Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism

Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION: HOW NATION-STATES ARE MADE
The concurrence of the German and Italian revolutions will one day represent one of the most fruitful of parallels for the philosophy of history.
--HEINRICH TREITSCHKE1
FOR OVER THE PAST 130 years, Heinrich Treitschke's invitation to scholars to compare the German and Italian national revolutions has gone largely unanswered. Despite the turbulent parallels between nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and Italian political development, the two cases remain an underutilized comparison for the study of state formation, nationalism, and federalism. This study takes up Treitschke's appeal to compare the two great episodes of nineteenth-century European nation-state formation in order to address a puzzle: how are nation-states made, and what determines whether nation-state formation leads to the creation of federal or unitary patterns of governance?
In an age when the issues of state building and federalism have returned to the center stage of politics in discussions of the European Union and nation building more broadly, a comparative analysis of nineteenth-century European nation-state formation offers a fruitful way to investigate questions that are once again concerns for scholars and policymakers: What are the conditions under which a new political entity is created? What determines the institutional form of that entity? What are the conditions under which federalism can be created? In moments of institutional founding, how much impact do political leaders actually have in designing political institutions? Can political leaders who seek federalism simply adopt a constitution that guarantees federalism? Can a federal constitution be violently imposed? Or must it emerge "bottom up" from a collection of symmetrically powerful subunits negotiating themselves into existence?
This study focuses on Europe during the nineteenth century because it is a period that casts new light on these issues. Though the rise of nationalism is normally attributed to the French Revolution, it was in fact during a decisive period between 1830 and 1880 in Europe, North America, and South America that many contemporary nation-states were created through the dual processes of imperial disintegration and national integration. Left standing in Europe were the new modern creations of Greece, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Bulgaria, and Romania.2 This period that I call the "national moment" transformed the political map of Europe, North America, and South America. The political systems that emerged out of this set of nearly simultaneous experiences of nation-state formation were marked by a wide array of institutional forms that provide a diverse set of empirical cases for contemporary scholars of political development.
In particular, in one area of nation-state structure--the institutionalized territorial distribution of power between national and subnational governments--the new nation-states of the late nineteenth century displayed an institutional diversity that raises the question of how nation-states are formed and how the relationship between national and subnational governments comes to be established. While some newly formed polities such as Germany and Canada became explicitly federal political systems, others such as Italy and Belgium became classically unitary systems. In federal systems, like Germany and Canada, regional states were absorbed but remained intact as constitutionally sovereign parts in the larger "national" political framework: regional governments had formal access to the national government, discretion over public finance (i.e., taxing and spending), and administrative autonomy. By contrast, in states such as Italy and Belgium, any existing regional governments were erased from the map as sovereign entities and left without formal access to the new national governments, without public finance discretion, and without formal administrative autonomy. While experiencing a similar timing in their formation, the new nation-states of the nineteenth century experienced divergent institutional political arrangements of territorial governance after national unification. That both federal and unitary systems were the products of these institution-building experiments raises a deeper theoretical paradox of federalism's origins that is the central question of this book: How can a state-building political core that seeks to integrate its neighbors be strong enough to form a larger nation-state, but also not be too strong to entirely absorb and erase existing units, thereby creating a unitary nation-state? If the core is too unyielding, will not a unitary system result? If too accommodating, will not a union be impossible to forge in the first place?3