SOME THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS ON FEDERATIONS AND FEDERALISM
SOME THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS ON FEDERATIONS AND FEDERALISM

Summary/Abstract: The prejudice of uniformism evaporated after World War II and nowadays nobody discusses the feasibility of federations. The Laski quotation which is the opening sentence of Me Whinney’s: Comparative Federalism (1962) provokes only an indulgent smile. It reads: „The epoch of federalism is over". And obsolete sounds Lord Bryce's view according to which federations are doomed being a transient form of government to be superseded by a unitary one. In this respect the classic Dicey has to be objected too, when he claims that a federation „will always be at a disadvantage in a contest with Unitarian states of equal resources”, or that the „rigidity of federal institutions is almost certain to impress on the minds of citizens the idea that any provision included in the constitution is immutable and, so to speak, sacred.” (1939, 171 ff.). However the U.S. constitution comes right away into mind not once amended in spite of its „sacredness”. Similar exaggerated views were expressed in the East. They' were based on illusions of the overwhelming superiority and might of central — and bureaucratic — planning. However, it turned out that we have a chance of avoiding Hayek’s road to serfdom, we in the non-capitalist East, on the condition of dropping undue, overcentralized planning, the very source of inner tensions and inefficiency. Now, in search of more flexible solutions it is clearly seen that federations and all other forms of decentralization have a future, have unexhausted prospects of development. We have to take into consideration too that in the last few decades new federations were mushroming and we were faced with hitherto unknown problems. All this proves the vitality of problems of federations and federalism.

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