World Federalist Association

Pax Romana World Federalist Movement

The Eighth Annual National Federalist Society Symposium on Law and Public Policy, 1989.

Then, once the European project is halfway over the cliff, the federalist moment might arrive. But the operative word is might a headlong plunge into the abyss might prove equally likely.

And, while India urgently needs to reform its tax system, spending policies, and regulation, political change is difficult in a multiparty federalist democracy of 1.2 billion people spread over a large subcontinent. The current government is a fragile multiparty coalition.

In the midst of constant civil wars which shook Nueva Granada throughout the nineteenth century, and in an effort to thwart Panama apos s struggle to regain its independence, a new federalist Constitution was introduced which remained in force until 1886.

It is time for the Sunni world to recognize the need for a federalist approach to manage the instability and conflict that plagues it. Even the US must reconsider its regional policy, which has long depended on alliances with despotic Sunni rulers.

MADRID Before his appointment as EU Commission President, Jean Claude Juncker was pilloried as an old school federalist who would do little to alter the status quo. But the new structure that he has imposed on the Commission implies a radical overhaul of how things are done in Brussels.

Ongoing violence in Basra and the fighting between Sunni Awakening Councils and Al Qaida in Iraq demonstrate this. In fact, the current escalation points to an increasing political struggle between the federalist position of Shia Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki and the centralist position of Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr.

In fact, many of the federalist arguments look dubious in particular, there is no single European social model. The differences for instance between the Scandinavian countries, the Mediterranean countries, and the liberal Atlantic countries like Ireland and the UK are sometimes more pronounced than those between Europe as a whole and the US.

But the last few years have made clear the absence of majority support for a European federation by the states that make up Europe, a point underscored by the debate surrounding the failed Constitutional Treaty. In fact, many of the federalist arguments look dubious in particular, there is no single European social model.

For others, especially in the European Union s Brussels Eurocracy, it is seen as another leap forward in the construction of a European super state. Taking their cue from the sacred Rome Treaty s reference to ever closer union, the European Commission s theologians view every crisis as an opportunity to advance their federalist agenda.

In 1790, when Alexander Hamilton argued that the new federal government should assume the states debts from the War of Independence, he encountered fierce hostility. The only way to sustain such a new political order, James Madison argued in The Federalist Papers, was to ensure that federal powers were few and limited.

Outsiders and the few Iraqi liberals worry mainly about this Islamic provision, but the widespread Sunni opposition to the constitution is aimed at other provisions the exclusion of the Saddamist Ba ath Party from political life and government, and the federalist provisions that grant autonomy to the 18 Iraqi provinces and allow them to combine into regional governments.

The Sunnis would probably accept the federalist provisions if they applied only to the Kurds. They know that the alternative is not a return to centralism, but secession by the three Kurdish majority provinces of Dahuk, Arbil, and As Sulaymaniyah to form an independent Kurdistan, with its own treasury, army (the Pesh Merga), and oil production around Kirkuk the second largest reserves in Iraq.

Americans do not believe that liberal democracy is the best form of government because what the people want is automatically right or good, but because it pits interest against interest. As James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.