Foreword
This book by Lidia Bonifati is innovative, inspiring, and an invaluable contribution to scholarship for many reasons.
One reason is that this book bridges two important strands of literature on compound systems that too often remain isolated: the power-sharing literature and federalism literature.
As a way to accommodate territorially concentrated minorities, constitutional asymmetry is a key concern in power-sharing literature. There, the debate was mostly on the potentially destabilising nature of constitutional asymmetry. Constitutional asymmetry, however, was never measured; thus, it was impossible to determine at what level asymmetry constitutes a potential danger. I introduced the ‘constitutional asymmetry score’ in my book on Dynamic Federalism,1 and I am extremely happy that Lidia Bonifati took this up to measure, for the first time, constitutional asymmetry in a wide range of multi-tiered multinational systems. It allows us to assess the intensity of constitutional asymmetry and to situate it in each of the three structural dimensions: status, powers, and fiscal arrangements.
By contrast, traditional federal theory – based on a limited set of ‘model’ federations, mostly Western, homogeneous and coming together – sat uneasily with new systems of dispersed authority and with constitutional asymmetry common to these systems. This book takes an important new step in a burgeoning scholarship on constitutional asymmetry as a feature of multinational federal systems, only a few years after Maja Sahadžić laid the foundations for a federal perspective on constitutional asymmetry.2 It focuses on federal dynamics rather than (much contested) narrow definitions of federations in traditional federal theory. This way, it can include new systems of dispersed authority as multi-tiered systems in their own right instead of so-called ‘quasi-federations’ – a popular term in federal theory, but both misleading and derogatory. As Lidia writes in her introduction, integrating constitutional systems in the Global South as fully-fledged systems, away from the implied superiority of traditional theory, is a much-needed decolonial perspective. At the same time, the book examines systems that are widely recognised as ‘federations’ – Belgium, Canada and India – in a way that takes them out of the straitjacket of traditional theory, unfamiliar with multinationalism and how it impacts constitutional design.
Another reason is that the book brings together political science and legal scholarship. In what Erk and Swenden call the “new wave of federalism studies”,3 focused on federal dynamics, political, social, and economic scholars have taken the lead, and legal scholars are lagging behind. This is a loss for this “new wave”, as it fails to capture valuable insights on the role of courts and legal procedures in federal dynamics. Lidia Bonifati’s book provides irrefutable proof thereof, where she shows how legal along with extra-legal factors explain the different manifestations of constitutional asymmetry, and how courts reshape the degree of these asymmetries. Leading up to the courts’ approach to constitutional asymmetry, the book also discusses their role in accommodating diversity. Bringing courts into the study of federalism and asymmetry is a major contribution in itself, especially considering its breadth, including national and supranational courts, as well as quasi-judicial bodies. This builds on what Stefan Graziadei coined “power-sharing courts”4 and extends it through a comparison with hybrid courts.
With her interdisciplinary background, her scholarly rigour, and the ease with which she penetrates and connects strands of literature, this author is a young talent to follow closely, her book what was needed to fuel the “new wave of federalism studies” across disciplines.
Enjoy the reading!
Patricia Popelier