Secession and American Federalism
by Arthur Versluis
Published in Modern Age, Summer 2007
Arthur Versluis is Professor of American Studies at Michigan State
University, and author of numerous books, including Island Farm and The
Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance.
The beginning of the twenty-first century saw a mostly unremarked
development of considerable significance: for the first time since the
founding of the Confederate States of America, the United States once
again had an extensive secessionist movement. In 2003, author Thomas
Naylor founded the movement for a Second Vermont Republic (the first
such republic of Vermont having lasted from 1777 to 1791); and in 2006
and 2007, author Kirkpatrick Sale organized two annual North American
symposiums of secessionist groups. Within a year, Sale had more than
thirty North-American secessionist organizations listed in his
directory, the most serious of which were in Vermont, Texas, Alaska,
and Hawaii.1 Of course, it is commonplace across the political spectrum
and certainly in mainstream print and broadcast media, to dismiss such
movements as quixotic self-parody. As we will see, that would be a
mistake.
In an article in Modern Age, “The Revolutionary Conservatism of
Jefferson's ‘Little Republics,'” we saw the extent to which Jefferson
had emphasized decentralization and the primary political authority of
the townships. We also pointed out how the ensuing several hundred
years of American history represented a continuous, growing repudiation
of Jeffersonian decentralism, and an intensifying nationalist
centralism that culminated in the Behemoth of Imperial Washington,
D.C., in the early twenty-first century, with its far-flung military
bases, its ever-greater national bureaucracies, and its extraordinary
deficit expenditures. The twenty-first century American secessionist
movement emerged out of exactly this historical context - - that is,
out of conscious rejection of American gigantism.
Historical Context of Secessionism
We should begin with the ur-text of American history, the Declaration
of Independence. Taken in a contemporary context, what might we make of
this Declaration of the Thirteen States? As we all know, it asserts
forthrightly that
when in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people
to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another
and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal
station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a
decent respect to the opinions
of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel
them to the separation.
The Declaration continues that
To secure these rights [to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of
Happiness], Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed, - - That whenever any Form of
Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the
People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,
laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in
such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and
Happiness.
These words are or at least at one time were familiar to every
schoolchild, but they take on a new significance when placed in the
context of a contemporary American secession movement. If secession
from Britain during the period of the British Empire was a legitimate
act, then contemporary secessionists ask, why is it illegitimate to
consider any subsequent secession from what is widely referred to today
as an American Empire?
Such a question seems entirely foreclosed. But is it? Russell Wheeler,
president of the Governance Institute, and a constitutional scholar
associated with the Brookings Institution, ridicules the idea:
If Vermont had a powerful enough army and said, “We're leaving the
union,” and the national government said, “No, you're not,” and they
fought a war over it and Vermont won, then you could say Vermont proved
the point. But that's not going to happen.2
This puts it in a nutshell: secession and decentralization are from
this sarcastic perspective indistinguishable from violent rebellion, a
doomed course of action given the massive resources of the American
national government and national military. The question of secession
was settled by the War Between the States, and that is the end of it,
or so it would seem. Without doubt, Lincoln's war was pivotal for the
centralization of American national power at the expense of the
states.3
But was this centralization of power inevitable? It is revealing to
compare two nearly contemporaneous civil wars: the American, and the
Swiss. The bloodshed and destruction of the American Civil War are
quite well known, and need only a gesture here: well over half a
million dead, and a terrible toll on civilians. The Swiss Civil War was
rather different. In 1847, the Swiss federal troops, under the command
of General Guillaume Henri Dufour (1787-1875) of Geneva, occupied
primarily Catholic cities including Fribourg, and a bloody civil war
was certainly possible. But Dufour explicitly forbade his troops from
unnecessary bloodshed, refrained from battlefield slaughter, and won
the war with under one-hundred casualties. The following year saw the
approval of the Swiss confederation, and a very different kind of union
than the American one.
Before the American Civil War, it was still broadly accepted in the
United States that secession was possible - - hence some Northern
legislators proposed constitutional amendments to prohibit it. The
desire to prohibit secession would seem to demonstrate that it was de
facto possible, as the Declaration of Independence itself would
suggest. Of course, the Declaration does not have the status of law –
but the U.S. Constitution does, and it nowhere prohibits secession.
Nonetheless, after the American Civil War, the notion of secession in
effect became anathema.
The Swiss Confederation, on the other hand, does make secession at
least theoretically possible, as is visible not only in the secession
of Jura from the Canton of Bern, effective in 1979, but also in Article
53 of the current Swiss Constitution, which reads as follows:
Article 53: Existence and Territory of the Cantons
(1)The Federation protects the existence and the territory of the
Cantons.
(2)Modifications of the number of the Cantons, of the Cantons or their
status are subject to the assent of the population concerned, of the
Cantons concerned, and of the People and the Cantons.
(3)Modifications of the territory of a Canton are subject to the assent
of the population concerned, of the Cantons concerned, and the assent
of the Federal Parliament in the form of a federal decree.
(4)Intercantonal boundary settlements may be made by treaty between the
Cantons concerned.
As Thomas Fleiner, Director of the Institute of Federalism at the
University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and a leading international
constitutional scholar points out, implied in 53.2 is a series of
referenda that in point of fact could allow for a peaceful secession,
as indeed has happened on a cantonal level in the very recent past.4
This is not to suggest that there is any such contemporary Swiss
secession movement. There is not, and it is interesting to consider
why.
Comparative Federalism: Swiss and American
All the sources and individuals I have consulted on the question of
Swiss federalism emphasize two key factors in the Swiss system: direct
democracy, and cultural depth and complexity built over time. Important
legislation is always subject to referenda, that is, subject to the
direct vote of the people, and indeed, to a required double majority at
the cantonal and the federal levels. Direct democracy is an essential
part of the Swiss system. But there is a second dimension of the Swiss
polis that is also critical, as Lidija Basta Fleiner points out: the
cultural dimension.5 Swiss multicultural federalism emerged from
communes and cantons; it is built, so to say, from the ground up in a
typically Swiss conservative way over a relatively long period. Thus,
it has developed a stability that is embedded
in Swiss culture, and that is ratified by the vote of the people. Both
of these tend to be quite conservative in effect: for instance, only a
small percentage of referenda actually pass.
These two dimensions of Swiss federalism are mostly absent from the
contemporary national American political system, which has moved
seemingly inexorably toward a stronger and stronger central government
over the past hundred years or so. Whereas in Switzerland, national
initiatives can be constrained by a referendum process, in the United
States this is only possible on the state level. Furthermore, the
American system has a separate national apparatus to enforce national
laws, whereas the Swiss national government can only implement laws
through the cantons and communes – thus, again, emphasizing the local
dimensions of Swiss governance and putting constraints on grand
national schemes that can come about without any local or regional
initiative, support, or response.
As that indefatigable proponent of federalism and of the importance of
Switzerland Denis de Rougemont remarked in The Heart of Europe, by the
onset of World War II, the United States mostly had abandoned its
decentralized federalism. Already in 1941, he brings up “an obvious
question [concerning] Switzerland. Why has the canton remained
relatively vigorous in that country, while in the United States of
America, the corresponding unit, the state, has lost so much vitality?”
His answer is the uniquely Swiss cultural combination of “conservatism
and a progressive spirit” that has preserved local traditions,
language, religion, and the corresponding localism of the cantons and
communes that safeguard individual liberty and diversity. By
definition, in a decentralized state, totalitarianism cannot emerge.6
In contrast, centralized, homogenized nation-states allow no real
diversity: “they are like immense frozen political deserts.”
The American system has taken quite a while to arrive at centralism. It
is true that Lincoln asserted a Hamiltonian agenda through his conduct
during the Civil War, but this only set in motion an emphasis that we
see repeated in the course of the twentieth century. One might note
Theodore Roosevelt's speech ”The New Nationalism” is Osawatomie,
Kansas, in 1910, where he said
The National Government belongs to the whole American people, and where
the whole American people are interested, that interest can be guarded
only by the National Government. The betterment which we seek must be
accomplished, I believe, mainly through the National Government. The
American people are right in demanding that New Nationalism without
which we cannot cope with new problems. The New Nationalism puts
national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient
of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting
to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of
the impotence which springs from over-divisions of governmental powers,
the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or legal
cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national
activities to a deadlock.
The other Roosevelt usually is construed as the source of American
twentieth-century state centralism, but, obviously, this tendency was
well established by the 1930s and the New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson's
social programs, like the Vietnam War, were also only extensions of
prior Rooseveltian and Wilsonian interventionism. By the early 1970's,
one finds the term “New Federalism” emerging in relation to the Nixon
era, as if Nixon might have devolved centralist authority back to the
states or localities - - but of course, nothing of the sort happened.
The term “New Federalism” was an empty signifier, to be sure.
Once again, from the 1980s on, historians began to refer to Reagan's
“New Federalism,” and some, like Alan Brinkley of Columbia University,
took Reagan's rhetoric seriously enough to devote a book, The New
Federalism, to his and his colleagues' alarm over what they perceived
as Republican efforts at decentralization of the
American political system. As we all know, however, there in fact was
no decentralization. The national deficits grew to incredible
proportions over the course of Republican presidencies, and under the
Bush, Jr. administration of the early twenty-first century, became
truly gargantuan, while all manner of new national programs and schemes
proliferated. What Eisenhower at least had warned against - - the
military-industrial-espionage complex - - had become vast and
uncontrollable, and the national government inserted its military
presence almost everywhere around the globe.
During roughly this same era, the Swiss national government did gain
some minimally greater authority, but the fact remains that the
Confederatio Helvetica remained exactly that - - a confederation of
individual states that, in turn, are aggregated individual communes.
Furthermore, the Swiss system does not feature the kind of national
election circus that the American presidential cycle has become, but
rather entails the sober and restrained annual choosing of a president
from the federal council. Thus, the Swiss presidency could not develop
into the grotesque public spectacle we see in the United States, where
for four or eight long years, one is treated to countless images of the
same figure strutting forth, again and again, before the ever-ready
presidential paparazzi.
In other words, the American spectacle of grand-state centralism - -
marked by claims of “unitary executive authority,” attempted
abrogations of habeas corpus, and assertions of a millenarian American
destiny to rid the entire world of tyranny - - is inconceivable in the
Swiss system. One might rejoin that Switzerland is a comparatively
small country, and could not undertake grand Napoleonic follies (though
there was a period long ago when some citizens might have been
tempted). But such a rejoinder misses the point: during the same period
of intense industrialization, technicization, and financialization of
society, the Swiss nonetheless did not abandon their tradition of
federal decentralization of power. The Swiss had no need for a “New
Federalism” because they had not misplaced their original one.
American Secessionism
And so we begin to see how the twenty-first century American
secessionist movement emerged within larger historical and
international contexts. The most important of these contexts is the
growth of centralized national governmental authority in the United
States, which by the early twenty-first century, gave many citizens the
sense that nothing could be done, that Behemoth will do what Behemoth
will do, and that no individual or even community cold effect even a
small change in its course. This sense of individual powerlessness was
intensified by the widely unpopular invasion and occupation of Iraq,
which has dragged on year after year without any likelihood of
cessation, and which neither Democrats nor Republicans have seemed
capable of bringing to a close.
Since the secession movement arguably began, and certainly was nurtured
in Vermont, it is worth noting that in 2006-2007, many towns in Vermont
held votes for the impeachment of the president. If American federalism
more closely resembled the Swiss variety, these votes would not seem
quite so far-fetched, because they very well might have led to a
national referendum on the Iraq War. Instead, however, one is treated
to the spectacle of Vermont citizens being ridiculed for their
assertion of the New England town-hall-meeting tradition that in fact
corresponds exactly to Swiss communally and cantonally-driven
federalism. Local and regional authority thus is shunted aside as if it
were irrelevant to anything.
Hence, one is unsurprised to find a Vermont and, indeed, a broader
American secession movement. The very existence of the secession
movement (or, to be more accurate, counter-movement, since it is a
reaction) tangibly indicates how far the American federalist system has
gone in the direction of centralization. When citizens no longer feel
that they have any say over the decisions of the national government,
one could expect that some would turn their attention to creating
regional autonomous zones where their voices can count. While one may
or may not take seriously the notion of Vermont's or Hawaii's potential
status as an independent republic, the very broaching of the topic is
itself significant.
What likelihood is there that such an American secession movement might
build strength, let alone be successful? One might be tempted to
dismiss such movements out of hand, but that would assume the
permanence of the early twenty-first-century American status quo, with
its far-flung military bases, its de-industrialized heartland, its
rising national, corporate, and individual debt, in short, its
tell-tale signs of imperial overstretch all ignored. A secession
movement may seem quixotic, but the fact that proponents of regionalism
are emerging across North America certainly suggests that something
more than tilting at windmills is afoot here.
Secessionist proponents argue that the industrial-technical system is
based on diminishing coal, oil, and natural gas reserves - - that is,
on comparatively inexpensive sources of energy. If, as some modern-day
prophets have it, the end of the oil age will mean the end of modern
hyper-industrial globalism, it is entirely possible that this will
result in a corresponding movement toward regional and local autonomy.7
In such an event, perhaps secession would be moot - - vast global,
national, or imperial systems eventually would be unsustainable anyway.
This is very much the argument of Kirkpatrick Sale, convenor of the
First, Second, and Third Secessionist Conventions. Author of several
books on bioregionalism, Sale believes that the current
industrial-technological system, based on transport of goods over vast
distances, is unsustainable and will collapse. As
industrial-technological centralism breaks down, regional
decentralization will become inevitable.8 Thus, secessionism is not so
much an ideal toward which one might strive, as it is descriptive of
what will inexorably emerge when the gigantic apparatus of modernity
breaks down. This catastrophism means that the movement itself is
non-violent, more a matter of preparing for an inevitable
decentralization. Such remarks belong to the realm of speculation, of
course, but they do represent a characteristic way of thinking among
leading secessionists.
Secession and Conservatism
At this point, we might turn our attention to the essentially
conservative nature of the American secession movement. The Vermont
Republic movement in particular harks back to the period of the
founding fathers, and terms itself the Second Vermont Republic in
deference to the First Vermont Republic, which predates the United
States itself. The proposed flag of the new Vermont Republic is green
and, in the upper left-hand corner, has thirteen stars. Supporters of
the Vermont Republic advocate a return to a decentralized
constitutional Jeffersonian vision, to genuinely limited government. In
other words, the American secessionist movement in general, and its
most well-known proponents, espouse a return to founding American
principles.
Secessionist conservatism only seems at first glance to be radical. A
closer inspection suggests that its insistence on local and regional
authority represents an effort to re-assert the principle of genuinely
limited national government. By advocating secession, proponents thus
assert as forcibly as possible a principle that is generally
unrepresented either in the Republican or in the Democratic parties,
candidates, legislators, and judges. One looks in vain for indications
of any national movement toward decentralization of power: in every
sphere, one sees a consistent and continuous emphasis on
centralization. In such a context, secessionism appears to be the only
avenue to asserting an agenda of decentralization.
Underlying and impelling the nascent American secessionist movement is
not just the assertion of regional or local autonomy, but, even more,
the expression of disgust with the remoteness and rule-by-fiat of the
national government and its two-party hegemony. In this and related
respects, the secessionist movement is fueled by what ultimately is a
conservative instinct to return to a stricter constitutionalism.
Proponents are not easily categorized politically because,
fundamentally, they do not fit into the binary division between
Democrats and Republicans, both of which parties, for different
reasons, prefer centralized national power and themselves as dispensers
of the national spoils. One can understand, then, why those who seek
decentralization would be inclined to look outside the two hegemonic
political parties, and why secessionism is the almost inexorable
result.
Conclusions
One cannot make too many generalizations about international
decentralizations of power in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. Of course, the Soviet Union disintegrated into some
independent and some federated states, but in the early twenty-first
century under Vladimir Putin, there was an increasing tendency toward
re-centralization. The former Yugoslavia disintegrated into independent
states, and there are a few other examples. But secessions are very
rare, even for a member of a relatively loose federation like the
European Union. For instance, if Switzerland were to join the European
Union, it is interesting to consider that the EU offers no opportunity
to leave it. One can understand why, given the conflicts of
mid-twentieth-century European history, the EU would be disinclined to
develop processes for secession. But if even the EU makes no provision
for secession, how much more unlikely would such a course be for an
American state like Vermont? For the most part, centralized states do
not give up authority except when, like the Soviet Union, they
disintegrate from within.
Why, then, is an American secessionist movement worthy of attention?
The answer is above all because of the other questions that such a
movement raises. Perhaps the most important aspect of the American
secession movement is to throw into relief the extent to which the
American federal state has departed from its originary model. When one
begins to think about local, state, or regional authority, when one
begins to ask whether the American national government has gained too
much power, grown too large and become too remote from the people, when
one begins to wonder whether Swiss confederated decentralism might make
a great deal more sense than the current vast national bureaucracies,
then the secession movement arguably has begun to have its most
important effect. The nascent American secession movement compels us to
as far-reaching and profound questions, and it will be interesting
indeed to see the answers that emerge.
Such answers emerge not immediately, but over generations. At heart, we
are discussing the grand political opposition revealed by the twentieth
century. On the one hand, we see the totalitarian temptation, the
desire to standardize and to unify a gigantic space and population, to
centralize power and to mobilize the masses through pseudo-mythological
ideology and through fear and, if necessary, terror. On the other hand,
we see the federalist model, which represents entirely the opposite
pole: decentralization, a refusal of the centralizing temptation, an
insistence on the value of the individual, of the humane and the human.
Decentralized federalism is the ideal politico-cultural model of the
West, as figures as diverse as Wilhelm Ropke and Denis de Rougemont
have recognized. At its heart is a profound respect for individual
liberty and an abiding awareness of individual civic responsibility.
From this federalist polis, all centralizations are deviations that in
turn derive from the enduring temptation to make over others, to make
over the world so that it might conform to some monstrous fantasy.
Dostoevsky captured this temptation perfectly in The Brothers Karamazov
with his chilling character, the Grand Inquisitor, whose defining
impulse is to take away the freedom of others for what he claims is
their own good. The federalist polis is
precisely the opposite: its essential characteristic is the
preservation of individual, communal, and regional liberty and
responsibility. Federalism insists on individual and local authority;
totalitarianism obliterates these.
Ultimately, the new American secessionist movement's most important
contribution may be to remind us not only of the original vision of the
American polis, but beyond that, of the ideal polis of the West, and of
its essential contribution to humanity. It is true that we live in an
era prone to gigantism and ideology. What Denis de Rougemont wrote
during the Second World War is still true today.
Our era is delirious, and this delirium is called politics. Lost in
gigantic masses given over to murderous myths, playthings of powers he
cannot see, and by whom he cannot make himself heard, the individual
feels himself more despised and helpless than he has ever been in the
course of history. He has no hold on the realities or unrealities which
determine his life, send him off to war, rouse his passions, demand his
sacrifice. Either his opinion is not asked, or he has no way of
expressing it. Everything is too big for him, everything escapes him.
But if a group is formed somewhere, at once the real world, the human
world, takes on again its density, its consistence.9
Here, in this last sentence, is the turning point, the forming of what
Jefferson termed the “little republic,” based in the recognition of the
dignity, liberty, and responsibility of the individual citizen. In the
end, it is of this profoundly Western ideal that the secessionists
remind us, and for that service above all, we must respect them.
1. See Middlebury Institute, Registry of North American Separatist
Organizations (Cold Spring, N.Y., 2007). 2. John Curran, “Vermont
Nascent Secession Movement Grows,” AP story, 3 June 2007 . 3. See James
Randall, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (Urbana, 1964); Thomas
Dilorenzo, The Real Lincoln (New York, 2003) and Lincoln Unmasked (New
York, 2006); see also Walter Brian Cisco, War Crimes against Southern
Civilians (Gretna, La., 2007). 4. Swiss Constitution, adopted by public
referendum, 18 April, 1999. 5. See Lidija R. Basta Fleiner, Thomas
Fleiner, eds., Federalism and Multiethnic States: The Case of
Switzerland (Fribourg and Bale, 2000), 1-36, also Erich Bapst, “The
Autonomy of Communes,” 213-230 on the complexity of Swiss society. 6.
See Denis de Rougemont, The Heart of Europe (New York, 1941), 92. 7.
See, for instance, James Kunstler, The Long Emergency (New York, 2005).
8. Interview with Kirkpatrick Sale, Coldspring, N.Y., May 14, 2007. 9.
Denis de Rougemont, The Heart of Europe, 255.