Of course, I considered treaties as so much toilet paper.
Francesc Pi i Margall isn’t a name that appears often in discussions and breast-beating about the breakdown of the liberal international liberal order. This is unsurprising, not least because he died aged 77 in 1901. This Catalan thinker is interesting, and not just because he was—from 11 June – 18 July 1873—president of the short-lived First Spanish Republic. He was influential in the first Spanish workers’ movement, and an ardent federalist who attempted to establish a “cantonalist” political system along Proudhonian lines, keeping central state power to an essential minimum. As a friend of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, his theoretical contributions were influential in the Spanish anarchist movement. In his book La reacción y la revolución (1854), he described his idea of federalism as being “unity in variety, the law of nature, the law of the world”, founded on the bottom-up contract between “natural and spontaneous collective beings”.
A couple of months ago, I had the good fortune of being asked by the Institute for Autonomous Studies of the Generalitat (Government) of Catalonia to translate Pi’s magnum opus on federalism, Las nacionalidades (1877). I was looking forward to some linguistic wallowing in the decimomónico Spanish of a good writer, but found a book that is politically fresh, commonsensical, and more relevant today than it was at the time it was written. It’s relevant because, like Proudhon, Pi is grappling with the age-old principles of authority and liberty, and the relationship between obedient faith and free reason. Age-old they may be, but these principles are of crucial importance today as liberty—and, in fact, any moral political order on which the principle of liberty must rest—is disappearing together with the ability to think, which is the ultimate loss of liberty. Now, when AI is “thinking” for us (and this so-called intelligence is quintessentially artificial, algorithm based, so it can’t think freely), when ignorance is so deliberately spread that there’s a word for the study of this dumbing-down phenomenon (agnotology), how can we get back to this kind of sensible, constructive political thinking, focused less on what went wrong, but how to create a system that’s better for everyone? Reading Pi i Margall is a good start.
The basic, of course Eurocentric, idea of Pi and Proudhon is that the inescapably opposed principles of authority and liberty lead to two irreconcilable regimes, absolutist or authoritarian, and liberal. They understand that, since rights like freedom entail duties, neither authority nor liberty can function alone so the two are condemned in Proudhon’s words to “endless mutual borrowings”. A further contradiction is that principles are in the realm of the ideal but governance consists of deal-making and compromises, “a promiscuity of rule which strict logic condemns and innocence shrinks from”. Since arbitrariness is an intrinsic element of politics, corruption becomes the “soul of power”, which in those days, led to wars and revolution. In our days, revolution is quelled by means of a whole armoury of biological, military, and information technology, and wars are magnified to cataclysmic proportions. Both men, naturally antimilitarists, concluded that, since human nature, in all spheres of existence, is an essential, unmeasurable, unpredictable part of politics, political units need to be small if they are to be manageable.
What’s called the “global” system today tends to be understood in terms of power and not qualities. In some quarters, it’s bewailed as horrible but without much thought of how to go about making it decent. Power is concentrated among very few leaders of governments and corporations, and the powerless, for example the world’s Indigenous peoples, don’t belong to this so-called global system in any way except numerically. Foucault described how, by means of disciplinary and biotechnical mechanisms, exercise of power seeps into every living cell of society, and that was before the onslaught of computerised information and surveillance systems which interrupt, as Brian Massumi observes, “the flow of everyday life, micro-segmenting attention” so that, “The nascent thought that begins to stir with every movement of feeling is stoked by each successive hit, only to be short-circuited by the cut to the next”. The capacity to think is being excised from us.
Another aspect of this problem is that what’s happening in the world is unbearable to think about, and drugs, a big part of the offending system (the industry represented USD 2,295 billion in GDP in 2022, up by 25% compared to 2017), are the fix for the anxiety. Gen Z statistics from the US show that 34% take prescription medication, 19% self-medicate, and nearly half (46%) have received a formal diagnosis of mental health problems. A Harvard Medical School study states the obvious: depression blunts the ability to think. To get back to Goering, Douglas M. Kelley, the American psychiatrist tasked with assessing Goering’s mental state before he was tried at Nuremberg, concluded that he and his cohorts were ordinary people whose personalities “could be duplicated in any country of the world today”. In other words, the Holocaust and all the monstrous crimes were committed by men with healthy minds. But this begs the question of how minds can be healthy in a grotesquely sick system.
No wonder the politics being done in the name of the people is against the people and everything people actually cherish, if they can’t think clearly enough to work out what’s going on and how to get rid of the life-destroying system they’re trapped in. People aren’t sovereign and neither are states. Their heads aren’t leaders but figureheads, many of them criminals who know how to play the system. You only have to look at the material and (im)moral support given by liberal democracies, signatories to all the human rights documents you want, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the Genocide Convention, to Israel’s openly genocidal project in Gaza. Goering wasn’t speaking for himself alone: “treaties are toilet paper”.
Authority isn’t an attribute of leadership but a power unto itself emitting orders which, without reason, logic, or judgement, and outside the law, ascribe enemy status to anyone and anything that doesn’t suit the system: immigrants will kill and eat your pet dog and cat. In Political Theology, Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt canned the idea that legal norms guided ascription of right and logical political behaviour, “Ascription is not achieved with the aid of a norm; it happens the other way around. A point of ascription first determines what a norm is and what normative rightness is. A point of ascription cannot be derived from a norm, only a quality of a content”. As Brian Massumi puts it, Trump is a “knock-off of the Schmittian sovereign”. With mindless tweeted ascription as the norm, citizens who are less and less able to think can be pushed to lack of concern about crimes like genocide and ecocide, and even to kill or die in defence of what they are made to believe is their way of life.
In brief, the results of all this in the “global” system, are extreme debilitation of the legitimacy and effectiveness of international organisations like the UN, the International Criminal Court, and all their covenants; annulment of democratic norms; economic instability; the threat of ecocide; aggressively shifting power dynamics; apocalyptically armed one-upmanship especially between the US, China, and Russia; the paradox of increasing protectionism in the “global” order, which suggests that it’s closing down to the order of a few; genocide as normal; huge humanitarian crises in collapsed states; headlines like “AI could pose ‘extinction-level’ threat to humans” (presented as a “national security” problem); and “ideological” divides that aren’t ideological because ideology means a system of ideas and ideals.
Big Tech fuels conflict at all levels of social and political life. Spyware and mass surveillance annihilate fundamental rights and freedoms and, in rampantly unequal and discriminatory political systems, largely unregulated automated tools reflect and heighten the unfairness, so “algorithmic bias” is blamed when governments target the most marginal groups of society. To give just one example, Serbia has introduced a semi-automated social welfare system that excludes thousands of people, mainly Roma communities and people with disabilities, from access to social assistance. For many, this is a stealthy death sentence. Big Tech isn’t neutral but racist. Migration and border enforcement methods relying on data software, biometrics and algorithmic decision-making systems are tools of discrimination, racism, and unlawful monitoring of racialised people. And right now, the US Supreme Court has ruledthat the Trump administration can deport immigrants to countries they’re not from, and especially to El Salvador, South Sudan, and Libya, all known for being dangerous, lawless places where human rights violations are routine. The United States is a signatory to the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees. More “toilet paper”.
We’re being made to think that the only way to manage today’s unwieldy “global” system (seen as a problem of domination and not as sets of all the various peoples, cultures and natural forms comprising it) is to try to homogenise it, which means exterminating difference, in every sense. Here, Pi i Margall is emphatic about where that leads: “For the moment, we know that federation is based on the nature of man and of societies, and that by the mere fact of violating the autonomy of the groups that exist within it, every unitary nation is condemned to exist in perpetual servitude or eternally at war” (127). In all today’s chaos-engendering mindlessness, reading Pi i Margall’s lucid text is a relief. In Las nacionalidades, he not only defends federalism as a viable political system but provides painstaking analysis (without the aid of Google) of federal systems as they existed in his day and, specifically, those of the United States, Germany, the Austra-Hungarian Empire, and Switzerland. So we can see how they function.
The work is divided into three sections. The first, “Criteria for the Reorganisation of Nations”, speaking of large and small peoples and how large nations were formed and at what cost, and criticising criteria usually cited in favour of the formation of large nations, among them history, identity of language, natural borders, and race. In the second part “Federation”, he describes this idea in terms of the units of town, province, nation, and then nationality, and jurisdiction of federal power (in trade, liberty and order, rights and duties between peoples, and foreign relations). Then he discusses non-essential jurisdiction of federal power in the four countries he studies, and also the means that federal powers must have for exercising their authority (including federal courts, army and navy, the treasury), how many federal powers there should be, their organisation, and the relations uniting them. In the last section he analyses the case of Spain, its conflicts of unity; how Spain took the path of absolutism and its effects; the consequences of the forced unitary principle in terms of war, revolution, politics and administration; the treasury; ineffectiveness of the system; legislation; diversity of languages, customs, weights, and measures; the question of autonomy of provinces; juridical problems of criminal, trade, civil, mortgage, water, and procedural law; and, finally, how federation could be organised in Spain (a blueprint for anywhere).
At this point, I’d like to cite Pi i Margall in his own words and to some length, to give a better idea of his thought. When he judges that the fate of large, unitarian nations is to be “turbulent or despotic” he explains that, “Culture in them is far from uniform, interests are far from equal, and opinion far from moving at the same pace and to the same extent. If absolute authority does not restrain them, they are spurred along by competing powers and are almost always governed by minorities. They advance one day and regress the next, with the most abrupt and sudden changes in a theatre of incessant struggles. When the evil reaches its peak, they have no alternative than to submit to dictators. In the absolute impossibility of achieving harmony among desires and quieting tempers, they must turn to force but achieve only a fleeting peace. In the end, compressed passions explode and war breaks out again” (110). He presciently continues, “Life, political activity, is mainly in the capitals, which is where all ambitions gather and move. Not the best qualified but the most swashbuckling citizens usually rule. The most vice-ridden men frequently climb to occupy the most powerful positions of the state, and some rise with the support of the people who, without knowing them, entrust to these men the right of representing them…The numbers of people and parties that covet power keep rising, and the end result of the process is the politics of scoundrels” (111).
Today’s unitarian form is neoliberalism with a unified (because imposed) worldview based on lies and deception, and a way of life that has turned the human being into a monad, as in the Pythagorean version of “an elementary individual substance which reflects the order of the world and from which material properties are derived”. In our alienated relations with others and the world, we are reflections of this heartless and mindless system. Law, which is supposed to protect humans and all elements of their habitat, has been twisted to become the tool and substance of power. Then anything is possible. Queues of people, those still alive in a genocidal operation, desperate for humanitarian aid after their country has been razed to the ground, can be bombed as this is a “combat zone”, because of their ascription as enemies.
The unity of large nations is false. Real unity, says Pi, “resides in the existence of the same powers for each order of interests, and not in the absorption of all interests by a single power. Starting from this idea it is possible to collect all of humanity under one heading without violence, but starting from the opposite idea means that it would never be possible, not even within each nation, to silence the protests of the provinces or of the peoples” (113). The unity of federation is based on recognition of separate spheres of action. “One is where they move without affecting others like themselves, and the other is where they cannot move without affecting the federation. In one they are as autonomous as human individuals in their thought and conscience. In the other, they are as heteronomous as humans are in their lives when relating with other humans. Devoted to themselves as they are in the first sphere, they work separately and independently while, in the second, they reach agreements with the societies whose lives they affect, establish a power that would represent everyone, and implement what they have jointly decided. In fact, among equal entities it cannot be otherwise. Therefore, federation, the covenant, is the system that best befits reason and nature” (115).
Pi must have been one of the few European thinkers of his times who recognised the right of Indigenous peoples to live as they choose, in harmony with their surroundings. “They remain enclosed in the bosom of their families, and have not opted for becoming constituted as a city or for contact with civilised peoples. They find that nature is more than bountiful in satisfying their few needs and, since nothing obliges them to seek help from other human beings, they resist exchanging their independent habits for the kinds of discipline that all societies demand” (120). Federated systems as they exist in neoliberalism, aren’t known for protecting Indigenous rights because self-determination is understood as being within the system and, since Indigenous peoples resist the system and its despoliation, their ascription is that of “enemy”, fit for extermination. Pi i Margall’s federalism is the result of a moral set of principles and values, seeking to ensure collective rule of all ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups as well as nationalities, to end the dominance of any one community over the state, and to let all communities enjoy proportional rights over resources. In this sense, he anticipated universalism as the foundation of human rights theory.
On the ethical dimension of federalism, Pi writes, “However, two cities or two nations that unite must guarantee rather more than material interests. Moral interests are of equal or greater importance…Without order, that is, without respect for the laws, the greatest states go into decline, as their wisest institutions become corrupted and sterile and liberty and rule of law perish in the same wreck. Without liberty, or in other words, without respect for human conscience, thought, and personality, societies stagnate and become degraded, living under terror, and constantly endangering order. The seditions of the Gracchi spawned the Sulla dictatorship and despotism of the Caesars. The rapid decline that turned cultured Spain into the most backward of western nations has its origins in the despotism of the House of Habsburg” (136).
Nowadays, many people dismiss the idea of universal human rights as utopian, but in Las nacionalidades, Pi i Margall shows how an international system that respects the human rights of all persons and peoples can quite easily be organised. He resolves Proudhon’s paradox of liberty and authority by devolving central power to small political units, in a confederation united by covenants, where populations have some familiarity with the people representing them, and have the liberty to exercise some authority, which now belongs to an ethical framework resulting from participation and negotiation. The basis of the international order is theoretically national self-determination, but this right is frequently denied, especially to peoples without states. Pi i Margall saw, foresaw, and understood this as a basic human rights problem: the right of persons and peoples to shape their own future in a system where everyone wants this right. This was his idea of “unity in variety, the law of nature, the law of the world”, a healthy system that might nourish healthier minds for a healthier politics.
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