Federalism and Territorial Cleavages

FEDERALISM AND TERRITORIAL CLEAVAGES Edited by Ugo M. Amoretti and Nancy Bermeo Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xiv, 498pp, US55. 00 cloth (ISBN 0-8018-7408-4) Ugo M. Amoretti's original question was whether regional cleavages in Italy-always hot issue in the electoral politics of the peninsula-would be better accommodated by than by the unitary state structure established when the country was unified almost 150 years ago. When he teamed up with Princetoris Nancy Bermeo, who had long-standing interest in the political effects of institutions, and mobilized 17 other authors, associated with universities in 10 countries, the objective became to better understand why some territorial cleavages are more easily accommodated than others and to what extent accommodation facilitated by federal state structures (2). This collection of original essays is not limited to federations, as it includes countries with strong unitary character as basis for comparison. It begins with seven case studies of advanced industrial democracies (Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, Spain, Britain, Italy, France), followed by two chapters on post-communist regimes (Russia and comparative analysis of eastern Europe), four case studies of developing democracies (India, Nigeria, Mexico, Turkey), chapter on electoral rules and party systems in federations, chapter on the analytical and moral levels of the relationships among political liberalism, national pluralism, and democratic federalism, and chapter arguing that US-style symmetrical would be inappropriate for many democratizing countries, especially multinational polities. Territorially dispersed minorities, such as First Nations in Canada, blacks in the US, Turks in the Netherlands, and the Roma in eastern and central Europe, do not fall within the scope of this book. The focus is indeed on territorial cleavages, presented by Amoretti as today's main source of conflict and one of the principal causes of violence in the world (8). The difficulty with this starting point is that territorial cleavages are often coterminous with social, economic, ethnic, or religious cleavages, fact that the editors acknowledge but nevertheless tend to neglect at the theoretical level. The chapter on Canada, written by Richard Simeon and subtitled Federalism, language, and regional conflict, is built around two arguments. The first is that the highly decentralized nature of Canadian explains its historically demonstrated capacity to manage and accommodate the dualist and regionalist character of the country; and the second is that greater asymmetry could bring about more effective accommodation in the future, but the dynamics of constitutional politics will make this very difficult to achieve. In short, Simeon argues that the main historical sources of political division in Canada have been language and region, and that an adaptive has institutionalized and perpetuated these differences, allowing, for instance, Quebec to achieve a considerable de facto asymmetry within Canadian federalism (104). …