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Introduction

When outlining the main features of a classic federation, scholars commonly contend that both the federal government and federated entities are sovereign and autonomous in their own powers, meaning that neither level is subordi­nate to the other, and they both share the ‘nature of state', enjoying the whole bundle of functions and state powers (Bin and Falcon 2012, p.

51). This idea of sovereignty ‘divided' between federal and peripheral units (embedded for the first time in the US constitution of 1787) is regarded as one of the most important elements distinguishing a pure federation not only from unitary states, but also from quasi-federal/regional states. In fact, in regional states sovereignty belongs to the centre, with territorial sub-units enjoying only mild forms of autonomy: in other words, while in federal states the two con­cepts are commonly used interchangeably, peripheral units in regional states are autonomous but not sovereign, as sovereignty remains undivided at the central level. The question thus becomes: how does the sovereignty of feder­ated entities differ from the constitutionally protected autonomy enjoyed by regions in regional states? Using the Italian regional system as a case-study, this chapter contributes to the discussion on the differences between federal and regional systems by looking at the meaning of sovereignty and autonomy of constituent units.

Section 2 briefly sketches the main differences between regional and federal states. Section 3 retraces the intellectual history and meaning of sovereignty in general terms, and the specific concept of divided sovereignty in federal states. Finally, Section 4 contains an empirical study of Italy and examines the classi­fication of sovereignty and autonomy made by the Italian Constitutional Court (hereafter ‘the icc').

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Source: Fenwick Tracy B., Banfield Andrew C. (eds.). Beyond Autonomy: Practical and Theoretical Challenges to 21st Century Federalism. Brill | Nijhoff,2021. — 265 p.. 2021

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