The Middle Layer: States, Provinces, and Regions

by bam

The course about the level of government between the nation and the locality: the US state, the German Land, the Canadian province, the Spanish autonomous community, and the devolved nations of the United Kingdom. It is course 4 of the path whose method course, Who Has the Power to Do This?, already taught the four questions and the vertical stack, and it sits directly above course 5, The Local Layer. Its one load-bearing idea is the difference between federalism and devolution, taught as entrenched versus delegated. A United States state is a co-sovereign: its existence and its equal representation in the Senate are bolted into the Constitution, and the federal government cannot abolish it. Scotland's powers, by contrast, come from the Scotland Act 1998, an ordinary Act of the Westminster Parliament that, under the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, Parliament could in principle repeal. That distinction, whether a middle-layer government holds its power by constitutional entitlement or by a statute the center can rewrite, is the whole lesson. You will learn the US reserved powers and the anti-commandeering doctrine, why a state cannot be abolished, and interstate compacts; then Germany's Laender and the Bundesrat, Canada's provinces under the Constitution Acts of 1867 and 1982, and Spain's contested estado autonomico; then the United Kingdom's asymmetric devolution and the sovereignty question at its heart. It closes with a map of federal, devolved, and unitary systems and a capstone: classify a real subnational government as entrenched-federal or devolved, and defend it from the primary documents. This course teaches how to read authority. It is not legal advice.