Abolishing states would not be the end of the matter; the country’s leaders would have to make a number of fundamental secondary decisions. Someone would ultimately have to decide which of the essential functions currently performed by state government should be nationalized, which ones should be localized, and, as to the latter, how the various local functions are to be further distributed among the many different species of local governments – municipalities, counties, townships, special purpose districts, and unincorporated areas. Who should select the decision-maker? Decisions would also be needed as to the processes and responsibilities for replacing the states’ current roles in national elections, in supplying the bulk of the country’s judges, and in the constitutional amendment process. This chapter considers the options for filling those voids. In the process, it offers a portrait of what a unitary American republic might look like without state government.

This introductory chapter articulates the main thesis and summarizes the arguments that support it. It lays out the reasons that the thesis is important, describes what the book adds to the existing literature, explains some critical terms and concepts, and adds necessary disclaimers.

The Cochin Harbor Project (1920–1936) forms the subject of Chapter 4. Through a close reading of the official correspondence relating to the development project, this chapter will trace the differing visions of development articulated by those involved with the project and analyze how these changed over time. Conceived as a solution for the political and environmental issues confronting multiple state authorities in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Cochin Harbor Project would be dogged by uncertainties from the time of its inception. These uncertainties stemmed not only from the participation of princely states in the modernization of a port in British India but also from the technological choices made during the project’s execution to reconcile divergent interests. Through a close analysis of the technological choices made over the course of the project’s execution, this chapter will examine the reasons why the harbour’s development took the form that it did. It will discuss these decisions not only in the context of the economic aims of the colonial state but also equally of the political aspirations of the region’s princely states.

Does a treaty apply to all of a party’s territory? How is territory defined? In the absence of an express definition or other contrary intention, the territory comprises the metropolitan territory of a state and any other territory under its sovereignty. But practice varies. Many bilateral treaties have provisions expressly extending them to overseas territories or enabling such extension by notification or subsequent agreement. Multilateral treaties may also include an express territorial application clause. UK practice from 1967 has been to apply multilateral treaties only to its metropolitan territory unless it makes a specific declaration of extension to any of its overseas territories. On rare occasions, a state may conclude a treaty only so that it applies to a specific overseas territory. The issues posed for federations are discussed, together with certain methods by which the problems can be reduced: territorial clauses, federal clauses and federal reservations. The case of the Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions is also analysed.

Every state possesses the capacity to conclude treaties. Treaties between states may be expressed as being by heads of state or by governments, and less often by state agencies or ministries. Some special cases are examined: the Cook Islands and Niue, the Vatican City (the Holy See), Taiwan, Palestine, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, Western Sahara and indigenous peoples. In the case of federations, for the most part, constituent units conclude non-binding instruments with other states or their territorial units. But, in some cases, the state may authorise the conclusion of a binding treaty by a constituent unit. The chapter examines treaty practice in respect of Belgium, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republika Srpska, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Kosovo, and the Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions.

This chapter is concerned with the material constitution of the federation as a discrete form of political association. The chapter shows that the federation is a political order founded on an interstate agreement of constitutional nature between its Member States. This constitutional contract gives birth to the Union as a new institutionalised legal and political order and transforms the constitutions of its Member States in a material sense by relativising the dialectical relationship between governors and governed that lies at the heart of state sovereignty. The federation is characterised by a dual political existence, the Union and the Member States, which stand in a heterarchical relationship to one another. The federation is a dynamic order, characterised by the continual construction of political identity of both the Union and Member States.

Federation was promoted as an ideal before and between the two world wars, in both colonial independence movements and internationalist thought. It also became a term for promoting reforms to imperial governance, referring sometimes to greater political and economic integration and at other times to devolution or self-rule. Writers around the world responded to these developments directly, in specific political and constitutional discussions, and through indirect engagement with federalism’s rhetorical, conceptual, historical, and affective structures. Modernists such as Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner exemplify the range of white metropolitan writers’ playful, earnest, and creative engagements with federal themes during the interwar period. Paradigmatic of a so-called ‘federal moment’ amidst global decolonisation movements during the post-war period, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children illustrates federalism’s contested status as both a legacy of colonial rule and a potential mechanism for imagining postcolonial futures.

The political struggles that delivered the first wave of independent Caribbean nation states are often retrospectively characterised under the banner of nationalism, but it is important to acknowledge the diversity of ideologies and affiliations that were involved in the transition towards non-colonial sovereignty. This chapter explores the role that writers and imaginative writings played in shaping alternative political imaginaries in the Anglophone Caribbean region from the 1920s to the 1960s. Its arguments expand the terrain of literary nationalisms beyond the now canonical fictions of male Windrush generation novelists writing at the mid-century. It attends to the nascent nationalism invoked by literary projects at the turn of the century, considers the role assigned to the writer in the short-lived project of Anglophone regional Federation between 1958 and 1962 that predated the constitution of nation states, and explores how Pan-African and Black Atlantic movements powerfully shaped the decolonial literary imagination in the early twentieth century. It also acknowledges the crucial role that women played in male-centred histories and politically engaged literary traditions.

If you search for ‘federation’ on the internet, you will find accounts of systems of government in which sovereignty is divided between a central, national government and a series of regional, partially self-governing states. You may well find a webpage of the Parliamentary Education Office recording that, ‘in a process known as Federation’ Australia ‘became a nation on 1 January 1901 when six British colonies – New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania – united to form the Commonwealth of Australia’ (PEO 2020). These search results suggest some key takeaway points for students of Australian politics. First, a federation is a particular form of political system where two tiers or levels of government (national and regional) share power and neither has authority over the other. Second, when capitalised ‘Federation’ describes the process which resulted in the creation of Australia at the dawn of the last century. The final point to note is that Australia’s federal system shapes its politics and other activities. Its federation provides a good example of how 21st century Australian politics remains in the grip of institutions established in the distant past.

You might expect a textbook on Australian politics to begin with a discussion of contemporary Australian politics taking place in a strangely shaped building in Canberra, or with a somewhat esoteric discussion of colonial parliaments. What we will explore in this first chapter are two connected ideas: what is politics and why do we study it. There will, of course, be an overview of the political institutions, as well as discussion of some important terms, and a peek at what challenges might lie ahead for Australian political structures.

So how should we think about with an examination of contemporary politics in Australia? We should begin with acknowledging that the politics we study now is the product, one way or another, of a series activities, actions and interactions that stretch far back in time. The real politics and history of Australia starts somewhere between 50,000 and 65,000 years prior to white settlement – although how far back is not clear. If we acknowledge the past, we can understand how it has shaped our contemporary society.

Federation is an inherently flexible form of political organisation that involves ongoing negotiation, coordination and compromise to meet changing local and temporal conditions.The history of Australian Federation illustrates this: from the origins of the federal idea in the mid-nineteenth century, amid the emergence of quasi-federal arrangements within the British Empire (1847-1890); to the creative outcomes of Australia’s constitution-making decade, when American and other influences garnered attention (1891-1901); and through the subsequent outworkings of the Australian Constitution as it has been interpreted and applied alongside the growth of the nation. The proven adaptability of Federation may inform contemporary approaches to the constitutional recognition of Australia’s First Peoples.

Self-determination conflicts have, for a very long time, been considered intractable. Given the apparent zero-sum game character to such conflicts, the only outcomes appear to be victory for either side or interminable conflict. While the post-Cold war era has brought about a further round of self-determination conflicts marked by very high levels of violence and civilian casualties, this period has also led to a significant number of self-determination settlements. In the main, these have been autonomy settlements or examples of federalisation; and are often combined with complex power-sharing arrangements. This practice has contributed considerable wealth to the tool-kit available to construct bespoke, internal settlement options in relation to the numerous secessionist conflicts or controversies around the globe. This chapter considers this settlement practice in light of international legal doctrine on self-determination, and in terms of the constitutional processes and transformations required to craft the particular autonomy, federal, transitional and secessionist solutions, which may be necessary to rejuvenate popular consent for the conflict-affected state going forward.

At the end of 1850 Edward Hargraves returned to Sydney from a year on the other side of the Pacific. He was one of the ‘Forty-Niners’ who had converged on California in search of gold. Although unsuccessful in that quest, Hargraves was struck by the similarity between the gold country there and the transalpine slopes of his homeland. In the summer of 1851 he crossed the Blue Mountains to Bathurst and washed a deposit of sand and gravel from a waterhole to disclose a grain of gold in a tin dish. A revival of bushranging in the 1860s drew on the discontent of the rural poor, and the young men who joined Ned Kelly, the most legendary bushranger of them all, were sons of struggling or unsuccessful selectors. From 1877 England and Australia began playing regular cricket matches. The first Australian victory on English soil in 1882 gave birth to a mock obituary to England’s supremacy and thus the Ashes, which are the world’s oldest international sporting contest.

In Australia, Irish and Catholic are virtually synonymous. In the eastern states, Irish Catholics often comprised nearly a third of the population and rarely less than a quarter. Irish nuns, priests, bishops, and laity shaped the country almost from the beginning. This chapter traces the development of Irish, and Irish Catholic, Australia across the continent from the early 1800s to Federation and beyond.

Chapter 1 discusses attempts to coordinate colonial military resources for the South African War, and how the war led many to doubt whether the British Empire could be effectively defended, or its people and resources effectively coordinated in moments of crisis. It then shows how these doubts structured ongoing state-building projects in British colonies, specifically the federation of Australian colonies into one Commonwealth in 1901 and the abortive attempt to federate New Zealand with Fiji. The chapter ends by demonstrating that this fashion for large federal projects was an attempt to solve imperial dilemmas of security and population control, and was freighted by racial politics.