Sovereignty and Autonomy of Constituent Units
Federalism scholarship usually contends that both the federal government and the governments of the constituent units are sovereign and autonomous in their own spheres of powers, so that there is no subordination between the two, as they enjoy a ‘partnership' relation and share the ‘nature of state' (Bin and Falcon 2012, p.
51). Consequently, in classic federations peripheral governments ‘are not the mere delegates of the central power'—as in unitary states—since ‘they all have their own primary, law-making powers attributed to them by the Constitution', even if federal partners ‘are bound by common rules, constitutional rules, to one another' (Cyr 2014, p. 21). Because this understanding of federalism is influenced by US scholarship, for reasons that will be explained in Section 3, authors write of the sovereignty and autonomy of constituent units as if the two terms were synonyms and thus interchangeable. Conversely, in a unitary state, the ‘ultimate political authority' or ‘sovereignty' lies with the central government and any administrative, legislative or financial decentralization ‘occurs at the discretion or will of the central government, which may, if it so determines, overrule constituent units on any matter' (Watts 2013, p. 20).Regional states are positioned somewhere in between, since sovereignty belongs only to the centre, while regions are not sovereign but enjoy forms of constitutionally protected autonomy, as the icc has indicated. But in what ways does sovereignty in federated entities differ from the constitutionally protected autonomy enjoyed by regions in regional states? Section 3 offers a theoretical answer to this question.
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