The Past Speaks

My PhD thesis was on Canadian Confederation. [You can read the book based on it if you really want]. Confederation took place in the 1860s and 1870s, when the separate colonies in British North America agreed to federate and give up control over many important matters to a central government in Ottawa. My PhD thesis was focused on the political economy of Confederation.

I’m also a card-carrying interdisciplinary historian. History is an empirical discipline, which is one of the reasons ordinary people can enjoy books written by history professors. However, I also believe that, in many cases, it is appropriate for historians to draw on theories created by other social scientists, particularly political scientists, economists, and anthropologists. Theory can help us to make sense of the jumbled facts of reality and to discern broader patterns. I’ve long been interested in the fact there was a worldwide trend towards territorial unification in the 1860—the unification of Italy and Germany and Canadian Confederation all took place at roughly the same time. My hunch is that new technologies had a great deal to do with this  trend. Some contemporaries thought that this was the case.

By the time of Confederation, British North Americans had come to associate the revolutionary effects of Morse’s electric telegraph, which was commercialized in the 1840s,  with the creation of the larger political units. In 1862, Amor de Cosmos, the editor of Victoria’s British Colonist advocated the union of the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia on the ground that it was “the age of the electric telegraph and the railroad.” Shrinking distances required larger political units. In the debates on Confederation in the parliament of Canada in early 1865, a supporter of Confederation named Charles Alleyn declared that “the telegraph has annihilated time, railroads and steamers have devoured space.” He said that these new technologies had caused a worldwide drive for “territorial aggrandizement, this gathering together of the disjecta membra of nations.” Alleyn referred to the recent steps to unify Italy and Germany, Russia’s absorption of small countries in the Caucausus and Central Asia, as well as the strengthening of central government authority in Mexico and the United States.  Another supporter of Confederation, Hector Louis Langevin, spoke of the vast improvement in communications which had occurred since the union of Upper and Lower Canada. In 1841, telegraphy in Canada had consisted of a single semaphore used to relay messages between the Quebec Citadel and some nearby islands. But as Langevin observed, the capital could now communicate instantaneously with “the most remote districts” of the Province. Political union with the other colonies, he suggested, was the natural extrapolation of this technological development, of the death of distance.

Given my interest in interdisciplinary history and the processes of territorial unification and sub-division, I was naturally intrigued by a recent post over on the Thousand Nations blog. This blog was put together by a group of people who believe that, in general, the more nation states there are in the world, the better off we will be. There reasoning is similar to that of the people who favour competition in the mobile phone business—with more competition for your business, consumers will benefit from better service and lower prices. The creators of this blog say that the world is a much better place today, when there are nearly 200 members of the UN, than when there were just sixty UN member nations, in the late 1940s. In fact, they argue that the world would be better off if this trend continued and there were 1,000 sovereign countries in the world. To achieve this, each American state, Canadian province, and French department would have to become independent and start issuing passports. The creators of the blog also say that it would be tragedy if the world’s existing states were consolidated into a few big continental blocks, a North American Republic, a federal  European Union, etc.

I’ve always been inclined to the view that it is usually better to have many small political units than a few big ones. I came to think this way after reading some of the works of the late Jane Jacobs. My small-is-beautiful philosophy is but one of the reasons I think that Canadian Confederation was a mistake foisted on British North America by a clique of megalomaniacs. You may or may not share my view that it is better to have more states than fewer, but the Thousand Nations blog has certainly posted some interesting data in the last few days. For instance, have a look at these numbers:

Decade-by-decade breakdown of how new UN member states were created:

Decolonization:
1970s: 23
1980s: 8
1990s: 2
2000s: 0

Secession:
1970s: 1
1980s: 0
1990s: 20
2000s: 3

Reunification (each decreases the # of states by 1)
1970s: 1
1980s: 0
1990s: 2
2000s: 0

The recent blog post that caught my eye examines the political economy literature on why states consolidate and split up. The post was written by Brad Taylor. Several political scientists and economists have advanced general theories trying to explain what accounts for territorial consolidation and sub-division.  Taylor begins his literature survey by pointing out that: “While the size of nations is normally taken as an uninteresting brute fact by political economists, there have been some notable attempts to explain what causes a country to be a particular size and what size a country should be.” Taylor then examines the theories of such writers as David Friedman, Alberto Alesina, and Enrico Spolaore. David Friedman, it should be noted, is the son of the late Milton Friedman and the father of Patri Friedman, one of the creators of the ThousandNations website.

I’ve read all of the scholars Taylor discusses before. To repeat, I am very open to the possibility that there is a grand political-economy theory that explains why territorial consolidations such as Canadian Confederation take place.

The theories discussed in Taylor’s post are all rather interesting, but to my mind none of them is terribly convincing or fits the facts of the cases with which I am most familiar. Until a political economist comes up with a more plausible general theory, we will have to fall back to the position that each act of territorial consolidation and division should be regarded as a special case, sui generis, to be studied and understood on its own terms without references to other nation-building acts of territorial unification.