There are many halfway solutions that could dampen support for a split – from a simple in-out referendum to new tax-gathering rules, a properly federal Spain or a confederation between Catalonia and the rest of the country.
Yesterday it seemed as if the crisis was raising the old question of the finalité of European unification: should Europe become a nation writ large, a confederation, a federal state, a mere economic community, an informal UN, or something historically new: namely, a cosmopolitan Europe founded on European law that performs the role of politically coordinating Europeanised nation-states?
Towards the end of the century, after Canada's confederation, the federal government began to formalize their administration.
The older provinces already had this control, but when Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba were admitted to Confederation, the federal government retained resource rights and paid the provincial governments an annual grant as compensation.
The colonial-law prohibition was codified at the federal level by the Confederation Congress Proclamation of 1783 and the Nonintercourse Acts of 1790, 1793, 1796, 1799, 1802, and 1834.
This arrangement transformed what had been a confederation into a federal state.
Although Bismarck had led the transformation of Germany from a loose confederation into a federal nation state, he had not done it alone.
The Swiss Confederation is a federal republic with four official languages and has a population of approximately 7.7 million inhabitants.
The pre-publication history for this paper can be accessed here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/14/499/prepub The study was commissioned and supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport and the Sports Confederation of the federal state Brandenburg.
A federation is one species of such a federal order; other species are unions, confederations, leagues and decentralised unions and hybrids such as the present European Union (Elazar 1987, Watts 1998).
An example of confederal arrangements that gave birth to a federal union is the Articles of Confederation (1781 89) that preceded the Constitution of the United States.
