Federal State

8 Key excerpts on "Federal State"

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  Human Geography

  People, Place, and Culture

  • Erin H. Fouberg, Alexander B. Nash, Alexander B. Murphy, Harm J. de Blij(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Another way to govern a multinational state is to con- struct a federal system, orga- nizing state territory into regions, substates, provinces, or cantons. In a strong federal system, the regions have a lot of 76 CHAPTER 3 Political Geography B l a c k S e a Sea of Azov Aegean Sea A d r i a t i c S e a B a lti c Se a BOSNIA ALBANIA KOSOVO CROATIA RUSSIA BELARUS LATVIA LITHUANIA POLAND SWEDEN GERMANY CZECH REPUBLIC SLOVAKIA AUSTRIA HUNGARY SLOVENIA CROATIA ROMANIA ITALY GREECE UKRAINE MOLDOVA ESTONIA BULGARIA TURKEY RUSSIA MACEDONIA SERBIA MONTENEGRO DENMARK ITALY 45° 50° 15° 20° 25° 30° 25° 15° 20° 40° 45° 55° 50° 35° 10° 30° 35° Longitude East of Greenwich 40° ETHNIC MOSAIC OF EUROPE’S EASTERN FLANK 0 100 200 300 Kilometres 50 0 100 150 Miles After Hoffman, 1953 Slavic Czechs Slovaks Slovenes Croats Muslims Bulgars Macedonians Serbs Ukrainians No group over 50% Non-Slavic Russians Turks Magyars Albanians Romanians Belarussians Poles Pomaks Latvians Lithuanians Montenegrins control over government policies and funds; in a weak federal system, they have little control over government policies and funds. Most federal systems are somewhere in between, with governments at the state scale and at the substate scale each having control over certain revenues and certain policy areas. By giving control over certain policies (especially culturally relative policies) to smaller- scale entities, a government can keep the state as a whole together. Federalism functions differently depending on the context. In Canada, there is a strong central government dealing with issues of national concern such as air transportation, international trade, national security, and criminal law. Provinces, on the other hand, have considerable authority over internal affairs such as taxation, private property, and civil matters. Nevertheless, disputes between the federal and provincial governments over control of resources, infrastructure funding, and immigration are frequent.

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  Human Geography

  People, Place, and Culture

  • Erin H. Fouberg, Alexander B. Murphy(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  How states organize the territory within their boundaries matters as well. In the 1950s, political geographer Richard Hartshorne described the forces within a state that encourage unity as centripetal and the forces that divide them as centrifugal. Whether a state thrives, according to Hartshorne, depends on the balance between centripetal and centrifugal forces. Many political geographers have debated Hartshorne’s theory, and most have concluded that we cannot select a given circumstance and simply define it as centrifugal or centripe- tal. A war with an outside power can pull a state together for a short time and then divide the state over the long term. Timing, scale, interaction, and perspective factor into unification and division at any given point, as does a state’s position in the world economy. Whatever their circumstances, governments attempt to unify states by structuring themselves to encourage buy-in across the territory, by defining and defending boundar- ies, and by exerting control over all of the territory within those boundaries. Focusing attention on how different governments have tried to unify peoples and territories within their domains reminds us of how important geography is. Governance does not take place in a vacuum. The particular spatial strategies pursued by governments interact with the characteristics of places to solve or worsen problems. Unitary and Federal States Until the mid- twentieth century, most states were highly centralized, with the capital city serving as the focus of power. Few states sought to accommodate minorities (such as Bretons in France or Basques in Spain) or outlying regions where identification with the state was weaker. Political geographers call these highly centralized states unitary states. Their administrative framework is designed to ensure the central government’s authority over all parts of the state.

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  21st Century Geography: A Reference Handbook

  • Joseph P. Stoltman(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  federal system exhibits a distinctive three-tier structure of federal, state, and local government jurisdictions. Most of the world's nation-states have uni- tary two-tier systems in which civil subdivisions at all domestic governmental scales are entirely subordinate to national authority (Central Intelligence Agency, 2010). Barely 10% have a three-tier federal structure in which provincial-level governments hold significant authority of their own. And even among countries with federal struc- tures, such as Australia, India, or the Russian Federation, the United States gives U.S. state governments very strong governmental roles, which makes U.S. state boundaries among the most important provincial-level boundaries found anywhere in the world. An insightful approach to understanding the U.S. fed- eral model of governance was presented by political scien- tist Daniel Elazar (1984) in his book American Federalism. According to Elazar, the American federal system is more appropriately characterized as a noncentrali ed govern- mental system than as a decentralized governmental system. 171 172 • HUMAN GEOGRAPHY A decentralized governmental system, such as the uni- tary Jacobin framework established for France after the French Revolution, involves higher and lower levels of government. In terms of political geography concepts, the Jacobin framework can be understood as a core-periphery governance model in which powers delegated to provinces or localities can be recentralized back to the core at any time. It is essentially a "Fall of the Bastille" and the rise of the National Constituent Assembly concept of democratic transformation from "subjects of the King" to "citizens of the Republic." So Elazar, on the one hand, thus considers the common terms centrali ation and decentrali ation as suitable for discussing variations of unitary governmental systems but, on the other hand, as unsuitable for discussing the American federal system.

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  State and Local Politics

  Institutions and Reform

  • Todd Donovan, Daniel Smith, Tracy Osborn, Christopher Mooney(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Federalism: State and Local Politics within a Federal System 43 policy responsiveness is enhanced when politi-cal authority is dispersed among subnational units. Finally, subnational units are able to provide and manage governmental services more efficiently than if they were carried out by the central government. Of course, the decentralization of political power can lead to asymmetrical, or uneven, rela-tions among the states. In the United States, not all states have the same degree of power within the federalist system. Although all states are afforded the same protection and authority under the U.S. Constitution, some states have more clout within the federation because of the relative size of their economies and populations, differences in their socioeconomic and demographic makeup, and dis-parities in their social and cultural environments. These variations have led to differential power rela-tions among the states, as well as between each state and the federal government. 9 Why Federalism? America’s Founding One of the most fundamental struggles in Ameri-can political history has been the turf battle for political power waged between the states and the national (or, as mentioned, federal) government. The cyclical ebb and flow of this tension between the national and state governments has been con-tinuous for over two centuries and is rooted in the founding of the country.

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  Pluralism and Political Geography

  People, Territory and State

  • Nurit Kliot, Stanley Waterman(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Labor Government’s recognition of the states, explicit in the formal abandonment of unification, represented the acceptance of the politically inevitable; it meant also that the boundaries of the states would have to be respected, regardless of any anachronisms they might pose. One of the defining characteristics of federalism is that the territorial limits of the component states should be inviolable except for the acquiescence of the states themselves (Duchacek 1970). Save for possible minor boundary changes it is unlikely that any such body will vote for its own dismemberment. The rightness of this stability can also be supported. Were such changes possible unilaterally, presumably by legislative sanction of the central authority rather than by local secession the federal character of the state would be undermined. While the inviolability of the state boundaries is common to the federal countries, it is obviously more pronounced among the federations built ‘from below’. Both cases in which state boundaries have been altered comparatively easily lack this organic evolution. In West Germany federalism was established within a somewhat unsatisfactory territorital framework, the lander to a large extent following the post-1945 Allied Occupation zones; in India the federal government can initiate the process of territorial reform. This, together with other facets of the constitution, raise doubts as to whether India can be categorised as truly federal.

  Given the origins of the Australian federation it is not surprising to learn that the existing states have successfully resisted attempts for their subdivision since 1901. These attempts became most closely associated with the ‘New State’ movements, which were most active in New South Wales and Queensland. New staters argued that the existing states were too large and were politically dominated by geographical/sectional interests. Often located on the margins of the existing state the New State movements represented centre-periphery conflict. It was in the resistance to the formation of New States that the constitutional strength of the states became apparent (Whebell 1973). Some of the movements commanded sufficient local legitimacy to ‘force’ the holding of a referendum – notably New England in northern New South Wales (Woolmington 1966), though by gerrymandering the area in order to include populations that are known to be unsympathetic to secession, the position of the state was thus reasonably assured.

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  The Limits of Boundaries

  Why City-regions Cannot be Self-governing

  • Andrew Sancton(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • McGill-Queen's University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 Boundaries for Central Governments The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that the boundaries of sovereign states are relatively stable and have become even more so in recent years. When new states have been created, they have generally used old boundaries, often the boundaries of constituent units within the state. In federations, these constituent units – states and provinces in the United States and Canada – generally have constitutional responsibility for local government. For municipalities in North America, the states and provinces are effectively the sovereign unit of government. For the purposes of this book, it is important that we understand that they are even more important than the federal governments based in Washington and Ottawa. In this chapter, we look at the boundaries of sovereign states and then at the boundaries of constituent units in federations. But first we explore some of the more theoretical issues relating to the boundaries of sovereign states. THE OPTIMAL SIZE OF NATION-STATES Robert Dahl is one of the few modern political scientists to have paid much attention to the relationship between size and democracy. He emphasizes that the first conceptions of democracy related to the city-state and that this vision “prevailed, by and large, from the Greeks to Rousseau.” 1 According to this understanding, democracy involved debate among citizens in open meetings followed by a decision-making process in which every citizen had a direct voice. But this form of democracy eventually gave way to the kind of representative democracy we are familiar with today in our larger nation-states. Dahl is very much concerned with trying to balance the effectiveness of citizen participation, which is more feasible in smaller political units, with the capacity of political systems to accomplish collective objectives, which is enhanced in larger units

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  The Dynamics of Federalism in National and Supranational Political Systems

  • Michael A. Pagano, R. Leonardi(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  As federalism scholar Daniel Elazar ( 1994a: 3) once said, “Territorial boundaries, whether national borders or household property lines, sort people out in space so as to minimize conflict and aggression and orga- nize competition and cooperation among people.” Federalism, as a structure, is often extolled for its ability to achieve national unity while promoting subnational diversity. The themes of this introductory discussion are developed in the remain- der of the chapter. First, the focus shifts to a more conceptual consideration of space, place, and borders, which sets the stage for an examination of the founding of the US and the persistence of sectionalism. After that, a consti- tutionally-created mechanism for overcoming state boundaries and fostering regional cooperation, the interstate compact, is addressed. From interstate compacts, the chapter moves to an examination of an alternative, non- spatial governmental structure, more specifically, the case of Belgium and the representation of language communities. In the conclusion, the lessons of social forces, space, and boundaries are reconsidered. Space, places, and borders The distinction between “space,” a more general term, and “place,” a more particular one, is worth considering. According to political geographer John Agnew (2002b), space is an area in which an organization such as a nation- state functions. A map image and narratives solidify the spatial meaning in public consciousness. Thus we refer to the US as stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, reaching from Canada on the north to Mexico on the south. Additionally, a repository of nation-sustaining stories of heroes and critical events has taken on near-epic proportions. We conceive of an American national identity that connects individuals located at distant points across the country and at different periods of time. On the other hand, “place represents the encounter of people with other people and things in space” (Agnew 2002b: 5).

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  The Geography of Frontiers and Boundaries (Routledge Library Editions: Political Geography)

  • J. R. V. Prescott(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  The often ephemeral nature of internal boundaries makes it much more difficult to trace their evolution in function and position than that of international and federal boundaries, which are usually defined in some published treaty. Internal boundary changes are usually published in a Government gazette, and can be very difficult to follow. Freedom of movement across federal and internal boundaries makes it easier to carry out fieldwork in respect of these two categories than is the case with most international boundaries. Lastly it seems likely that people are more aware of the influence on their lives of federal and internal boundaries than of international boundaries. This is because federal and internal boundaries may determine the level of taxation, the requirements to be observed in building a home, the state schools available for children, and the quality and quantity of cultural amenities such as libraries.

  The following sections consider those aspects of intra-national boundaries appropriate for geographical study and the methods which may be used. The evolution of federal and internal boundaries

  Geographers are concerned with the evolution of boundaries in respect of definition, function and position, and it is important to realize that evolution in these respects may be related or take place separately. For example, in 1917 the latitudinal boundary which had allocated territory between the Northern and Southern Provinces of the Colony and Protectorate of Lagos was delimited. This change in definition was accompanied by a change in position which transferred 5,650 square miles to the Northern Provinces, but the function of the boundary remained unchanged. On the other hand, in 1921 the international boundary between Eire and Northern Ireland was created from existing county boundaries without any changes in definition or position.

  Studies are available dealing with the evolution of the federal boundaries of the United States, Canada, Australia, the Soviet Union and Nigeria. The development of Nigeria’s federal boundaries is distinct from the other four cases: first, because the area which became Nigeria had a large settled indigenous population long before the boundaries were drawn by colonial administrators; second, because the boundaries reached their present form as the primary internal boundaries of a unitary state – the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria; and third, because there was no attempt to colonize the area by large numbers of Europeans. In Australia and North America the boundaries were drawn in areas being colonized by Europeans, who were opposed by numerically small indigenous groups, lacking political hegemony. Nor did any of these Federal States experience a period of unitary government involving the whole of their present territory.

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