A federal state is a complex political and administrative entity, incorporating territorial entities. The latter have fairly broad legal powers up to sovereignty close to state.
The most common features of a federal state :
- Geographically, the federation is divided into separate entities: states, cantons, lands, republics, and so on.
- Federated entities have the right to adopt their own laws, constitutions, and may have their own legislative, judicial, and executive bodies.
- However, the supreme legislative, judicial and executive power in relation to the entire state still belongs to the federal authorities. The competence between the subjects of the federation and its center in each individual case is delimited by the union constitution.
- Most federal states have both common union citizenship and citizenship of federal entities.
- The main national foreign policy activity can only be carried out by the union bodies that officially represent the country at the international level.
- The federal state of law, as a rule, has a bicameral parliament. One of the chambers of the parliament is assembled from representatives of the country's regions.
Varieties of a federal state
There are several options for such political and administrative entities. So, for example, there are symmetric and asymmetric federations regarding the constitutional legal system. A symmetric federal state is a state in which all its territorial entities have the same constitutional legal status. For example, the United States, where all states in this sense are equal. And, on the contrary, subjects of asymmetric federations may differ in their powers. This is the case in Brazil and India.
Among other things, federations can initially be formed for various reasons. And depending on these historical conditions, their following varieties are formed:
- Territorial federal state. These are those states whose administrative division is based on a purely geographical feature. Such, for example, the USA and Germany.
- National federations - here the very reason for the division of the country into administrative entities lies in its multinationality. And then, when dividing the territory, the factor of compact residence of peoples is necessarily taken into account. Actually, such a principle lies in the federal structure of Russia.
- Mixed.
By the method of education, they can be contractual and constitutional. If contractual ones arise from smaller, previously independent countries, to solve common problems: protection, effective economic activity, and so on, then a constitutional federal state is often a former unitary state, at a certain historical stage transformed into its administrative-territorial division.