Notes

 

 

When, twenty-five years after its first issue, The Federalist decided to have an English and French edition, the intention was “to work for the world unity of federalists and constitute, to this end, a point of reference and an instrument for an exchange of information”. Indeed, many people are aware of the need for federalism but “without unity of organization, i.e. without the opportunity to know that what is being done in one’s own region, country or city is being done in other regions, countries and cities of the world as well, nobody can gain confidence in his own action and thus maintain it, thus contributing towards making federalism into a political force”.[1]

The publishers of the review were aware that it was a long-term task. However, less than a year after this decision and in the light of contacts created and encouraged throughout the world in a very short space of time, what was initially nothing more than a declaration of intent, became a certainty stated with much greater vigour: “One is struck with wonder seeing how many courageous and tenacious men and women, outside Western Europe, are currently devoting their energies to the struggle for World federation, which is doomed to remain pure ideal testimony… for a long time”.[2]

In a recent editorial, an analysis was finally given of the possible paths towards federal unity of the world, the final objective of all federalists, i.e. all those who have turned the struggle for peace into a personal question and the moral basis for their political action.[3]

This note wishes to go no further than pause for a moment to take stock of the different organizations that exist and the evolution of our ties with them at a time when federalists from other continents are for the first time (or once again) becoming real partners.

 

***

 

The interest that has been created in federalist circles outside Europe by The Federalist needs to be stressed. The numerous mentions that this review has received is proof of this.[4] It is also proof that The Federalist has responded to the expectations and real needs, albeit often unexpressed, of all activists throughout the world. Finally, it is proof of the quality of the cultural and political work undertaken, the best, wrote an official of the American World Federalist Association to Mario Albertini, after that of the Committee to Frame a World Constitution, or Committee of Chicago, and the publication of Common Cause, from July 1947 to July 1951.[5]

In other cases, the leaders of various federalist organizations have spontaneously offered to help us on the crucial issue of distribution, by centralizing requests for subscriptions coming from specific countries. This is

the case with the British Federal Trust[6] or the Association to Unite the Democracies in the United States. They are also sending us hundreds of addresses of federalist militants or organizations involved with the question of peace, intellectuals and university teachers, libraries and research institutes, as for example has been done in Australia and the North American continent.

It is interesting, moreover, to stress that the publication of the review in three languages has taken place at the same time as a reawakening of interest among federalists, outside the European Community, in the process of European integration, its significance as an example and its effects on the international balance of power, following the approval of the Draft Treaty establishing the European Union by the European Parliament in 1984.[7]

 

***

 

This is true for Atlantist federalists of the AUD, the organization which inherited and has continued the work of the Interdemocracy Federal Unionists Inc., which was set up in the United States in July 1939, after the publication by Clarence K. Streit of his book Union Now[8] and which became the Federal Union Inc., from 1940 to recent times.[9]

Streit, who died last July in Washington, was, at the time, correspondent for the New York Times at the League of Nations. As a privileged observer, he denounced the weaknesses of the organization, a fragile league of sovereign states, incapable of protecting peace against the Fascist threat and he concluded that federalism was necessary. He identified “Public Problem number one” as being the need to create a World government and indicated the only possibility of preventing war and assuring long-term victory for the democratic system in the federal union of democratic states existing in those days in a single state, whose very power would have discouraged any potential aggressor and which attracted every new state, that had become democratic, to it, thus giving life to the first nucleus of the World federation.

After the war, Streit saw the USSR, former ally in the fight against Fascism, as the new threat against which the free countries would need to build their unity and he had split away from most of the American world federalist movement, which by 1941 had already rejected the anti-Soviet and pro-Atlantic position of Streit’s followers and, with the advent of the cold war, rejected his support of NATO circles and theses.[10]

At the same time, Streit refused the prospect of European unity as an end in itself, a unity that, on the one hand, would have simply split democratic countries between the European Union and the United States Union and which, on the other hand, would have risked being dominated by the “Marxists”.[11]

For some years now the AUD, although standing firm on the two basic principles of its action, i.e., as Streit himself recently recalled, “to start an international federation by beginning with a nucleus composed of the leading democracies, those centered mainly around the North Atlantic Ocean and to gradually expand it as nations become ripe for this”,[12] attaches great importance to the European Union and expresses the hope that its organizational contacts with the UEF will develop rapidly.[13]

We need to recall that The Federalist recently defined the conditions that would avoid the idea of the union of democracies from falling in a perverse circle, and that would make it possible to create an economic and subsequently political federation between a politically united Europe and the United States at the same time as encouraging the process of formation of great federal unions in Asia, Africa and Latin America and an end to the North-South divide.[14]

In this respect, we need finally to stress that, although the AUD has defined the World democratic federation as its ultimate goal and has reaffirmed that “the intercontinental union of advanced democracies is the driving force of its mission”, it has enlarged the sphere of its commitment, with a view to encouraging the dialogue both with the UEF and with the world federalist movement.[15]

 

***

 

In recent years, just as the contacts between European federalists and Atlantist federalists have intensified so those between the UEF and world federalists have also increased.

At the end of the war, in August 1947, both organizations, the World Movement for World Federal Government[16] on the one hand and the UEF on the other, were created in Switzerland, in Montreux, but separately. Immediately, a problem arose as regards the relationships and coordination between those federalists who from the beginning pursued the goal of World federation and those who advocated a preliminary phase in which regional federations were created.[17] The intention to collaborate, however, remained a dead letter, and the contacts between the two groups became increasingly tenuous despite certain people’s efforts and those of Alexandre Marc in particular.

The WAWF, from the moment of its creation, considered the formation of regional federations as one of the roads that would have made it possible to reach a World federation, but did not give it a privileged status vis-à-vis others, such as the election of a people’s constituent assembly, the registration of World Citizens or the strengthening of the UN and the revision of the San Francisco Charter. The problem of regional federations is found in numerous resolutions, in which reservations are also clearly stated. However, no concrete action was ever undertaken in this sense.[18]

This can apparently be explained, at least during the first years, by the blissful optimism which reigned in world federalist circles and by the widespread conviction that the World federation was not, essentially, the result of a long process of historical maturation, but could on the contrary arise from nothing, almost as if through the intervention of the “holy ghost”. “One would be surprised”, wrote Rolf Paul Haegler (still Secretary of the Swiss World Federalists) at the conclusion of his book, “of the extraordinarily brief time in which many world federalists seem to have hoped to be able to realize their ideal: calling of a constituent people’s assembly by 1950, while the responsible groups had only been set up in 1947, revision of the Charter and complete transformation of the United Nations Organization into a World federation by 1955, i.e. two to three years after deciding to launch a campaign to this end, all this is too unrealistic… The world federalists have for too long cherished the illusion that it would have been enough for them to present a world constitution and procedures acceptable by all to obtain the hoped-for ratification of the proposed text”.[19]

In all fairness, it should be pointed out that European federalists, with some exceptions, were insufficiently concerned with the World federation, apart from recognizing the simple moral and cultural demand and we must agree wholeheartedly with Ferdinand Kinsky, a member of both the UEF and the WAWF, when he stated recently: “In the past World federalists often looked upon European federalists with suspicion (‘they want to create a new super-power and thus divide the world even more’). On the other hand European federalists thought themselves as being more realistic than World federalists whom they considered totally utopian”.[20] Forty years after the end of the Second World War and the foundation of the principal federalist organizations the moment has come for both sides to convince themselves that, as Kinsky recalled, European unity and World federation are two complementary and not alternative objectives and to agree with him that “a World federalist strategy today can neither consist of simply repeating our goal (‘We need a World federation’), nor be a conformist limitation to a policy of small steps (‘Let’s strengthen the United Nations!’). Nobody can expect the big powers and even the medium size industrialized countries to transfer their sovereignty to the United Nations in the present composition with its large majority of Third World countries. The only realistic strategy towards a World federation is the regional approach. It consists of promoting federalist solutions for European, African and Latin American unification, and of the promotion of federalist settlements in the Middle East and Indochinese conflicts”.[21] Currently, it seems reasonable to affirm that world federalists are close to recognizing that if federalism can only be a world scale matter, “it can be achieved only through a process which must begin in a precise place’’.[22]

This is, we feel, the meaning of the growing importance that they, as Atlantist federalists, have recently attributed to the process of European integration and the action of the European Parliament.[23] Finally, it should be recalled that in June 1986 the WAWF organized a new meeting in Aosta, mostly dedicated to the “European example”, to which John Pinder and Francesco Rossolillo, respectively President and Vice-president of the UEF, were invited.[24] Also present at this meeting was Ira Straus, a leading AUD official.

 

***

 

Apart from the federalist organizations existing and still active today, there is potential for such organizations in other continents. Thus, the International Student Association of Japan[25] has been in contact with the European Federalist Youth, proposing to organize common seminars and asserting they will fight for the diffusion of the ideals of federalism in Asia.

In Africa, the federalist message of the fathers of independence, in particular Nkrumah, Nyerere and Senghor, has not fallen into oblivion. Currently, the bases seem to exist for the creation of an African federalist movement independent of Africa’s political contingencies.

Even in Latin America federalism and the problem of continental unification have been at the centre of the political debate since the struggles for independence. Artigas, who struggled for the union of the peoples of the Rio de la Plata or Simon Bolivar, who organized the Panama Congress, are two examples that occurred at the beginning of the last century. At a time when most of the Latin American countries have returned to democracy and when the politicians of the continent, like Raul Alfonsin, want to relaunch the process of economic and political integration,[26] there no longer exists, at least as far as we know, any organized federalist force South of the Rio Grande.[27] However, as in post-Fascist Europe, the conditions exist for a renewal of federalist action in this part of the world. All that is missing, as the leaders of the Argentine section of the Movimento Federalista Europeo wrote in a recent pamphlet, is “the spark that sets the fire alight, a handful of enlightened and disinterested men that turn utopia and dreams into reality”.[28]

 

***

 

In recent years The Federalist has acted as a catalyst between the different currents quoted in this note. Their ultimate common objective is the creation of a World federation. This does not detract from the fact that these different organizations, also linked by common cultural references, each have their own originality and mid-term objectives. They have immediate possibilities of joint action, that do not necessarily mean their fusion. The celebration of the bicentenary of the Convention of Philadelphia, that calls upon all federalists and that will be marked by the congress of the World Federalist Movement, only a few months after the UEF congress in Strasbourg, should be the opportunity to cement the rapprochement that is underway.

 

---