Introduction: Federalism and democracy

Abstract

Nonetheless, it is important to recognise that perceptions of federalism changed concomitantly in the nineteenth century with the uneven development of liberal democracy in the United Kingdom (UK), parts of Continental Europe and Latin America and the United States of America (USA). In comparative terms, the imperial federation that constituted Imperial Germany in 1871 sat uncomfortably with the constitutional metamorphosis of Switzerland in 1848 into a new federation, the Canadian Westminster model of parliamentary federation in 1867 and the post-bellum USA but they were different types of federal models that practised different kinds of limited liberal representative democracy. Not surprisingly, it was the USA that became the dominant federal model of emulation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for aspiring liberal democracies wishing to utilise federal principles for different purposes. As the USA progressed so impressively in socio-economic and technological terms in the late nineteenth century so did the reputation of federalism not only as an innovative means of state and nation building but also as the archetype of a new form of territorial state and government whose philosophical foundations were anchored in the concept of civitas or res publica. The new republic gradually came to symbolise the ideal of liberal democratic constitutional government with popular sovereignty vested in the written constitution. No better example of the high esteem in which the US federal model was held can be demonstrated than the famous statement made by one of the leading scholars of federalism in the early period after the end of the Second World War. In 1946 Kenneth Wheare’s Federal Government was published and in the course of introducing his definition of the federal principle he confirmed the status of the model in the following terms:Many consider it the most important and the most successful example. Any definition of federal government which failed to include the United States would be . . . condemned as unreal. . . . (For) the federal principle has come to mean what it does because the United States has come to be what it is. . . . I believe, the government of the United States is the most successful federal government in the world.4