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Au cours des dernières décennies, les Canadiens ont connu bien des variantes du fédéralisme, allant de la concertation sous Lester B. Pearson à l'asymétrie administrative sous le tandem Pelletier-Charest, en passant par le fédéralisme rentable chez Robert Bourassa et le fédéralisme dominateur chez Pierre Elliot Trudeau. S'agit-il de tendances qui viennent inspirer les nouvelles générations d'électeurs ? Ou s'agit-il de modes appelées à se remplacer les unes les autres au gré de la conjoncture politique et des rapports de force ? Au moment où certains pays en crise sur la scène internationale (l'Irak, le Sri Lanka, la Russie) en sont venus à favoriser le fédéralisme, comment se fait-il qu'au Canada l'enthousiasme des Québécois soit si faible pour ce modèle de gouvernement ? Ce livre propose une lecture plurielle et actualisée des enjeux politiques qui sous-tendent les rapports entre le Québec et le Canada. Quatre grands thèmes y sont étudiés : les fondements du fédéralisme et ses traditions, les métamorphoses du fédéralisme, les relations fédérales-provinciales et intergouvernementales, et enfin les politiques propres à la gestion de la diversité. Chacune des études jette un éclairage novateur sur un ensemble de questions centrales, dont celles du déséquilibre fiscal, des réformes démocratiques, des rapports entre minorités et majorités et du déficit fédératif au Canada.

Le fédéralisme tel que pratiqué au Canada n’a jamais eu la cote auprès des Québécois. Non pas que les Québécois soient opposés au fédéralisme en soi mais plutôt parce qu’ils se refusent à accepter la façon dont il est mis en application par les instances politiques à Ottawa. On retrouve deux notions clés au centre de l’interprétation québécoise : l’autonomie des États membres et la non-subordination des pouvoirs entre les deux ordres de gouvernement. La conception du fédéralisme prévalant auj...

Ainsi que le politologue Alfred Stepan le constate, « chacune des démocraties de longue durée opérant dans un contexte de polité multilingue et multinationale est un État fédéral ». En bref, le fédéralisme posséderait les qualités essentielles contribuant à la pérennité des institutions politiques démocratiques. Cela se fait en garantissant aux minorités l’accès aux institutions, en assurant une redistribution de la richesse et des ressources, en établissant un juste équilibre du pouvoir entr...

International audience; The controversial issue of secession has received little attention from experts of federalism. The best federal studies either evade it or dismiss it in a few lines. However, the issue of secession has been present throughout the history of federations. This book is one of the first to explore the complex relationship between federalism and secession.The authors whose work is presented here recognize the potential of federalism as a way to organize relations between several different states, peoples, nations or territories under the same government. However, they are not naïve or idealist about the ability of the federal idea to succeed in the complex situations in which it is applied. In some cases success seems assured (the United States, Switzerland, Germany, etc.), and the merits of federalism can be showcased. But there are also failures (the former Yugoslavia, or more recently Brexit) and semi-failures that have generated turbulence in recent years in devolutive systems (Scotland in the United Kingdom, Catalonia in Spain) or federative systems (Québec in Canada).This book provides a nuanced portrait of the issue of secession in federal contexts and lays the groundwork for questioning the still too fragile legacy of the great thinkers of federalism.

In this chapter, we study under which conditions dyadic federations—a genus of multinational federalism composed of two major communities—have ‘succeeded’ (i.e., survived) and under which they have ‘failed’ (i.e., broken apart). Through a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of all democratic dyadic federations, past and present, we show that dyadic federations can succeed if geographical factors such as the territorial dispersion of the dominant groups play in its favour and when institutional arrangements (i.e., a proportional electoral system or a national party system) ensure fair political representation for both communities or prevent polities from being conceived in exclusively sub-national terms. In the absence of territorial dispersion, other institutional arrangements such as executive inclusiveness and an equal economic distribution between groups appear to be crucial in preventing the breakup. In general, dyadic federations that survive tend to do so for many years. By contrast, our analysis shows that a bipolar federal project is likely to fail in the absence of stabilising institutional arrangements (i.e., electoral proportionality and a national party system) and, more particularly, when economic resources are unequally distributed between communities and when these communities are clearly territorially separable. The duration of the union is, again, of importance because the dyadic federations that failed did so at their very beginning. Our results inform the literature on federalism, national diversity and democracy by showing that federalism can be a successful institutional arrangement for bipolar polities when its survival as a state is desired or without a viable alternative.

Many authors argue that transnational polities such as the European Union (EU) cannot be considered democratically legitimate if corresponding public spheres do not develop, so as to allow genuine public participation on their policies. As ultimate carriers of public spheres, mass media have a crucial role to play. For the EU, this would be through a pan-European media system or Europeanisation of national media. The existence of merely national media, focused on a national context, is considered problematic from this perspective. This argument takes as premise the existence of national public spheres in every national context. However, this is not necessarily so in a federal multilingual polity such as Belgium where media are organised on the level ofbased on the two large language communities. Consequently, an inadequacy and tension, similar to that between national media systems and the European context, exists between community media and the Belgian context. Using a combination of quantitative (selection of actors, themes, etc....) and qualitative (metaphors, use of deixis, etc....) content analysis of tvTV news and political debates, we focus on this tension by analysing how community media cover federal politics, how they represent federal political actors and issues. We show that, similarly tolike the lack of Europeanisation of national media, we can speak of a lack of federaliszation of community media in Belgium and therefore also of the absence of a genuine Belgian, federal, public sphere. The case of Belgium can therefore contribute to the ongoing debate on transnational public spheres, but also the other way round, as results of our analysis bring forward interrogations on democratic legitimacy of the Belgian federation, similar to those on the EU.

This chapter investigates the relationship between federalism and democracy in Switzerland. It explores how the interaction between them has evolved over time in the Swiss system in relation, among other things, to the expansion of direct democracy, the changing nature of minorities and the representation of cantonal interests at the federal level. The chapter argues that, by and large, federalism and democracy have reinforced each other in Switzerland. However, there are also multiple sources of tensions between the two and significant challenges on the horizon. Despite the system's idiosyncrasies, Switzerland's experience thus offers some valuable lessons of wide relevance.