Last week, the world’s most globe-spanning empire until the mid-20th century let its fate be decided by 3.6 million voters in Scotland. While Great Britain narrowly salvaged its nominal unity, the episode offered an important reminder: The 21st century’s strongest political force is not democracy but devolution.
Before
the vote was cast, British Prime Minister David Cameron and his team were so
worried by voter sentiment swinging toward Scottish independence that they
promised a raft of additional powers to Edinburgh (and Wales and
Northern Ireland) such as the right to set its own tax rates—granting
even more concessions than Scotland’s own parliament had demanded. Scotland won
before it lost. Furthermore, what it won it will never give back, and what it
lost it can try to win again later. England, meanwhile, feels ever more like
the center of a Devolved Kingdom rather than a united one.
Devolution—meaning
the decentralization of power—is the geopolitical equivalent of the second law
of thermodynamics: inexorable, universal entropy. Today’s nationalism and
tribalism across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East represent the continued
push for either greater autonomy within states or total independence from what
some view as legacy colonial structures. Whether these movements are for
devolution, federalism, or secession, they all to varying degrees advocate the
same thing: greater self-rule.
In
addition to the traditional forces of anti-colonialism and ethnic grievance,
the newer realities of weak and over-populated states, struggles to control natural
resources, accelerated economic competition, and even the rise of big data and
climate change all point to more devolution in the future rather than less.
Surprisingly, this could be a good thing, both for America and the world.
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Woodrow
Wilson brought his fierce anti-colonialism to the Paris Peace Conference after
World War I, insisting on national self-determination as one of his famous “Fourteen Points.”
But stubborn Western Europeans held on to their imperial possessions until
World War II bankrupted them. The dismantling of the British and French empires over
the course of the 20th century gave birth to more than 75 new countries within
four decades. Decolonization was followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union,
which created 15 independent states. All told, the jackhammer of devolution has
more than tripled the number of countries around the world, from the 51
original member states of the United Nations to its 193 members today.
Strangely,
international law as enshrined in the UN Charter appears to work
against these trends, strongly privileging state borders as they are as if to
freeze the world map in time. But to paraphrase Victor Hugo, there is nothing
more powerful than an idea whose time has come. People can no longer be cheated
(for long) out of their legitimate aspirations for self-rule.
Devolution
helps to sensibly reorganize large and unwieldy post-colonial states. Take the
example of India, where more than 60 years of independence have brought little
development to peripheral and rural states in the east and northeast of the country.
Rather than fostering economic growth outside the capital, New Delhi’s priority
instead has been imposing either the Hindi (Mahatma Gandhi’s preference) or
English languages across the country. But such malign neglect has only stoked
devolutionary pressures. Since 1947, the number of states in the Indian
federation has doubled, with the 29th (Telangana) created earlier this year. As
state boundaries better conform to ethnic and linguistic boundaries, provincial
units can focus more on their internal growth, rather than on having to defend
themselves against the center. Notice how the second-largest contributor to
Indian GDP besides Mumbai’s Maharashtra state is Tamil Nadu, the
state that is geographically farthest from notoriously corrupt New Delhi.
Another
accelerant of devolution is ubiquitous data. Much as modern nation-states seem
to have lost their monopoly on armed forces, so too has evaporated their
dominance of information flows and narratives. Call it the triumph of
transparency: Whether through free media, leaks, hacks, democracy, or legal
pressure, people increasingly know how their countries are run—and crucially
how their money is spent. This March, participants in a nonbinding online
referendum in Venice overwhelmingly supported an
unofficial “declaration of independence” from Italy. The reason? Venice pays 70
billion euros in taxes per year, but receives only a fraction back in fiscal
transfers, meaning support from the capital.
Catalonia,
with its unique language and centuries of cultural traditions, made similar
calculations with respect to Madrid and is set to vote on independence in
November. Spain and Italy’s constitutions forbid secession, but to avoid severe
internal unrest beyond that which has already beset them since the financial
crisis, both governments will likely grant more autonomy to these important
provinces. Ultimately, these upstart—or start-up—regions want the “devo-max”
deal the Basques of northern Spain have: complete fiscal autonomy with no taxes
paid to the capital.
Even
global warming can drive devolution: As Greenland’s ice sheet melts, its 60,000
Inuit have greater access to abundant and valuable reserves of resources such
as uranium and natural gas. This creates an incentive for Greenlanders to hoard
the potential windfall rather than send it to Copenhagen, which has retained some governing
authority over the island since Denmark seized and colonized Greenland
nearly three centuries ago. The 2021 date proposed for a Greenland independence
vote provides an eerie parallel to Scotland’s referendum, which took place
roughly 300 years after that country joined the United Kingdom. Unlike
Scotland, however, Greenland’s vote for
independence wouldn’t even be close. Make way for another seat at
the UN.
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Shrill
warnings against devolution ignore the evidence that it is also a logical
consequence of connectivity. In the days before Scotland’s independence
referendum, Gordon Brown, the Scotland-born former British prime minister, made
a passionate appeal to his countrymen to choose unity over independence.
Scotland’s “quarrel should be with globalization, rather than England,”
he said.
But on whose terms should that tug-of-war for jobs be waged? Smaller states and
smaller economies have less of a margin for error when it comes to their own
survival. Would Scotland have outsourced its manufacturing base to Asia in the
way that far-off London capitalists so enthusiastically did? Would Scotland, as
politicians in London warned, really have been unable to establish its own
currency within 18 months? As even the anti-independence Economist noted,
28 new central banks have been created in the past 25 years; Estonia set up its
own central bank and currency in a week. A connected world—the result of
Brown’s bogeyman of ‘globalization’—has turned such bureaucratic hurdles into
commoditized tasks.
The
more cities and provinces attain quality infrastructure—courtesy of investment
from their own governments and foreigners—the more they can leverage these new
capacities. In America, fiscal federalism is a crucial driver of economic
dynamism. For example, Texas has made itself the most business-friendly state
in the country by minimizing regulations and keeping taxes low; it now boastsan
$8.8 billion surplus. California also experiments at the state level with
immigration and greenhouse-gas emissions reduction policies that are best
suited to its own needs and goals. Oil-rich British Columbia and
gas-and-mineral-rich Western Australia have their own resource wealth funds that
have propelled infrastructure investment and growth in cities such as Vancouver
and Perth first, before a share of the profits is sent to the distant capitals
Ottawa and Canberra.
In
Europe, devolution has become a healthy form of competitive arbitrage—a
perpetual negotiation to get maximum freedoms from under-performing national
governments so that over-performing provinces can get on with their own
priorities. An independence movement is brewing in Sardinia, for instance, that
would see the already autonomous Italian island sell itself to landlocked (and
far better governed) Switzerland as a maritime canton.
Can
all devolution be handled so peacefully? With all the world’s terrain claimed,
one’s gain (of independence) must equal another’s loss (of territorial
integrity). Borders can therefore either change violently, or can be softened
through devolution. Devolution is why the Basques and Quebecois are at peace
today. To attempt to stem the pro-Russian rebel tide in Ukraine, the parliament
in Kiev last week granted self-rule to the eastern provinces of Donetsk and
Luhansk as a gesture to keep them within the Ukrainian orbit. Devolution today
is thus not just a force of tribalism but a tool of peacemaking.
This
kind of thinking will be necessary for remapping the Middle East as the
century-old Sykes-Picot map of the region crumbles. The near-total dissolution
of the Arab political cartography embodies the most severe entropy,
fragmentation, and disorder. Today only the oil-rich micro-states of the
Persian Gulf such as Qatar and the UAE have purchased long-term
security. But we do not yet know what will replace the current Syria and
Iraq—to say nothing of the Islamic State’s plans for Jordan, Lebanon,
and beyond.
Yet
if one rule of counterinsurgency is to find, protect, and build stable
enclaves, that is also a bottom-up approach to replacing Arab colonial
cartography with a more legitimate order based on smaller and more coherent
islands of stability. Rather than artificial nations, the future Middle East order
will likely consist of robust tribal states like Israel and Kurdistan, and
urban commercial centers with mixed populations that will protect themselves
and their trade routes.
Perhaps
a world of smaller states would bring globalization more into balance, with
each state maintaining the necessary production and jobs essential for social
stability, even if not optimizing global comparative advantage. A world of
smaller states might also be a more peaceful one as well, with none able to
survive without importing food and goods from others. Such a world would embody
the principle of anti-fragility that the author Nassim Taleb advocates: too
small to fail.
The
map of the world is in perpetual flux, with territories splintering and
combining in various configurations. North and South Yemen merged in 1990;
Czechoslovakia divorced in 1993. South Sudan seceded in 2011; now there’s
talk of North and South Korea reunifying along the model of East and
West Germany. The fundamental search for more coherent political entities can
bring turbulence, but not always violence.
Thus,
the Scottish precedent is a harbinger of neither global chaos nor the end of
multi-national harmony. In fact, devolution’s dialectical opposite is
aggregation. The world may splinter, but it also comes together in new
combinations such as the European Union, which ultimately absorbs all the
continent’s micro-states into a truly multinational federation. Witness the
Balkans, where two decades on from the bloody wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution,
all its former republics have become or are candidates for EUmembership.
If the world wants to see global solidarity of nations, the tribes may need to
win first.
Parag Khanna is a senior research fellow at the New America
Foundation and author of The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New
Global Order and How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next
Renaissance.