Federations in Crisis — the Failure of the Old Order

Abstract

emulated about eighty years later with the passage of the British North America Act, 1867, which created the Dominion of Canada as a federal union within the British Empire. Since then, the federal idea caught on and has spread to all continents, adapting itself to local circumstances and to the experiences of history with varying degrees of success. The mortality rate among federations was and remains high, witness the recent demise of the West Indian Federation, Ghana-Guinea, Mali-Senegal, the Central African Federation of Rhodesia-Nyasaland, and the 1958-61 United Arab Republic. Although never considered perfect, only lately have serious cracks appeared in the federal structure of the two older federations, the American and the Canadian. In 1939 Harold Laski observed that the assumption that "a creative America must be a federal America," and that "the wider the powers exercised from Washington, the more ineffective will be the capacity for creative administration," was more than any philosophic pattern responsible for the malaise of American democracy.' His plea was for the recognition that the federal form of state is, or was at that time, unsuitable to the stage of economic and social development that America has reached. Laski expanded his argument to include Canada, among others, exemplifying the need for drastic constitutional revision, since the historic division of powers impairs the need for social and economic reconstruction. He argued, first, that there were certain objects of administrative control left to the constituent units, that is, states or provinces, for which they were no longer suitable instruments of regulation. The areas of health, education, unemployment compensation, labor conditions, railroad rates, and electric power should be centralized, that is, placed under complete federal control. Second, that the proper objects of federal supervision cannot any longer be dependent upon constituent unit consent. Laski's thesis was based on the assumption that large capitalist enterprises, such as du Pont in Delaware or Anaconda Copper in Montana, out-class, in terms of power, the power of the state in which they operate; as he put it ". .. the formal powers of the states are rarely commensurate with the actual authority they may venture to exercise. And it is the common citizen of the United States who pays the price of that margin