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Bulletin n. 1/2005 - December 2005

List of contents

Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government

Subsection 1.The theory of federation

Hayden Robert M.

"Democracy" without a Demos? The Bosnian Constitutional Experiment and the Intentional Construction of Nonfunctioning States

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, Volume 19, Number 2, May , pp. 226-259

East European Politics and Societies

The social science literature on ethnically divided states is huge and varied, but suggestions for constitutional solutions are strangely uniform: "loose federations" of ethnically defined ministates, with minimal central authority that must act by consensus and thus cannot act at all on issues that are contested rather than consented. In Bosnia, the political system mandated by the international High Representative suffer the same structural flaws that were used to make the former Yugoslav federation and the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina unworkable. Similarly nonviable systems were proposed in 1994 to 1995 for Croatia and in 1998 to 1999 for Kosovo and recently for Cyprus and for Iraq. This article analyzes the paradox of mandating consensus-based politics in ethnically divided states, inclusion in which does not have the consent of most members of at least one group.

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Shivdeep Singh Grewal

A cosmopolitan Europe by constitutional means? Assessing the theoretical foundations of Habermas’ political prescriptions

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, Volume 27, Number 2 / June , 191-215

Journal of European Integration

In recent years, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has called for the adoption of a federal constitution by the EU. As such — particularly given the impact of his thought on the social sciences more generally, and its affinities with traditional theories of European integration — a question arises: why has a specifically Habermasian theory of European integration not developed? This article argues that one is already present, albeit implicitly, in the interstices between Habermas’ journalistic and theoretical oeuvres, merely requiring delimitation, exegesis and application. It combines a sophisticated and comprehensive account of European integration and democracy with an innovative ‘hermeneutic’ dimension. The latter broadens the parameters of EU studies to encompass relevant developments in European culture. Having identified its component parts and ‘reconstructed’ this theory, the article concludes by subjecting it to a preliminary empirical test against the results of interviews with radical left and social democratic MEPs and personnel.

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von Beyme Klaus

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Asymmetric federalism between globalization and regionalization

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Journal of European Public Policy

The question ‘who speaks for the Europeans?’ involves a basic contradiction in European constitutional engineering: federalist autonomy developed against democratic representation on the basis of popular sovereignty of equal citizens. Working on a European Constitution includes the search for a fair balance between the modes of representation. This paper shows, however, that the balance remains precarious. Asymmetries in the de iure institutional settings and in de facto social and economic development permanently reshuffle the balance. Older theories of federalism in the age of classical modernism started from a rational model of symmetric states' rights. Postmodernist thinking with its patchwork scenarios developed more tolerance towards asymmetries. The neo-liberal paradigm leads away from ‘participatory federalism’ in the direction of a ‘federalism of competition’. In the early federations the poor territories in a ‘class struggle from below’ asked for subsidies from the centre. In recent federations a ‘class struggle from above’ is developing. The rich states fight for asymmetries because they feel punished if they have to subsidize the poorer areas.

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Fassbender Bardo

Auswärtige Zuständigkeiten bundesstaatlicher Gliedstaaten. Die Entstehung des Prinzips der dynamischen Verweisung im Zeitalter der Gründung des Deutschen Reiches (1866-1871). Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und zu einer allgemeinen Lehre des Bundesstaates europäischen Typus.

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, Band 53, 2005 , 207-283

Jahrbuch des öffentlichen Rechts der Gegenwart

Nach dem Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland sind die deutschen Länder berechtigt, im Rahmen ihrer Gesetzgebungskompetenz mit auswärtigen Staaten völkerrechtliche Verträge abzuschließen (Art. 32 Abs. 3 GG). Die Bestimmung verdeutlicht, daß in der grundgesetzlichen Konstruktion des deutschen Bundesstaates die Staatlichkeit der Länder auch ihre Völkerrechtsfähigkeit umfaßt, das Grundgesetz die Länder also nicht nur in ihrem Verhältnis zueinander und zum Bund, sondern auch völkerrechtlich als Staaten auffaßt und anerkennt. Darin liegt die verfassungsrechtliche und -theoretische Bedeutung des Art. 32 Abs. 3 GG, ungeachtet der Tatsache, daß in der Praxis der Umfang der von den Ländern abgeschlossenen völkerrechtlichen Verträge gering geblieben ist.

Das Vertragschließungsrecht bundesstaatlicher Gliedstaaten bildet heute einen Bestandteil gemeineuropäischen (Bundes-) Verfassungsrechts. Die durch das Vertragschließungsrecht vermittelte Völkerrechtssubjektivität der Gliedstaaten ist ein charakteristisches Kennzeichen des Bundesstaates europäischen Typus.

Der vorliegenden Abhandlung liegt die These zugrunde, daß es zu diesem Rechtszustand ohne ein zentrales verfassungsgeschichtliches Ereignis nicht gekommen wäre: die Entscheidung der deutschen Reichsverfassung von 1871 für die völkerrechtliche Vertrags- und Handlungsfähigkeit der deutschen Einzelstaaten. Wie es zu dieser historischen Entscheidung kam, ist in geschlossener Form und auf der Grundlage der historischen Quellen bisher nicht dargestellt worden. Eine solche Darstellung wird hier versucht. In ihrem Mittelpunkt stehen die auswärtige Gewalt und die völkerrechtliche Stellung der deutschen Einzelstaaten als Gegenstand der Verhandlungen über die Norddeutsche Bundes- und die Reichsverfassung von 1867 und 1871 (Teil III). Anschließend werden die in diesen Verfassungen gefundenen Lösungen als Ausdruck der Bismarckschen Grundanschauung des deutschen Bundesstaates erklärt (Teil

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IV). Bevor der Blick in die Vergangenheit gerichtet wird, geht er in die Umgebung der Gegenwart und sucht zu erkennen, welchen Prinzipien der vertikalen Verteilung auswärtiger Kompetenzen das Verfassungsrecht der europäischen Bundesstaaten (Schweiz, Belgien und Österreich) und Italiens als eines dezentralisierten (regionalisierten) Staates sowie das Recht der Europäischen Union folgt.

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Wibbels Erik

Book Review: Designing Federalism: A Theory of Self-Sustainable Federal Institutions

in

, Vol. 38 n. 4 , 446 - 450

Comparative Political Studies

No abstract available

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Arceneaux Kevin

Does Federalism Weaken Democratic Representation in the United States?

in

, Vol. 35, n. 2, Spring , pp. 297-312

Publius: The Journal of Federalism

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Levinson, Daryl J.

Empire-Building Government in Costitutional Law

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, Volume 118 - issue n. 3/2005 , 915 - 972

Harvard Law Review

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Campbell Andrea Louise

Federalism and the Politics of Old-Age Care in Germany and the United States

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, Vol. 38 n. 8 , 887-914

Until the early 1990s, Germany and the United States had similar systems of long-term care. At that time, Germany created a new social insurance program, whereas American reform efforts stalled. As conventional explanations of social policies—rooted in objective conditions, policy legacies, interest group mobilization, and party politics—fail to explain the diverging trajectories, the authors show how differing federal structures shaped reform efforts. German federalism gives states a strong voice and encourages collective responses to fiscal problems, enabling comprehensive

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restructuring of long-term care financing. In the United States, states lack a political mechanism to compel federal policy makers to tackle this subject. This analysis suggests reform of social welfare issues with weakly mobilized publics is unlikely without proxy actors that have institutional or political means to forcibly gain the attention of policy makers. In addition, scholars should pay more attention to "varieties of federalism" in analyses of the welfare state.

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Rowley Charles K.

Fragmenting parchment and the winds of war: The Constitution of the United States, 1860–2004

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, Volume 124, Numbers 1-2 , 33 - 56

Public Choice

The tension between Hobbesian and Lockeian perspectives on the origins and functions of the state was resolved decisively at Philadelphia in favor of the latter. Fourscore and seven years on from 1787, however, Abraham Lincoln’s resolve to save the Union rather than to preserve the Constitution launched a series of attacks by the executive and legislative branches, sustained by a complaisant judiciary, on the parchment so carefully crafted by the republic’s Founders. This essay documents the federal government’s exploitation of security threats, from the Civil War to the War on Terror, to dismantle constitutional rights to life, liberty and property.

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Patricia Mindus

Il letto di Procuste: l'inadeguatezza del lessico politico moderno per il costrutto inedito dell'odierna Europa

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, Vol. 21, Fascicolo 1

Teoria Politica

The essay deals with the current tussle over the political and legal defintions of the EU. By confronting the actual structure of the European Union with some of the major categories in western political thought (such as State, nation, etc.), the article aims to test the conceptual consistency not only of the Draft Treaty but also of some theoretical innovations recently put forth by EU-scholars. Particularly relevant is the analysis of multilevel governance as an alternative to classic federalism.

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Montpetit Eric, Rothmayr Christine, Varone Frédéric

Institutional Vulnerability to Social Constructions. Federalism, Target Populations, and Policy Designs for Assisted Reproductive Technology in Six Democracies

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, Vol. 38 n. 2 , 119 - 142

This article contributes to efforts to integrate power-based, institutionalist, and constructivist perspectives on policy making. Using an analysis of policy designs for assisted reproductive technology, the authors argue that jurisdictional federations are more vulnerable to social constructions based on widely held perceptions of social groups than functional federations and, to a lesser extent, unitary states. In fact, policy makers in jurisdictional federations tend to rely on communicative discourses aimed at convincing a wide public, whereas those in functional federations need

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coordinative discourses to obtain the support of actors who play key roles in decision making. Where coordinative discourses prevail over communicative discourses, policy makers will more likely target advantaged groups with restrictive policies.

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Habtu Alem

Multiethnic Federalism in Ethiopia: A Study of the Secession Clause in the Constitution

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, Vol. 35, n. 2, Spring , pp. 313-336

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Smith Stephen F.

Proportionality and Federalization

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, Vol. 91 n. 4 , 879

Virginia Law Review

The literature treats the “federalization” of crime as a quantitative problem. Congress, on this view, has simply enacted too many federal crimes. This Article challenges this way of conceptualizing the federalization problem. The real problem with federalization is qualitative, not quantitative: federal crimes are poorly defined, and courts all too often expansively construe poorly defined crimes. Courts thus are not passive victims in the vicious cycle of federalization. Rather, by repeatedly interpreting criminal statutes broadly, courts have taken the features of federal criminal law that critics of federalization find objectionable – its enormous scope and its severity – and made them considerably worse.

One of the most significant adverse effects of federalization, which is overlooked in the case law and all but ignored in the literature, lies at the heart of this Article: the danger of disproportionately severe penalties. Poor legislative crime definition, coupled with the judicial practice of expansively construing criminal statutes, allows prosecutors to drive up the punishment federal defendants would otherwise face. Sometimes, courts construe ambiguous statutes to move into federal court defendants who would otherwise face lower penalties in state court. More often, courts expand serious crimes to encompass behavior for which Congress prescribed lower penalties elsewhere. This Article shows how courts can adjust their interpretive strategies to counteract the severity and scope of the federal criminal code so that federalization need not be the disaster that its critics fear.

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Hopkins John

Public Law in a Multi-Layered Constitution

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, Volume 11 (2005) - Issue 3 , 466-467

European public Law

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Pappi Franz Urban, Becker Axel, Herzog Alexander

Regierungsbildung in Mehrebenensystemen. Zur Erklärung der Koalitionsbildung in den deutschen Bundesländern

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, Heft 3, 46. Jahrgang, September , 432-458

Politische Vierteljahresschrift

ABSTRACT: The German federal governmental system is conceptualized as a full-fledged two-level system, in which the Länder governments participate in federal policy decisions via the second chamber Bundesrat and in which the stakes of state coalition building are high for the federal parties. Our research question is whether we can find systematic empirical evidence for an influence of federal on state parties to build state governments whose party composition is concordant with federal politics, containing either exclusively federal governmental or non-governmental parties. We answer this question by indirect evidence. We show that such concordant majority coalitions occur above average even if important coalition predictors are controlled as minimal winning coalitions or participation of dominant and/or central players. We predict the 182 actual Land governments which were formed in the period from 1949 to 2003 compared to the possible governments in each situation.

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Hale Henry E.

The Makeup and Breakup of Ethnofederal States: Why Russia Survives Where the USSR Fell

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, issue 1, vol. 3, march , 55-70

Perspectives on Politics

ABSTRACT: Why do some ethnofederal states survive while others collapse? The puzzle is particularly stark in the case of the former Soviet Union: the multiethnic Russian Federation has managed to survive intact the transition from totalitarian rule, whereas the multiethnic USSR disintegrated. The critical distinction between the USSR and Russia lies in the design of ethnofederal institutions. The USSR contained a core ethnic region, the “Russian Republic,” a single region with a far greater population than any other in the union. This core ethnic region facilitated dual sovereignty, exacerbated the security fears of minority-group regions, and promoted the “imagining” of a Russia independent of the larger Soviet state. In place of a single core ethnic region, the Russian Federation contains 57 separate provinces. This feature of institutional design has given Russia's central government important capacities to thwart the kind of centrifugal forces that brought down the USSR. This holds important lessons for policy makers crafting federal institutions in other multiethnic countries.

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Krane Dale, Koenig Heidi

The State of American Federalism, 2004: Is Federalism Still a Core Value?

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, Vol. 35, n. 1, Winter , pp. 1-40

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Andreas Auer

The constitutional scheme of federalism

in

Journal of European Public Policy

Federalism consists of a specific combination of self-rule (autonomy), of limited rule (superposition) and of shared rule (participation), implying the coexistence of two independent levels of government acting simultaneously on the citizens. Federal constitutions regularly accomplish specific functions, like defining the constituent units, distributing powers between the latter and the central unit, and providing for a conflict resolution scheme. This contribution argues that the EU meets every one of these conditions for being considered, in legal terms, as a multinational federal type construction.

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Wilfried Swenden

What – if anything – can the European Union learn from Belgian federalism and vice versa?

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Regional and Federal Studies

This article highlights the similarities and differences between Belgium and the EU as multi-level polities and indicates what they might learn from each other. The comparison focuses on (dis)similarities in the internal structure of the components that form the multi-levelled polity, in the processes of central decision-making and in the institutional framework at large. I argue that plural multi-level polities can be more easily sustained if their centre respects the linguistic and territorial integrity of the constituent entities, central decision-making rules are ‘majority-constraining’ and institutional adaptation takes the character of piecemeal reform. Facing growing electoral discontent, leaders in both polities must confront the challenge of maintaining a sufficiently strong centre, while at the same time fostering inter-segmental cooperation in order to stimulate the gradual creation of a trans-segmental public sphere.

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Baker Samuel H.

Why Executive Power Centralizes Government

in

, Vol. 33, No. 6 , 747-766

Public Finance Review