The Aetolians, the Europeans and the Pakistanis: Lessons for modern federations

In the present essay we begin with a short presentation of the Aetolian proto-federation, an ancient Greek federation and then, through an interactive approach we compare its structure and institutions with those of the European Union (EU), a would-be federation and Pakistan, an established federal state in central Asia since 1948. To achieve this, we make use of a specific set of criteria such as the democratic legitimization (or not) of their main federal bodies, the existence or not of common defense and security policy, common currency, incentives to participate in the federal structure such as single citizenship (Greek: isopoliteia,) and federal justice. Our results indicate that the Aetolian federation had practiced a series of institutional settlements, such as both direct and representative democracy, cohesion policies such as flexible federal taxation policies and basic economic freedoms and thus, it can serve as a benchmark for further EU integration.