The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes believes that federalism may be the only way to preserve local cultures in a world of increasing economic integration. The Federalist Papers, he has argued, “should be distributed in the millions.” When British Prime Minister Tony Blair set out to modernize his country, he made devolving power outside Westminster a key element in the campaign. This was necessary, he said, to protect Britons' “fundamental rights and freedoms” and to “develop their sense of citizenship.” In the 1990s, the diplomat and historian George Kennan confessed to dreaming of a United States reconstituted as a confederation of twelve regional republics, each of which would be small enough to provide “intimacy between the rulers and the ruled.”

For anyone who might not yet have noticed, political decentralization is in fashion. Along with democracy, competitive markets, and the rule of law, decentralized government has come to be seen as a cure for a remarkable range of political and social ills. Enthusiasm extends across geographical and ideological boundaries, uniting left and right, East and West, and North and South. It is hard to think of any other constitutional feature – except perhaps democracy itself – that could win praise from both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Newt Gingrich and Jerry Brown, François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.

Political decentralization means different things to different people, and I will discuss definitions in Chapter 2.