Dynamic Federalism: A New Theory for Cohesion and Regional Autonomy, by Patricia Popelier

Abstract

In recent years, theoretical research on federalism has experienced a kind of renaissance that seems to be the logical consequence of sundry comparative books and articles that demonstrate an ever-growing realm of federalisms, as federalism became the magic word for describing all kinds of combinations between self-rule and shared rule, for mature and emerging, full-fledged and quasi, symmetric and asymmetric multi-tiered systems, including even “hybrids” such as the European Union. A common narrative of these works was not to consider “just” classical federal states or to waste time reflecting on the term federalism itself which, deriving from the Latin word for compact or agreement, seems to have lost all its meaning when being generously applied to multi-tiered systems without any discernible traces of a foedus either at their foundation or afterwards. Obviously, the plethora of comparative literature provoked novel theoretical perspectives that range from questioning the very need of defining federalism (Palermo and Kössler 2017, 64–66) to the elaboration of a “federal idea” (Lev 2017). An original addition to these newer theories on federalism is the concept of “dynamic federalism,” which is also the title of a pioneering book recently published by Patricia Popelier.