Diritto Pubblico Comparato ed Europeo

Sommario

1. Ambito dell’indagine. – 2. Federalismo latino-americano delle origini e regressione centralizzatrice. – 3. Inconsistenza politica delle Assemblee Parlamentari latino-americane. – 4. Le diversità “funzionali” dei federalismi latino-americani. – 5. La concezione del federalismo nei Paesi socialisti.

Abstract

In the chaos of languages characterizing, on the political side, every approach to federal phenomena it is useful to go back to concepts. So doing, both in the Italian debate and in the analysis of the series of cases of the several “federalisms” all over the world, you don’t risk running into mistakes or misunderstandings due to inappropriate word choices. This writing takes into account, simplifying at the most, two groups of countries, homogeneous among them: Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, and Brazil on one side; ex USSR (Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia), on the other. In spite of the conventional and structural analogies with the classical federalist model, in the two groups of systems taken into account, we end up in front of “Federal States without Federalism” because the criterion of the vertical division of powers, when it is not completely hidden, it is only applied as a distributive criterion of competences, out of any real self-government intent. In those cases, instead of the principle of assistance, we have to refer to criteria of power organization in a horizontal way (simple “instruments of devolution”), phenomena that exhaust their function inside institutional balances having a horizontal geometry, whereas, the qualitative innovation typical of the federal governments is linked, in an opposite way, to participating processes that go along vertical lines.