Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction

Chapter 9 The federalist agenda

A frequent criticism of anarchism is that it is an ideology that fits a world of isolated villages, small enough to be self-governing entities, but not the global, multi-national society that we all inhabit in real life. But in fact the major anarchist thinkers of the past: Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, had a federalist agenda that was a foretaste of modern debates on European unity.

That minority of children in any European country who were given the opportunity of studying the history of Europe as well as that of their own nations learned that there were two great events in the 19th century: the unification of Germany, achieved by Bismarck and the Emperor Wilhelm I; and the unification of Italy, won by Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Vittorio Emanuale II. These triumphs had been welcomed by the whole world (which in those days meant the European world) because Germany and Italy had left behind all those silly little principalities, republics, papal provinces, and city states, to become nation states, empires, and, of course, conquerors.

They had become like France, whose little local despots were finally unified by force, first by Louis XIV with his majestic slogan ‘L’État c’est moi’, and then by Napoleon, heir to the Grande Revolution, just like Stalin in the 20th century, who built up the administrative machinery of terror to ensure that the slogan was true. Or they had become like England, whose kings (and its one republican ruler, Oliver Cromwell) had conquered the Welsh, Scots, and Irish, and sought to dominate the rest of the world outside Europe. The same thing was happening at the other end of Europe. Ivan IV, appropriately named ‘The Terrible’, conquered central Asia as far as the Pacific, and Peter I, known as ‘The Great’, using the techniques he had learned in France and Britain, took over the Baltic, most of Poland, and the west of Ukraine.

Advanced opinion throughout Europe welcomed Germany and Italy to the gentleman’s club of national and imperial powers. The eventual results in the 20th century were appalling adventures in conquest, with the devastating loss of life among young men from the villages of Europe in the two world wars, and the rise of populist demagogues like Hitler and Mussolini, as well as their endless imitators to this day, who claim L’État c’est moi. Consequently, although we have had all too few politicians arguing for the breakdown of nations, we have a host of them of every persuasion who have sought European unity: economic, social, administrative, or, of course, political.

Needless to say, in efforts for unification promoted by politicians we have a multitude of administrators in Brussels issuing edicts about which varieties of vegetable seeds, or what constituents of beefburgers or ice cream, may be sold in the shops of member nations. The newspapers joyfully report all this trivia. The press gives far less attention to another undercurrent of pan-European opinion, evolving from the views expressed in Strasbourg from people of every political hue, claiming the existence of a ‘Europe of the Regions’, and daring to argue that the nation state was a phenomenon of the 16th to 19th centuries, which will not have any useful future in the 21st century. The forthcoming pattern of administration in the federated Europe that they are struggling to discover is a link between, let us say, Calabria, Wales, Andalusia, Aquitaine, Galicia, or Saxony, as regions, rather than as nations, seeking their regional identity, economically and culturally, which has been lost in their incorporation in nation states, where the centre of gravity is elsewhere.

In the great tide of nationalism in the 19th century there was a handful of prophetic and dissenting voices, urging the alternative of federalism. It is interesting, at least, that those whose names survive were the three best-known anarchist thinkers of that century. The political Left as it evolved in the 20th century has dismissed their legacy as irrelevant. So much the worse for the Left, since the debate is now monopolized by the political Right, which has its own agenda in opposing both federalism and regionalism.

First among these anarchist precursors was Proudhon, who devoted two of his books to the idea of federation in opposition to that of the nation state. They were La Fédération et l’Unité en Italie of 1862, and in the following year his Du Principe Fédératif. Proudhon was French, a citizen of a unified, centralized nation state, with the result that he was obliged to become a refugee in Belgium. And he feared the unification of Italy on several different levels. In his book De la Justice of 1858, he had forecast that the creation of the German Empire would bring only trouble both to the Germans and to the rest of Europe, and he pursued this argument into the political history of Italy.

On the bottom level was history, where natural factors like geology and climate had shaped local customs and attitudes. ‘Italy’, he claimed,

It was therefore unnatural for Italy to become a nation state.

He understood that Cavour and Napoleon III had agreed to make a federal Italy, but he knew they would rely on a vainglorious princeling from the House of Savoy who would settle for nothing less than a centralized constitutional monarchy. And beyond this, he profoundly mistrusted the liberal anti-clericalism of Mazzini, not through any love of the Papacy but because he recognized that Mazzini’s slogan ‘Dio e popolo’ could be exploited by any demagogue who could seize the machinery of a centralized state. He saw that the existence of this administrative machinery was an absolute threat to personal and local liberty. Proudhon was almost alone among 19th-century political theorists to perceive this:

Everything we now know about the 20th-century history of Europe, Asia, Latin America, or Africa supports this perception. Nor does the North American style of federalism, so lovingly conceived by Thomas Jefferson and his friends, guarantee the removal of this threat. One of Proudhon’s English biographers, Edward Hyams, comments that

And his Canadian translator Richard Vernon paraphrases Proudhon’s conclusion thus:

This observation reveals a profound understanding of the psychology of politics. Proudhon was extrapolating from the evolution of the Swiss Confederation, but Europe has other examples in a whole series of specialist fields. The Netherlands has a reputation for its mild or lenient penal policy. The official explanation of this is the replacement in 1886 of the Code Napoleon by ‘a genuine Dutch criminal code’ based upon cultural traditions like ‘the well-known Dutch “tolerance” and tendency to accept deviant minorities’. I am quoting the Netherlands criminologist Dr Willem de Haan, who cites the explanation that Dutch society

In other words it is diversity and not unity that creates the kind of society in which you and I can most comfortably live. And modern Dutch attitudes are rooted in the diversity of the medieval city states of Holland and Zeeland, which demonstrates, as much as Proudhon’s regionalism, that a desirable future for all Europe lies in an accommodation of local differences.

Discussions about European integration in the 1860s prompted a sceptical reaction from Proudhon:

Swallowing up neighbouring countries may be unfashionable nowadays, but we can see Proudhon’s misgivings being realized in the way debates and decisions of the European Community are dominated by the large states at the expense of the smaller member nations.

The second of my 19th-century mentors, Michael Bakunin, demands our attention for a variety of reasons. He was almost alone among that century’s political thinkers in foreseeing the horrors of the clash of modern nation states in the First and Second World Wars, as well as predicting the results of centralizing Marxism in the Russian Empire. In 1867 Prussia and France seemed to be poised for a war about who should control Luxembourg and this, through the network of interests and alliances, ‘threatened to engulf all Europe’. A League for Peace and Freedom held its congress in Geneva, sponsored by prominent people from various countries, such as Giuseppe Garibaldi, Victor Hugo, and John Stuart Mill. Bakunin seized the opportunity to address this audience, and published his opinions under the title Fédéralisme, Socialisme, et Anti-Théologisme. This document set out 13 points on which, according to Bakunin, the Geneva Congress was unanimous.

The first of these points proclaimed

His second point argued that this aim implied that states must be replaced by regions, for it observed

His fourth point claimed

Consequently his fifth point demanded

The vision thus became bigger and bigger, but Bakunin was careful to include the acceptance of secession. His eighth point declared that

Bakunin refers admiringly to the Swiss Confederation, ‘practising federation so successfully today’, as he put it, and Proudhon too explicitly took as a model the Swiss supremacy of the commune as the unit of social organization, linked by the canton, with a purely administrative federal council. But both remembered the events of 1848, when the Sonderbund of secessionist cantons were compelled by war to accept the new constitution of the majority. Proudhon and Bakunin agreed in condemning this subversion of federalism by the unitary principle. There must be a right of secession.

Switzerland, precisely because of its decentralized structure, was a refuge for numerous political refugees from the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires. One Russian anarchist was even expelled from Switzerland: he was too much even for the Swiss Federal Council. This was Peter Kropotkin, whose ideas connect 19th-century federalism with 20th-century regional geography.

Kropotkin’s youth was spent as an army officer in geological expeditions in the Far Eastern provinces of the Russian Empire. His autobiography tells of the outrage he felt to see how central administration and funding destroyed any improvement of local conditions, through ignorance, incompetence, and universal corruption, and through the destruction of ancient communal institutions which might have enabled people to change their own lives. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the administrative machinery was suffocated by boredom and embezzlement. There is a similar literature from any other empire or nation state.

In 1872 Kropotkin made his first visit to Western Europe, and in Switzerland was intoxicated by the air of democracy, even a bourgeois one. In the Jura hills he stayed with the watch-makers, a community of self-employed craftsmen. His biographer Martin Miller describes his reactions:

His stay in the Jura hills was a turning point for Kropotkin. The rest of his life was, in a sense, devoted to gathering the evidence for anarchism, federalism, and regionalism.

Kropotkin’s approach is not simply a matter of academic history. In a study of Un federalista Russo, Pietro Kropotkine (1922), the Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri quotes the ‘Letter to the Workers of Western Europe’ that Kropotkin handed to the British Labour Party politician Margaret Bondfield in June 1920. In the course of it he declared that:

Today we can see the relevance of this opinion, ignored for 70 years. As an exile in Western Europe, Kropotkin had close contact with a range of pioneers of regional thinking. The relationship between regionalism and anarchism has been handsomely delineated by the geographer Peter Hall, when director of the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at Berkeley, California, in his book Cities of Tomorrow (1988). There was Kropotkin’s fellow anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus, arguing for small-scale human societies based on the ecology of their regions. There was Paul Vidal de la Blache, another founder of French geography, who argued that ‘the region was more than an object of survey; it was to provide the basis for the total reconstruction of social and political life’. For Vidal, as Professor Hall explains, it was the region, not the nation, which

Finally there was the extraordinary Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes, who tried to encapsulate all these regionalist ideas, whether geographical, social, historical, political, or economic, into an ideology of reasons for regions, known to most of us through the work of his disciple Lewis Mumford.

Professor Hall pointed out that

Those 19th-century anarchist thinkers were a century in advance of their contemporaries in warning the peoples of Europe of the consequences of not adopting a regionalist and federalist approach. After every kind of disastrous experience in the 20th century, the rulers of the nation states of Europe have directed policy towards several kinds of supranational entities. The crucial issue that faces them is whether to conceive of a Europe of States or a Europe of Regions.

To do them justice, the advocates of a united Europe have developed a doctrine of ‘subsidiarity’, by which governmental decisions outside the remit of the supranational institutions of the European Community should be taken by regional or local levels of administration, rather than by national governments. A resolution has been adopted by the Council of Europe, calling for national governments to adopt its Charter for Local Self-Government, ‘to formalise commitment to the principle that government functions should be carried out at the lowest level possible and only transferred to higher government by consent.’

This precept is an extraordinary tribute to Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin and the ideas that they were alone in voicing (apart from some interesting Spanish thinkers like Pi y Margall or Joaquin Costa). Of course it is one of the first aspects of pan-European ideology that national governments will choose to ignore, though there are obvious differences between various nation states in this respect. In many of them, for example Germany, Italy, Spain, and even France, the machinery of government is considerably more devolved than it was 50 years ago. The same is true of the former Soviet Union.

One anarchist thinker from the Netherlands, Thom Holterman, has set out the criteria which anarchists would see as the prerequisites for a free united Europe. His warning is precisely that the obstacle to a Europe of the Regions is the existence of nation states. Another is that because the thinking and planning of the future of Europe is in the hands of governmental bureaucracies, they are all preparing for a Europe of the bureaucrats.

Kropotkin used to cite the lifeboat institution as an example of the kind of voluntary and non-coercive organization envisaged by anarchists that could provide a worldwide service without the principle of authority intervening. Two other examples of the way in which local groups and associations could combine to provide a complex network of functions without any central authority are the post office and the railways. You can post a letter to Chile or China, confident that it will get there, as a result of freely-arrived-at agreements between different national post offices, without there being any central world postal authority at all. Or you can travel across Europe and Asia over the lines of a dozen different railway systems, public and private, without any kind of central railway authority. Coordination requires neither uniformity nor bureaucracy.