Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

Without lapsing into the federalism-as-a-panacea view, most recent writings on federalism emphasize the particular relevance of this form of political arrangement for the challenges faced by many states today It is now common among political thinkers to observe that, in the words of Ronald Watts, “we appear to be in the midst of a paradigm shift which is taking us from a world of sovereign nation-states to a world of diminished state sovereignty and increased interstate linkages of a constitutionally federal character.”¹ In short, 65 years after Laski wrote his famous piece, any talk of the “obsolescence of federalism” would itself sound distinctly obsolete.