Description

A group of organisations, without ending their independant existence, create a new common institution to advance their common interests.

Motivation and Discussion

In government, as in other parts of life, great advantages can be gained by scale. Federation is an attempt to gain the benefits of scale without surrendering the identity or idiosyncratic power of the component organisations. War is one of the most obvious areas where scale is advantageous and mutual interest is greatly similar. By contrast with a simple merger or takeover of organisations, Federations are formed on a a principle of subsidiarity, where powers are held by default at the smallest and most individual scale.  

Federations are plastic and high maintenance institutions, prone to deform over time under the many forces acting on them. The new central organisation brought into being by a federation will, like all institutions, tend to draw power to itself. Over time a successful central government can take over more and more responsibilities originally assigned to the component organisations. This is often given philosophical support by appealling to the shared values and economies of scale that initially brought the component organisations together.  As popular allegiance to the central institution grows, the division of power to unevenly sized component organisations may increasingly seem unfair.

Federations involve multiple executives, at the central and component level. They therefore have higher maintenance costs and involve more officials than either a single central institution, or the several component organisations which preceded the Federation. These costs increase as the central institution draws power to itself, duplicating responsibilities nominally vested in the component organisations.  Avoiding an entropic collapse to the centre requires continual revision of the terms of Federation.  

By contrast, when the central institution is trusted with few responsibilities, its capability for advancing the common interest is diminished, and its reason for existence decreases. Where a common interest is no longer apparent, Federations dissolve with unpredictable violence back to their originating organisations.

Examples

Switzerland has been an evolving and enduring federation from 1291 to today, excepting a 5 year interruption under French republican occupation. The original confederacy of three cantons was formed to make common military cause against the Holy Roman Empire, and to manage trade and other shared interests. This fairly lightweight original alliance expanded over time, and under external pressure, to include eight canton communities and more territory under a patchwork of individual treaties. Cities such as Zürich and Berne continued to pursue their own interests including similar alliances with their other neighbours. In 1529 and 1531 inter-cantonal religious civil wars broke out, though due in part to the reputation of Swiss mercenaries Swiss territory was never a major battlefield of the Thirty Years War.  A Switzerland of thirteen cantons achieved formal legal independence at the end of that war with the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. This regime endured until Switzerland was engulfed by French revolutionary forces in 1798; the occupying army established a centralized Helvetic Republic.

The Helvetic Republic was hugely unpopular, and a political and economic failure. Intervention by Napoleon in 1803 restored some power to the cantons, and Swiss independence was fully restored at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, along with a last expansion of the included cantons, and formal guarantee of its (armed) neutrality by the Great Powers of the day. The political upheaval, tied up with other questions of reform such as the universality of suffrage and the role of the Church in the state, continued amongst domestic political parties until the outbreak of a brief and not particularly deadly Catholic/Protestant civil war in 1847. The victorious Protestant Free Democrat Party promulgated the first singular federal constitution in 1848; it was heavily influenced by the American and French constitutions. This constitution has since been periodically revised, including being wholly revised in 1874, the introduction of continual partial revision by voters in 1899, proportional appointment of the Federal Council in 1959, female suffrage in 1971, and another complete revision in 1999.

The United States of America was created in 1780 as a federation of geographically proximate colonies which declared independence from the British Empire. The initial version of this federation, the Continental Congress, was found to be powerless to the point of uselessness. The revised constitution gave more powers to the federal government, in return for explicit recognition of the rights of individuals within the founding document, as insurance against tyranny. Even then the resulting federation was on very loose, Swiss, lines. Over the two centuries since, a variety of internal and external shocks, including civil war, have seen the central government assume much more power at the expense of the states. Although the written constitution has had around 20 amendments, some as fundamental as banning slavery or alcohol, most of the assumption of power has been through evolutionary processes such as common law or Paymaster techniques.

Yugoslavia was a federation of Balkan states and ethnic communities united and shattered multiple times during the 20th century. The 19th century saw the Balkans be a violent playground for Great Powers, during the disintegration of the Ottoman and Austrian empires, and the expansion of Russian and other interests in the region. This competition culminated as World War I, and in its aftermath the constitutional monarchy, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, was established for mutual defence. This endured only until 1941 when it was invaded by Axis powers as part of WWII. They established a proxy government run by the sympathetic Ustase, extreme Croatian nationalists. At the end of WWII, and with the agreement amongst Great Powers that these states would be under a Soviet sphere of influence, Yugoslavia became a federation of communist republics. Although the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia retained the contempt for individual rights and market economics typical of communist regimes, regional and ethnic politics remained important, and useful elements of political leverage for the federal government. A potent example occurred in the early 1970s, during a resurgence of political liberalism. Marshall Tito supported greater regional autonomy as a way of stealing the liberals' most popular issue, then crushed the liberal movement using standard totalitarian techniques. Nevertheless, an extraordinarily complex constitution was amended in 1974 to include the right of republics to secede, and giving greater autonomy to regions such as Kosovo. This autonomy was expressed in practice even under Tito, and it later made legal secession easier for Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia. After multi-party elections in 1990 following the collapse of Eastern European communism, these republics declared independence in 1991, though their legal right to do so didn't prevent those secessions sparking a violent civil war.

Other successful states such as Australia, Brazil, Canada and Malaysia have been also established along federal lines and without civil war amongst the constituent states.

Unions such as the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) or the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) have been created from smaller unions in order to gain benefits of scale in negotiations with employers and governments. Different trade unions have common interests in their members' working conditions, as well as ensuring the organisation itself plays a role in wage negotiations and setting conditions of work. Trade unions financially and organisationally support political causes, even having formal roles within major political parties in the case of the Labor parties in Britain and Australia. Federated trade unions also suffer from diseconomies of scale - for instance in 2005 several component trade unions threatened to withdraw from the AFL-CIO due to philosophical differences over which politicians to support.

Related Patterns

Suffrage, Paymaster