three ways to advance democratic practices: regionalism, nationalism, and federalism

Reprint from Recognition and Redistribution in Multinational Federations - ISBN 978 94 6270 024 6 - © Leuven University Press, 2015

Recognition and Redistribution in Multinational Federations


Recognition andRedistribution in

Multinational Federations

Edited by Jean-François Grégoire

Michael Jewkes


© 2015 by Leuven University Press / Universitaire Pers Leuven / Presses Universitaires de Louvain. Minderbroedersstraat 4, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium)

All rights reserved. Except in those cases expressly determined by law, no part of this publication may be multiplied, saved in an automated datafile or made public in any way whatsoever without the express prior written consent of the publishers.

ISBN 978 94 6270 024 6D/2015/1869/2NUR: 730

Cover illustration: Vladyslav Starozhylov. Shutterstock.Cover design: Stephanie SpechtLay-out: Friedemann Vervoort


Contents

Preface 9

Introduction 11

Recognition and Redistribution in Multinational Federations: Reconcilable Goals, or Unresolvable Tension? 13

Michael Jewkes

Part I: Recognition in Multinational Federations 33

1. Non-territorial Jurisdictional Authority: A Radical Possibility in Need of a Critique 35

Helder De Schutter

2. Nations, Popular Sovereignty, and Recognition: Challenging the Indivisibility Assumption 57

Geneviève Nootens

3. Three Ways to Advance Democratic Practices: Regionalism, Nationalism and Federalism 73

Alain-G. Gagnon Jean-François Grégoire

4. A Short Note on Language and Identity 97

Antoon Vandevelde

5. Recognition and Political Accommodation: from Regionalism to Secessionism – The Catalan Case 107

Ferran Requejo Marc Sanjaume


Table of Contents6

Part II: Redistribution in Multinational Federations 133

6. Federalism, Contractualism and Equality 135

Andrew Shorten

7. Federal Distributive Justice: Lessons from Canada 157

François Boucher Jocelyn Maclure

8. Fiscal Federalism and Solidarity: In Search of an Ideal Formula 183

Philippe Van Parijs

Part III: Sources of Stability in Multinational Federations 193

9. If You Can’t Trust Them, Join Them: Federalism and Trust in Divided Societies 195

David Robichaud

10. Federalism as Efficient Justice 215

Jean-François Grégoire Michael Jewkes

Index 241


For León and Mathieu


Preface

This book grew out of a three day workshop held in Leuven, Belgium from May 2nd- 4th 2013. It took us a long time to make the workshop happen but it was worth the wait and the effort. It was exciting to bring together academics from countries that all face, in many different ways, the issues that the book explores, namely: Belgium, Spain, the UK and Canada. We had the chance not only to exchange insightful ideas, but also human experiences and to open our minds to new horizons. We are glad to share the results of this event with the world and modestly hope that the book will inspire other people to engage in these issues, within and beyond their own borders.

The workshop was a joint venture between the Research Group on Plurina-tional Societies (GRSP) and Research in Political Philosophy Leuven (RIPPLE). Our thanks must go, first and foremost, to all those who presented and comment-ed upon papers; as well as to those who attended and contributed to the work-shop’s success. Many of those who presented work on that occasion have contrib-uted chapters to this volume and can thus be found in the list of contributors. We would, additionally, like to extend our thanks to those others who presented at the workshop but whose work does not feature in the book: Dimitrios Karmis; Raf Geenens; André Lecours and Stefan Rummens. We offer particular thanks to Jocelyn Maclure and Helder De Schutter who provided the initial impetus for the conference, and who gave their time and effort to assist in its organization.

We are grateful also to our families and loved ones for their continuing support and belief from the start. Thanks to our parents, Mathieu, Magdalena, Dave, Ali-cia, León and Lupe.

At Leuven University Press we would like to express our gratitude to Veerle De Laet for her enthusiasm for the project from the very beginning and for her understanding and patience while we have been putting together the final prod-uct. A final thanks goes to Brendan O’Leary and to one anonymous reviewer who helped to improve the quality and the clarity of the book with their highly insightful comments.


3. Three Ways to Advance Democratic Practices:

Regionalism, Nationalism and Federalism

Alain-G. Gagnon – Université du Québec à Montréal Jean-François Grégoire – KU Leuven

Since the end of the First World War, the objective of empowerment has provided meaning and hope to countless disenfranchised groups and communities across the globe. The Maritime Rights Movement of the 1920s and 1930s, when several regions of Canada – mainly in the East, hence ‘Maritime’ – protested against what they saw as unfair economic policies dictated by the central government in Ottawa, is a clear example of the quest for empowerment. So too are the decolo-nization movements in Africa and in Asia and, more recently, the women’s rights movements and the claims of First Nations peoples that, unfortunately, have for far too long fallen on deaf ears.

One prominent and interesting example of such movements is the case of Quebec and especially the Quiet Revolution (Révolution tranquille) that took place in the 1960’s and 1970’s. During this period, the province was the theater of the rise of a generation of political actors who launched major institutional reforms that have fundamentally altered Quebec’s political and social landscape. Although there was no clear consensus on the road, virtually everyone agreed that things needed to change so that people could be properly educated, receive adequate health care, and find the employment necessary to enjoy a decent life. In other words, there was a consensus that the people of Quebec needed political empowerment so that they could possess the means of self-determination and collective dignity.

But what exactly do we mean when we speak of collective empowerment and what can justify such political habilitation of regional and national groups in fed-eral contexts? First, collective empowerment means that political entities, such


Alain-G. Gagnon, Jean-François Grégoire74

as Catalonia1, or Quebec which will be discussed in this chapter, get the politi-cal capabilities that they need to protect their members’ freedoms and to create the possibility for upward social mobility. The political capabilities needed to do these things are those which give national governments the competences they need to make democratic decisions on matters that are crucial for self-determi-nation. In the federalism literature, these capabilities are referred to as ‘powers’ or ‘competences’. We are not claiming here that nations should have all the compe-tences that their leaders desire, but rather that when members of a political com-munity identify themselves as forming the relevant demos to decide on issues that they see as being in their fundamental interests, they should have the right to do so. Why could Scotland organize a referendum on its self-determination, where-as Catalonia could not? There is no normative reason to differentiate between such cases. Empowerment means that the demoï who claim to be recognized as distinct political communities, for reasons of democratic equality and fairness, should have the political and legal powers to be democratically auto-nomos.

That hints at a second dimension of empowerment: against whom should minority and dominated communities be empowered? The alien forces that can compromise the ability of political communities to be self-determining and to be able to exercise power over the rules and institutions which will shape the eco-nomic and political landscape of their members can take many forms. They can manifest themselves through a small exogeneous elite which controls positions of power, as was the case until about 60 or 70 years ago with Anglophones in Quebec and the French speaking elite in Flanders. Another variation is that of centralized institutions which often undermine the legitimacy of regional or na-tional groups to exercise their fair share of control over the decisions that concern them. Finally, exogeneous forces can be global such as when they are embodied by other states, global institutions such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, or by multinational corporations. In face of this multiplicity of threats of domination, regions and national groups alike must find a niche in the political world that can provide them with adequate democratic control over the norms that will shape the economic and political landscape of their residents or members. In short, collective empowerment is political in nature: it concerns the ability of governments, presumably representative in nature, to use their coercive

1 For a detailed summary of the political demands that Catalonia addressed to the Spanish gov-ernment and the failings of Madrid to satisfy them (which led to the surge of national mobili-zation that is enflaming the region), see Requejo and Sanjaume in Chapter 5 of this volume.


Three Ways to Advance Democratic Practices 75

power to enforce justice; and is democratic in form: the norms of justice to be enforced are decided upon collectively, by the relevant demos.

In this chapter, we address three distinct ways to give meaning to empower-ment: regional mobilization, nationalist expression, and federal pursuit. By trac-ing back some key elements in the history of the nation québécoise since its Quiet Revolution (1960’s-70’s), our goal is to investigate the relation between the em-powerment of political communities, recognized as such, and the development of local democratic practices and the establishment of fair relations between demo-cratic political communities within federal constellations. We argue that nation-alist claims should be understood as rational and political claims of justice, and not as grounded in emotions and a psychological dependence on the recogni-tion of identity, understood as a purely cultural concept (Guibernau 2013). Our conclusions suggest that the issue of recognition in multinational federations is a genuinely political one: what matters is the political and legal empowerment of sub-units and member states (provinces, regions, states, cantons) to impose constraints in the pursuit of justice (i.e. to protect their weakest members against the impersonal and ruthless forces of globalization), and not mere symbolic rec-ognition or tolerance.2 This entails that national identity, as any other form of identity, does not need recognition from another in order to make sense of itself. Recognition understood in a dialogical process of identity formation should not be conceived of, at least in collective relations, as a social condition for self-es-teem. It would be awkward to claim that collective entities ascertain a form of sociopathic dependence on symbolic recognition by others to make sense of their identity. What we observe is rather that nations seek equal political recognition in and through the decision-making process of competence sharing that charac-terizes federal regimes. Thus, we need federal or proto-federal regimes to resist the temptation to advance a centralizing logic and instead to set institutions on the path of demoï-cratic practices. Federalism ought to empower communities politically to be able to meet their needs and collectivize the coercive power of their governments through democratic practices.

2 In 2006, the Conservative government in power in Ottawa symbolically recognized the exis-tence of the Nation Québécoise, but this recognition was not accompanied by any sort of po-litical recognition and legal empowerment of the Québec State. As a result, this event did not change anything in the relations between Québec and Ottawa, nor in the self-perception of the inhabitants of La Belle Province. For more on this issue, we refer the reader to Anctil and Dubreuil, 2008.



The chapter is divided in three parts. (1) The first section fleshes out the mean-ing of regional empowerment by stressing the importance of the active engage-ment towards itself that is needed by every political community, to give life to democratic institutions and to preserve collective and individual freedom. (2) The second section explores how nationalist mobilization can channel the forc-es of different regional struggles into legitimate claims for self-government, un-derstood as well-ordered democratic institutions that feed justice. (3) The last section shows how what we call ‘federal pursuit’ can and should provide the conditions that politically empowered national communities need to be able to maintain democracy, sustain justice and enjoy collective dignity. The upshot will be a consistent account of political empowerment that accommodates the multi-level model of government that is already becoming the hallmark of 21st century political governance.

1. Empowerment through regional mobilization

In this section, we discuss regional mobilization to highlight the importance of civic engagement in the evolution from mere cultural communities into genuine political communities. Without constant engagement with itself, a community cannot become nor remain a free political association. This is why before exam-ining what political empowerment means for a nation, both internally (self-gov-ernment) and externally (federalism), we start by digging into the first moments of the Quiet Revolution to show that, in a world of acute uneven development, regional mobilization is often motivated by a desire to avoid domination, in the sense of not being subjected to an alien will and to stand on an equal footing with fellow community members and neighbors. In short, to claim and defend collec-tive and individual rights to equality and dignity.

In the early 1960’s, the Eastern Quebec region of Lower St. Lawrence had been selected for a pilot project known as the Eastern Quebec Planning Bureau (Bu-reau d’aménagement de l’Est du Québec – BAEQ). This was a time of particu-larly high social and political unrest in Quebec and the region was hand-picked for the simple reason that it was one of the most economically depressed areas in the country. Farming, fishing and forestry activities were in the midst of an economic hollow. The choice seemed to be between surviving in this remote land or abandoning the community in favor of urban service centers. Obviously if a greater number of people would have chosen to leave the area it would have been



difficult if not impossible for the others to make a living in the region. Tensions could be observed in local hall meetings as people expressed their respective con-cerns. To get a better sense of the transformations that took place in the region: in 1931, according to the first census conduced in rural areas, one could count 135 000 farms. Twenty years later, that number had dropped to 100 000. Nowadays there are less than 28 000 farms in the region (Vachon 2011).

The driving idea behind this pilot project was that it was possible to bring about major economic transformations through technical and scientific advancements. State intervention had been gaining popularity in a province that had otherwise produced the least interventionist governments in the country. It became obvious that the changes being considered might have a negative impact on the region’s social fabric given that they were pointing in the directions of industrialization, urbanization and bureaucratization. These processes would further alienate and enrage people from the villages that formed the region’s backbone.

It is worth noting that what seemed to matter most for decision-makers was the need to inform people about the urgency to act more than to advance con-crete measures to allow people to continue living in the region. Edward Smith re-minds us that “participation was carefully thought out, painstakingly structured, generously staffed and supported; more than half of the nearly 4 million dollars (under federal-provincial matching funds) was spent by the BAEQ on public in-formation and consultation” (Smith 1970: 21) If nothing else, the BAEQ helped to sensitize people to the fact that they were a regional community and that their efforts could make a difference.

Governments in Ottawa and Quebec were also trying to reap the political ben-efits from these interventions. However they often wound up getting caught-up in jurisdictional battles. In the end, in 1966, the BAEQ tabled 10 solidly docu-mented volumes including a major inventory of the region’s economic potential. These volumes were rooted in the language of program efficiency and advanced recommendations on the consolidation of economic vocations, the specialization of policy sectors, the selection of potential winners and losers, and on shifting population from remote and under-populated areas to urban centers.

Although Eastern Quebec was subject to this pilot project, the region was also marked by high political tensions. One can safely say that the year 1970 incar-nated this effervescence for several reasons. For one, 1970 marked the election of Robert Bourassa (1933-1996) as Quebec’s premier. Bourassa fit perfectly with the spirit of the time. At 36, he became the youngest premier of Quebec. His strategy to gain power was simple and is strangely similar, at least in name, to



a contemporary political project: A Plan for the North. He declared during the Spring election campaign of 1970, that this initiative would lead to the creation of 100,000 jobs. In the Lower Saint-Laurence region a savior had been found and, as a result, Liberals who had been out of power since 1966 took 8 out of the 10 ridings that composed the area.

Second, the autumn of 1970 has been the theater of the infamous October Crisis (La Crise d’Octobre). Many books, documentaries and films have been pro-duced about this event. Throughout the province, political science and sociology were gaining prominence as legitimate fields of research. One needs to remember that not very long before, the fields of study that were most valued among Fran-cophones were law and medicine as well as religious studies and theology. Now Quebec had become a laboratory for social science research; it was a concrete pilot project of social planning, economic modernization, and political manage-ment.

When the Crisis broke out, the Canadian Armed Forces invaded urban centers and could be seen on rural roads. Quebec and Ottawa teamed up to eradicate what was depicted by politicians as evil forces throughout the province. In doing so, however, some actors did not always demonstrate good judgment – incar-cerating hundreds of people for no valid reason other than the fact that police were said to have found anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, or anarchist materials on their book shelves or that these people had spoken against the establishment. At the provincial election of November 1976, of the eight ridings still attributed to the region, only the riding of Bonaventure did not fall into the hands of the Parti Québécois (PQ).

Another striking example of regional mobilization that is typical of the Quiet Revolution took place in that same year when many parishes witnessed the ep-isode of the ‘angry priests’. In short, nineteen priests published a manifesto that depicted government initiatives as being counterproductive and leading to the closing of municipalities throughout the region. Those angry priests denounced government initiatives for the weakening of the social milieu. Known as the Dig-nity Operations I, II and III, those social movements convinced many people to get involved in local, regional, Quebec and federal politics. Of the 85 villages that had been targeted for closure, only 10 were finally closed down. Nevertheless, these events left a very bad impression of elite and technocratic planning on the local population. However, the upside of these events is that they blew a breath of democracy into local communities that were still defined purely by their cultural identity: French language and Catholic religion. As this breath gave life to local



people as political bodies, individuals started to realize the political potential of the force that the people could apply in order to constrain elites and force them to govern on the terms of the masses.

In sum, the lesson that we draw from these events is the following: empower-ment is a potent concept whose strength is drawn first and foremost from the will of a people to avoid domination through the advent of a democracy that feeds justice and which allows all to live in freedom and dignity. The two following sections examine these practices in the context of national self-government and federal belonging.

2. Empowerment through nationalist mobilization

In this section, we explore the Quiet Revolution as a prominent example of how a nationalist mobilization can channel into a coherent and democratic political community, what would otherwise have been disparate regional struggles. Our reflection here focuses on nationalist mobilization in a political and economic context influenced by forces of globalization, forces that can undermine the vi-ability and prosperity of national communities within the world order.

As we saw in the first section, the forces of globalization can take the form of personal forces, such as those of technocratic agencies imposing new forms of social organizations in the name of science and necessity. They can also manifest themselves in impersonal ways, such as in neo-liberal terms of ‘progress’ and the absence of interference in economic ‘development’. But, again, these forces can have very uneven consequences across regions or social classes. In such a context with a multiplicity of threats of domination, we see nationalist mobilization, and ultimately national self-government, as necessary to empower national groups and permanent minorities against both the personal and impersonal forces of globalization. There is a need for the political empowerment of national groups, a need for the creation of vernacular democratic practices, a need to create insti-tutions that will allow individuals and local groups to see their interests furthered through the Rule of Law and constitutionalism. Nationalist mobilization allows regional groups who share common vulnerabilities, more often than not on the basis of shared identity variables, to be empowered by the force of the national group taken as a whole. The particular wills of those who struggle at the regional level can converge and form a common ‘General Will’, in the rousseauvian sense, which will legitimate the laws they will adopt as a political community and which



will give to each more force to preserve its dignity and freedom.3 Such collective political empowerment is needed to channel the strength of the will of national groups against the alien forces of globalisation. We now turn to this kind of na-tional empowerment that has been alive in Quebec since the Quiet Revolution.

Sociologist Marc Renaud has written a useful summary of the social and eco-nomic conditions prevailing in the 1960s in Quebec. At the time, francophone Quebeckers represented 80 % of the population of the province and owned 50 % of the businesses, but controlled barely 15 % of the value added in the industrial sector in the province (Renaud 1983: 160). In short, Francophones controlled the least profitable sectors of the economy, those sectors being, first and fore-most, agriculture and to a much lesser degree, retail trade, services, and construc-tion. Let us quote an excerpt from Renaud’s account:

“…quite a few French Canadians had the formal training enabling them to fulfill top managerial, professional, and technical jobs in the economy and, after the educational reforms of the mid-1960s, their number consid-erably increased. In effect a new middle class was born… This new middle class is, in essence, different from Quebec’s old middle class and traditional elites whose power and status derived above all from their position vis-à-vis the religious order.

In the early 1960s, this new middle class was confronted with a private economy quite incapable of generating new job outlets and quite inhos-pitable to certified French-Canadian skills. The expansion of the state in this context came as a miracle. It provided job outlets to university – and technically trained French Canadians, thus securing the survival of that class within Quebec” (1983: 169).

The implementation of such overwhelming changes helped to give Quebec’s state actors legitimacy as they were viewed as being responsible for the upward mobil-ity of francophone Quebeckers. In turn, state nationalism was advanced as the main mechanism for transforming economic and political conditions, and for providing francophone Quebeckers with equal job opportunities. The task was gargantuan considering that, in 1959, fewer than fifty specialists in the human and social sciences (including economists, urban planners and social workers) were employed by the Quebec government, and that almost a third of all public

3 We here refer the reader to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, book 1, especially chap-ter 6.



sector employees had less than five years of formal education. At the same time, more than half of the public sector employees worked in the administration of justice, highways, Hydro-Québec, or the Liquor Commission (Brooks and Gag-non 1988). It is in this context that the Parent commission was set up to bring about a major reform in the area of education.

The Parent commission was set up in 1961 to bring the key field of education under state control. Its report, tabled in 1966, found that the state

“must see to social and economic progress, provide for the general welfare, protect the community, correct injustices, help the weak. In view of this, it may be said that the modern state can no longer leave a part of its people in ignorance without jeopardizing the progress and peace of society and without complicity in inequities which it has a mission to redress. Thus it is obligated to provide, directly or indirectly, for the education of all, and this is one of its essential functions, of which it will never again be able to divest itself.”4

The work of the Parent commission corresponds to a period in Quebec poli-tics when state nationalism was also on the ascent in public consciousness – as a result of a widespread awareness of common vulnerability and often domination. For many Francophone Quebeckers, the only way for them to reverse the power structure was to call upon the state to tame the forces of blind private capital that had kept francophone Quebeckers from position of economic leadership.

Most francophone Quebeckers also saw state nationalism as a potent instru-ment for advancing democratic practices, developing solidarity and social cohe-sion, for attenuating discrimination, for increasing social inclusion, for stimulat-ing public investment, for counteracting the imperatives of globalization and the promulgation of privatization, and for undermining neo-liberal practices. With-in this context, we submit that all political parties within the Quebec National Assembly have defended, from the 1960s onwards, some form of state national-ism. However, it should be noted that the difference between the Liberals and the PQ has kept growing, especially since the referendum campaign of 1995. The former being openly federalist, and the latter still having the full political inde-pendence of Quebec as its leitmotif.

The Quebec National Assembly thus became the face of what had traditionally been French Canadian nationalism – that extended beyond Quebec’s borders.

4 See Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Education in the Province of Quebec (1966).



There was an important mobilization of French speaking people, who saw the Quebec state as the potential bearer of French Canadian aspirations and claims, as the rights-bearer of a nation of people who felt disempowered and dominated by imperialist federal institutions.

It is in this context that the emergence of a ‘Québécois general will’ took place. A public system of education was necessary to empower Quebeckers of different re-gions who shared a vulnerability, due to their lack of education in many domains, such as politics, economics, business, work relations, etc. As the province built up a province-wide network of public institutions of education – and as some privileged brilliant minds studied abroad in prestigious universities – the French majority in Quebec became more and more aware of its capacities to collectively handle its destiny and development. As a result, the National Assembly witnessed in 1976 the first election of the nationalist Parti Québécois. The province’s gov-ernment was at the time one of the most educated in the world, which led to the adoption of the first Charter of Rights in the Canadian federation – and which inspired the Canadian one that came several years later – and the Charte de la Langue Française, known as Bill 101 (Loi 101).5 With these two charters, the state of Quebec affirmed that its constitution and legal apparatus put forward norms of citizenship that could be integrated into a global legal framework. At the same time, it also asserted that the nation that was habilitated by this con-stitution wanted to be a contributing member, not a slave, of a global system of cooperation and trade.

Let us clarify further the Québécois’ enthusiasm toward state nationalism. To be clear, nationalism is a polysemic concept. For some, nationalism is a reaction-ary movement that seeks to advance an ethnic project based on some primordial ties and in opposition to liberal values. For others, nationalism is the expression of a social movement that seeks to transform power relations and redress past injustices. Still, for others, it is a quest for identity in a world that is caught be-tween forces of integration and disintegration (Laforest and Brown 1994, Keat-ing 2001). In practice, both Canadian majority nationalism and Quebec minori-ty nationalism have at times adopted different postures with respect to culture, economy, and identity politics. That being said, our general understanding of

5 It should be noted, however, that the Loi 101 contains provisos to grant linguistic rights to Que-bec’s historical English minority, as well as to Indigenous peoples. One should resist interpreting what we describe as the emergence of a nationalist ‘general will’ in Jacobinist terms, which is to say as being hostile to minorities, pluralism and regionalism. In addition to the provisos, one can also refer to the ‘preambule’ of the Loi 101. Government of Quebec [1977] 2014.



these two forms of nationalisms in Canada is that, over the last thirty years, they have overwhelmingly tended to combine liberal values with their respective na-tionalist projects.

Thus, as the Quebec example suggests, nationalism is not always an ugly thing. American political scientist, Craig Calhoun converging with our standpoint in-vites us to avoid discussing nationalism simply as:

“instances of passionate excess or successful manipulation by demagogues. For nationalism is equally a discursive formation that facilitates mutual recognition among polities that mediate different histories, institutional arrangements, material conditions, cultures, and political projects in the context of intensifying globalization. Nationalism offers both a mode of access to global affairs and a mode of resistance to aspects of globalization. To wish it away is more likely to invite the dominance of neoliberal capi-talism than to usher in an era of world citizenship” (Calhoun 2007: 166).

Our own point is that nationalist mobilization can be an effective and powerful vector of justice, when it is conducted as a socio-political project. As described above, prior to the Quiet Revolution, the Québécois did not have much control over the economic activities that were taking place on their territory, neither did they had a state that tracked and represented their interests. Now, we suggest that the nationalist mobilization that took place within La Belle Province was a vector of justice as it served to democratize access to the most attractive positions in so-ciety, both in the private and public sectors. The main objective of the Quiet Rev-olution was not primarily cultural, it was essentially political. Democratic access to higher education and increased opportunities for socio-economic mobility are not tied to the content of the culture québécoise, but to principles of justice, such as equality of opportunity and equality of conditions.

This process of democratization of education and opportunities squares per-fectly with establishing a Charter of Rights based on universal principles (Charte des droits et libertés de la personne, 1975). However, Bill 101 (Charte de la Langue Française, 1977) was much more controversial and has received fierce opposition, especially from Canada outside of Quebec and federal politicians. Investigating in details the legitimacy of the different aspects of Bill 101 would be way beyond the scope of this chapter – and would deserve a study of its own.6 Nonetheless,

6 For the official text of law, we refer the reader to the online version that can be find on the Government of Quebec’s website; official link in bibliography. In addition, one may consult Gagnon and Montcalm 1990.



we claim that Quebec’s linguistic policy is well integrated into the province’s con-ception of social justice because making French the official language of use in the public sphere allows for the inclusion of the members of the majority of the population into the schemes of social cooperation and justice. Many inhabitants of Quebec live in remote regions, far from urban centers where higher education is more readily accessible and bilingual families more common. To prevent de-velopment from occurring unevenly across regions – as emphasized in the first section – adopting the language of the most vulnerable members of the polit-ical community, unilingual French speakers, allows the collectivity to reduce inequalities amongst regions and social classes by democratizing opportunities for socio-economic mobility. Moreover, slightly more than 50% of the province’s population speaks only French,7 and would thus suffer from systemic disadvan-tages if Quebec were to adopt a politics promoting institutional bilingualism. Ac-cordingly, it is considered that personal bilingualism, through the public school system, is preferable. It is hard to see how Quebec could have democratized edu-cation and socio-economic mobility in a bilingual setting, which would not have been very different from the linguistic laisser-faire situation that prevailed prior to the nationalist mobilization that resulted from the Quiet Revolution.

Before we conclude this section, we need to say a word about Canada’s 2006 resolution concerning Quebec as a nation. That year, the Canadian government symbolically recognized the existence of “the ‘nation québécoise’ within a unified Canada”. However, to say that this recognition significantly changed the way that Quebeckers conceive of themselves or relate to Canada could not be further from the truth. As recent polls (covering the fifteen year period from 1997 to 2012) have shown, the percentage of the population which says it is strongly attached to Quebec has remained constant at around 75%; while the proportion of peo-ple saying they have a strong attachment to, or identify primarily with, Canada has significantly decreased.8 This sociological fact suggests that our claim about nationalism holds true: well-understood and legitimate nationalism is motivated by rational and political demands, not by a need for identity recognition. The fact that most people living in Quebec identify strongly with their primary po-

7 The statistics may include people who speak French and other languages that are not English, such as Arabic for example. For the exact numbers, we refer the reader to Canadian official statistics taken from the 2011 census.

8 These results were published in a non-academic journal, L’Actualité, on 3 June 2014. The polls were conducted by the Ekos firm in 2012-2013, and among others by scholar Michael Valpy, from the University of Toronto.



litical community is because they are aware of the ways in which, since the Quiet Revolution, the government in Quebec has been successful in improving their economic and social opportunities and increasing their democratic control over their cultural and political institutions. On the other hand, most people feel de-tached from Canada because they do not identify with its policy choices in sev-eral domains (foreign policy, environmental regulations and protection, criminal justice, management of national pluralism, and so on). We can say that people in La Belle Province identify with it because of its success in empowering them and because they feel more and more detached from the government in Ottawa because of a perceived failing to meet their policy preferences. The recognition of the nation by the central government has not changed the relation between Quebec and Ottawa, nor has it changed Quebeckers’ self-perception. This situa-tion exemplifies perfectly our claim that nationalism is a way to channel claims of justice and fairness, not merely cultural or identity ones.

In brief, as with regionalism, nationalism can help to empower communities that have been ignored, neglected or taken for granted. This brings us to our dis-cussion of federalism as a potent tool for recognition and the empowerment of communities and societal cultures in a pluralist context.

3. Empowerment through federal multinational mobilization9

What has been lacking in most accounts of federalism is an understanding that it can also serve as a mechanism for empowering minority cultures and nations in complex political settings. In addition to regionalism and nationalism, federal-ism can be understood as an instrument for empowering communities. From this perspective, in this last section we argue that federalism can provide the external politico-legal framework in which nations can develop their socio-political proj-ects, as well as providing limitations to national autonomy in a post-Westphalian world. Our discussion will still focus on the case of Quebec, but it will of course expand from the Canadian context and apply to other federal experiences.

In Multinational Democracies, James Tully introduced a new distinctive type of political association, the multinational democracy, in the following manner:

“Multinational democracies, in contrast to single-nation democracies (which are often presumed to be the norm), are constitutional associa-

9 Some elements introduced in this section are developed in Gagnon 2014.



tions that contain two or more nations or people… Since the nations of a multinational democracy are nations, their members aspire to recogni-tion not only in the larger multinational association of which they are a unit, but also to some degree in international law and other, supranational legal regimes (as for example, the four nations of the United Kingdom). Accordingly, multinational democracies are not traditional, single-nation democracies with internal, sub-national ‘minorities, seeking group rights within, but societies of two or more, often overlapping nations that are more or less equal in status” (Tully 2009a: 196).

Tully’s analysis is very penetrating, as it highlights the political dimension of rec-ognition in multinational political constellations, especially when stating that nations are, or should be, ‘equal in status’. Another author who has expressed ideas that became very influential in this domain, both theoretically and in prac-tically shaping the Canadian federation, is Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919-2000). His writings, prior to his entry into federal politics, have much in common with Tully’s sensible and sensitive account of multinational democracies. Trudeau, in fact, once argued in favor of a political project known as the multinational option, in which federalism and democracy could be advanced simultaneously. For the young Trudeau, the classic Westphalian model of the state could not provide a satisfying response to minority claims or contribute to the advancement of plu-ral communities. Tully has recently revisited some of Trudeau’s earlier writings on multinational federalism and found them deserving of high praise as they are based on “grass-roots democratization, local and regional experiments in social-ism, and a plurality of national, ethnic, democratic, regional and economic as-sociations” and in which “English-Canadian and French-Canadian nationalisms would co-exist within the federation and be civic and plural rather than ethnical-ly homogeneous” (Tully 2009a: 196).

However, following his entry into federal politics, Pierre Trudeau chose not to pursue his own conceptualization of the ‘multinational option’. He showed also a clear discomfort with the idea that Canada could be imagined as a ‘communi-ty of communities’ (Bickerton, Brooks and Gagnon 2006). Rather he defended the idea that all Canadians should fall under the scope of undifferentiated recog-nition and that individual rights should prevail over all other forms of political recognition. This was clearly expressed in the 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy that sought to remove the notion of ‘Indian’ as a distinct legal status in Canada. In other words, institutions, culture, identity, belonging, history, gender, indige-neity should not interfere with concrete political life.



As we now find ourselves in an age of great uncertainty,10 (Spain and Belgium might dislocate, to name only these two) it is crucial to connect with the ideas contained in Trudeau’s earlier writings. This age is defined by the creation of a global market and economic standardization, by a rising tidal wave of cultural Americanization, by the decline of political literacy and civic engagement, by a growing uniformity between formerly distinct societies and cultures, and by the continuing atomization of the individual. Taken together, these phenomena con-stitute an unprecedented threat to the survival of minority cultures, identities, and nations. Thus there is a pressing need for minority groups to reassert them-selves and to resist the homogenizing imperatives of the age of uncertainty.

The relationship between international organizations and national minorities underwent a significant transformation between 1995 and 2005. Instead of pro-moting the rights of national minorities, as they once did, international organi-zations now tend to focus on protecting the rights of individuals within minority nations. To be fair however, the plight of the national minorities of Kosovo and East Timor has been brought to public attention via the intermediary of inter-national organizations. However these cases represent exceptions to the devel-oping trend that has taken hold in the supranational sphere and that has meant a tradeoff between the recognition of national minorities and the advent of a global society constituted of culturally diverse groups.

In order to ensure their long-term survival, national minorities must overcome a major hurdle as national majorities have historically downplayed or ignored national minority claims. Confronted with threats emanating from minority groups, representatives of the all-encompassing state have demanded the unques-tioned loyalty of national minorities. However, within the context of unfettered cultural and economic globalization, the dual threat of cultural erosion and de-clining international relevance is potentially far more devastating for minority nations.

Nations must not only counteract the homogenizing forces of globalization, they must also resist the pressure of cultural uniformity generated from within their own states (Gagnon 2010). The loyalty and unity that national majorities demand of national minorities cannot be accepted unless it is also reflected in the adoption of commensurate measures meant to ensure the protection of liberty, freedom and democracy within the multinational polity. It is an issue of condi-tional trust (Karmis and Rocher 2013).

10 For more on all the issues related to this age of political uncertainty in multinational states, such as Belgium, the UK, Spain and Canada, we refer the reader to Gagnon 2011 and 2014.



On this point, the words of Lord Acton resonate across time. Lord Acton ar-gued that modern multinational federalism entailed finding a balance between unity and liberty. Avoiding the reconciliation of these two ideas would have del-eterious consequences on any state. On the one hand, despotism would prove to be the logical outcome if the goals of unity were served at the expense of lib-erty. On the other hand, the entrenchment of liberty without attention to uni-ty would lead inevitably to anarchy. For Lord Acton, the institutionalization of multinational federalism presented a means to avoid both of these paths. Lord Acton made clear that

“The presence of different nations under the same sovereignty… provides against the servility which flourishes under the shadow of a single author-ity, by balancing interests, multiplying associations, and giving to the sub-ject the restraint and support of a combined opinion… Liberty provokes diversity, and diversity preserves liberty by supplying the means of organi-zation… The coexistence of several nations under the same State is a test, as well as the best security of its freedom” (Acton 1949: 185).

The dilemma between security, which requires cohesion and hierarchy, and lib-erty has long occupied political theorists and has given birth to different types of federations.

Given these considerations, the first thing to recognize is that federalism does not have to be imperialistic, hierarchical or authoritarian as we have been remind-ed by James Tully in his Public Philosophy in a New Key where he discusses ma-jor types of current political struggles (Tully 2009b). Federalism might just as well, and more importantly ought to, institutionalize non-dominating relations between political communities and their respective governments (Gagnon 2011: 129). In this regard, the Canadian experience is quite relevant, especially if we consider the nationalist mobilization in Quebec discussed in the previous sec-tion and place it in the context of a fight for recognition and non-domination within Canadian imperial (prior to 1982) and centralizing (post-1982) federal experience.

Since its inception, Canada has had to address diversity and recognition issues and, as such, the Canadian case provides an informative account of the manner in which minority and majority nations have been engaged in an evolving institu-tional and ideational dialogue. We will attempt to elicit, from this particular con-text, broader lessons that may be applied both to other federal polities and states undergoing the process of federalization. In doing so, we focus on non-domina-



tion as a vital principle to ensure that national minorities and national majorities coexist under the auspices of fair inter-communal relations and through which minority nations can fulfill their legitimate and democratic aspirations without undermining a politics founded on consent, freedom, historical continuity and reciprocity.

Since the birth of the original Canadian pact of 1867, transfers of competences between the federated entities and the federal government have always benefited the latter (Brouillet 2005). This tendency of federal political actors to be guid-ed by a ‘reason of the State’ logic (raison d’État) reached its paroxysm in 1982, when P. E. Trudeau’s Liberal government repatriated the Canadian constitution from London. Despite Trudeau’s openness regarding the constitutive pluralism of Canada as an intellectual, as a politician he embodied an unquestionably – and increasingly – centralizing view of the federation. The new constitutional order of 1982 altered the Canadian political landscape so radically that Quebec refused to sign it; and still has not to this day. The reason for this refusal is quite simple: the limitative judicial character of the Constitution reduces both the scope and the state capacity of Quebec (and of the other federated entities) to legislate in areas that allows its citizens to democratically control their destiny and advance their specific identity institutionally. The province’s political recognition, as a dis-tinct political community, has withered away within Canada’s new multicultural identity and the entrenchment of Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the new Constitution. The idea of a pact between political communities was re-moved from the definition of Canada; and so was anything, even remotely close, to a federal spirit or culture. It is worth pointing out that even the notion of fed-eralism does not appear once in the Canadian constitution.

The conflict between the requirements of a genuine federal culture and the logic of the ‘reason of state’ – which animates political actors who fear for the stability and survival of the political constellations that they are responsible for – is consti-tutive of many federal (or proto-federal) states. That is why it is often national mi-norities, such as the Quebeckers or the Catalans, who are the most ardent defend-ers of federal practices within multinational polities. The fact that such minority nations are constantly flirting with independence, we suggest, is to be explained by the fact that they feel dominated by central institutions. Because their central gov-ernments refuse to channel their centripetal aspirations through the promotion of novel formulations of the federal idea, and remain instead stuck in outdated conceptions of state sovereignty, the centrifugal forces become more and more channeled into independence movements. The self-perception of vulnerability



that central institutions entertain in minority nations is often counter-productive and that is why, in order to reach equilibriums that empower nations, the ideal of non-domination – developed by philosopher Philip Pettit (1997, 2012) – should be the normative idea underlying the promotion of a federal spirit. In the remain-der of this section, we will flesh out what the ideal of non-domination requires to show how it can sustain a viable federal spirit in Canada and elsewhere, in the sense of providing the normative and institutional tools to promote the form of nationalist mobilization described in the previous section.

Building on the lesson that we drew above from Lord Acton, we suggest that the political ideal of non-domination implies not only tolerance between peo-ples who dwell side by side within a political constellation, but also the negation of a hierarchy (negarchy) between orders of governments, so that each can keep each other in check and that a fine balance between centripetal (standing up for unity) and centrifugal (upholding difference) forces can be reached. Non-dom-ination requires more than the ideal of tolerance, which could be satisfied even if minority nations, like Quebec, were not politically and legally empowered to sustain their own sphere of justice, norms of citizenship and model of the man-agement of their own pluralist world. This is exactly the problem that leaders of Quebec’s independence movement have identified ever since Trudeau imposed a new Canadian constitution on them in 1982. More specifically, the switch from bi- or multi-nationalism to a Canadian-wide multiculturalism made the nation québécoise vulnerable to the pressure of the Anglo-Canadian majority which has tried, for decades, to impose its own citizenship regime on its minorities. The fear of the Quebeckers that they would be the victim of a ‘tyranny of the majority’ motivated their ‘resist-stance’ towards central institutions and strengthened their attachment toward Quebec institutions, which are perceived as the only place in which citizens can have an effective democratic control over their political future.

More recently, the election of a majority Tory government in Ottawa, with fee-ble political support from Quebec, did nothing to diminish this feeling of dem-ocratic vulnerability and domination. The broken promise of the Conservatives to practice a more open federal governance towards national diversity, especially in response to Quebec’s democratic demands, has of course not contributed to feed a spirit of federalism in Canada, in fact, quite the opposite.11 Federalism has not been oriented towards the advancement of democratic practices – and has continued to feed support for Quebec’s independence.

11 For a detailed account of what is meant by the broken promise to practice a more open form of federal governance, we refer the reader to Montpetit 2007.



Recent events point out to another requirement implied by the adoption of the political ideal of non-domination in federal states, which is that the promo-tion of a federal spirit must not be based, at least not only, on good faith and sym-bolic recognition – as alluded to in the introduction (see footnote 2). Good faith during elections can lure members of minority nations and alienate them from power, which is detrimental to a healthy democratic life. Moreover, mere good faith and mere receptivity to the claims of minority nations does not guarantee their political autonomy over time. For example, a central government can em-power a minority momentarily through, say, monetary transfers that compensate for past injustices without transferring any power to prevent injustices from reoc-curring. In other words, mere good faith can turn dominating central institutions into a ‘benevolent master’ for a certain period of time, but this is not sufficient to get rid of the institutional conditions for domination and sustain a genuine federal spirit. The central authority can decide to change its attitude at any time or the next government might be much less benevolent. Just as a slave remains a slave even if his master is benevolent, a minority nation remains dominated by federal institutions if nothing is done to restore equality in inter-governmental dynamics. A true federal spirit requires that governments interact as equals, with-out an unhealthy dependence.12

As an example of this idea, the ‘spending power’ that the central government granted itself in 1969, allows the government to step over some competences that are strictly reserved to the provinces in the original Constitution, on the basis that it is its duty to equalize standards of public goods across the country.13 As a result, the Canadian government has slowly imposed conditions on provinces to receive new categories of transfers. Moreover, some of these categories were created just before Quebec’s referendum on its independence in 1995, so as to stress the dependence of the province on the central government – presumably to make the ‘dependence’ of Quebec towards Canada more salient to the voters. It is not too far-fetched to interpret this remodeling of federal competences – that Quebec always opposed – as an effort towards more centralization, rather than as a desire to promote a genuine federal spirit while respecting Quebec’s exclu-sive competences. The ideal of non-domination requires that federated entities

12 In federations, sub-units have developed cooperative relations in order to protect themselves against arbitrary interference from the central government. The Canadian Council of the Fed-eration, of which Quebec is naturally part, is a good example of this desire of sub-units not to be subjected to jurisdictional rules to which they have not consented.

13 Government of Canada, “The spending power: scope and limitations”, 1991.



be protected against such arbitrary interferences from the central government and vice versa.

The last point that we want to flesh out concerning the ideal of non-domina-tion is its relation to the moral concept of dignity. The Constitution of 1982 was imposed on Quebec without its consent and without Quebec having any ‘count-er-power’14 to resist the will of Ottawa and of the other provinces. Needless to say this was very humiliating for Quebec’s government and its population. The ideal of non-domination is strongly tied to the moral concept of dignity, as one agent’s moral integrity is violated when another agent imposes its will on it (regardless of whether the agent is a person or a group). Being dominated in such a way as Quebec was – and to some extent still is, because it still has not signed the 1982 constitution – constitutes a clear violation of the dignity of the Quebec state and of its members, as citizens; in short, of Quebec as a political community. The promotion of a genuine and sustainable federal spirit requires that parties do not merely say that they are willing to honor the dignity of their federal partners, but that they commit themselves to establish rules that effectively reduce the vulner-ability of autonomous political communities towards other communities or the central government.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have introduced and discussed the politics of empowerment as a necessary ingredient for the deepening of democracy in multinational feder-ations. Regionalism, nationalism and federalism have been called upon through-out the chapter to measure the extent to which they can rally citizens around objectives of fair representation and redistribution in a world that has become gradually focused on efficiency, performance and power domination. We have illustrated this condition by highlighting the extent to which market economic strategies tend to create uneven development, which have, at times, been attenu-ated by key state interventions. In the case study discussed above, we also stressed how a mobilized community can challenge forces that seemed to escape their control. Similarly, nationalist mobilization was discussed here from a perspective that is not sufficiently stressed in the literature: that is as a catalyst that can pro-mote and advance a just status of political communities within a multinational

14 For a philosophical account of the notions of non-domination and ‘anti-power’, we refer the reader to Philip Pettit 1996, 1997, 2012.



democratic context. From this standpoint, recognizing and granting addition-al power to minority nations, such as Quebec, Scotland or Catalonia, can only contribute to the political stability of existing political regimes. To do otherwise could contribute to the alienation of these political communities and even risk jeopardizing the future of these complex political settings. Multinational feder-alism scholars and political actors alike ought to advance democratic practices by channeling centripetal forces through the promotion of a federal spirit which is based first and foremost on the political ideal of non-domination.

Regionalism, nationalism and federalism, through the use of different and complementary lenses, can contribute to further democratic practices in liber-al democratic states by bringing power closer to citizens in the various regions, nations and federated states. Besides, mobilizations around these various poles ought to incite majority nations to show solidarity toward minorities while con-tinuing their political associations. Multinational federalism, as with the poli-tics of identity, according to the late Stuart Hall (1996: 444), works with and through difference, is able to build those forms of solidarity and identification that make common struggle and resistance possible without suppressing the real heterogeneity of interests, communities and identities and without fixing bound-aries for eternity. In brief, the optimal option for the enhancement of contempo-rary democracies in multinational contexts is to resist their natural inclination for domination, through centralization and inadequate multi-level democratic institutions. In other words, federalism ought not only to ‘tame minority nation-alism’ (Kymlicka 2001), but also majority nationalism. Federalism should allow diversity to grow while not neglecting the binding of interests needed to generate the benefits of cross-national solidarity and cooperation.

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three ways to advance democratic practices: regionalism, nationalism, and federalism

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