American federalism is modeled---it solves global wars.

The bitter harvest of the nationalist revolution was gathered in this century with the slaughter of the First and Second World Wars and with the fifty-year Cold War that then followed. These events finally made clear to the great-great-grandchildren of the Enlight- enment that celebration of the nation state could lead to Nazism and Stalinism, to war and genocide, and to totalitarianism and the most complete loss of freedom humankind ever experienced. By 1945, the democratic revolution was still in full flow, but the nationalist revolution was not. World leaders scrambled to replace the still collapsing colonial, imperial transnational structures with new federal and confederal transnational structures.

The fifty years since then have seen the birth of the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, the European Convention on Human Rights, the British Commonwealth, the Confederation of Independent States (CIS), the GATT, the NAFTA, and countless other transnational "federal" entities of varying degrees of importance.24 Many of these were openly inspired by the success story of American federalism, which, for example, led many Europeans to want to build a Common Market that could become a "United States of Europe." While many of these new democratic transnational entities are very weak, they nonetheless have developed important powers: they have helped to keep the peace, and in some instances, as with the European Union, they show real potential for some day attaining essentially all the attributes of sovereignty commonly associated with a federal nation-state, like the United States. The growth and success of transnational confederal forms since 1945 is truly aston- ishing and rightly is viewed by many - either with alarm or with hope - as holding out the eventual prospect of a future global fed- eral government or at least the prospect of several continental-sized federal governments.

At the same time, U.S.-style constitutional federalism has become the order of the day in an extraordinarily large number of very important countries, some of which once might have been thought of as pure nation-states. Thus, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Republic of Austria, the Russian Federation, Spain, India, and Nigeria all have decentralized power by adopting consti- tutions that are significantly more federalist than the ones they re- placed.25 Many other nations that had been influenced long ago by American federalism have chosen to retain and formalize their fed- eral structures. Thus, the federalist constitutions of Australia, Can- ada, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, for example, all are basically alive and well today.

As one surveys the world in 1995, American-style federalism of some kind or another is everywhere triumphant, while the forces of nationalism, although still dangerous, seem to be contained or in retreat. The few remaining highly centralized democratic nation- states like Great Britain,26 France, and Italy all face serious secessionist or devolutionary crises.27 Other highly centralized nation- states, like China, also seem ripe for a federalist, as well as a demo- cratic, change. Even many existing federal and confederal entities seem to face serious pressure to devolve power further than they have done so far: thus, Russia, Spain, Canada, and Belgium all have very serious devolutionary or secessionist movements of some kind. Indeed, secessionist pressure has been so great that some federal structures recently have collapsed under its weight, as has hap- pened in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the former Soviet Union.

All of this still could be threatened, of course, by a resurgence of nationalism in Russia or elsewhere, but the long-term antinational- ist trend seems fairly secure. There is no serious intellectual sup- port for nationalism anywhere in the world today, whereas everywhere people seem interested in exploring new transnational and devolutionary federal forms.28 The democratic revolution that was launched in Philadelphia in 1776 has won, and now it seems that democrats everywhere join Madison in "cherishing the spirit and supporting the character of federalists."29