Abstract
For those of us interested in the spread and consolidation of democracy, whether as policy makers, human rights activists, political analysts, or democratic theorists, there is a greater need than ever to reconsider the potential risks and benefits of federalism. The greatest risk is that federal arrangements can offer opportunities for ethnic nationalists to mobilize their resources. This risk is especially grave when elections are introduced in the subunits of a formerly nondemocratic federal polity prior to democratic countrywide elections and in the absence of democratic countrywide parties. Of the nine states that once made up communist Europe, six were unitary and three were federal. The six unitary states are now five states (East Germany has reunited with the Federal Republic), while the three federal states—Yugoslavia, the USSR, and Czechoslovakia—are now 22 independent states. Most of postcommunist Europe’s ethnocracies and ethnic bloodshed have occurred within these postfederal states.
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Notes
See William H. Riker, “Federalism,” in Fred Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975) vol. 5: 93–172.
Mohit Bhattacharya, “The Mind of the Founding Fathers,” in Nirmal Mukarji and Balveer Arora, eds., Federalism in India: Origins and Development (New Delhi: Vikas, 1992), 81–102.
Adam Przeworski, “Some Problems in the Study of the Transition to Democracy,” in Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 47–63.
See William H. Biker, Liberalism Against Populism: A Confrontation Between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice (San Francisco: W.U. Freeman, 1982), 247–253. As Biker acknowledges, however, federalism may also give the majority in the subunits the power to limit the freedom of some of the citizens (as the history of the southern United States shows), making it difficult for the federal government to protect them.
See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority-Rights (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). For a powerful argument by a distinguished legal theorist that group rights are often a precondition of individual rights, see
Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 193–216. For a political and philosophically acute discussion of these issues in India, see
Rajeev Bhargava, “Secularism. Democracy, and Bights,” in Mehdi Arslan and Jannaki Rajan, eds., Communalism in India: Challenge and Response (New Delhi: Manohar, 1994), 61–73.
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© 2005 Dimitrios Karmis and Wayne Norman
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Stepan, A. (2005). Federalism and Democracy: Beyond the U.S. Model. In: Karmis, D., Norman, W. (eds) Theories of Federalism: A Reader. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05549-1_23
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