Contrasting Unitary and Federal Systems

TLDR: The modern age of statism at most divided polities into unitary or federal states as mentioned in this paper, which obscured the origin and development of the polity: hierarchic, organic and covenantal, with the first two leading to unitary states and the third to federal polities.

Abstract: The modern age of statism at most divided polities into unitary or federal states. In doing so it obscured the three models of the origin and development of the polity: hierarchic, organic, and covenantal, with the first two leading to unitary states and the third to federal polities. All three models produce institutions, are informed by political cultures, and lead to political behavior characteristic, and at times even singular, to each. This article explores some of the institutional, cultural, and behav- ioral consequences of each of the three models and compares them. Modern political science is grounded in the study of the state, conceived ideally as a unitary, centralized, homogeneous, self-sufficient, and politically sovereign polity encompassing a single nation, a territory, and a unitary government. This modern conception of statehood was either derived from or found its original expression in the Westphalian system, based on the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, that put finis to the Thirty Years' War in western Europe and, through it, the wars of religion that had plagued that continent since the Protestant Reformation some 130 years earlier. Under the Westphalian system, Europe was to be organized on the basis of such states all striving to achieve those ideal goals. Sovereignty was viewed as vested in the state and indivisible. During the next 300 years this state system spread throughout the world as Europeans settled new territories that in turn became independent states or colonized older societies that acquired statehood through decolonization. At the same time, the leading states in the state system, and in principle all of them, moved from absolutist rule to some definition of republican or democratic rule.