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There is a last question that we should address when we try to imagine the conditions for a good society today. It is clear that there are sets of issues which cannot be tackled at the level of the nation-state but only in a wider context. Indeed one of the most debated issues today concerns precisely the so-called crisis of the nation-state. To be sure, this crisis is often exaggerated by the advocates of the neo-liberal model of globalization who have an interest in asserting that the nation-state with all its regulations has become obsolete and that all the barriers to the free movement of capital should be dismantled. But there are also those who, while being critical of neo-liberalism, similarly announce the demise of the nation-state, but in this case what they call for is the development of a 'cosmopolitan democracy' and of a 'cosmopolitan citizenship'. What they overlook is the fact that democratic governance requires the existence of units where popular sovereignty can be exercised and that this requires boundaries. It is a dangerous illusion to imagine the possibility of a cosmopolitan citizenship that would be based exclusively on an abstract idea of humanity and that would be coextensive with the whole planet. Democracy is unthinkable without the idea of a 'demos'. No democratic self-governance can be effective without such a demos. This is not to argue that the nation-state is the only possible form of demos and that we should not try to imagine other forms. It seems evident to me that the process of globalization is affecting the conditions of exercise of democratic citizenship and that one should not hold desperately onto the nation-state as the only possible shell for democracy.

There is a lot to be argued for the coexistence of smaller and bigger units of democratic decision, according to the kind of problems to be resolved and the types of issues to de decided. If instead of envisaging globalization as the creation of a vast homogenous space - which is clearly inaccurate - we view it as proceeding under the mode of a set of regionalizations, as a new form of articulation between the local and the global, we will be in better condition to imagine which forms of political associations will be better suited to secure the exercise of democracy at various levels. It is in this context that I find the diverse attempts to formulate a new form of federalism, one that would be appropriate for our present conditions, especially promising. For instance, some proposals have been made in such a direction by Massimo Cacciari, the former Mayor of Venice who argues that what we need today is a Copernician revolution that would radically deconstruct the centralistauthoritarian- bureaucratic apparatus of the traditional nation-state. He affirms that the modern state is being torn apart as a consequence of two big movements: one micronational, and another one supranational; on one part, from the inside, under the pressure of regionalist or tribal movements, on the other part, from the outside, as a consequence of the growth of supranational powers and institutions and of the increasing power of world finance and transnational corporations. In his view federalism is the answer to such a situation, a federalism that would recognize the specific identity of the different regions, of the different cities, not in order to separate them from the other places but on the contrary in order to establish the conditions of an autonomy that would be conceived and organized on the basis of multiple relations and exchange between those regions and those cities. Federalism, he says, should be envisaged as combining solidarity and competition, as a form of autonomy exercised in systems which are integrated in a conflictual mode.

If we want to impede the consequences of globalization as leading to the imposition of a single and homogenizing model of society, with all the possible forms of 'tribal' reaction that this would certainly entail, it seems to me that it is urgent to imagine new forms of associations in which pluralism could flourish and where the capacities for popular participation should be enhanced, and this is why I find such a federalist vision very suggestive. By allowing us to envisage new forms of solidarity based on recognized interdependence, it could constitute one of the central idea around which democratic forces could get organized, and would certainly put some life in the agonistic struggle that I am advocating. As against the antipolitical illusions of a cosmopolitan world governance, and against the sterile and doomed fixation on the nation-state, the rediscovery and the reformulation of the federalist ideal provides a crucial insight for our inquiry about the form that a good society should take in the twenty-first century.