Year LXIV, 2022, Single Issue, Page 99
THE AGGRESSION AGAINST UKRAINE AND
THE OUTLOOK FOR FEDERALISM IN THE WORLD
The New International Political Scenario.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has profoundly changed the international political scenario. The international political system is divided once again, just as it was during the Cold War. Power politics is back, and with it the worrying risk of an escalation that could lead to the use of nuclear weapons, as Russian government leaders have repeatedly threatened. All this is accompanied by a global economic crisis characterised by inflation, the threat of recession, and deepening social inequalities.
The first casualties of this deterioration in the international political climate are the nuclear non-proliferation treaties: in this regard, we may cite the abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal and the demise of the INF Treaty, as well as the fact that the latest two Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conferences, held in 2015 and 2022, ended in failure to agree on an outcome document.
Putin has destroyed the pillars on which Russia’s relations with the civilised world were based, and the rules governing peaceful coexistence between the world’s leading political players. In his opening address to the United Nations General Assembly on 20 September, 2022,[1] António Guterres declared that “Our world is in peril — and paralysed (…). The international community is not ready or willing to tackle the big dramatic challenges of our age”. In a sobering assessment of the present and future ills of a world that is close to an irreversible tipping point, a world in which we risk having “No cooperation. No dialogue. No collective problem solving”, he concluded that the time has come to revive the fundamental values on which the United Nations is based.
The invasion of Ukraine is the latest example of the disorder currently sweeping the world. Russia has violated the rules of the world order that were stipulated in 1945 and 1991. However, Putin’s original plan to overcome Ukrainian resistance in the space of a week and replace Zelensky with a puppet government has failed, and, as we write, Russian troops have pulled back to the left bank of the Dnieper River. It thus appears that Russia, a petrostate struggling with serious economic backwardness, has no chance of winning the war. Meanwhile, its aggression against Ukraine has had the effect of strengthening the cohesion of the international alignment that supports Kyiv, as shown both by the EU’s endorsement of Ukraine’s application to join the bloc, and by Sweden and Finland’s applications for NATO membership; and it also appears to have irritated Russia’s allies, China and India, which have condemned Putin’s nuclear threats. In short, Russia has progressively isolated itself from the international community. However, backed into a corner from which it has no escape route, it retains the capacity to lash out, and for this reason is still very dangerous.
Europe’s Dependence on Russian Gas.
This war cannot end with a winner and a loser. Russia’s status as a great nuclear power means that its defeat, in a traditional military sense, is impossible. A compromise solution will therefore have to be found, which is what Macron meant when he warned that Russia must not be humiliated. Considering that supplying arms to Ukraine and imposing economic sanctions against Russia have thus far been insufficient to stop the war, an immediate ceasefire is now the first step needing to be taken in order to resume the process of building world peace.
The total embargo on imports of Russian gas and oil, introduced by the EU in line with the position of the United States and following a proposal by the European Parliament, had it been adopted as soon as Ukraine was invaded, would have deprived Russia of the resources it needed to finance the war. It was a unique opportunity, but the EU wasted it. As a result, the ball is now back in Russia’s court, making it highly likely that the Russians will turn off the gas taps. Now, negotiations can only be started once both sides accept, given the existing balance of forces, that neither of them can prevail.
Europe’s dependence Russian gas has proved to be a colossal strategic mistake that has tied the hands of most of the European countries, especially Germany and Italy. The idea that Russia, because of its economic backwardness and high economic dependence on fossil fuels (destined to run out and be replaced by renewable energy sources), would be forced to seek some form of partnership with the EU, and more generally with the West, in the mould of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, has turned out to have no basis in fact. The decision to build the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was taken a year after Russia annexed Crimea, when Putin’s expansionist ambitions were already clear to see. Until the war actually began, though, Germany continued to believe in the prospect of détente and dialogue with Moscow. Now, with winter almost upon us, the EU must take steps to remedy the situation, by stepping up its pursuit of energy independence, i.e., by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy resources as far as possible, by storing gas in order to be able to cope with the reduction, or even interruption, of gas supplies from Russia, and by diversifying its supply sources, importing more from Norway, Egypt, Israel, Azerbaijan and Algeria. Given that the world depended on fossil fuels for 82 per cent of its energy in 2021, a proportion that has dropped by only three percentage points in the past five years,[2] it is clearly delusional to count on a rapid decarbonisation of the production system, a process that is still destined to take a number of years.
The War in Ukraine Is Preventing Progress on the Road to World Federalism.
It is important to consider that the war is not simply a conflict between Russia and Ukraine. It is a war waged by Russia against the EU and what it represents for the world, i.e.:
— a model of international democracy which extends its range of action beyond national borders without resorting to weapons, and has shown that it can unite the European peoples under the flag of the great political values of freedom, democracy and human rights;
— an international order based on the rule of law and defence of human rights as opposed to the balance of power among sovereign states;
— a global player with the capacity to drive the formation of a multipolar international political system able, through international cooperation and multilateralism, to replace the violent antagonism of hostile forces.
The war has upset the order of priorities on the world political agenda, and as long as it goes on there can be no resumption of dialogue between the great powers, or progress in terms of spreading multilateralism and federalism in the world. Military spending absorbs huge financial resources that could be used for the investments needed to promote the transition towards a sustainable development model, in other words, to finance the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, the welfare state, the European social model, the digital transformation, arms reduction, and so on. This is why the priority goal of federalist strategy has to be the ceasefire that will make it possible to negotiate peace and silence the arms. Now, though, is not the time to dwell on the details of a plan to build a new and peaceful world order: to do so would amount to putting the cart before the horse.
We need to be aware that, under the current circumstances, conditions favourable to a renewal of multilateralism and to the spread of federalism can manifest themselves only in those great regions of the world whose internal cohesion is stronger than the cohesion, at world level, fostered by the phenomenon of globalisation. The EU stands out in this regard. And it is actually the Russian invasion, by prompting Ukraine to apply to join the EU, that has restarted the Union’s process of enlargement. At the same time, Europe also needs to create an energy union, which would represent the largest transfer of sovereignty since the monetary union and would put Europe in a stronger position to negotiate gas prices with Russia. Finally, it is important to remember that energy transition is the key way to fight the deadly threat of climate change.
But the African Union and Latin America also offer the conditions necessary to move towards closer forms of economic and monetary union. In 2019, the African Continental Free Trade Area was created, while in 2007, Mercosur and the Andean Community created the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). To develop further, these two integration processes need external support, which the EU, the world’s largest economic and monetary union, could provide.
Regional Organisations as Pillars of UN Reform.
The United Nations Charter (Articles 52-54) clearly recognises the role played by regional international organisations in the maintenance of peace and security. They represent one of the most significant innovations in international relations seen in the 20th and 21st centuries. It is, after all, hard to imagine that world peace might be brokered between member states numbering as many as 200 or so. In fact, the steady increase in UN member states (there are now almost four times the number there were in 1945) has led to an alarming trend towards fragmentation and anarchy in this setting. And the great disparity in the size and power of the member states is the UN’s most serious structural flaw.
Regional organisations represent an intermediate level of governance between nation-states and the United Nations. It should be noted that the different regional integration processes differ considerably in scale. An idealistic enthusiasm for large-scale solutions, illustrated by the Bolivarian project for a federation of Latin American peoples or by pan-Africanism and pan-Arabism, coexists with sub-regional integration processes, which better reflect the current extent of economic and social interdependence.
Regional peace-building is a prerequisite for creating world peace. The regional government is an indispensable tool for making the functioning of the United Nations more efficient, fairer and more democratic. Regional groupings of states represent an alternative to the United Nations’ current hierarchical structure, which reflects the power disparity between states of different sizes (ranging from city-states such as San Marino to states of subcontinental dimensions such as India), and to the organisation’s fragmentation into an unmanageable number of states. In other words, having a smaller number of players in the international system of states would facilitate negotiations and international cooperation.
It should be noted that within the United Nations, regions are understood to correspond to continents, with the notable exception of Europe, which, in a hangover from the Cold War, continues to be divided into East and West. To distribute the seats within the UN, the member states are divided into five groups: “Asia-Pacific States”, “African States”, “Latin American and Caribbean States”, “Eastern European States”, and “Western European and other States”. The last of these groups includes Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, while the USA is a special case, i.e., it “is not a member of any regional group, but attends meetings of the Group of Western European and other States as an observer and is considered to be a member of that group for electoral purposes.”[3] The Eastern European group includes Russia, a state that is both European and Asian.
It is, nevertheless, important to ake into account the difference between continents and regions, the latter being a term that may, in turn, refer either to regional organisations or to geographical regions. The Asian continent, for example, includes six regions, i.e., four regional organisations, namely, the Commonwealth of Independent States, which includes the European part of Russia), the Arab League (which includes North Africa), the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and two geographical regions, i.e., China and East Asia (which includes Japan and the two Koreas).
Regional organisations, insofar as they bring together groups of states, must be understood as building blocks of the world community, an intermediate level between nation-states and global institutions. They do not replace states, nor do they eliminate their autonomy. They constitute the framework within which legislative, executive and judicial bodies can evolve to enable them to address issues with a regional dimension. In accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, nations should ideally be represented at regional level, and the world’s large regions at global level.
In 2011, the EU became the first international organisation to be granted enhanced observer status in the United Nations General Assembly. This status gives it the right, for example, to speak in debates before individual states, circulate documents, and submit proposals and amendments. The granting of it to the EU is a step that should encourage stronger cohesion of other regional groups within the General Assembly, allowing them to obtain a voice in the Security Council and transform it into the definitive council of major world regions.
Such a change in the structure of the Security Council would conceivably help the world order to evolve in a more democratic, more just, more balanced and more peaceful direction, as it would allow all states, through their respective regional organisations, to be represented in the Security Council, as opposed to just the strongest ones, as is currently the case. Furthermore, a reorganisation of the United Nations into groups of states of equivalent size and power could make it possible to gradually overcome the hegemony of the great powers and the inequality that exists between states. Finally, the unjust discrimination between permanent and non-permanent members of the Security Council could be overcome by replacing the right of veto and unanimity voting with a democratic majority voting system.
Towards the Transformation of the Security Council into the Council of Major World Regions.
The end of the bipolar world order, among its main effects, rendered the composition of the Security Council anachronistic and created the need to expand and transform it from a directorate, made up of the five major powers, into a more representative body. There are two ways of tackling this problem.
The traditionally proposed solution is to open up the Security Council to the strongest states, those that have risen to the top places in the hierarchy of world power, attributing a permanent seat to Germany, Japan, Brazil, India and one or two large African countries, yet to be identified. It is based on the idea that these could be entrusted with the dual task of policing their respective regions and representing the smaller states that come under their umbrella. Thus, Germany would represent the Benelux countries, the Scandinavian ones and those of Central and Eastern Europe, while Japan would represent the countries of the Far East, South-East Asia and the Pacific.
However, the original idea of giving Germany and Japan permanent seats on the Security Council — this was seen as a rapid way to address the need to reform this body and it had the support of the USA — was flawed and unrealistic, and so it was abandoned. Indeed, it would have strengthened the hegemony of the North over the South of the world and would also have given Western Europe three seats and therefore an absolutely disproportionate weight. Similarly, the more recent suggestion that the Security Council could be enlarged to include Latin American, Asian and African states, runs into similar difficulties, as the excluded countries are unwilling to be represented by the more powerful states in their respective continents. It is a proposal that reflects the principles of domination and inequality that determined the current structure of the Security Council, and as such it fails to meet the needs of today’s world and does not comply with the objectives of equality and justice that the EU wishes to affirm in the field of international relations.
The best way to achieve Security Council reform that is both fair and more in line with the evolution of power relations in the world is to pursue the formation of regional groups of states. A world order reorganised on this basis is an alternative not only to the fragmentation of the world into a plethora of small and very small states, which find themselves pitted against the large ones, but also to the hierarchies that are inevitably created as a result of power gaps between states.
The EU’s growing cohesion and the prospect that it could become an international player within the UN both depend very much on the extent to which it can move forward with its unification process. It should be remembered that, despite the divisions that exist within the EU on the major issues of international politics, the positions of its member states show, overall, a high degree of convergence. This is seen especially in the fields of trade, economic and monetary policy, where Europe is able to speak with a single voice. In the WTO and the FAO, the European Commission represents all the EU member states, and within the UN, the EU already acts as one in most cases. Europe’s Achilles heel is the fact that its foreign and security policy decisions have to be taken unanimously. That is the problem that has to be overcome in order for the EU to be able to take a seat on the Security Council.
Granting the EU a seat on the Security Council could put an end to the hegemony, within it, of the bloc’s two most powerful states (France and Germany), and also to Germany’s pressing for a permanent seat. It should also be considered that making Germany a member of the Security Council could potentially encourage the country to develop its own foreign policy, independently of the EU, which in turn might conceivably provide a stimulus for a reawakening of German nationalism. Moreover, if Germany’s demands were met, how would it be possible to ignore those of Italy, Spain, Poland and so on? If the Europeans were to decide to start giving precedence to national interests once again, then the whole single Europe project could easily be irreparably damaged. And yet, paradoxically, in spite of the current movement towards institutional advances intended to strengthen the EU’s ability to speak with a single voice, this is precisely what we are now seem to be seeing.
The Treaty of Lisbon, by recognising the legal personality of the EU, creating a quasi-minister of foreign affairs (the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy), and promoting the formation of a single security system through the Permanent Structured Cooperation mechanism (PESCO), has given the EU the possibility to strengthen its international role. To facilitate the pursuit of this objective, PESCO, unlike the enhanced cooperation mechanism, does not require the involvement of a minimum number of states in order to be triggered. Just as Germany gave up the Deutsche mark to allow the birth of the euro, so France today is called upon place its seat on the Security Council at the disposal of Germany and the other partners in a structured cooperation, thereby paving the way for the creation of a European seat.
It should be remarked that the German government, even though it has repeatedly changed its position, has often declared that it would be willing to give up its claim to a seat on the Security Council, should the prospect of creating a European seat materialise.
The European Union, precisely because it represents the most advanced of the regional unification processes under way in the world, is best placed to take the initiative for bringing about a regional reform of the Security Council. By becoming a member of the Security Council, it will be, for the rest of the world, a model of reconciliation between nation-states, and will give other world regions, still divided into sovereign states, the impetus to pursue their own federal unification.
Ultimately, the solution we have examined offers three advantages: first, it would allow all states (and not only the strongest ones, as is currently the case) to be represented in the Security Council through their respective regional organisations; second, it would allow the hegemony of the superpowers and the inequality between states to be progressively overcome through a reorganisation of the UN based on groups of states of equivalent size and power, and in particular it would give the developing countries of Africa, the Arab world, Latin America, South Asia and South-East Asia the chance to discover that political and economic unification offers them their best chance of emerging from their condition of dependency; third, it would allow the unjust discrimination between permanent and non-permanent members to be definitively overcome by replacing veto power and unanimity voting with the majority voting system required by democratic principles.
Towards Global Multilevel Governance.
The above-outlined UN reform project suggests that the state needs to be rethought and reorganised, not abolished. Even though Hobbes, in Leviathan, defined it as “a mortal god” (“to which we owe (…) our peace and defence”),[4] the state, even in the face of the challenge of globalisation, still lives. In contemporary political science literature, the reorganisation of state power at different territorial levels has been termed “multilevel governance”,[5] a formula evoking the federalist vision of political institutions that makes it possible to rethink and overcome the model of the unitary state. The classic definition of the federal government was provided by Kenneth C. Wheare, who described the federal principle as “the method of dividing powers so that the general and regional governments are each, within a sphere, coordinate and independent”.[6]
It is pure illusion to think that destroying the nation-state can, by itself, lead to stronger forms of solidarity. Certainly, the nation-state was the expression of the strongest concentration of power and the deepest political division the world has ever known; however, as shown by just some of the many examples of failed states — we might think of Somalia, Yugoslavia, Libya, Congo, Sudan, Afghanistan —, disintegration of the state signifies a regression to primitive barbarism, fierce tribal hatreds, and archaic forms of solidarity based on ethnic or religious bonds.
In the face of such phenomena, one cannot help but appreciate the positive role of national solidarity in overcoming local, regional and class-based selfishness, and its unique contribution to history. After all, France, Spain, Italy and Germany all succeeded in unifying populations with different ethnic, linguistic and religious backgrounds, and this unity was naturally acquired through centralisation, i.e., by sacrificing pluralism.
In truth, the post-national space remains an unknown territory. Federalism, however, has helped to identify and clarify the limits of the nation-state experience, specifically by denouncing the exclusive character assumed by the bonds of national solidarity, which admit no form of loyalty towards communities bigger or smaller than the nation. That said, suppressing national solidarity in the era of globalisation would be a mistake. Rather, it must be seen as a step on the ladder leading to broader forms of solidarity, both between nations within federations embracing entire world regions, and between macro-regional federations within the world federation. At the same time, national solidarity does not and should not exclude solidarity within local and regional communities, as the two can coexist. The federal model is, indeed, an institutional formula that allows the coexistence of different forms of solidarity towards territorial communities of different sizes, ranging from small local communities to the whole world.
Lucio Levi
1 United Nations, A. Guterres, Secretary-General’s Address to the General Assembly, September 2022, pp. 5-6, https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2022-09-20/secretary-generals-address-the-general-assembly.
[2] bp Statistical Review of World Energy, 2022, 71st edition, https://www.bp.com › global › pdfs › statistical-review.
[3] United Nations, Department for General Assembly and Conference Management, Regional Groups of Member States, https://www.un.org/dgacm/en/content/regional-groups
[4] T. Hobbes, Leviathan, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1904, p. 119.
[5] I. Pernice, Multilevel Constitutionalism and the Treaty of Amsterdam: European Constitution-Making Revisited?, Common Market Law Review, 36 n. 4 (1999), pp. 703-750. L. Hooghe and G. Marks, Multi-Level Governance and European Integration, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
[6] K. C. Wheare, The Federal Government, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1964, p. 11.
