Negotiating Diversity

Front matter

Alain-G. Gagnon & José Maria Sauca (eds.)

Identity, Pluralism and Democracy

IVERSITAS

CHAPTER 10 Multiculturalism and Legal Pluralism

European Perspectives...

Joxerramon Bengoetxea

CHAPTER 11 Interculturalism and Republicanism. Is Dialogue Possible? Maria Isabel Wences darts 191

Dune 239

Alain-G. GAGNON & José Maria SAUCA

This book on Negotiating Diversity builds on a research programme pertaining to Identity, Pluralism and Democracy that has been financed by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion de España (DER 2009-12683) and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and it is part of a larger joint initiative led by the Research Group on Plurinational Societies (Université du Québec à Montréal) and the Research Group on Democracy and Justice (Carlos HI University of Madrid). Since 2007, members of our research groups have been in constant dialogue and have organized a series of scientific activities both in Madrid and Montreal. Our two research groups have teamed up in developing a scientific discourse that stresses concepts such as Culture, Identity, Diversity, Pluralism, Trust, Civil Society, Citizenship and Governance. Members of our research teams have not only shared conceptual tools but they have also taken a stand on many fronts including respect to deep diversity, strengthening democratic practices, and empowering political communities.

The last two decades have witnessed an increase of interest in the domains of identity politics, legal and constitutional pluralism as well as in the implementation of democratic practices in complex societies. This is why we decided to concentrate on those key issues to improve present-day political life.

Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, we have experienced the emergence of new themes pertaining to cultural identity that brought to the fore not only religion, nationality, and gender but also historical trajectories, memory, migration, issues related to inclusion and exclusion and by extension citizenship. Minority and majority nations have been busy working on these fronts so as not to lose any ground, as if everything about these issues could reduced to a zero-sum game. In short, in addition to usual debates pertaining to community tensions and redistributive policies inspired by a theory of justice, there has emerged a field still to be plowed in the areas of recognition and empowerment.

Such political changes have led researchers to embark on a new journey and go beyond questions that are essentially descriptive and often times technical. Instead of examining qualitative dimensions linking political bodies, specialists have too often portrayed power relations from a quantitative perspective. Scholars have generally focused on who is best positioned to find a solution that would concern the entire country. Responses have generally favored the central state. Other times, authors have focused on the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judiciary branches, failing to explore political dynamics between those powers or, in the cases of federal states, between orders of government.

Subsequent to an intense workshop, hosted in May 2010 by the Universidad Carlos III, we mandated conference speakers to write original contributions that took into account up-to-date materials and to crossexamine the literature. Contributions to this volume benefitted greatly from interactions with several professors involved in the conference. Many thanks to Xavier Arbos, Jestis Prieto de Pedro, Luis Rodriguez Abascal, Andrés de Francisco, Rainer Nickel, Francisco Colom, Carlos Thiebault Louis-André, José Maria Rosales, Maria José Farifias and Alicia Cebada.

Colleagues took on the challenge and revisited their contributions with inspiration and drive. In addition to these original contributors, we invited Ramon Maiz (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela), Gérard Bouchard (Université du Québec a Chicoutimi) and Isabel Wences (Centro de Estudios Politicos y Constitucionales and Carlos III University of Madrid), three well-established scholars, to join this book project. These specialists study complex societies from three distinct vantage points, namely political philosophy, history, and political science, and innovate by providing an ambitious multi-dimensional approach to tackle issues of identity, pluralism and democracy.

The book is organized around four parts. In part I, Ramón Máiz and Francois Rocher explore political and social dynamics in plural societies and reflect on a series of normative issues that ought to be considered by political actors in the management of federal and non-federal societies. This is followed in Part II by studies conducted by Alain-G. Gagnon, José Maria Sauca and Jocelyn Maclure of a growing literature pertaining to governance, recognition and empowerment as it applies to countries experiencing tensions with respect to identity politics, majority/minority cultures and religion. In Part III, José Woehrling, Ascension Elvira and Eduardo Ruiz team up in proposing an in-depth exploration of human rights, political rights and institutional pluralism in Europe and Canada with a special interest in the protection of rights and freedoms, the role of supranational bodies in upholding national and sub-national political rights as well as the evolving nature of self-determination from a human rights angle. In Part IV, Gérard Bouchard, Joxerramon Bengoetxea and Isabel Wences address a central concern in the politics of diversity by putting to test approaches founded on multiculturalism and interculturalism. Quebec, Catalonia and Scotland constitute relevant experiments for societies seeking to advance models of deep diversity in advanced liberal democracies.

In connection with this international initiative, it is worth pointing out some recent publications produced by our respective research teams that provide foundational elements to the present endeavour.

Members of the Research Group on Plurinational Societies (www. grsp.ugam.ca) have released several important studies among which is included Multinational Democracies! that provided theoretical and normative considerations for three structuring projects. In 2009, GRSP published an important volume entitled Dominant Nationalism, Dominant Ethnicity? in which contributors explain how nation-states proceed to impose their own nationalism and how minority nations resist or not or even renegotiate their place within a given state. A parallel endeavour led to the publication of Contemporary Majority Nationalism’. This book illustrates the extent to which minority nations do not have a monopoly over the incarnation of nationalism and that, often times, majority nations have advanced their own nationalist agenda through the implementation of targeted public policies. These two previous studies have led GRSP members to launch into a new project addressing trust and mistrust* between majority and minority nations that bring together European and Canadian scholars specializing on divided polities.

Similarly, members of the Research Group on Law and Justice (www. derechoyjusticia.net/en) have been working on pluralism in its different dimensions: cultural diversity, human rights, cosmopolitanism, religion, immigration, and gender. Their collectives works have focused on reinforcing civil society’s ideals*, on recovering historical memory‘ and on deepening trust and lawfulness’. As a result, researchers in the areas of

Gagnon, Alain-G. and James Tully (eds.), Multinational Democracies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Lecours, André and Geneviève Nootens (eds.), Dominant Nationalism, Dominant Ethnicity. Identity, Federalism and Democracy, Brussels, PIE Peter Lang, 2009. Gagnon, Alain-G., André Lecours and Geneviève Nootens (eds.), Contemporary Majority Nationalism, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011.

Karmis, Dimitrios and François Rocher (eds.), La dynamique confiance-méfiance dans les démocraties multinationales: le Canada en perspectives comparatives, Québec, Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2012.

Sauca, José Maria and Isabel Wences (eds.), Lecturas de la sociedad civil. Un mapa contemporáneo de sus teorías, Madrid, Trotta, 2007.

Pallin, José Antonio Martin and Rafael Escudero Alday (eds.), Derecho y Memoria Historica, Madrid, Trotta, 2008; Alday, Rafael Escudero (ed.), Diccionario de memoria historica. Conceptos contra el olvido, Madrid, Libros de la Catarata, 2011.

7 Mendieta, Manuel Villoria and Isabel Wences (eds.), Cultura de la Legalidad: Instituciones, Procesos y Estructuras, Madrid, Libros de la Catarata, 2009. See also legal theories, political philosophy and international law have developed an interdisciplinary approach to diversity from different vantage points and especially exploring the impact of law on the social construction of identity.

Building on these political and juridical interpretations, this book seeks not only to synthesize and question current-day literature but to go beyond conventional approaches. It does so in three ways: first, by moving beyond the debates between communitarianism and liberalism through an in-depth interpretation of cultural and national diversity in the context of democratic multinational societies; second, by further sensitizing political and social actors in countries such as Canada and Spain, as well as the United Kingdom, Belgium and Switzerland, to the importance of both legal and constitutional implementation of diversity; and third, by advancing a theoretical stance that questions conventional wisdom and puts to the test dominant approaches in the field of comparative politics and law. Through these efforts, we will continue to advance a project based on an ongoing intellectual exchange within as well as across national settings.

As editors of this book, we are particularly grateful to all authors for their continued trust and support as well as to Olivier De Champlain and Thomas Lafontaine (UQAM) as well as Kyle Ritchie (Concordia University) who have assisted us in the last phase of the book preparation.

Eunomia. Revista en Cultura de la Legalidad (eunomia.tirant.com) edited by the Program on Culture of Lawfulness (www.trust-cm.net).

Part I

DIVIDED SOCIETIES AND FEDERALISM

CHAPTER |

Ramon MAIz

Professor, Department of Political Sciences and Public Administration, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

“[...] not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations”

Introduction: Is a Normative Theory of Federalism Necessary Today?

The positive theory of federalism of an empirical and comparative orientation has flowered in recent years, to a great extent driven by neoinstitutionalist perspectives and those of political economy!. But this has not, however, been a mere development and perfecting of traditional analyses, facilitated by the availability of new models and theoretical tools, nor of the appearance, up until recently non-existent, of reliable empirical evidence. If we compare it with the works of classic political thinkers — Althusius, Madison, Tocqueville —, or with the most recent works of economics (Public choice theory, Welfare economics, etc.), current theory on federalism introduces, with a rare unanimity, at least two ruptures of significant importance. First, it is formulated from an

' Inman, Robert and Daniel Rubinfeld, “Rethinking federalism”, Journal of Economic

Perspectives, vol. 11, n° 4, 1997, pp. 43-64; Maiz, Ramon and Pablo Beramendi, “La segunda generación de análisis institucionales del federalismo” in Pablo Beramendi and Ramon Maiz, Federalismo y Neoinstitucionalismo, Zona Abierta, n° 104-105, 2003, pp. 1-16; Rodden, Jonathan, “The Dilemma of Fiscal Federalism: Grants and Fiscal performance around the World”, American Political Science Review, vol. 46, n° 3, 2002, pp. 670-687; Colino Camara, César, Teoria y realidad del cambio institucional de las federaciones. Ph.D. dissertation, Madrid, UNED, 2005; Wibbels, Erik, “Madison in Baghdad?: Decentralization and Federalism in Comparative Politics”, Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 9, 2006, pp. 165-188.

openly positivist perspective and with an empirical orientation, indebted to the most recent social sciences, and with the intention of being on the margin of the traditional normative issues which monopolized earlier debate. Thus, the extravagant assumptions underlying initial economic analyses (complete information on voters, on the responsibility of each level of government, on the mobility of business and individuals, on the fidelity of local politicians to the preferences of the electorate, etc.) have been subject to an empirical scrutiny from which they have not come out well’. Secondly, it is much more circumspect, if not openly reticent in arguing that there are unlimited universal and decontextualized benefits to the federal form of organization of the state for the quality of democracy or the functioning of the economy. The prospective beneficial effects of federation (overcoming problems of aggregating preferences through local spheres of decision making and control) are not considered ubiquitous and universal, but rather dependent on the concurrence of a good number of contextual variables, such as: a greater or lesser clear distinction between levels of government, broad economic powers of regional governments, general control over the market on the part of the central government, the internalization of costs by each level of government, etc’.

However, does the confirmation that federation is not the panacea that some of the classical thinkers dreamt of and the excellent quality of a good part of the disillusioned recent literature obviate the need for a substantive normative theory of federalism? The general thesis defended here is that this new body of positive empirical studies does not exhaust or resolve by itself the need for a substantive normative theory. In other words, the question of the stability of federal systems, specific to positive empirical theory, does not by itself provide an answer to the question regarding the justice of the political-territorial organization of complex societies‘. It is still imperative to have a theory capable of providing answers to questions such as: is the federal organization of states desirable, should multinational states have a federal structure, upon what normative principles should political-territorial organization be constructed, how do we evaluate different federal designs, etc. In the end, the evaluation of the

N

Rodden, Jonathan and Susan Rose-Ackerman, “Does Federalism Preserve Markets?”, Virginia Law Review, vol. 83, 1987, pp. 1521-1572; Treisman, Daniel, The Architecture of Government: Rethinking Political Decentralization, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Gagnon, Alain-G., “The moral foundations of asymmetrical federalism: a normative exploration of the case of Quebec and Canada” in Alain-G. Gagnon and James Tully (eds.), Multinational Democracies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Gagnon, Alain-G., “The moral foundations of asymmetrical federalism: a normative exploration of the case of Quebec and Canada” in Alain-G. Gagnon and James Tully (eds.), Multinational Democracies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

institutional performance of a federation or a federal mechanism depends on the normative perspective of the evaluator. Moreover “empirical study in the social sciences is meaningless if it has no normative import”. And this cannot be at the mercy of mere subjective opinions, ad hoc normative assumptions or unchallenged pre-judgments; rather, it requires the systematic and substantive elaboration of an argument through internally consistent propositions that can be debated and tested.

To do this, however, the rigid separation between federalism and federation must be overcome’; in other words, between the theories, movements and ideologies that propose federal formulas and solutions; and those existing federal political systems, in debt to historically specific ideas, traditions, contexts, experiences and trajectories. In short, an autonomous argument that federation is the institutional architecture of a just political order is essential, or in other words, an argument for the moral political value of the federal principle’. In fact, today more than ever, from Canada to Iraq, from Spain to India, major issues related to peace, liberty, equality and political stability are found to be connected to the design of federations. And this design requires normative, as much as positive empirical debate, on values, institutional solutions and federal public policies.

In this sense, the reintroduction of politics and institutions, as well as the endogeneity of the latter, in the most recent federalist theory of an empirical and comparative orientation, opens up the possibility for a fruitful dialogue between both positive/empirical and normative dimensions, which can only be beneficial to both. In any case, although autonomous and substantive, a normative theory of federalism, to respond to the problems and challenges of modern democracies, cannot be distant from the developments of positive/empirical theory, nor the advances made in the comparative politics of federalism. On the contrary, endowed with a new modesty regarding its pretensions, it should be, in the strictest sense, contextualist and developed, overcoming the endemic tradition of “separate tables” within the broad discipline of political science.

In this vein, the arguments discussed in this text revolve around two basic assertions. (1) Federalism constitutes not only a specific institutional

Gerring, John and Joshua Yesnowitz, “A Normative Turn in Political Science?”, Polity, vol. 38, n° 1, 2006, pp. 101-133.

King, Preston, Federalism and Federation, London, Croom Helm, 1982; Elazar, Daniel, Exploring Federalism, Tuscaloosa, Alabama University Press, 1987; Burgess, Michael, Comparative Federalism, London, Routledge, 2006.

Gagnon, Alain-G. and Charles Gibbs, “The Normative Basis of Asymmetrical Federalism” in Robert Agranoff (ed.), Accommodating Diversity: Asymmetry in Federal States, Baden-Baden, Nomos, 1999, p. 76.

formula based on political decentralization and accommodation, but an authentic political philosophy, a normative model of democracy based on the covenant and the pact, clearly differentiated from liberalism and communitarianism and in debt to the republican tradition; and (2) federalism has, however, historically developed into two well differentiated traditions: one, monist, derived from the North American experience of the federal construction of a nation-state, which has been predominant (national federalism); and the other pluralist, minoritarian, focused on reconciling different and overlapping local, regional and national identities (plurinational federalism)*.

However, to take into account the synthesis of self-government and shared government, of unity and diversity, of the federation as a conceptual design of a state of states; as well as, in contrast to the premises of the nation-state, the coexistence of different nations within one state, requires at least two tasks. These are (1) the reformulation in a democratic-republican key of the classic, organic and pre-political concept of the nation; and (2) the construction of a normative theory of federal democracy.

1. The Veil of Ignorance and the Federal Principle of Autonomy (Self-Government)

Surprisingly, the canonical theory of liberalism is absolutely silent regarding the normative questions raised by the federal principle. As Norman recently pointed out, “our ‘mentors’ — philosophers like Rawls, Nozick, and Dworkin — were silent on the mysteries of federalism””. In effect, as is well-known, Rawls thought that the institutional details of a just society should only be addressed subsequent to when the parties in the original position have established the principles of justice, in other words, when the veil of ignorance is partially lifted and the basic details of

Caminal, Miquel, E/ federalismo pluralista. Barcelona, Paidós, 2002; Hueglin, Thomas, “Federalism at the Crossroads: Old meanings, New Significance”, Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol. 36, n° 2, 2003; Karmis, Dimitrios and Wayne Norman, Theories of Federalism: A Reader, London, Palgrave, 2005; Maiz, Ramon, “Democracy, Federalism, and Nationalism in Multinational States” in Ramón Máiz and William Safran, /dentity and Territorial Autonomy in Plural Societies, London, Frank Cass, 2000; Requejo, Ferran, Multinational federalism and Value Pluralism, London, Routledge, 2005; Norman, Wayne, Negotiating Nationalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006; Gagnon, Alain-G., Au-delà de la nation unificatrice: Plaidoyer pour le fédéralisme multinational, Barcelona, Institut d’Estudis Autonòmics, 2007; Gagnon, Alain-G. and Raffaele Iacovino, Federalism, Citizenship, and Quebec, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2007; Beaud, Olivier, Théorie de la Fédération, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2007.

Norman, op. cit., p. 80.

society, public opinion and the political culture are revealed. In addition, the principles of justice are applied to the basic structure and should not reflect specific characteristics of society or of concrete political systems. Only once we begin to lift the veil of ignorance and we see the general characteristics of our society (cultural pluralism, for example) can we design institutions which attend to these specific characteristics, with these institutions always following the patterns marked by the principles of justice that we have previously chosen in the original position, under the veil of institutional ignorance.

Among other things, this model implies that the parties in the original position accept de facto: (1) the foundational irrelevance of a multilevel distribution of political power in contrast to claims of sovereignty; and (2) the consideration of the borders of the state as natural, as given and existing in ‘“perpetuity”!°. The first assumption means that the plurality of political wills and constitutional and legislative spheres within a state of states constitutes a minor detail, irrelevant in any case for the theory of justice. The second implies that the really existing political community (nation-state) and with it the overlapping of political and cultural dimensions are considered prior to justice and equity, and the question of the homogeneity and unity of the demos (a question, i.e. who are the people of the state, which is in reality, from the point of view of logic, prior) is considered normatively resolved by factual history. The naturalist fallacy which the model incurs, deducing from the “is” (construction of a nation-state) a “should be” (the equation state = nation) thus incorporates, without any elaboration, a postulate which conceals from us ab initio the possibility of a normative foundation on the basis of unity and diversity.

It should be noted that these premises lead to a self-evident and undisputed corollary: the unitary national state is the model taken as the basis for the theory of justice. And this is true in a dual sense, first, as the theory considers — contradicting without any explanations the North American constitutional tradition — that the federal dimension of the republic, its character as a “compound republic”, lacks foundational importance in regards to principles. And secondly, the overlapping of political and cultural borders is taken for granted in the theory — in this case following the constitutional-nationalist tradition of the US of “centralized federalism”! — and the interpretation of the national state in a monistic manner as nation-state is considered as self-evident. This position is, of course, common to all egalitarian liberalism’.

Rawls, John, Political Liberalism, New York, Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 278.

Riker, William, The Development of American Federalism, Boston, Kluwer, 1987. Dworkin, Ronald, A Matter of Principle, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1985.

The result is that the decisive dimension of the “compound republic” (Madison), of a state of states, of the articulation of self-government and shared government, the overcoming of the concept of sovereignty — as a means (1) to construct democracy in states of wide territorial dimensions, in addition to (2) providing innovative “republican remedies for republican diseases” — is elided in the foundations of a theory which aspires to provide the normative guidelines for a just political order. Based on the “veil of ignorance” federalism is irrelevant as the federation is considered to be an institutional peculiarity of second order, derived from specific historical circumstances, its theoretical nature discarded in a radical way by implicitly postulating that it should not enter into the principles of justice or the basic structure of society. Only once the principles of justice are established is it the moment to partially lift the veil of ignorance and begin to descend the ladder of abstraction to take into account the particularities of public culture and the economy of each society in designing institutions. For Rawls, only in the subsequent descent toward the level of constitutional and legislative law would the federal dimension perhaps appear as relevant".

However, to take state borders as given and to exclude the plurality of centres from which political will generates as an element of the basic structure, the theory of Rawls and, in general, egalitarian liberalism, adopt two extremely problematic hypotheses. These hypotheses are (1) in contrast to Madison, the hypothesis of sovereignty, the concept of the sovereign state endowed with a single (or ultimate or original) centre from which political power emanates; and (2) in contrast to Calhoun, (apart from other considerations) the hypothesis of the nation-state, the coincidence between cultural and political borders, the theoretical impossibility that the demos can consist in a plurality of demoi, and the existence of minority communities that can suffer the eventual oppression or exclusion under the state’s protection of the majority community. A theory of justice which implicitly begins from these propositions is a seriously flawed theory on its own terms, as it assumes postulates in debt not to principles of justice that are object of an eventual overlapping consensus, but rather to a particular idea of the good; namely, the imposition by the state of a comprehensive doctrine (majority nationalism) regarding one of the most disputed problems among contemporary states and international society.

One would think that in the contemporary republican perspective we would find the normative-theoretical elaboration of federalism absent

13 King, Loren, “The federal structure of a Republic of Reasons”, Political Theory, from liberalism". But that is not at all the case. A good example of this is a work of reference in contemporary republican theory: Republicanism by Philip Pettit. In responding to the question, how can the state be organized so that state interference is not arbitrary, in other words, to address republican forms of constitutionalism and democracy, Pettit postulates three fundamental conditions. These are (1) the rule of law, (2) separation of powers, (3) that the law be relatively resistant to the will of the majority. However, only in regards to the second condition is “the decentralization of power that is achieved by having a federal system” admitted as one of the measures possible. He concludes with an empirical observation that leaves the federal dimension of republicanism without theoretical elaboration. “It is no accident that republicans have been traditionally in favour of federations”. What is more, in addressing the deliberative dimension of republicanism, the absolute necessity that people “be able to coalesce around group identities that were previously suppressed”’!® is recognized, but this observation referring to individuals and groups is not complemented by a reinterpretation of what institutional framework is capable of reconciling unity and diversity and plurality with overlapping identities, which are principal elements of federalism. It is also striking, regarding the same issue, that Mauricio Viroli, for example, could write a book called For Love of Country, and despite its subject, “an essay on patriotism and nationalism”, there is no mention of the federal republican tradition”.

Nevertheless, the contribution of federalism to a theory of the just society" is of normative foundational importance that goes far beyond the mere adjectival and ad hoc concretion that is conceded in the last phases, that is, far from the “constitutional essentials” of the Rawls’ model or its condition as one mere “measure” among many others that institutionalize the republic (Pettit). There are important reasons to assume that federalism should be inscribed into the very heart of the normative theory of democracy.

To begin with, we should remember the centrality of federalism in the republicanism of Kant. In effect, even though this is often neglected in

Maynor, John, Republicanism in the modern world, Cambridge, Polity, 2003; Laborde, Cécile and John Maynor, Republicanism and Political Theory, London, Blackwell, 2008.

Pettit, Philip, Republicanism, Barcelona, Paidós, p. 234.

17 Viroli, Maurizio, For Love of Country, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995. LaSelva, Samuel, Moral Foundations of Canadian Federalism. Paradoxes, Achievements, and Tragedies of Nationhood, Montréal-Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996; Gagnon, Au-delà de la nation unificatrice : Plaidoyer pour le fédéralisme multinational, op. cit.

many classic and modern interpretations”, it is not only (1) the separation of legislative and executive powers as well as (2) the form of representative government that constitute the factors that are the core of Kantian republicanism. In the “second definitive article” of Zum ewigen Frieden (For a Perpetual Peace), written in 1795, he adds a third factor; namely: “The law of nations shall be founded on a federation of free states”. In this way “a federation of nations (Vô/kerbund) which, however, should not be an worldwide, international state (Vô/kerstaaf)” is postulated as an alternative scenario to war”. Certainly, in Kant we find an ambiguous use of the concept of federalism, sometimes as federation and other times as confederation, induced by his classic concept of sovereignty as absolute power (unlimited and indivisible). Yet, in his view, in contrast to Madison, only under sovereignty can the full condition of a state of law be reached and hence the ultimate aspiration of a world republic”. However, the ultimate objective of a world republic (Weltrepublik), of a state of nations (Civitas Gentium) is, first, too distant for a world of states that rejects in hipotesis what is just in tesis. The federation of states raises the normative horizon of the possible. “The practicability (objective reality) of this idea of federation (Idee der Füderalität), which should gradually spread to all states and thus lead to perpetual peace, can be proved’’”.

Secondly, and above all, the Kantian world republic is shaped as a federal republic. Thus, in the work, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft of 1793, he postulates a “state of perpetual peace based on a league of peoples, a world republic (auf einen Volkerbund als Weltrepublik gegrindeten)’#. This is, then, the so often neglected key. Volkerbund als Weltrepublick is, in other words, a world federal republic, a Staatenverein Republik freir verbtinder Völker (a republic of free federated nations), not only as an alternative to the “monstrosity” (Ungeheuer) of a world monarchy, but also to a unitary world republic in debt to a single sovereignty. Thus, Kant’s view was that, given the regulative nature of the idea of reason, a unitary world republic would

Vlachos, Georges, Fédéralisme et raison d'État dans la pensée internationale de Fichte, Paris, Pedone, 1948; Bobbio, Norberto, Diritto e Stato nel pensiero di Emanuele Kant, Torino, Giappichelli, 1969; Philonenko, Alexis, Théorie et praxis dans la pensée morale et politique de Kant et Fichte en 1793, Paris, Vrin, 1968.

20 Kant, Immanuel, Zum ewigen Frieden Akademie Textausgabe, vol. VIII, Berlin, De Gruyter, 1968 [1795], p. 354.

+ Pogge, Thomas, “Kant’s Vision, Europe, and a Global Federation” in Luigi Caranti (ed.), Kants Perpetual Peace. New Interpretative Essays, Rome, Luiss University Press, 2006, pp. 75-98.

Kant, op. cit., p. 356.

Kant, Immanuel, Die Religion innehalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft Akademie Textausgabe, vol. VI, Berlin, De Gruyter, 1968 [1793], p. 34.

22 23 only ever constitute the horizon of an always unfinished trend, while he conceived of an international order for a new plural and cooperative world.

Third, the federal association (foderative Vereinigung) not only constitutes for Kant a superior alternative to that of a world government, the fusion of states under one power which will control all the others, but is also preferable from the point of view of the very diversity of humanity”. Nature, as he says in the first Supplement of For a Perpetual Peace, “wisely separates nations (weislich die Völker trennt)”. “She employs two means to separate peoples and to prevent them from mixing: differences of language and of religion” (der Verschiedenheit der Sprachen und der Religionen). In short, what is a source of war and conflict, the plurality of states and nations, is also for the philosopher from K6nigsberg/Kaliningrad a source for the possibility of international accommodation and political cooperation. The departure from the state of war, conceived as a natural state of states and the emergence into a new cooperative, federal order, does not mean the construction of a new world sovereign. And in this way is indicated, in the very core of Kantian political philosophy, the incipient normative republican foundation of the pluralist federal synthesis of self-government plus shared government, and unity in diversity.