Federalism and Nationalism

Recent crises, COVID the latest and most notable, have once again brought into focus the issue of nationalism. Borders have been erected in Europe, something unthinkable during even the Syrian refugee crises, in the name of safeguarding the nation and its citizens, all while the nativism of Johnson and Trump has been found under-equipped to confront the perils of the day. What are we to do? Where should we turn? Though I do not have the answers to these questions, I nonetheless thought I would take some time to take a look at federalism and its relationship with nationalism, given that the former is often argued to be a way by which to mitigate the latter. To do this, I want to specifically talk about Canada, one of the largest and most decentralized federal states around today and see if anything more general can be learned about federalism and nationalism.

As I have mentioned before, one of the most common assumptions made by proponents of federalism is that it can help mitigate, perhaps even act as an antidote for, the rising tide of nationalism. In theory, this makes sense as have a central government could both remove some of the levers of power from the hands of state nationalists as well as give people another institutional locus around which to rally. The issue with this is that, in practice, having a central government does not automatically precipitate these changes. In the case of Canada, over 150 years of federal government has failed to mitigate or weaken regional identities. Quebec is the most famous case this, given that it has twice tried to secede from Canada and that it continues to elect Quebec nationalist governments at both the federal (in the form of the Bloc Québécois) and provincial (historically the Parti Québécois, but more recently the Coalition Avenir Québec) levels, but it is far from the only province to have a regional identity which has found fertile soil within which to grow in Canada. Other prominent examples of this can be found in cases such as Alberta and Saskatchewan’s recent flirtation with the idea of separatism (which has become referred to as Wexit), the fondness which Newfoundlanders harbour for their distinct history and the independence they enjoyed prior to joining Canada in 1949 (the popularity of the Republic of Newfoundland flag is a testament to this fondness), and the creation of Nunavut as a Inuit territory through the division of the North West Territories. We can also expand the conversation to talk about the growth of those nations and which exist within Canada yet do not form a majority within any province or territory, most notably the various First Nations and French Canadians communities who have never shied away from taking political action.

Strikingly, in almost all of the cases that I have just mentioned the major acts of nation building have all occurred after Canada became an independent dominion. If anything, the creation of a federal Canadian state, one which was both more centralised and more democratic than the colonial entities which preceded it, seems to have cultivated the growth of regional nationalism. For why this may be the case, we can turn to Pierre Trudeau, one of Canada’s most influential former Prime Ministers (and the father of the current one) who was also a talented scholar specializing in the study of federalism. In his book Federalism and the French Canadians, Trudeau notes that:

“Most English Canadians fail to realize that it is their attitude which exactly determines the extent and force of Quebec nationalism. Central government encroachments, which are accepted in other provinces as matters of expediency, cannot be so viewed in Quebec. For French Canadians are not in any important sense represented in the Canadian power elite, whether governmental or financial, and any attempt at unilateral transference of power from the Quebec elite to the Canadian one will naturally set the corresponding defence mechanisms in motion.” (pp. 140–141)

Trudeau’s assertion helps explain the growth of regional nationalism in post-confederation Canada, as the centralising tendencies of the Federal Government have certainly played a key role in helping proto-national communities make the jump to nationhood (it bears mentioning that many of the nationalisms within Canada, particularly the First Nations and French Canadian ones, are older than the Canadian nationalism; an obvious illustration of this is the Quebec flag, which predates the Canadian flag by seventeen years). It seems, therefore, that the argument that having a federal state with a central government will mitigate regional nationalism is entirely backwards. Instead, the confluence of political power may actually have a centrifugal effect on federal institutions, as nationalist reactions are encouraged by the encroachment of a centralised government. This is not to say that a federal state is bound to break apart, after all Canada has remained a state despite some close calls, but simply that nationalism should not be expected to wane within such a state.

I do not believe such a hostile relationship, which precipitates the growth of substate nationalism, is a fundamental requirement of federalism. Indeed, this hostile relationship is itself all to often predicated upon a federal government which looks at its substate units with a level of distrust. Trudeau, for all his brilliance, always maintained an extremely hostile view of substate, and in particular Quebec, nationalism, believing in the need for these communities to exorcize themselves of their own respective nationalisms (he discusses this on page 155 of Federalism and the French Canadians). Instead, he favoured a civic-minded vision of the state, with the provincial parliaments acting not as the parliaments for cultural distinct national communities, but simply as more effective instruments of democracy. However, during his time in office Trudeau himself was responsible for the growth of substate nationalism in Canada: his patriation of the Canadian Constitution without the approval of Quebec was what began the process that led to the 1995 referendum and kept Quebec firmly outside the hands of Ottawa ever since; and the National Energy Program (NEP), which he brought in as a way to control Canada’s growing energy sector, remains a point of frustration for many Albertans who saw it as indicative of Ottawa’s hostility towards Albertan interests. More generally then, this fixation with achieving a post-nationalist world may itself be what is feeding the growth of nationalism today.

What we can take from this, however, is that a federal state which is built to accommodate sub-state nationalism, rather than resist it, is the most likely to persist. In making this observation, I am reminded of René Lévesque, founder of the nationalist Parti Québécois and father of the Quebec separatist movement, and his vision of creating a Canada whose institutions would treat the various substate nations found within the state with a greater degree of equity. In his book An Option for Quebec, Lévesque refers to his desire to create a “stable framework in which new institutions…[can] provide unprecedented progress to…ancient and still sovereign peoples who dared to take the plunge into well-ordered interdependence” (p. 99). His vision for a framework of interdependence is in line with a decentralized federal or a confederal state, highlighting that the principle goal of federal institutions ought to be to promote cooperation between regional communities, not to irradiate their identities. Such a state, whose federal or confederal institutions promote both national sovereignty and interconnectivity and interdependence, is certainly a model of accommodation that would be worthy of emulation.