Theoretical Goals

In the theoretical section of the book, several authors raise this challenge, sig­nalling that it may be problematic to begin with the classical conceptions of federalism dating back to the seminal works of William Riker (1964, 1987, 1996).

Filipov, Ordeshook and Shvetsova (2004) and Bednar (2009) advance this theoretically by forwarding the idea of ‘self-sustaining federations', whereby autonomy is coupled with other conditions that operate as safeguards (struc­tural, political, judicial and popular), in order to ensure the federation has the potential to achieve its intended political and economic objectives. While these influential theories acknowledge that federalism is in fact a ‘collabora­tive system', they still characterize federalism as a system of boundaries that must be protected from both ‘encroachment by higher levels' and the ‘shirking' of responsibility from below. Both dilemmas are characterized as undermining federal stability (see de Figueiredo and Weingast 2005), the central preoccupa­tion of many federal scholars.

A Rikerian rational choice perspective, therefore, suggests that when a fed­eral government encroaches on the sub-units, or the sub-units shirk or free ride their responsibilities, it becomes a federalism problem—a turf war about winning or losing autonomy: the majority's, the minority's, a federal agency's, a territory's, or mine versus yours.

The courts have likewise become the ultimate decision makers on policy issues, when public policies compete on questions such as residency require­ments for individuals seeking same-sex marriage or euthanasia, or on defining who is, and who is not, subject to national and/or local laws. This is problem­atic for two reasons.

First, the operation of federalism becomes dependent on its legal interpre­tations, which are culturally, historically and contextually defined and cannot be resolved theoretically. As Gagnon and Mathieu, for example, highlight in their contribution to the book, while the Supreme Court of Canada has tradi­tionally recognized ‘the autonomy of the provincial governments to develop their societies within their respective spheres of jurisdictions for much of the past fifty years', Canada and Quebec had competing societal projects.

Second, even moving beyond multinational federations, we know that com­peting levels of government implement public policies on contentious social issues in order to consolidate both their sphere of autonomy and public legit­imacy. Federal courts can, however, undermine this sub-national ‘legitimacy', particularly when policy innovations challenge national norms and/or socie­tal values, because they are either too progressive or not progressive enough. From a judicial perspective, therefore, legal theories of federalism continue to identify autonomy with federalism such that constituent units are conceptual­ized as both sovereign and autonomous. ^[1]

Erika Arban (Chapter 4), building on the cases of Italy and Spain, takes issue with this contention. She suggests that while many federal scholars com­monly use the concepts of sovereignty and autonomy interchangeably, classi­fying 21st-century federations (including emerging, quasi-federal, regional) is extremely complex.

There must be some matter, even if only one matter, which comes under the exclusive control, actual, or potential, of the general government and something likewise under the regional governments. If there were not, that would be the end of federalism. [emphasis added]

Reiterating the central research question put to the participants of the International Association of Federal Studies 2018 Conference, is it possible to promote the principal of federalism beyond the idea of unit autonomy? If we cannot, federalism's relevance may wither in the context of increasing interde­pendence between levels of government. We know interdependence increases along with the complexity of issues to be addressed in the context of increas­ing financial and economic globalization.

As federal scholars, therefore, we should no longer assume that sovereignty is ‘divided' in all federations as in the traditional Anglo-American varieties. Peripheral units in the cases of Italy and Spain have constitutionally protected autonomy, but they are not de jure sovereign. Particularly in the case of Spain, where the risk of secession is high, the idea of autonomy as equating to sover­eignty de facto is considered a real threat to its current federal arrangements. Now more than ever, we must explore the ways in which federal systems of gov­ernment can balance interdependency with autonomy. As Benz (Chapter 2) succinctly states, as a system of government, federalism does not imply auton­omy of governments at different levels. Rather, federalism invites governments to operate in a mutually coordinated manner (see Bolleyer and Thorlakson 2012). If we accept this theoretical proposition, contemporary federalism can promote the organization of naturally occurring societal complexity.

Moving ‘beyond autonomy' as the organizing feature of federalism, how­ever, may require us as scholars to move beyond Riker. For Smith (Chapter 3), Riker's explanations of federalism, the so-called ‘race to the bottom' in fed­eral systems, presumes a Hobbesian competition for power and control that is based on assumptions of power and greed.

In a similar vein, we should no longer assume that the goal of ‘preserving autonomy' is what ‘holds federations' together (Stepan 1999). Newly emerging federations such as Nepal, Myanmar and Sri Lanka did not ‘come together' in order to preserve their autonomy, as Riker (1964) predicted. In these newer federations, power is devolved to the periphery in order to prevent the breakup of a country and to reduce ethnic tensions (Breen 2017). Balancing ethnic and racial tensions is, likewise, what motivates the emergence of federal arrange­ments and the granting of local autonomy in many African countries. In the cases of Ethiopia, South Africa and Zimbabwe examined in Chapter 11, the ten­sion between federalism and democracy is real, because the granting of ‘imag­ined' local autonomy obfuscates democratic accountability.

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