By Benjamin M. Studebaker
It is not enough to make normative arguments for a new kind of political system – it is necessary to legitimate that system. Legitimacy is not simply a matter of making a good argument. Legitimacy is about getting people to do things they might not otherwise do. When the political system is legitimate, people endorse it. At the very least, they accept it, despite reservations, either because they believe there are no viable alternatives or because they believe pursuing those alternatives is too risky. When the political system lacks legitimacy, people move to revise it. They work to change its procedures and, in extremis, they even attempt revolutions and revolts. To change the political system, it is necessary both to delegitimate the existing system and to legitimate a credible alternative. Legitimacy is to do with what motivates people to act, either to defend some political order or to subvert that order in concrete, effective ways. Normative arguments for or against particular political systems don’t perform the legitimating (or delegitimating) function unless they are actually motivational in these relevant senses.[1]
When trying to legitimate a new kind of political system, it’s necessary to identify an audience for legitimation. The audience is the set of political actors that need to be won over for the political system to be successfully established. To successfully legitimate a new system to a particular audience it’s necessary to design the system in such a way that the audience in question sees, straightforwardly, how the new system aligns much better with their values than the system we are looking to replace.
It’s much easier to maintain an existing political system than it is to create something new. Old political systems need merely persuade their subjects of their acceptability. New systems must inspire people to go to great lengths – to devote themselves to life projects that often seem to have a slim chance of success. It’s one thing to argue that a supranational federal republic is better, in some pragmatic sense. It’s quite another thing to inspire the organized devotion necessary to bring such a system into being.
To do that, you need to know your audience. What are the values that are important to the audience, and how does the system need to be structured to show the audience that it is indeed worth struggling for over the course of many years? The need to legitimate the system forces aspirant designers to make concessions to multiple audiences with a diverse plurality of aspirations. Often the need to legitimate the system plays a larger role in determining its structure than the designer’s own values and goals. It is in this sense that creating a new political system is a political act. It involves navigating intractable disagreements among people who differ from one another in deep, lasting ways.
In the first post in this series, I showed what federalism needs to do for us. It is not enough for federalism to provide for security – it must qualify commercial competition, unlocking new cooperative modes. In the second post, I argued that it really is possible to do this. By governing flows of money and people, we can enable individuals to create for themselves the lives they want. But even if my arguments are very good, creating a new political system is not merely a question of arguments. There’s also a question of audiences. The arguments I gave in the first two posts are premised on the idea that I can speak to you as an individual. As an individual, you feel constrained by the stultifying logics of military and commercial competition. There are values you have that you feel unable, in some sense or other, to realize within the present political framework. So, I try to show that, by embracing this new framework, you can realize your values as you understand them.
But what if you don’t want to be spoken to as an individual? What if you think of yourself as a member of a nation, a people, a society, a social group? What if you think of yourself as a child of God, as an emanation of the one? Often, liberal arguments struggle to persuade because they address a unit – the individual – that is poorly organized or in short supply. If people don’t think of themselves as individuals – if they lack this kind of consciousness – there is an important sense in which they aren’t.
This produces a dilemma. Should we attempt to organize individuals and, where possible, to create more of them? Or should we make concessions to prevailing ontologies? For me, this is the core of the unit question. What are the units that we are proposing to federate? Are they individuals or are they something else? Our legitimation strategy depends on the way we answer this question. And because the need to legitimate the system has so much influence over the way the system is structured, the audience we choose will shape the system we are ultimately able to propose.
Not the Nation
Clarence Streit understood very clearly that nations cannot be the unit on which federalism is based.[2] For Streit, when we take the nation as the unit, it becomes “sacrosanct” – it becomes frozen in time as the essential locus of power within the system. The national governments become the audience for legitimation, and their demands and preferences come to dictate the way the system is structured. This ultimately destroys the entire project.
Consider the supranational federal republic (SFR) we discussed in “Creating the Cataracts.” In that piece, I emphasized that the SFR can and should empower cities and counties by distributing tax revenue to the local administrative units nearest to the places where economic activity occurs. But if the SFR makes decisions through nation states, each of which appoints delegates or ambassadors to vote on the way revenue is shared, why would the SFR vote to empower cities and counties? Would it not choose, instead, to protect the supremacy of the nation-states? Instead of distributing SFR revenues to the people who are proximate to the places where wealth and corporate income is generated, the SFR would become a vehicle for enabling the nation-states to further develop their centralized administrative apparatuses.
When nation-states are free to develop centralized capacities, this concentrates economic development in a handful of favored metropoles. We see this very clearly in old European nation-states. London and Paris became enormous. Other cities – Birmingham and Manchester, Lyon and Marseille – never developed into true alternative power bases. They were stunted by the metropoles they came to orbit. Even in younger states, like Italy or Germany, where multiple significant cities already existed when the state was founded, development is uneven. Specific cities begin to pull ahead and take on dominant positions – consider Milan or Munich.
By increasing the resources and autonomy of the free cities and counties, the SFR compels the nation-state to reverse course. For the nation-states to receive a share of SFR revenues, they must negotiate with the cities and counties. Instead of picking which cities and counties get to host national bureaucracies, the nation-states are forced into a dialogue with the cities and counties that are succeeding independently. Since these cities and counties are getting rewarded with SFR revenues for their success, they don’t need national investment. On the contrary, it is the nation-state that needs to persuade these cities and counties to share revenue. In such a situation, the nation-state is likely to frame itself as negotiating on behalf of those who live in underdeveloped regions, who can only receive SFR revenues with their support and advocacy. In this way, the SFR inverts the nation-state’s historical functions. It stops further enriching already dominant metropolitan areas and instead becomes an advocate of underdeveloped regions.
This can only happen if the SFR does not depend on the nation-states for legitimacy. If the SFR instead makes decisions by asking the nation-states what it should do, it will never be able to generate these alternative power bases Once the nation-states are the recognized stakeholders, the SFR merely becomes a tool for the growth of their bureaucracies. Instead of encouraging growth in neglected regions, it further concentrates growth in the already dominant supercities where national governments sit. These cities oversee many millions of people. Their immense size – and their extraordinary level of dependence on national governments – makes it quite difficult for individual citizens to constructively intervene in them. London and Paris are gilded cages.
Smaller cities and counties with meaningful resources create an opportunity for individuals not only to use these resources to explore new cooperative modes, but to take a larger, more substantive role in local affairs. It becomes important for individuals to have a say about what these smaller cities and counties do with the SFR revenues. The significance of the revenues – and the fact that the revenues are directly tied to the economic activity of nearby individuals and firms – pushes citizens to become involved in local affairs to a degree that would, under current conditions, seem fanciful.
When nation-states control the money, they don’t just overdevelop the capital region. They also make interventions into the culture industry so as to curate subjectivity. They fund the arts and sciences, but they do so on their terms – the arts become a vehicle for creating and sustaining national and group identities, while the sciences become a vehicle for extending their might. The nation-state funds forms of art and science that would not otherwise be commercially viable – it offers alternatives to the commercial logic – but it does so only on its own terms.[3] Those terms themselves tend to be stultifying. They also produce huge gulfs in education and culture between the capital region – where prestigious universities like Oxford, Cambridge, the University of London, Ecole Polytechnique, PSL, Sciences Po, and the Sorbonne sit – and the other cities and towns, which often fall into deep cultural neglect.
Over time, nation-infected art produces subjects who are unable to think of themselves as individuals, as anything other than members of nations, peoples, races, ethnicities, and groups. These subjects then demand to be recognized and spoken to in these terms. If you refuse, you are accused of denying their identities, their ways of life, as if these things arose spontaneously from within them. By creating a plurality of culturally vibrant cities and counties at a diversity of population sizes, the SFR fights back against this tendency.
The claim that national and group identity itself arises from the individual and must therefore be privileged by liberals is the most insidious claim of the last 150 years. It is pushed continuously by those whom Max Weber referred to as the “privileged hirelings of the state” – the university-educated professionals.[4] It can be pushed from both the right and the left. In one breath, it champions old European nationalisms and notions of an exclusively “western” civilization. In other breaths from other mouths, it champions identity politics, race reductionism, and third worldist orientalism.
Locked in the Cage
And yet, this effort has been enormously successful, so much so that today we take ourselves to be in a culture war between its right-wing and left-wing instantiations. Within this paradigm, both liberal individualism and spiritual universalism are nearly impossible to articulate politically. Organizing effectively on the basis of something other than the nation or the group – even on the basis of something like economic class – appears almost to be a pipe dream.
Yet, if no social base for an alternative politics can be found, federalism is not able to make itself independent from the politics of nations and groups. Dependent upon that which it seeks to eclipse, it is reduced to their instrument. It loses its potential. We see this clearly with the existing international system. When national governments are criticized, they blame the international system for tying their hands. But the citizens cannot influence the international system precisely because the states have constructed the system in a manner that insulates it totally from them. This allows the nation-states to position the international system as a convenient boogie man. Nationalism and groupism become ways of resisting an internationalism – a “globalism” or “globalization” – that is framed as essentially hostile to the citizen by its very nature.[5]
To say, “Hold on a minute! This is just the wrong kind of internationalism. Let me give you an argument about a kind that would be better, that would be more democratic, that would create a higher kind of freedom!” reads nicely on paper, but evades the problem at the level of legitimation. The nation-state’s subservience to the international system it constructed on its terms has allowed the nation-state to create its own perennial excuse. There is a need not merely to argue for better internationalisms, but to overcome the nation-state as a form.
The excuse functions because it is not merely spoken, it generates real political gridlock. It gives rise to two conflicting forms of opposition:
Technocratic Liberal Internationalism
Nationalist Post-Liberal Democracy
Those who continue to identify as liberals identify with the international system against the nation-states that create and sustain it. Those who continue to identify with the nation-states drop the commitment to liberalism. The liberals cease to be democrats, and the democrats cease to be liberals. Each then frames the other’s abandonment as evidence of authoritarian intent. To stop the technocrats, you must support the nation-state. To stop illiberal drift, you must support the international system. Each of these lines of dissent leads back into a structure that is dominated by nation-states. The nationalists explicitly choose the nation-state, while the liberals choose the international system that makes decisions through national representatives.
In this way, the ostensibly radical opponents of the status quo can only choose which of the two faces of the current order to strengthen. They have not succeeded in getting outside the nationalist paradigm. Their radicalism is stillborn.
How can we move beyond this impasse? We cannot simply negate the nation-state in favor of the individual or of some other unit – be it God, society, or something else. We need a positive political project that serves as an object of devotion, as a point of orientation. This project needs to be more compelling than the nation-state, more motivating than it. It must come to exist in material reality – it must give rise to an actual, existing social movement, not a mere collection of good arguments.
And yet, what is this? What is Streit’s Union Now? These are good arguments. While Streit made a concerted effort to spark a grassroots campaign for federalism in the 1930s and 1940s, this movement struggled to get off the ground. Without it, the federalist movement was forced to focus on lobbying national governments and persuading prominent influencers. Its audience became the existing national political establishment, limiting what it could achieve. Often, federalist proposals were used as a foil. The presence of federalism in the public debate facilitated other, lesser forms of transatlantic cooperation. And over the course of World War II, nationalist sentiments intensified, and this made the task more difficult as time went on. By the end of the war, the supremacy of the nation-state was a fait accompli. Because federalists were unable to challenge the nation-states, their arguments could be appropriated and deployed by those states to consolidate their positions in the post-war world. Instead of recognizing federalism as a real possibility, it could be treated it as a useful foil, a convenient tool for constructing a more “realistic” international system.
In the aftermath of the victory of the nationalists, federalism struggles to appear practical, and what appears impractical will struggle to be appropriately motivating. If it is not possible for good arguments to motivate a federalist social movement, there is an objective legitimation deficit for federalism. This legitimation deficit cannot be overcome simply by trying, again and again, to better articulate the relevant arguments. Federalists are left with two options:
We can prioritize creating a viable social movement, even if this forces us to adopt positions and objectives that are not obviously immediately connected with federalism.
We can prioritize the pursuit of federalism, even if this means adopting a more troubling audience for legitimation.
Both strategies are fraught with peril. There is no guarantee that if we pursue other, more socially tractable near-term goals, those goals will eventually generate the conditions under which a social movement for supranational federalism can establish itself. We might just expend our energy in a series of lower stakes struggles. All the while, ungoverned commercial flows will continue subjecting people from all backgrounds to ever-growing amounts of stress. That stress tends to debilitate people politically and socially – it makes them less able to reason about complex problems together.
Yet if we attempt to pursue federalism directly with only very limited forms of social organization, this will make us more dependent on the nation-states and on the existing elites. We would be unlikely to get further with such a strategy than the federalists of the past.
Healthcare as a Path to Federalism
We face an enormously difficult problem, and I’m not sure we can solve it. To overcome it, we need a way to build a social movement that does not estrange us from our ultimate objectives. This requires a cause that is more immediately motivating than federalism but which also directly leads into it.
Healthcare is a serious problem in many countries. The story in the United States should be fairly familiar – the healthcare sector has ballooned to 17% of GDP, $12,555 per capita. That’s 50% more than Germany spends, double what the UK spends, and triple what Italy spends.[6] Only $245 billion is spent on medical research, just over 5% of the $4.5 trillion total. There is very clearly an enormous amount of inefficiency and waste. The system is painfully unpleasant to navigate, and it’s producing a considerable amount of resentment and frustration.
It’s enormously difficult to transform the American healthcare sector because of the very large number of jobs and money tied up in the system. To shrink the system, it’s necessary to find new jobs for the millions of bureaucrats the system feeds. This makes it paradoxically extraordinarily expensive to make the healthcare system more efficient and cost-effective. The up-front cost becomes a barrier to reducing long-term costs. State governments totally lack the capacity to pay these costs. Even the federal government would be hard-pressed to find a way to raise the necessary funds. The power of commercial flows discourages the state from raising taxes, and the use of subsidies and incentives would produce an incredible amount of inflation.
This is not merely an American problem. Even in the countries where healthcare spending is a much smaller percentage of GDP and much cheaper per capita, governments increasingly struggle to raise enough revenue to pay costs. The National Health Service in Britain is a key example. Even though NHS spending was less than 11% of GDP in 2023, the government is struggling to support the system. Wait times have ballooned across the board.[7] Even in this theoretically much more affordable situation, the state lacks the fiscal capacity to sustainably provide a service that was, until recently, viewed as a basic, fundamental right.
During the Brexit referendum, nationalists argued that leaving the European Union and withdrawing from the international system would empower the national government to save the health service. But that wasn’t true. Outside the EU, there is even more pressure on the UK to become a tax haven to attract foreign investment, and that makes the health service even harder to sustain.
Healthcare is much more concrete than freedom, sovereignty, and the other abstractions that are typically invoked in federalist arguments. It should be much easier to organize a viable social movement to demand affordable universal healthcare. It should also be relatively easy to demonstrate the connection between bloated, failing healthcare systems and the inadequacy of both the nation-states and the existing international order.
These kinds of arguments aren’t being made in large part because federalists are not thinking in terms of legitimation. We are not thinking in a sufficiently political way. The philosophical arguments we are producing do not motivate an audience. To have independence from the nation-states, we need to demonstrate to a much larger, wider array of people that we are interested in taking up their problems. But we need to choose problems that are clearly directly connected to supranational federalism. To motivate citizens to devote themselves to the project of developing better, more effective tools, we must recognize that the tools the nation-states offer us are inadequate. In trying to transform the healthcare sector, we are confronted with the limitations of the tools immediately available to us. We are forced to deal with this situation and reckon with it.
If not healthcare, we will have to find some other issue that performs the same role. The citizens must be the audience for federalism. If we cannot make federalism immediately and viscerally relevant for the citizens, we lose access to the citizenry as an audience. Without that audience, we are forced us to make appeals to the national establishment, to an audience that won't support the kind of federal institutions we want to see.
Consider the effects that this dependence has had on socialism. As socialists have lost the ability to motivate large numbers of workers, they have gradually adopted a different audience. Instead of making their case to workers, they increasingly make their case to state bureaucrats. This dependence on national elites has slowly twisted socialism. It has ceased to be meaningfully social. Instead, it has become a vehicle for expanding the control of the national bureaucracy over the lives of individuals. If federalists adopt the same audience, we will end up in the same predicament. We will become entirely appendaged to established institutions, professionalized bureaucracies, and nationalist and groupist political ontologies. Indeed, this is how we are currently widely perceived – as cosmopolitan globalists who are uninterested in improving the lives of individuals in the here and now. We can deny this and decry it, insisting that we are being misunderstood or deliberately misread, but none of this changes our concrete political situation. It’s screaming into a void. We have to prove we care about our fellow citizens as individuals by taking an active interest in their individual needs.
Suppose we’re able to solve this problem and generate a federalist social movement that is meaningfully independent from the nation-states and from the international system those nation-states built for themselves. How might the political institutions of a supranational federal republic concretely function? In the next entry in this series, we’ll explore how supranational political institutions can be designed to maintain legitimacy across time while achieving all the other objectives we’ve discussed across this series – promoting new cooperative modes, governing transnational flows, empowering cities and counties, and giving citizens the political capacity to solve their pressing, immediate problems.
[1] I’ve written a book on legitimacy. See Benjamin M. Studebaker, Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies, Edinburgh University Press, 2024.
[2] Clarence Streit, Union Now, Harper & Brothers, 1939.
[3] This has been recognized at various points by theorists from all over the political spectrum. See e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. A.M. Ludovici, T.N. Foulis, 1911; Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford University Press, 2002; Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster, Monthly Review Press, 1971.
[4] Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H.H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills, Oxford University Press, 1946.
[5] For more on these legitimation problems see e.g., Dirk Jörke & Jared Sonnicksen, “Towards an Antifederalist Theory of the EU: Democratic Federal Lessons for the European Union,” Journal of Common Market Studies 58.2 (2020): 217-234; Studebaker, Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies, pp. 128-130.
[6] OECD, “Health spending,” https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/health-spending.html
[7]Sonja Stiebahl, Esme Kirk-Wade, and Rachael Harker, “NHS Key Statistics: England,” House of Commons Library. Published October 25, 2024, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7281/