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Rethinking The Origins of Federalism: Puzzle, Theory, and Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Daniel Ziblatt
Daniel Ziblatt
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

This article examines the paradox of how federal political institutions are created: how can a state-building core be unyielding enough to forge a union but accommodating enough to grant federal concessions to subunits? A comparison of the trajectories of national unification in nineteenth-century Germany and Italy indicates that the formation of federations does not come about exclusively through voluntary “contract”; instead, coercion and cooperation go hand in hand in the formation of all states, including federations. Whether the outcome is federal or unitary depends on the level of subunit infrastructural capacity at the moment of founding.

The article finds that where the constituents of a potential federation are parliamentary and well governed, they can deliver the benefits of state formation, assuring their continued existence in a federation. Where such subunits are patrimonial and poorly governed, they are absorbed within a unitary model of governance. This institutional explanation supplements accounts emphasizing the cultural sources of federalism and revises arguments that only militarily weak founding cores make federal concessions to their constituents.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , October 2004 , pp. 70 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2004

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References

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30 This argument has a long pedigree. For the German case, see Helmut Böhme, Deutschlands Weg Zur Grossmacht (Germany's path to great power status) (1966; Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1972); for the Italian case, see Clough, Shepard, The Economic History ofModern Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

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35 For examples of repeated efforts at negotiation, see the collection of diplomatic correspondence in the multivolume work, Carlo Pischedda and Rosanna Roccía, eds., Camillo Cavour Epistolario (Camillo Cavour's letters) (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2000).

36 Ibid. Evidence of these diplomatic reports between Cavour and his envoy in Florence can be seen in “Da Carlo Bon Compagni di Mombello,” Doc. 380, March 18 (p. 352); see also “A Carlo Bon Compagni di Mombello” (p. 619).

37 Ibid. “Da Carlo Bon Compagni di Mombello,” Doc. 800 (pp. 628–29). These are Cavour's envoy's words describing the situation in Tuscany in his April 27,1859, report.

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47 In response to the criticism that this measure and the other two might simply reflect underlying socioeconomic differences, it is instructive that the correlation between regional GDP per capita and; each of the measures is very weak, suggesting that institutional capacity has a conceptual weight of its own. For GDP per capita data on the Italian states, see Esposto (fn. 3), 585–604.

48 Riall (fn. 39), 90.

49 Ibid.

50 Fried (fn. 15), 75

51 Ibid., for a summary of these debates.

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60 Otto von Bismarck, in Scheler (fn. 22), 755.

61 Huber (fn. 55), 212–20.

62 Otto von Bismarck, in Scheler (fn. 22), 739–40.

63 Text of treaty is in Huber (fn. 55), 224–25.

64 Gall (fn. 58), 317.

65 Erich Brandenburg, Die Reichsgrundung (The founding of the empire), 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1923), 219.

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69 Of the universe of seventeen cases, the only three in which state building gave rise to federal outcomes, Switzerland (1848), Germany (1871), and Austria (1920), all had regional-level parliaments, constitutions, and systems of administration in the constituent states at the moment of the first modern national constitution. In the remaining fourteen cases, state building resulted in unitary outcomes. Of these fourteen cases, only one case, Denmark (1849), had modern subnational parliamentary institutions at the moment of polity formation. In all other cases, including the Netherlands (1815) and Italy (1861), unitary institutions were adopted in a context where subnational parliamentary institutions were absent. The single exception, Denmark, might be explained by the absence of a federal ideology in 1849, which undermined the prospects of federalism. For further systematic testing of the infrastructural account vis-à-vis other arguments, see Daniel Ziblatt, “The Federal-Unitary Divide: Lessons of Seventeen European Nation-States,” Center for European Studies Working Paper (Cambridge, Harvard University, 2005).

70 For a discussion of the limits of the European model in the African context, see Herbst, Jeffrey, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the limits of European models in Latin America, see Centeno, Miguel, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

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