Federalism is the acceptance of an irreducible difference between the will of the whole and the will of the parts. As an alternative to sovereignty, it is a way of understanding and practicing the relationship between multiple political entities, where the accent is placed on the autonomy and direct participation of the members of the federation. Parallel to the denied request of centralism, the response is the creation of a network of sectorial agreements among the federated members, in a dynamic of coordination of autonomous parts …

For about one century, European political and juridical thought has concentrated on the crisis of the State. In the 1920s jurists like Carl Schmitt and Santi Romano attempted to restore the necessary historical depth to the State, against the dominant trend in the social sciences, which confined it strictly to the territories of jurisprudence and political science. The State, as a concrete organization, produced by the social activity of man, had to be brought back to earth, recognizing its relative, variable character …

We are witnessing a general crisis that impacts both the order in which national parameters of citizenship are defined, and the modern concept of citizenship itself, as a homogenous status enclosed in given territorial and political-juridical boundaries, increasingly challenged by today’s migrations. This trend impacts the configuration of the typically 20th-century labor market, as well as the better-known forms of politics and democracy. Europe, from this viewpoint, represents a special example. The dual citizenship – national and European – introduced by the treaties …

The constitutions of the last 200 years have been the “loftiest” product of those social formations we call States. Having abandoned the universalism that had spread at the origin of modern constitutionalism, the state dimension has represented the perimeter within which to think about and then to attempt to guarantee constitutional rights. The concrete constitutional machine comes into play, on the one hand, to absorb the constituent, “terrible” power placed at the basis of order but always extending beyond its institutional boundaries …

Over the last fifteen years Latin America has represented a true laboratory. With this term, we refer to experimentation with political and constitutional forms capable of innovating the modern tradition, with a potential to be shifted into other contexts. In many countries, from Argentina to Brazil, Venezuela to Uruguay, Ecuador to Bolivia, we have seen the emerging of major popular, youth and native movements that have favored the advent in government of experiences of radical reform, short of determining the opening of true constituent phases …

A strategy of rights suited to times of crisis of representation. This is the perspective we want to investigate. If we look back, we realize that the forms of modern democracy in the Western countries are essentially configured on the basis of the principle of representation. In the 20th century political parties were the means that channeled the interests of the demos inside the sphere of the kratos. A representative democracy, then, but also a State of parties. The direct expression of the people could function as a counterweight, legitimizing – on election day …