Federalism and the new world order

Federalism is a venerable structure of government with institutional links going back to ancient times. With a modern history of more than two hundred years from the drafting and ratification of the Constitution of the United States in 1787, the American model now has a central position in discussions of federalism because of the dominance of the United States in world politics, especially since World War II, and the coherency of the American Federalist argument, which gave federalism a rationale for democratic republicanism (Diamond 1961; Wheare [1946] 1963).

A somewhat different tradition of European federalism was manifest in Switzerland, so that when the Australian Constitution was drafted in the 1890s it incorporated elements of both the American and Swiss models as well as being influenced by the Canadian hybrid of federalism and parliamentary responsible government. The postwar constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany was heavily influenced by the American model but also drew on a long national tradition of federalism (vonBeyme 1988).

Federalism was used extensively by imperialist European powers in cobbling together incongruous ethnic and tribal amalgamations to cover their belated withdrawals from Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite its failure in such instances (Franck 1968), however, federalism in one form or another remains the institutional basis of numerous systems of government around the world (Elazar 1987: 43–4).