A very good point. It is a difficult balance between avoiding a federal government overriding the states’ autonomy, whilst keeping certain functions centralised and coordinated.

Many modern federations do at least have a significant portion of their revenue generation that is highly centralised and federally managed, which ensures that “resources” shouldn’t be too much of an issue. The military is generally also a federal function, which is sensible, as this enables centralised mobilisation.

With these being the modern status quo, I think the ability of federations to defend themselves and project force in a coordinated manner shouldn’t be too much in doubt. Your second point is therefore probably the most salient one – how do we limit the power of federal governments to avoid them concentrating power over time?

I have a few thoughts on how to modify the structure of government to reduce this (and improve it in other ways), that I’m going to hopefully delve into in the next few posts. One (fairly radical) is around sortition, that I mentioned in last week’s post as a way to reduce the perverse incentives of the political class to resort to populism. Another is around improving on the presidential and parliamentary systems – I am a big fan of the “separation of powers” between the legislature and executive, as parliamentary systems that don’t have this are too easily able to force through laws to allow them to do what they want, but presidential systems concentrate too much power into one individual. A system in which the entire executive cabinet were directly elected would avoid both of these problems – keeping separation of powers, whilst spreading executive power between multiple (equally powerful but department specific) people. At this point, I have half written posts about both of these, so I’ll hopefully post something on them soon.

In terms of how a centralised government might be convinced to give up power to local authorities, I think there is a way. Ultimately, governments are made up of individuals, so if you can make something beneficial to enough of the individuals, they may vote to “reduce the government’s power”, because it is still increasing their own power or status.

The UK currently has 650 MPs, so in a hypothetical federalisation of the UK in which you reduce the “federal parliament” down to 250 MFPs, and split the UK into 20 states that each have state assemblies of 20 people each, you still need 650 politicians in total. Many politicians that think they will end up winning as a new MFP will be keen on the plan, as they will be 1/250 rather than 1/650, so despite the reduced scope of the federal parliament, they will have more power within it (and the federal parliament gets all the “sexy” stuff like foreign policy…). Similarly, many other politicians will be interested to be a “big fish in a small pond” – rather than being 1/650, these politicians will be only 1/20. If the new powers that states will gain are the functions of government these particular politicians are interested in (education, healthcare, etc.), many politicians might jump at the chance to have a greater sway in their management.

Basically, because different politicians will have slightly different focuses and motivations, it should be possible to create a system where everyone feels like they’re winning – everyone gets to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond that is more relevant to their interests. There will always be some people that don’t want change, but if you can get a majority to support it, you’ve won.