Asymmetry in Federations, Federacies and Unitary States

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements My thanks to Margaret Moore, Brendan O'Leary and Ron Watts for their invaluable help with this paper. Any flaws in the argument are, of course, my own responsibility. Thanks also to the Carnegie Corporation of New York and to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding my research. Notes 1. Asymmetrical federation can also describe situations where certain regions have a reduced autonomy, e.g. Canada's Territories (Yukon, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories). 2. Some definitional clarity is in order here, which may help avoid the standard criticisms of constructivists. “Pluri-national diversity” within a state describes a situation in which there are multiple nations. Individuals may identify with one, more than one, or none of these nations, and they may identify with different levels of intensity. A “nationality” refers to a nation which is a minority within a state. I used the term “nationality” is used because nationalities generally dislike the term “minority. A Staatsvolk refers to a nation which dominates the state, and is a substantial majority within it. Where I use the terms “nationality” or Staatsvolk, I am referring to politically mobilized communities rather than primordial categories. The presence of pluri-national diversity, and of nationalities and Staatsvolks, is testable, at least in democracies, by examining which parties people vote for, and what type of civic associations they participate in, and how long these patterns have existed for (O'Leary, Citation2005). 3. Horowitz does not, to be fair, suggest that other states seek to emulate the entire Nigerian experience, but he sees considerable merit in how Nigeria re-drew its boundaries in the late 1960s and also in the regional distribution rules it adopted in 1979 for electing its President (e.g. Horowitz, Citation1991, pp. 217–220). 4. These types of federations can function as symmetrical federations precisely because they have been organized to disaggregate minority communities. Without a minority in charge of its own region, there is unlikely to be a call for asymmetry. 5. In 1998, the socialist presidents of the Spanish regions of Andalucia, Castile-la Mancha and Extremadura published a “Declaration of Merida”, which rejected the existence of any “natural right [enjoyed by Spain's historic nationalities] that could be invoked to justify privileges among territories or inequalities among Spaniards” (Keating, Citation2001, p. 115). 6. The idea of “all-round” decentralization had been popular even before the development of secessionism in Bougainville. My thanks to Ron Watts, then a constitutional adviser to the government of Papua New Guinea, for this information. 7. If one looked at the wording of the American constitution of 1789 and the Canadian constitution of 1867, one would expect the United States to be much more decentralized than Canada. The opposite has happened. 8. The Charlottetown Accord was rejected not just outside Quebec, but inside it also. However, while most English Canadians appeared to think that its provisions for symmetrical decentralization went too far, voters in Quebec thought they did not go far enough. The referendum result thus nicely illustrates a central problem with symmetrical decentralization—seldom radical enough to satisfy the nationality, too radical for the Staatsvolk. 9. In some cases, as with the Kossovars and Magyars of Voivodina, it was a case of inferior autonomy and then no autonomy. Tito refused to give either the status of full republic but did permit a more limited autonomy. Milošević revoked the autonomy. 10. During the debate on the Meech Lake Accord, a popular campaign originated among Canadians outside Quebec, based on the slogan “My Canada includes Quebec”. The slogan seemed to have been intended to send a message to Quebecers that they were welcome members of Canada, but it also nicely conveyed the Canadian sentiment that there is no “English-Canadian” nation outside Quebec, and that the Canadian homeland includes the territory of Quebec. 11. Many English, like English-speaking Canadians, also identify with the whole state, or at least with the part of it known as Great Britain. 12. The UK government subsequently acted in breach of the Agreement by suspending unilaterally Northern Ireland's elected institutions on four occasions although it was not offiially challenged on the matter by its treaty partner. It has recently promised to rescind this suspension power. 13. Gladstone's first Irish Home Rule Bill proposed that no Irish MP be allowed to sit in Westminster! Such a proposal was problematic because the UK parliament would still have taxed Ireland, and had responsibility for foreign, defence, and monetary policy, etc. The proposal was intended to get the Irish out of Westminster, a key appeal for wavering Liberals. It is likely that such an arrangement would have relatively quickly given way to dominion status, which would have made it attractive to Irish nationalists. Gladstone modeled his Home Rule Bill on the British North America Act. 14. Scottish nationalist MPs already abstain on “English” affairs as a matter of practice, although Labour's Scottish MPs do not (Keating, Citation2001, p. 132).

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