Decouple federal government from nation-states

A world of city-states should join federal governments à la carte.

I spent the fall writing about smaller, local governments—the state and the city—and the ways they might be empowered to have more autonomy.

I argued that US states should become more like EU countries and that cities could be even more autonomous. What if a US state could have universal healthcare like the Nordic Countries, I asked? What if a US city could manage its own immigration policy? 

What if we split the whole world into city-states?

I mentioned only briefly in those essays that I still thought we should leave some part of the United States federal government intact—at one point I called it the “United City-States of America.” That’s because, even if I think we should grant more authority to smaller governments, we still need the larger ones to protect us from war, manage our international trade and currency, and also very importantly: to keep local governments in check. 

That doesn’t mean I think we should get all of those things from one large federal government like the United States—I don’t. Rather, I think the United States and other federal governments should decouple federal governance into several independent government layers that city-states can join ad hoc. Think: A human rights layer, a military layer, an economic layer…

A world of city-states could then join those federal governments à la carte, rather than be stuck with the whole menu.

To be clear: in a world of city-states we do still need federal governance. That’s because small nations could very easily become despotic ones if left to their devices, and they often have. 

Cities, for example, do not do a good job at deciding whether they should build more housing because the people that already live there don’t want more people and more density. But the larger state can see that these policies are causing rising home prices and homelessness and can step in to ensure that the city builds more housing and can effectively accommodate everyone in the state—just as New Zealand did, overruling its cities with great effect.

Similarly, states with too much power have historically used that power to harm their citizens. Some states were once pro-slavery while others were against—that’s why a civil war was fought, and ultimately slavery was outlawed federally. Later on, some states refused to desegregate schools until the federal government made them. Same-sex marriage was a state issue until it became federal. There is a reason the wellbeing of people has always escalated to the federal level: To overrule the tendency of some groups of people to treat other groups of people badly.

Even federally, it wouldn’t make sense for individual countries to manage climate initiatives. If that were the case, China could decide to go fully green while the US does the opposite, and we would keep polluting the world and that would affect everyone else in it. That’s why we created even larger layers of government like The Paris Climate Accord, where 192 countries signed on to meet climate standards that would affect the whole world. 

Even if I think we need more autonomy over our lives locally (the city, the state) we still need to grant autonomy to higher levels of government that can ensure the wellbeing of progressively larger groups of people (the nation, groups of nations, the world). 

But I don’t think we should have to get that federal government all in one place. I think we should dismantle federal governance into several overlapping layers.

That’s what the political scientist Philippe Schmitter was arguing for when the European Union began consolidating power in the early 2000s. At the time, many wanted the EU to become more like the USA—a consolidated European Superstate that presided over all European Countries—but Schmitter advocated for democratizing those government functions across several jurisdictions. 

“Instead of a single Europe with recognized and contiguous boundaries,” he said at the time, “there would be many Europes: a trading Europe, an energy Europe, an environmental Europe, a social welfare Europe, even a defense Europe, and so forth. Instead of one ‘Eurocracy’ that coordinated all the distinct tasks involved in the integration process, there would be multiple regional institutions acting autonomously to solve common problems and produce different public goods.”

Interestingly, the more we create these lightweight layers of government that nation-states can opt into, the easier it is for us to give more power to smaller autonomous local governments too. As Glyn Morgan points out in his book European Superstate, “In this type of polity, the state, as we know it, would no longer exist. Indeed, instead of a recognizable central government, the ‘condominio’ would be regulated by a variety of mechanisms of governance.”

The “condominio” was Schmitter’s term for this layered approach to governance where power is democratized across several lightweight and overlapping layers rather than one big central one. 

We didn’t know how to do that when we were establishing the United States. Back then we united the US colonies so we could fight the American Revolution. But what if we didn’t need to consolidate into one big giant country to fight together against Britain? Or to manage international trade? Or to have the same currency? Or to protect human rights? What if we could have remained separate, even as we united for various purposes?

We’ve learned how to do that since. In the last 100 years, we’ve established the EU, a collective of 27 countries who work together on international trade and currency; NATO, a collective of 31 countries who agree to defend one another militarily; and the Paris Climate Accord, where countries around the world agree to uphold certain environmental protections. We’ve created NAFTA, an agreement between Canada, the US, and Mexico to facilitate trade between countries; and the Schengen Zone, which allows citizens of several European countries to move and live freely between them. 

Each of these governance layers is lightweight, meaning they each only govern one specific thing: military defense, for example, or border control. They are also advantageous to join—a small country could get a lot out of joining NATO where it suddenly has access to a much larger military defense than it would on its own, or by joining the Schengen Zone, which allows citizens to move in and out of their territory with ease. 

By comparison, nation-states as governing bodies are quite heavy—they dictate quite a lot of the lives we live from human rights to the economy, from public parks to technology, from the military to education, from healthcare to immigration. In a big country like the United States, to have one federal government managing all of those things is incredibly cumbersome. And so long as you are a US state, you are stuck with the entire menu—you can’t choose à la carte. 

Europe ultimately went the “superstate” route, just like the US, but I still think there’s a case to do the opposite. Instead of having these giant superstates that control nearly every aspect of government for the states in their geologic territory, why can’t they offload that power to several more specialized branches? We already have them—organizations that manage defense, world health, international trade, farming, international waters. Why can’t the EU and the US, as well as countries around the world, outsource those functions to those more specialized layers? Smaller countries could then secede and join these various layers ad hoc. 

As Nathan Schneider says in his essay “Lighten the load of the nation-state,” “If people have opportunities to be part of more kinds of jurisdictions, they can put less stock in any one jurisdiction. They can keep identifying most with their nation-states, which can then focus on being great at governing their particular territory, or they can exchange that layer for other ones. The ethnonationalist fantasy has less to offer if the nation is no longer the only hope for change. A constellation of new jurisdictions is globalist, but it is also localist and more.”

In this world, the UK wouldn’t have had to choose between being a sovereign country and being part of the EU, instead, it could have remained a sovereign country even as it participated in various layers of the EU that are beneficial to it: for example, why couldn’t Britain have participated in the EU’s economic trade and security and defense layers while opting out of EU’s Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) which was disproportionately disadvantageous to Britain.

The UK shouldn’t have had to choose between all or nothing: a heavy superstate that controlled almost all of its life, or being a sovereign state on its own. It should be able to join the federal layers that make sense for them.

China is realizing the same, creating Special Economic Zones (SEZ) with their own autonomous laws even as they remain part of larger China. As Parag Khanna points out in his book Technocracy in America, China’s aim is “not to build a giant Singapore, but rather to replicate Singapore as many times as possible within China.”

US states could similarly become more autonomous even as they remain part of human rights treaties, international trade organizations, and military initiatives established by the US. In fact, that can be an enforced part of secession planning—that so long as smaller local governments opt into larger layers of government that govern much less, then they could effectively govern themselves much more.

“The overlapping jurisdictions should offer more rights and protections than we have now, not fewer,” Schneider says. “But they can also be more creative in their designs than governments are, picking from among a diverse palette of mechanisms to identify what is most appropriate to their particular domains. Some jurisdictions might be small, while others might represent everyone on earth, regardless of their territorial locations.”

By creating independent layers of government that smaller governments can adhere to, cities and states could peacefully secede from their larger cumbersome governments, even as they add lightweight layers that ensure they treat everyone well, can trade internationally and grow their economies, and can protect one another on the world stage. 

But I’d love to know your thoughts. Join us in the comments for a discussion of democratized federal governance!

Thanks for thinking through ideas with me,

Elle Griffin

Marginalia

Here are a few notes from the margins of my research:

I loved “Lighten the load of the nation-state,” by Nathan Schneider.

The nation-state could offload some of its governance burdens to other kinds of jurisdictions, other concurrent layers of governance that are more tailored and accountable in their domains…

In a world of new jurisdictions, nation-states would need to relinquish some of the power they now claim… Over time, new kinds of jurisdictions may become important enough to people’s lives that the permission of nation-states no longer seems necessary. Our primary identities may someday have less to do with accidents of birth and more to do with the jurisdictions we choose.

Maxwell Tabarrok

argues that we also need a layer of government that could stand for the future in “Spatial vs Temporal Externalities.”

No one in government today will gain anything if they make the world better 50 years from now or lose anything if they make it worse. They have no skin in the game when it comes to the long-run future…Climate change is something that governments care about, but not because they are trying to strike the socially optimal balance, taking the interests of foreigners and future people into account.

Heather Cox Richardson

says these layers of government even supplant colonization. That’s why the US is focusing on creating more partnerships rather than takeovers.

In the past three years, the U.S. has created a new security partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom, known as AUKUS, and held a historic, first-ever trilateral leaders’ summit at Camp David with Japan and the Republic of Korea. It has built new partnerships with nations in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as with Latin American and Caribbean countries, to address issues of immigration; two days ago the Trilateral Fentanyl Committee met for the fourth time in Mexico. This new system includes a wider range of voices at the table—backing the membership of the African Union in the Group of 20 (G20) economic forum, for example—advancing a form of cooperation in which every international problem is addressed by a group of partner nations that have a stake in the outcome. 

Daniel Sisson

’s Fracture of the United States series is a thoroughly interesting primer on how the states could secede. 

• Part 1: Empires Fall

• Part 2: Citizenship and the Internet

• Part 3: Polarization and Sovereignty

• Part 4: How the United States Will Fall