There might be an argument for repealing the 17th Constitutional amendment, restoring election of federal senators by state legislatures as The Founders envisaged, strengthening federalism The principle argument for popular election was, after all, charges the Senate had become a millionaires’ club. Today? Perhaps the current spectacle of a dubious “debate” over “Iraq” might have been improved were the states’ weight strengthened as intended against runaway populism.

From Istanbul to Beijing, federalism gets a hearing from time to time, a piece of governance for compromise needed for stability and modernization. That’s what is being worked out, hopefully, in Iraq, at the moment. [Forbid that anyone should take seriously Sen. Joseph R. Biden’s proposal setting up what inevitably would be three warring states along ethnic lines.] The first building bloc seems going into place with agreement to divide oil revenues, allotting some to Sunni areas which are bereft compared, at least as far as anyone knows now, to current production in the north and south. Divvying up the enormous potential of fossil fuel — U.S. farm lobby and worldwide enviromentalistas’ love affair with ethanol notwithstanding — would obviously be essential for any kind of viable future regime speeding American withdrawal.

But federalism is not easy. Malaysia, with its potpourri of British, Hindu, Moslem, and Chinese Confucian protocols, has made it work [even when several decades of cronyism by former Prime Minister Mohammad Mahathir almost subverted it].

The most ambitious effort, of course, is India. There Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s 1956 surrender to populism, redrawing British Indian maps to create states based on the subcontinent’s dozens of languages is still being played out. For example, a bloody, reigniting 25-year-old insurgency seeking to create an independent greater Tamil state in both Sri Lanka and India is only one example of New Delhi’s vulnerability. India resists solution of the Kashmir issue, principal bone of contention with Pakistan, in part, for fear of establishing precedent for secession.

Indonesia, struggling out of a 50-year history of war with Atjeh, minerals rich tip of northern Sumatra, had a federal state thrust on its revolutionary leadership by U.S., British, Dutch and Australian conciliators in 1949. But Soekarno, longtime dictator and demagogue, used nationalist sentiment to quickly disassemble it, leading to continuing strife among its myriad ethnic and racial constituents — their one commonality having been colonials under the Dutch for 350 years. Recent efforts to decentralize — and a tenuous peace in Atjeh — could do the work long overdue.

But Indonesia, like Pakistan, has one ethnic group, the Javanese, or the Punjabis, dominating the political landscape. Pakistan, carved out of British India, struggles with insurgencies now — some built on old ethnic roots, some led by Islamofascists — the battlecry of which is against Punjabi-raj. Ironically, Pakistan’s rulers — as with President Gen. Perve Musharraf [a scion of immigrants from what is now India] have not been Punjabi but its landlords and businessmen run the show.

The Dalai Lama, now 72, facing mushrooming Chinese military as well as ethnic immigrants in Tibet, is ready to accept “autonomy” rather than independence. Beijing gossip holds a struggle has ensued within Communist leadership by those who would accept his return — worried his death may bring on new guerrilla activity — and hardliners [presumably including President Hu Jintao who as Beijing’s Tibetan gauleiter in the late 80s brutally put down dissidence]. Yet decentralization may have to be formalized in China with increasing loss of control by Beijing over local Party cadre, especially those wallowing in corruption and falling living standards in rural areas where most Chinese live.

The latest convert to federalism is a most unlikely candidate: former Turkish President Kenan Evren, who headed the 1980 coup which overthrew an elected government accused of flirting with Islamicist revival. The 90-year old Evren, once representing the quintessence of “Kemalism” — modernization of a Turkish state through a highly centralized, regime borrowed from France and Prussia — now says dividing the country into states is the only way to solve its problems. Most of all, he sees it solving the problem of the Kurds, the huge Turkish minority — an ethnic group it shares with Iraq and Iran — who have waged an off and on revolt taxing Ankara’s military and financial resources since the 1960s. The problem becomes all the more critical for Ankara with Kurdish autonomy [and relative stability] across the border in Iraqi Kurdistan. Evren’s statements have unleashed a torrent of discussion — and abuse. But should Turkey move toward federalism, it would be monumentally significant for the rest of Asia which long hoped the formula of contemporary Turkey’s founder, Ataturk, was the correct one for their own nascent nationalism.