoxes that stud, like sequins, the debutante’s gown of the New World Order as it struggles to fashion itself amid the ruins of the Cold War.

This gown could become the shirt of Nessus, which tears away the skin that wears it, unless forms of conciliation are found between the worldwide movement toward interdependence and the multiple nationalist tendencies that are now rising to contradict it. Nowhere is this truer than in the Soviet Union.

Certainly, it is extremely difficult to predict whether Mikhail S. Gorbachev will outlast the changes that he has so courageously initiated, or fall victim to his own Frankenstein. But the cat is out of the bag and is roaming a world of instant communications, available information and visual vocabulary. The new political grammar transforms walls into air, and iron curtains into windows of irony.

But the Soviet crisis does point to one of the great paradoxes of the movements we are witnessing. The trilogy of economic interdependence, technological progress and instant communications can conceivably lead us all--from Moscow to Madrid to Mexico City--to a better world order of shared plenty.

Yet hardly has this door been opened than, in much of the world, the problems of culture and ethnicity have riotously stepped in to break up the celebration.

The paradox: If economic rationality tells us that the next century will be the age of global integration of the world’s national economies, cultural “irrationality” steps in to inform us that it will also be the century of ethnic demands and revived nationalisms.

How can you quicken the step toward global integration if you have Ukrainians and Lithuanians, Georgians and Armenians, Moldavians and Azeris yapping at your heels, denying the principle of a worldwide integration of productive forces? This is where political and cultural imaginations must join together to ask: Can we conciliate global economic demands with the resurrection of these nationalistic claims?

Both reason and imagination tell us that the name of the solution is federalism.

My hope is that we will witness a re-evaluation of the federalist theme as a compromise between three equally real forces--the nation, the region and the world.

To this end, “The Federalist Papers” should be distributed in the millions. Although 200 years old, it may hold the secret to making the New World Order work.

“The Federalist Papers” was written by three great North American statesmen, when there was such a thing: Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison. The applicability of their 85 essays is, of course, neither universal nor restricted to conditions in 1787. Madison, for example, addressed the human tendency toward factionalism. While clearly understanding that its causes were difficult to uproot, he proposed to control its effects.

How?

Through a seeming paradox: A strong national government, but controlled by checks and balances, separation of powers and federal diffusion of authority. You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

Thanks to “The Federalist Papers,” 13 factious little colonies of the English New World became a great modern nation. As the United States, Canada and Mexico today are designing a North American free-trade area, one wonders about the fate of the Iberoamerican republics to the south of the United States? Do they pose problems comparable to those we are seeing in the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe--not to mention Ireland and the Basque country, Brittany and Quebec?

The world transformation has caught Latin America in a vicious crisis--political, social, economic--with scant resources to actively present ourselves in the new, multipolar order.

Yet our contemporary crisis has made us realize that one thing endures in the midst of our political and economic failures. It is our cultural continuity, the multiracial and pluralistic culture we have created during the past 500 years.

Contrary to current events in Europe and Asia, cultural demands in Latin America do not disrupt the national or even the global rationalities. They reinforce them.

If, in Eurasia, the problem is the conciliation of international integration with ethnic demands through a new federalist regime, in Latin America the problem is to conciliate economic growth with social justice through, again, a democratic federalism.

Latin America has a peculiar advantage over other regions in today’s world. Our national cultures coincide with the physical limits of each of our nations, even as our larger cultural boundaries embrace the Iberian peninsula--Spain and Portugal--and through them Europe; and even as our internal diversification includes Indian and black cultures.

The important thing is that no local separatisms menace our national unity or our neighbors’ territorial integrity. Our culture, precisely because it is so varied--European, Indian, black--does not propose religious fundamentalisms or ethnic intolerance. As the Venezuelan author Arturo Uslar Pietri puts it, even when we are purely white in Latin America (and whites are a minority), we are Indian and we are black. Our culture cannot be understood without all three components. We are mestizo--a mixture of tastes, mores, memories and accents.

What we do bear is profound social injustice. But because the national cultures are contained within the national boundaries, it is up to each of us to solve this problem through local politics. It is here that the federalist idea is quite relevant for Latin America.

Traditionally, we have been ruled from the center and from the top. Today, emerging new civil societies--from Mexico to Argentina--propose rule from the bottom and from the outskirts of society.

The mission of Latin American democracy is to conciliate both movements. Whether in Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s Mexico, Alberto Fujimori’s Peru or Fernando Collor de Mello’s Brazil, we are trying to extend the republic, as Madison put it.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was widely believed that international resources previously earmarked for Latin America would now quickly shift to Central Europe and the Soviet Union. This has not happened.

The magnitude of the Eastern European crisis--nationalisms, separatisms, ethnic revolts and a 50-year backwardness in all aspects of economic life, from deteriorating infrastructures to wholesale ecocide--has given us all pause.

All this is making us realize that the problems of Eurasia, from the Elbe to the Pacific, require a major international effort comparable to the Marshall Plan. Massive new public investment is needed to boost communications, education, housing and a clean environment.

In most of these respects, Latin America is more modern and developed. Comparatively, we have a better basis for attracting investment than Poland, Romania or even Czechoslovakia.

As the dust of the critical ‘80s settles, we can judge our mistakes, but also our successes in historical perspective. Beginning with Battle in Uruguay, the Popular Front in Chile or Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico, the nation-state did create infrastructure, education, health and opportunities for the private sector throughout Latin America.

Of course, the state did become bloated. The private sector did become lazy and overprotected. Debt cut everyone’s wings. But, as a result of our historical commitments, there is life after debt.

Even as Latin America organizes her democratic existence and reforms her economic life, she has a great contribution to make to international relations. The end of the Cold War creates a new international context that demands cooperation, but refuses intervention.

As a result of our difficult dealings with our powerful northern neighbor, few regions in the world have greater experience in diplomatic negotiation than Latin America. This has created a cultural tradition that stresses peaceful solution of controversies, diplomacy and adherence to international laws and treaties.

If the federalist spirit becomes successfully ingrained at the national level in Latin America, it can perhaps play a role in uniting our republics in response to collective external challenges.

A free-trading zone in this continent would seem to be the first stage.

But we should not become fixated on “an initiative of the Americas.” Europe and the Pacific are equally important. Indeed, might not a federal Iberoamerica be the bridge between Europe and the Pacific?

Exactly 100 years ago, the Cuban patriot Jose Marti warned: “If we want to assure freedom, we must balance trade. A people who want to die trade with only one country. A people who want salvation trade with more than one.”