Essays
These are the Essays or original research articles recently published on Perspectives on Federalism.
It is not easy to see and to foresee how the European Union is moving forward. There are good and bad perspectives, both stemming from the global crisis, both with an unpredictable outcome. The goal to be ac...
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UN Security Council resolutions lack direct effect, as they are not intended to oblige States in terms of means but just of results. This statement by the ECJ in the Kadi judgment has recently been used by t...
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Since 2010 the Italian central government has embarked on a challenging program of fiscal consolidation, which is hugely affecting sub-central government finances. Sub-national governments are involved in reach...
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On 30 March 2007, Italy signed the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and ratified it by Law 18/2009. Through this, Italy has committed itself to reforming the structure of its...
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The eurozone crisis has made budgetary issues the focal point of political and public debates about the European Union. Besides the pessimistic context and conflictive nature of the ongoing negotiation of th...
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This paper aims to analyse a specific dimension of the progressive transformation of the territorial/nation-state law by using the particular lens of cross-border cooperation as regulated under EU law.
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In this paper I will focus on the role of national common judges (“giudici comuni”) in systems that are not characterized by a dual court system (one of the elements indentified by Gardner as peculiar to fu...
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Foreign affairs have been traditionally seen as an exclusive competence of central governments. However, over the last 30 years, European paradiplomacy has been progressively developing not least because of the...
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Even though there have been some revaluations of the Länder in the last two decades German debates on federalism hardly take subnational constitutional politics into account. For example, textbooks on federali...
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Not a single federation has been successful in demarcating the territorial matrix of the federation into ethnically pure subnational units. This includes federations that are primarily designed to accommodate e...
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The article aims to underline firstly the trend towards the homogenization of the subnational forms of governments, at regional level, across regional States, focusing on Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK...
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This paper analyses the process of reform of the Statutes in Spanish Comunidades Autonomas, which began in 2006, in order to stress the role that an identity narrative takes in it. Almost every Statute inserts ...
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Regional legislative power carries the same title as national legislative power. However, it is obviously different in nature. If Acts are general and impersonal – characteristics that distinguish them from r...
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Macau and Hong Kong Special Administrative Regions of the People’s Republic of China enjoy, via a complex web of constituent legal instruments (international treaties, norms of the PRC Constitution and, last ...
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Argentine federalism and sub-national constitutionalism is a very interesting case study for anybody trying to establish a federal system in any country around the world. Not because of its success, but precise...
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Which is the meaning of constitutional review for a proper assessment of subnational constitutionalism? The essay tries to answer this question by means of comparative analysis. To do so, it considers both fede...
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Comparative constitutional scholarship identifies sub-national constituent power as one of the defining features of federal systems. Moreover, according to public choice theory, devolutionary federal systems ar...
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This special issue of the journal is entirely devoted to subnational constitutionalism. To do so, it tries to adopt a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective and to identify constitutional patterns in tho...
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This article is the result of an ongoing research into a variety of features of Spanish local government . It aims, in particular, at providing a profile of the tools implemented by local authorities to improve...
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This article focuses on the analysis of the regulatory framework of citizen participation in the local government, which organises direct and participatory democracy at the local level, and identifies the laws ...
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The increasing complexity of our society requires mechanisms of democratic innovation that enrich the system of representative democracy to increase citizens’ knowledge and experiences, thus improving the qua...
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In the Bill of Rights of the Andalusian Statute of Autonomy, right to participation is extremely well-developed and is not restricted to the traditional rights to political participation, but rather is extended...
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Participatory democracy is a theme of growing interest in Italy, in both cultural debate and administrative practice. Some Regions have felt a need to provide a legislative framework in order to facilitate and ...
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This study offers a reflection on the current developments in participatory democracy at the regional level. Besides providing a descriptive analysis of the instruments put into practice through different legal...
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The homogeneity of the regulations governing the electoral systems of autonomous communities derives from their desire to imitate the system adopted for the Spanish Chamber of Deputies, and from their...
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The referendum is a poorly used mechanism for direct participation in the Spanish system, at both state and regional level. The discussion on the feasibility of this system at regional level has been examined b...
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Up to 15 years ago the Constitution entrusted State law with the task of regulating the election system of regional councillors. Since the nineties there have been radical changes in the provisions (constitutio...
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The right to petition is an instrument of popular participation whereby citizens are allowed to apply to an authority for the purpose of representing certain needs or to seek the adoption of specific actions. W...
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The Spanish Constitution has strict regulations regarding direct and participatory democratic mechanisms (referendum, popular legislative initiative). The Constitution has adopted the most restrictive popular l...
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The instruments of people’s participation found in the “first generation” Statutes (1971) were initially perceived as a further possible link between politics and civil society, in line with the overall f...
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The new ordinary statutes of Italian Regions attempt to reconcile the more traditional instruments of representative and direct democracy with the new instruments of participatory democracy. While no original a...
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This article reviews the new approaches to citizen participation introduced by the statutes of autonomy reformed from 2006 onwards. The reform process included the introduction of participatory values and princ...
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This paper assesses European cooperation in counter-terrorism, which was prompted by the terrorist attacks at the beginning of this century. The first part of the paper will provide a description of the main fe...
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The paper endorses a dynamic rather than a static analysis of the EU at super-systemic level of analysis. It sketches a toolkit to analyse the actors and contents of constitutional politics, exploiting the insi...
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The goal of this paper is to draw attention to a critical issue regarding the decline in the traditional doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty in the United Kingdom. Devolution has proven to be a serious threat...
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This paper analyses the regulation of standard costs in Legislative Decree No. 68/2011. It begins with an examination of some concepts that are often confused in the scientific and political debate, such as f...
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According to the ‘Defense Strategic Guidance’ (2012), the growing military capabilities of US allies will create new opportunities for sharing responsibilities in world affairs. The US strategic document co...
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After the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights has found a place among the formal sources of EU law, and has become a standard of review for the validity o...
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The aim of this article is to analyse one of the main features of asymmetry in the EU legal order: enhanced cooperation. After the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, two enhanced cooperation schemes (on div...
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This essay discusses the dubious premises of ‘repressive liberalism’ underlying the policies of cultural ‘integration’ that have been adopted by a number of otherwise liberal democracies around the worl...
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The wide range of disasters that has recently hit third countries has shown that not even the Member States with the widest network of consular and diplomatic representation can ensure on their own the protecti...
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The concept of ‘citizenship’ has significantly evolved since the work by Thomas Marshall in 1950: the emergence of various kinds of ‘identity/difference’ politics, the transformation of political rep...
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This paper critically assesses the EU’s anti-piracy operation Atalanta in the light of the protection of Union citizens. The main question is to which extent a Union citizen threatened by pirates off t...
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This paper aims to provide a brief analysis of the Ruiz Zambrano judgment (Case C-34/09). Traditionally, the EU citizenship has been mainly construed as a status of integration into the Membe...
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The financial crisis revealed the inadequacy of the European Economic and Monetary Union. The response of the EU and of the countries of the Eurozone has been slow and weak, due to the substantially confederal ...
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This essay proposes that the emergence and failure of the debate on the EU constitutional reform depends, amongst other things, on the rise of what it calls ‘publicity’ as public policy and governance fun...
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Most of the existing literature on judicial interpretation of federal constitutions focuses either on individual federations or on comparative studies of specific judicial techniques and/or specific fields. Thi...
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For decades the US has had a hegemonic position in the Middle East. A key country in this respect has been Egypt. However, in recent decades the EU has made itself increasingly felt in the region. Due to enlarg...
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The article argues that regionalism in East Asia since the end of the Cold War has been largely shaped by the interactions of China-US relations, influencing and determining the development and transformation o...
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The article looks at federalism as applied in Africa in the dual sense of a devolution of power from what would otherwise be unitary and centralised states to lower levels of governance and a transferral of aut...
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Sub-national regions (micro-regions) and supra-national regions (macro-regions) appear as disconnected concepts in the academic literature. They are studied by distinct academic communities between which there ...
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The purpose of this article is to propose a draft for an analytical frame for analyzing regional integration consisting of federalism theory and neo-functionalism. It starts out discussing the concept of region...
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Federalism, neo-functionalism and realism-intergovernmentalism offer different visions of European unity, evident in different European organizations such as the Council of Europe to the ECSC, EEC/EC/EU, and EF...
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The present article examines the process concerning the transfer of State Property to Regions and Local Authorities, recently introduced in Italy pursuant to Decree 85/2010. The transfer of State owned assets a...
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Antonio Mosconi
The wars in western Asia and the financial crisis of 2007-2008 spelt the end of the American attempt to global suprema...
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The wars in western Asia and the financial crisis of 2007-2008 spelt the end of the American attempt to global suprema...
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This paper aims to analyze comparatively EU’s, China’s and India’s diverging designs for the governance of Africa. The paper addresses one fundamental research question: to what extent do the Chinese and ...
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There is barely any agreement in the literature on the way one should compare the political parties defending the interest of a specific community on a particular territory – the ethno-regionalist parties ...
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If one looks at the rapid growth of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) since the Blair-Chirac meeting of Saint-Malo in 1998 and in particular at the launch of several crisis management missions it is...
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What impact did Europeanization have on the governmental capacity of Italian regions? Are the regions successful in addressing the challenges and the opportunities of European integration? Is the participation ...
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The view prevailing among legal scholars - and endorsed in this paper - is that the coming into force of the reform of Title V, Part 2, of the Constitution introduced a multi-polar institutional framework in ...
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This article investigates some of the causes of the financial crisis – global imbalances and unsatisfactory regulation of world liquidity – and supports the need to reform the present asymmetric internation...
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This article examines law no. 42 of 2009 which, in accordance with art. 119 of the Constitution, opens the way to the introduction of “fiscal federalism” in Italy. The new law falls within the sphere of the...
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From a “formalistic” point of view the Regions are and have been neglected (especially in the past) in the EU law context. To express such a situation the German constitutional lawyers used the formula "Lan...
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This essay aims at giving an overview on the role of the European and national Parliaments in the dynamics of integration. After resuming the main issues that such a subject present, the author analyses the ...
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The reaction of the European Union to the financial crisis consisted mainly in uncoordinated national plans. A real European recovery plan would have been more effective, but it was not possible because the ...
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After the end of the Cold War, peacekeeping operations have increasingly been launched by new actors (such as regional organizations and ad hoc coalitions) despite the continued and important role of the United...
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