Federation

• 1. Introduction

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  A federation gives roughly 40% of the world's population, about 3.2 billion people, a government split in two. Power sits with both a central authority and a set of provinces, states, or regions, and neither side can simply seize the other's share. The split is written into a constitution, and changing it requires a constitutional amendment rather than a single side's decision. Seven of the eight largest countries by area are run this way. Yet so are tiny places like Saint Kitts and Nevis and the Federated States of Micronesia, so size is not the rule it appears to be. The question is what really separates a federation from the alternatives that look almost identical from the outside. Why does Switzerland still call itself a confederation when it stopped being one in 1848? Why do Canadians say Confederation while their provinces are not sovereign? And how does a country end up federal in the first place, whether by states joining from below or by a central government letting go from above?

• 2. The Power Divide

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  Sovereign power in a federation is formally split so each region keeps some control over its internal affairs. The component states are sovereign in a limited sense, holding powers the central government may not exercise. But a federation is more than a loose alliance of independent states. Usually the component states hold no foreign-policy powers and so have no independent standing under international law. German Länder are the unusual exception, holding that power and beginning to use it at a European level. A central authority can carry sweeping overriding powers in theory. It may suspend a constituent state's government by invoking gross mismanagement or civil unrest. It may pass national legislation that overrides a state's powers under a duty to ensure peace and good government, or to meet obligations from an international treaty. Some federations are asymmetric, where certain states hold more autonomy than others. Malaysia is the example given: Sarawak and Sabah joined on different terms and conditions from the states of Peninsular Malaysia.

• 3. How Federations Are Born

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  Australia became a nation by the democratic vote of the citizens of each state, who voted yes in referendums to adopt the Australian Constitution. That origin is described as unique. More often a federation emerges from an initial agreement between several separate states. The aim can be to solve shared problems, to provide mutual defense, or to create a nation-state for an ethnicity spread across several states. The United States and Switzerland fit the first pattern. Brazil followed a different path, becoming a federation only after the fall of the monarchy, while some of its present-day states still keep borders set during Portuguese colonization, before the Brazilian state itself existed. Its newest state, Tocantins, was created by the 1988 Constitution chiefly for administrative reasons. Federations tend to be established voluntarily from below. That contrasts with devolution, where a formerly centralized state grants self-government from above. Argentina shifted between federal, confederal, and unitary systems before settling into federalism.

• 4. A Long Lineage

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  The 4th-century-BCE League of Corinth, Noricum in Central Europe, and the Iroquois Confederacy in pre-Columbian North America could each be described as federations or confederations. The Old Swiss Confederacy stands as an early example of formal non-unitary statehood. Several New World colonies and dominions made up of autonomous provinces turned into federal states upon independence, including the United States and various countries in Latin America. Not all of them held. The Federal Republic of Central America broke apart into independent states less than 20 years after its founding. Germany has switched between confederal, federal, and unitary rule since the German Confederation was founded in 1815. The North German Confederation, the German Empire that followed, and the Weimar Republic were all federations. Founded in 1922, the Soviet Union was formally a federation of Soviet republics, autonomous republics, and other federal subjects, though in practice it was highly centralized; the Russian Federation inherited a similar system. India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Malaysia became federations on or shortly before independence from the British Empire. More recently, federalism has been used to handle ethnic conflict, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Iraq since 2005, and in Somalia since 2012. With the United States Constitution effective on the 4th of March 1789, the United States is the oldest surviving federation. The newest is Nepal, whose constitution took effect on the 20th of September 2015.

• 5. The Look-Alikes

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  A unitary state can closely resemble a federation, and the distinction is often ambiguous. The difference lies in revocability. In a unitary state, the autonomous status of a self-governing region exists by the sufferance of the central government and can be revoked unilaterally. France and Japan, for example, have been unitary for many centuries. A confederation, in modern terms, is a permanent union of sovereign states for common action toward other states. It differs from a federation in three ways: it holds no real direct powers, its day-to-day decisions need special majorities or even unanimity rather than a simple majority, and changes to its founding treaty require unanimity. An empire is a multi-ethnic or multinational state with a central government, usually established through coercion on the model of the Roman Empire. A federacy is a unitary state that incorporates one or more self-governing autonomous areas while keeping its unitary structure; Åland was established through international treaty. A devolved state, such as Indonesia and the United Kingdom, lets the central government revoke a subunit's independence without changing the constitution, as with the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Parliament, and the Northern Ireland Assembly.

• 6. Federations In Disguise

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  Switzerland is still officially the Swiss Confederation, but the name is now a misnomer because the Swiss cantons lost their sovereign status in 1848. Canada used the word Confederation when its federal system was established in 1867, yet the term refers only to the process of forming or joining Canada, not to its structure, since Canadian provinces are not sovereign. Court rulings, legal reforms, and political compromises have decentralized Canada in practice since that year. Belgium moved the opposite way. It was founded as a centralized state on the French model and was reformed into a federal state by successive constitutional reforms since the 1970s, with a growing movement to loosen it further into a confederation. Spain grants more self-government to its autonomous communities than the constituent units of most federations retain, which is why some call it a de facto federation, also termed a regional state. The scholar Enrique Guillén López refers to the federal nature of Spain's government, a trend that almost no one denies. Navarre and the Basque Country hold full control over taxation and spending, paying the central government for shared services like the military and foreign relations. Each autonomous community is governed by a Statute of Autonomy under the Spanish Constitution of 1978. Even so, the Spanish parliament suspended the autonomy of Catalonia in response to the Catalan declaration of independence, ahead of the 2017 Catalan election.

• 7. The European Question

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  Robert Schuman, who began the European Community system, wrote that a transnational community like the founding European Coal and Steel Community lay midway between an association of fully independent states and a federation fusing them into a super-state. The Founding Fathers of the European Union wrote the Europe Declaration when they signed the Treaty of Paris on the 18th of April 1951, saying Europe should be organized on a transnational foundation. They wrote that the participating parties were laying the true foundation of an organized Europe, open to all nations, and hoped others would join the common endeavor. The EU is a three-pillar structure built on the supranational European Economic Community and the nuclear treaty Euratom, plus two intergovernmental pillars for External Affairs and for Justice and Home Affairs. It holds responsibility for trade, monetary union, agriculture, and fisheries. Its members keep the right to act alone on foreign policy and defense, and a near-monopoly over criminal justice and taxation. Since the Treaty of Lisbon, the right of member states to leave is codified, and more areas use qualified majority voting rather than unanimity. The German Constitutional Court defines the EU as an association of sovereign national states, a Staatenverbund, a view that makes it resemble a confederation more than a federation.

• 8. When The Union Breaks

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  Singapore was expelled from the Malaysian federation because of rising racial tension. That expulsion is one of the sharpest illustrations of a danger built into federal systems: the conflict between regional and national interests, or between different ethnic groups. The exact division of power between federal and regional governments is a frequent source of dispute. In the United States, such conflicts are often resolved through the judicial system, which sets the limits of federal and local power. Where the entire jurisdiction is fairly homogeneous and each state resembles a miniature of the whole, the arrangement is called congruent federalism; incongruent federalism exists where states hold distinct ethnic groups. When a federal government cannot build institutions to mediate linguistic, ethnic, or religious differences, the result can be secession or civil war. That happened in the United States, where southern states sought to protect slavery while northern states opposed it, with a catalysis in the then Kansas Territory, and also in Nigeria and Switzerland. Some federations collapsed outright, among them the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the Gran Colombia, the United Provinces of Central America, and the West Indies Federation. Today there are 27 federations in the world, with 6 each in Africa, Asia, and Europe, 4 in North America, 3 in South America, and 2 in Oceania.