The twentieth century will open the age of federations, or else
humanity will undergo another purgatory of a thousand years.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s prediction appears to have come true. Forty percent of the world’s
population lives in countries that can be considered or claim to be federal, and as Edward L.
Gibson says: “We live in an increasingly federalized world.”
Proudhon defined federalism as a social doctrine, a philosophy, a global view of society, a
‘ism’ like liberalism or socialism. Before him, Immanuel Kant had theorized on the idea of
federation, not as a doctrine but as part of a theory of law and politics. Kant conceived the
idea of an international federation to safeguard international peace from war and anarchy.
Throughout the 20
th
century, the focus of the scholarly literature on federalism shifted
from the doctrinaire and international levels to a more concrete emphasis on the national
or implicit point of departure or comparison for this body of literature. We engage our
discussion with this literature, with the study of federalism at the national level. In fact, we
propose to take the debate on federalism one-step further down in the hierarchy of
intergovernmental relations: toward the subnational level of state, province, Länder, and
We argue that federalism may be defined as a constitutional arrangement that creates
executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government at the subnational level. This
definition has important implications for the literatures on federalism and the separation of
powers, two themes that are often treated in isolation. First, it directs the attention of students
of federalism to the neglected subject of the separation of powers at the subnational level.
Most of the literature on federalism has emphasized the relationship between the national and
subnational levels of government, but has overlooked the organization of power at the
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Convention