11 · Federal and unitary: dividing power across territory

The last two lessons read a constitution's form. This one reads its territorial axis: does the constitution divide power across the map, or keep it at the center? Course 1 taught the vertical stack inside one country; this lesson asks the constitutional question one level up, and a later course in this path takes the middle layer apart in full. Here you learn to spot the model from the document.

The two models

In a federal system the constitution itself splits authority, so states, provinces, or Laender hold powers of their own that the national government cannot simply take away, and changing the split requires amending the constitution. The United States, Germany, Canada, India, Brazil, and Australia are federal. In a unitary system sovereignty stays with the central government, which may create regions and hand them tasks but can also reorganise or abolish them by ordinary law. France, Japan, and New Zealand are unitary.

The test: what happens to the region in a fight with the center?

The clean way to tell them apart is course 1's fourth question aimed at the region's very existence. Ask: can the center, acting alone, abolish the region or strip its powers?

• If no, because the region's powers are entrenched in the constitution and only a constitutional amendment could remove them, the system is federal.
• If yes, because the region holds its powers by ordinary grant the center can revoke, the system is unitary.

This is the same move course 1 made about US cities ("creatures of the state"), lifted to the national level. In a federation the states are NOT creatures of the nation; in a unitary state the regions ARE creatures of the center. The territorial axis is that contrast, written into the constitution.

A caution: the label can hide the practice

Federal and unitary are the poles, and real countries blur toward the middle in ways worth flagging rather than smoothing over.

• A unitary state can devolve sweeping powers to regional parliaments (the United Kingdom gave Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland real legislatures) and still be unitary, because those powers were granted by ordinary statute the center could in principle reclaim. Devolution is not federalism: the test is whether the grant is entrenched or revocable.
• Some federal constitutions centralise heavily in practice, and some countries (Spain is the standard hard case) genuinely resist the label, which is exactly the kind of contested classification this path teaches you to hold rather than force. Report what the document entrenches; flag what is disputed.

Why this axis sits beside the others

A constitution's territorial choice interacts with everything else in the course. A rigid, codified, federal constitution (Germany, the United States) locks the center-region split into hard higher law; a flexible, uncodified, unitary arrangement (the United Kingdom) leaves even the existence of a regional parliament ultimately in the center's hands. The three axes are one portrait: how executive power is held, how territory is divided, and how firmly the whole thing is fixed. Section 4 now turns from reading constitutions to watching them get made. This is comparative description, not legal advice.

Sources

• U.S. Const. amend. X. https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-10/
• Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (Grundgesetz), arts. 20, 30, 70 (1949). https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/
• Watts, R. L. (2008). Comparing federal systems (3rd ed.). McGill-Queen's University Press.