Bulletin n. 2/2009
October 2009
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
  • Barrios Suvelz Franz Xavier
    El lastre cognitivo del par conceptual “Unitario vs. Federal”
    in Reforma y democracia (Venezuela) , n. 44 ,  2009
    Scholars have dauntlessly adopted the unitary versus federal antagonism as a frame concept when analyzing decentralization. Nevertheless, this is a confused idea and has to be substituted for a new binomial which allows an accurate understanding of the complex territorial transformations of our time. This essay offers a new conceptual binomial based on the disclosure of the ultimate cause of territorial structuration, namely, the territorial law making power, which has also been currently overlooked. It can be assessed the richness of territorialization within the so called “unitary” State, and also it can be seen the non-federal alternatives to overcome the unitary model. While until now both federal and non-federal models (like the Spanish model born in 1978) drew on a power sharing between the national and the meso level, this work describes a new alternative built on three levels. This comes about due to the constitutional enhancing of the municipal level, without diminishing the demands for autonomy of the meso level, and at the same time consolidating the national level as a strategic instance. Through a new system of concepts like the breaking of national monopoly on legislation, State dissociation, municipal unlock, constitutional equipotency between levels, and territorial segmentation, a new theoretical frame is sketched in permanent test against comparative constitutional law and classical State law. Finally, the approach is applied in showing how deconcentration of the State has been neglected in the conventional analysis.
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