by Benjamin M. Studebaker
Why do federations stop expanding? In this piece, I’ll explore the role international politics plays in driving the construction of federations. Very often, federations begin when a large number of weak states face a common threat. It follows that in an environment where there are fewer wars and states experience less severe threats, they have less incentive to federate. But does that mean war is necessary for federalization, or are there other ways to bring it about?
Classical Greece was dominated by two major powers—Athens and Sparta. The third strongest city was Thebes. Thebes was much smaller than its rivals. Its territory amounted to just 650 km2, compared with 2,400 for Athens and 8,000 for Sparta. Athens and Sparta used their might to construct leagues of suppliant cities. In Athens’ Delian League, the smaller cities were effectively part of a protection racket. They paid Athens for protection, and if they didn’t pay, the Athenians would make sure they came to understand the value of security. Thebes was located less than a day’s ride from Athens. It was much too close for comfort.
Thebes was not strong enough to create a league of submission around itself. At the same time, Thebes did not want to be absorbed into the Athenian bloc. In this tricky situation, Thebes cut a deal with its neighbors. Instead of subordinating the neighboring towns, Thebes welcomed them into a federation, what the Greeks called a “koinon” or “common thing.” Thebes was located in a region called Boeotia, and the federation Thebes constructed bears that name. Around 395 BC, this Boeotian League included 11 cities, each of which elected a Boeotarch, or minister. Each city was entitled to send 60 delegates to an assembly in Thebes, but each was also obliged to contribute 1,000 infantry and 100 cavalry to the federal army. Decisions issued by the federal government were ratified in the cities by their local governments. Citizens who met quite stringent property requirements could participate directly in these local councils. Thebes explicitly excluded traders and craftsmen from citizenship.1
Like many later federations, the Boeotian League at once affirmed and abrogated the rights of its composite states. The 11 cities could refuse to ratify federal decisions, but if a city tried to ally with Athens, the Boeotian League reserved the right to act militarily against it. The city of Plataea often sought to ally with Athens, and on many occasions the Boeotians attacked Plataea, at one point exiling its entire population to Athens. The cities of the league could resist the federal government from within the federalist framework, but not from outside it.
Federalism did not just allow Thebes to survive—as the league grew stronger and the Athenians and Spartans wore each other out, the federation became a competitor for Greek hegemony. As the federation grew stronger, small cities in Greece were just as worried about being conquered by the Boeotians as they were the Athenians, the Spartans, or even the Persians. The stronger the league became, the less the league needed to incorporate cities it occupied as full members of itself. The cities it occupied became like the cities of the Delian League—suppliant cities forced to pay protection money.
Federations were uncommon in antiquity because they required that the states be weak enough to fear that they could not remain independent on their own, but strong enough that they stood a good chance of surviving together. And, as soon as ancient federations grow strong enough to be major players in their own right, they no longer need to incorporate more states on equal terms. So, federations only spring up in very special circumstances, and as soon as they are seriously successful, they stop admitting new members.
Liberalism is meant to change all of this. In a world where wealth comes from trade and not from the seizing of agricultural land by force, federations are meant to become a practical way to politically manage economic integration. But in practice, the federations that exist today still largely exist for ancient reasons. In the 18th century, the United States was a group of small, weak states. Benjamin Franklin’s famous 1754 cartoon was titled “Join, or Die.” In a world dominated by Britain, France, and Spain, a small state like Pennsylvania didn’t stand much chance. In the 19th century, Germany federated in large part because the German states knew federation was necessary to protect themselves from France. In the 20th century, the Soviet Union federated in large part because Vladimir Lenin knew the revolution would not survive in just one state.
A pledge to provide security is not sufficient to legitimate federations. All of these federations emphasized additional goods apart from security. The United States protected states’ rights with its senate, and it enshrined individual rights in its constitution. Germany offered nationalist catharsis, inviting its citizens to identify as Germans, to see themselves in their leaders. The Soviet Union pledged to empower workers. Its 1918 constitution made a variety of rights guarantees—but only to workers, to those who derived their incomes from labor.2 But, in all of these cases, a need for security was part of the story, and it’s hard to see how the federating process could have begun without it.
Federations continue adding states while they remain substantially weaker than the most powerful states. But, once they become great powers in their own right, they stop admitting new states. The United States never offered statehood to the territories it took from Spain. Instead, it colonized the Philippines, installed a puppet regime in Cuba, and held Puerto Rico and Guam as territories. Puerto Ricans have been US citizens for a century, but they still do without statehood. No existing US state was held as a territory for so long without acquiring statehood. There are 3 million Americans in Puerto Rico. There were just 62,555 in Wyoming in 1890. Germany annexed most of the territory it seized in 1938 and 1939, but from there began occupying land and installing puppet governments. The Soviet Union incorporated the Baltic states as Soviet Socialist Republics in 1940, but installed puppet governments in Eastern European states it occupied at the end of World War II.
When a federation becomes sufficiently powerful, it becomes possible to station troops in foreign states without granting those states federal rights. If there are no neighboring great powers to turn to for aid, the weak states have no choice but to accept military bases and even occupation. In 2020, the United States maintained 750 military bases in at least 80 countries. It deployed troops in 159.
In the middle of the 20th century, the United States flirted with the idea of incorporating Newfoundland. In the 1930s, Newfoundland was a British dominion. It was also deeply indebted and on the verge of economic collapse. The British suspended democracy in Newfoundland, installing what was called “the Commission.” Newfoundland is disproportionately Irish Catholic, and many Newfoundlanders felt they had more in common with the Irish diaspora living in the United States than they had with neighboring Canada or with the British authorities. The poor economic condition of Newfoundland made independence seem unrealistic, but joining the United States would get Newfoundland out from under Westminster’s thumb and provide a path to development.
Initially, the United States was encouraging. But during World War II, the British allowed the Americans to establish a military base on Newfoundland. When Newfoundland held a referendum on its status in 1948, Canada reassured President Truman that if Newfoundland joined Canada, the military base would remain. With that reassurance, the United States lost any remaining interest in the fate of Newfoundland. In the referendum campaign, proponents of independence tried to argue that once Newfoundland became independent, it could pursue union with the United States. But the United States didn’t seem to care, and this created uncertainty about whether it would ever be possible for Newfoundland to become part of the United States.3 Ultimately, Newfoundland narrowly voted to confederate with Canada. Today, Newfoundland has the lowest score on the Human Development Index of any Canadian province. But it is almost certainly better off than it would have been as an independent state, abandoned by a United States that views it as nothing more than a staging ground for military forces.
In recent years, Americans have begun to question whether these military bases do them any good. Are they really a way of projecting American power abroad, or are they an expensive burden that prevents the American state from making more sensible internal investments? In the decades following World War II, the American worker increasingly faced competition from workers in states the United States had occupied, like Germany and Japan. And in recent decades, the United States has increasingly traded with countries like China and Vietnam, in which it has no military bases with which to influence events. If military bases don’t guarantee trade on favorable terms, what are they for? Is the United States just paying to defend countries that don’t pay to defend themselves? In doing so, is it just subsidizing foreign infrastructure projects and public services while neglecting its own infrastructure and permitting its own housing, education, and healthcare sectors to become increasingly dysfunctional?
If it is the case that the United States benefits from having military bases in states without having to grant those states federal rights, then the United States has little incentive to grant federal rights. But if it is the case that the United States is effectively subsidizing the growth of foreign states, then those states have little reason to seek to join the federation. It’s a Catch-22.
Federation is further complicated by the expansion of the state apparatus over the course of the 20th century. States now have much larger bureaucracies, and those bureaucracies are expected to provide a much more extensive set of services and to employ many more people. Citizens in different states now enjoy sharply different economic rights, and this means that political integration will often lead to a lot of destabilizing labor mobility. If, for instance, the United Kingdom were to become part of the United States, would NHS junior doctors—who earn a salary of about $45,000—suddenly have the right to move to the United States, where they could almost double their incomes? If they were allowed to move, it would not be possible for the UK to maintain the NHS without sharply increasing salaries. Unless the UK were to receive subsidies from the federal government, it would not be able to afford the cost. The UK would be forced to Americanize its healthcare system. In the course of doing that, it would vitiate the right to healthcare free at the point of use, a right that is extraordinarily important to many people who live in the UK. Americans will not be interested in a federation that requires them to pay triple the salaries of doctors living in the UK, and the British will not be interested in a federation that requires them to give up the health service.
This problem comes up even when we discuss states that are relatively affluent and comparatively similar to the United States. It is an even sharper problem in cases where there is a major economic gulf between the United States and the foreign states in question. The United States can avoid subsidizing those states, but if it doesn’t subsidize them, it would have to deal with a very large amount of internal economic migration. For instance, US statehood for Mexico would either mean large cash transfers to Mexico or many Mexicans moving to wealthier parts of the federation where wages and living standards are higher. Existing Americans would resent the competition this would create and the downward pressure on wages it would exert.
It was much easier for the United States to incorporate new territory in the 19th century, when there was frontier territory available for settlement. If a large number of immigrants arrived in San Francisco or New York, and it became difficult to find decent work, native-born Americans could simply move into the interior of the country. Settlers constantly attacked and relocated Native Americans as an alternative to competing with immigrants for crummy jobs in coastal cities. Immigration drove genocide.
It was only when the frontier closed that it became necessary to find other ways for workers to survive in an increasingly competitive labor market. This was done first by restricting labor mobility and then by expanding the role of the state in managing the economy. So, today, when a new state is added to a federation, the people who live in that state expect a right of free movement. They expect to be able to access the public services of the expanding federation, to avail themselves of the rights they gain by becoming citizens of that federation. That means subsidies heading out or migrants moving in. Both of those possibilities are politically poisonous for federal governments. American public officials will not win elections by pledging to subsidize British doctors or Mexican workers, nor will they win elections by allowing millions of British or Mexican citizens to come to the United States.
The European Union has paid a heavy price for expansion. It allowed many Eastern European states to join when those states were still much poorer than the Western European states. The EU avoided subsidizing the Eastern European states, but this led to an enormous amount of migration from Eastern Europe to Western Europe. The Western European workers came to resent the Eastern Europeans. Opposition to the European Union expanded and deepened on this basis, and today it is painfully difficult for the European Union to generate the political will necessary to develop any new structures. Today, French and German diplomats propose that the EU become a multi-tiered system, enabling it to add Ukraine without giving Ukrainians the right to move west.4 The Ukrainians, who need the EU’s support to effectively resist the Russians, are in no position to barter about the terms. If the proposal goes through, the EU will effectively exploit Ukraine’s precarious situation to admit it without granting it the full rights to which it ought to be entitled as a member state. If the proposal doesn’t go through, Ukraine will likely be denied membership simply because the Western European states are not confident they can manage the political consequences at home.
This seems like the most likely route to federal expansion in the 21st century. A weak state, worried about its survival, desperately appeals to a larger bloc for admission. Because the weak state is in a bad way, the weak state will accept whatever terms the larger bloc offers. This enables the larger bloc to admit the weak state only partially. The federation commits to defending the weak state and to trading with it, but it does not grant the local population the right of free movement. This means the federation can withhold subsidies without experiencing an influx of internal migration.
For the United States, the case that seems to fit the parameters most clearly is Taiwan. While the United States has military bases in Taiwan, Taiwan cannot be sure the United States will honor its word and defend it against China. To ensure the United States is committed to its defense, it could attempt to join the United States, even on unfavorable terms. Any attempt by Taiwan to join the United States would force a confrontation with China. This means that if the United States wanted a confrontation with China, it could use the possibility of incorporating Taiwan as a means of forcing the issue. The current Taiwanese government is not interested in joining the United States or in a confrontation with China. But there are some in Taiwan—like the Formosa Statehood Movement—who think becoming part of the United States will ultimately be necessary to avoid becoming part of China. If the security situation in Taiwan deteriorates, it is entirely possible that this faction will grow out of desperation, especially if the United States reciprocates the interest.5
It is possible to imagine a hawkish American president who is determined to create a conflict with China. Such a president could put Taiwan in danger and then offer to save it. But the purpose of “saving” it would be to force China to invade Taiwan so that the United States can defeat and humiliate China. In this situation, Taiwan would be very overtly a pawn in someone else’s scheme. It would likely be badly damaged during any ensuing conflict, and if it ever were to become part of the United States, it would likely be as a territory rather than as a US state.
Ultimately, to get admission to the American federation on equal terms, foreign states would need to be considerably stronger relative to the United States than they presently are. They would need to be able to credibly threaten to hurt the United States if the United States doesn’t admit them on equal terms, e.g., by seizing American bases or cutting trade links. And, as soon as any new states were admitted to the United States, the federation would become stronger, making it even harder for the remaining external states to gain admission on equal terms.
Unless—perhaps there is another way. If federations could take a longer view about costs and benefits, they could absorb the adjustment costs of admitting new members to achieve long-term objectives. Federations avoid paying subsidies and allowing migration not because the leaders of federations believe the subsidies and migrants aren’t in the federation’s interests, but because they know they cannot get their citizens to think in a sufficiently long-term way. Their wealthier citizens won’t pay for subsidies even when those subsidies are clearly in the long-term interests of the federation, and their poorer citizens won’t accept economic competition from migrant workers. It’s for this reason that federal expansion usually requires serious security threats. When the adjustment costs seem trivial compared to the costs of losing a war or being surpassed by a competing power, citizens are more willing to pay the costs.
Liberal political theory struggles to produce a sufficiently strong commitment to long-term interests. For liberal political theorists, states need to be legitimated to individuals, and that means federal acts have to be explained to individuals in terms that those individuals could or should accept. Why should individuals agree to pay adjustment costs when they are unlikely to themselves experience the benefits? Liberal moral philosophers have tried to answer this question with complicated arguments suggesting that living people cannot reasonably consider themselves more important than future people or people living in other parts of the world.6 Even if we are permitted to discount the value of future people, these philosophers argue that future people must still be said to have a value greater than zero, and that means that in aggregate, their concerns greatly outweigh our own.
This argument, while morally compelling for committed liberals, has not yet shown much political potential. In practice, when federations expand, the rich avoid paying subsidies and pass the cost onto the poor in the form of migration. This has increased hostility not just to expansion but even to the maintenance of existing unions. Immigration has become one of the most important issues in western politics, and it is only likely to become more important as the planet warms and many poorer states buckle under the weight of environmental degradation.
What is really needed is a sense that there are other things that matter apart from the individual—that federations aren’t just valuable insofar as they bestow benefits on individuals, but that they are valuable in their own right, because they help make this world good. The rich need to contribute to federations not just because they will benefit or future rich people will benefit, but because they believe that the world itself is a koinon. They need the political maturity to recognize that their lives have little meaning unless they serve a purpose larger than themselves, than even the individual in the abstract.
To achieve liberal ends, it is necessary to go beyond liberal concepts. Liberalism does not itself supply a sufficiently rich set of concepts to accomplish the political tasks it sets for itself. In this sense, it’s not conceptually self-sufficient. That was the insight of Max Weber, who accused German liberals of failing to subordinate their individuality to the needs of the nation. But this is not just an insight for nationalists. Whatever kind of polity one prefers, there is a need to treat that polity as intrinsically valuable, as not merely an instrument for the individual. Otherwise, we get into these impasses where the interests of individuals conflict too sharply with the interests of the polity. The prevailing political theory has no tools with which to realign individuals with the interests of the state. It’s for this reason that something external to liberalism is always necessary, even from within a liberal point of view.
When the Persians invaded Greece in 480 BC, the Athenians and the Spartans joined together to resist them. But the Thebans did not. Instead, they joined the Persians. They hosted the Persian commanders in their city. They even fought alongside the Persians at the Battle of Plataea. They did this because the Thebans already understood on some level that there is, sometimes, a need to give up some individuality to make a better world. They had already done this to make their federation. So why not do it again? If Thebes can be part of a federation, why can’t it be part of a satrapy? They were willing to go beyond what was Greek for the good of their koinon. It didn’t work out for them, and in the centuries to come, the Athenians repeatedly denounced the Thebans as “Medizers.” Eventually, the Thebans came to feel ashamed of what their ancestors had done. When the Macedonians invaded Greece, the Thebans were determined not to be seen to join the invaders again. And so, in 335 BC, Alexander burned their city to the ground.
NOTES
- Though, like most Greek cities, there was some variation in the way Theban politics operated over the centuries. For a user-friendly introduction to Thebes, see Paul Cartledge, Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece (New York: Abrams, 2022). ↩︎
- For a discussion of rights discourse in the early Soviet Union, see Thomas Towe, “Fundamental Rights in the Soviet Union: A Comparative Approach,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 115.8 (1967): 1250-1274. ↩︎
- For more on Newfoundland, see Karl Mcneil Earle, “Cousins of a Kind: The Newfoundland and Labrador Relationship with the United States,” American Review of Canadian Studies 28.4 (2009): 387-411. ↩︎
- The proposal is available here. ↩︎
- For more on this faction, see Who is Blocking the Sunlight in the Taiwanese Sky?: An Examination of the True Legal Relationship between Taiwan and the USA, Kuan-Hsing Chen’s 2010 article “Deimperialization: Club 51 and the Imperialist Assumption of Democracy,” and Derek Sheridan’s 2016 article “‘Uncle Sam Said Very Clearly You Are Not a Country,’: Independence Activists and the Mapping of Imperial Cosmologies in Taiwan.” ↩︎
- E.g., Derek Parfit, On What Matters Vol 1-3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 & 2017). ↩︎
Benjamin M. Studebaker received his PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge. Send him mail.
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