The purpose of this book is to return to Riker's fundamental concern about the relevance of federalism in the 21st century.

In order to do so, our chosen conceptual focus is to re-evaluate the idea of autonomy in both theory and practice in federal studies. A well-known key characteristic and defining fea­ture of federalism is to combine ‘self-' with ‘shared rule' (Elazar 1987).

For Robert Dahl (1986, p. 114), the standard definition of a federal democracy is a system in which some matters are exclusively within the competence of certain local units—cantons, states, provinces—and are constitution­ally beyond the scope of the authority of the national government; and when certain other matters are constitutionally outside the scope of the authority of the smaller units. [emphasis added]

While this underlying logic explains both the purpose and potential of federal­ism in many of our federations, our central question driving the collective con­tribution in this book is to ask, does it still hold true in practice for 21st-century federal systems and their societies, and if not, why?

Contested in both the literature and by the authors of the chapters in this book, the idea of ‘autonomy' in federalism as equating to the ‘self-rule' or ‘sovereign authority' of one level of government pitted against another is re­examined. Taking various epistemological perspectives, the goal of the book is not to provide a unified definition of ‘autonomy' or to redefine it—an endeav­our we soon realized was beyond the scope of an interdisciplinary interna­tional collaboration. Rather, our goal is to question whether we could concep­tualize federalism beyond the idea of autonomy or, stated otherwise, to ask if autonomy—the potential of a level of government to ‘go it alone'—within societies that are increasingly complex and interdependent is still relevant in the 21st-century context.

Our collective consensus is that rather than thinking about a federal system of government as one of ‘clean lines' of authority, which is in practice unreal­istic, scholarship needs to better analyse and explain why some federations generate cooperative behaviour, thus generating both democratic stability and progressive policy outcomes, while others generate instability by transforming constituent unit into dissenters, rivals and even challengers for national power. One easily forgets that the original motivations of federalism were to force people and groups who would prefer not to sit down together to come to the table in order to compromise and to collaborate for the sake of the collective good, be it security-, economic- or welfare-oriented. The origins of federalism were always about ‘coming-together' (Riker 1964) or ‘holding-together' (Stepan 1999). Therefore, as Benz suggests (Chapter 2), the principle of federalism is about managing interdependence, not preserving autonomy as is regularly assumed.

1