The Founding Constitution. Reflections on the Constitution of a Federation and its Peculiarity

Abstract

In this article, we claim that the constitution of a Federation may be described as a federative compact and must, in our view, be thought of as different from a unitary constitution. To demonstrate this specificity of the federative constitution, we have used two criteria: formal and material. From a formal point of view, a federative compact is a result of an agreement, and it can be illustrated by the originality of the process of higher law making. From the material point of view, a federative compact possesses many clauses which are not to be found in a unitary constitution. This essay tries to develop further the idea of an autonomy of the Federation (as a political form) which is not a State.