Modern fantasy/scifi seems to not feature many federal countries (or as we will call them, “federations”)—that is, countries made up of several subunits such as states or provinces, each with certain powers that are distinct from those of the central government. (If a central government has total control over a country, and its subunits or provinces are merely administrative tools of the central government, this is called a “unitary state.” The “districts” in The Hunger Games come to mind.) Yet a federal design gives worldbuilders lots of opportunities for cool setting details and plot conflict.

I live in the United States, and some of my fellow Americans might assume that federations pretty much work the way things do in the U.S.: the states join together as co-equal partners under the federal government, with the same privileges and rights (that is, our federalism is symmetrical), initially for the sake of mutual defense against an outside threat and later to participate in the growing power of the strong federal government. (Alfred Stepan calls this “coming-together federalism.”) In fact, only a handful of federations were formed via coming-together federalism: the United States and Switzerland (which predated the French Revolution), and New Zealand (which did not last long as a federation).

William Riker argued that federations with a weak central government tended not to last long. They would be preyed upon by external enemies, lose internal cohesion as the subunits pull away from the central government and each other, or else decide to strengthen their central government in response—as the U.S. did, when we replaced the Articles of Confederation (which featured a weak central government heavily dependent on the states for its revenue) with the Constitution (featuring a much stronger Federal government with its own taxing power and laws).

(We can see some of these tensions working in real time in Europe, as the E.U. attempts to increase its control over member states and some states resist bitterly, with the U.K. leaving the E.U. altogether.)

If a federation has a strong central government, meanwhile, the central government tends to accumulate more power over time. As Riker put it, “If a federalism is centralized, then the ruler(s) of the federation have and are understood to have greater influence over what happens in the society as a whole than do all the rulers of the subordinate governments. And, having this influence, they tend to acquire more.” Eventually, it might dispense with the federal form altogether and restructure as a unitary state, as New Zealand did.

(This is comparable to the dynamic between a Palace ruler and a Nobility in the model of Samuel Finer, which I wrote about in my first worldbuilding book.)

But that is only one way to do things. (Which is great news for worldbuilders, because it means we have a great set of flexible concepts to make interesting settings with.) Following Stepan, we can actually talk about three ways in which a federation might form:

• Coming-together federalism;
• Holding-together federalism; and
• Putting-together federalism.

Moreover, there are many other possible federal or quasi-federal arrangements other than the symmetrical model. Daniel Elazar lists several, which we will discuss a bit later. First, let’s look at the different ways a federation might form.

Coming-Together Federalism

Riker argues that when a federation is formed among formerly independent states, it only remains a federation if it’s in the interest of both the political organizers and of the states. On the side of the organizers, they should want to expand their power over the states (perhaps over the other states, if the federation is spearheaded by one or two of the stronger states), but not be strong enough to do so by force. If they were strong enough, they would simply conquer or annex the states and form an empire, with a unitary government. (Stepan partly disagrees, as we will note below.)

On the part of the states, they need to have a sense of their own independent identities (or they would simply join into a larger empire), but should want the benefits of federation more than they want to remain independent. Most frequently, this includes protection from external attack, but also the opportunity to benefit from the federation’s increased power—especially the power to invade foreign neighbors!

If the federation ceases to be in the interest of the organizers, or of the constituent states, Riker says, then the federation eventually collapses—either because the states pull away, or because the central government breaks the federal bargain and becomes a unitary state.

Holding-Together Federalism

In another pattern pointed out by Stepan, a formerly unitary country may decide that some sort of federal structure is needed to prevent the country from breaking apart altogether. This could happen if the state is made up of several ethnic or linguistic groups in tension with each other—whether they have coexisted in one country for centuries, as with Belgium, or were more recently glued together, as with India. To preserve the country as a whole, the political regime is willing to transfer some of its power to the subunits (even if it has to create the subunits from scratch, as India frequently does).

Stepan points out that federalism seems to be the government structure best able to preserve the stability of a multinational country, because it best allows smaller communities to exercise their rights as communities. “In fact, every single longstanding democracy in a territorially based multilingual and multinational polity is a federal state. . . . [S]ome groups may be able to participate fully as individual citizens only if they acquire, as a group, the right to have schooling, mass media, and religious or even legal structures that correspond to their language and culture. Some of these rights may be described as group-specific collective rights. Many thinkers in the liberal tradition assume that all rights are individual and universal and view any deviation from individualism and universalism with suspicion, but this assumption is open to question.”

Putting-Together Federalism

Contrary to Riker, Stepan notes that some nondemocratic states, seeking to expand their power over their neighbors or actually conquering them, will preserve the conquered states in a federal arrangement. This is especially likely when the conquered states have their own durable national identities, similar to the holding-together model. Preservation of the federal subunits often allows for smoother administration of the absorbed territories, and makes submission to the conquerer somewhat more palatable to the conquered. Thus, federation can be a type of empire-building strategy.

The most prominent example was the Soviet Union, through which communist Russia dominated the formerly independent states that had broken away from the collapsing Russian Empire. The USSR recognized the linguistic and ethnic pluralism of its vast territories via the separate socialist “republics,” though Russia was unquestionably the top dog and extracted much wealth and resources from the peripheral republics.

(This model is partly replicated within modern-day Russia as well. Moscow treats Russia’s outlying provinces effectively as conquered territory, sucking up their wealth and manpower to benefit the elites.)

Different Varieties of Federalism

We mentioned above that not all federations are symmetrical—not all of the subunits have the same powers and privileges as each other. This is where we have tremendous scope to be creative.

Daniel Elazar noted, “The simplest possible definition [of federalism] is self-rule plus shared rule. Federalism thus defined involves some kind of contractual linkage of a presumably permanent character that (1) provides for power sharing, (2) cuts around the issue of sovereignty, and (3) supplements but does not seek to replace or diminish prior organic ties where they exist.” He lists several types of federal associations between states, aside from the symmetrical federation:

Before the United States Constitution introduced the modern style of federalism, Europe only knew of the confederation. In a confederation, the constituent states still mostly govern themselves, joining together only for limited purposes (usually mutual defense and foreign policy).

In more recent times, new flavors have developed. In a federacy, a larger and smaller power join together in an asymmetric relationship. The smaller power has more autonomy from the federal arrangement than the larger power, or existing subunits of the larger power if there are any; in return, it also has less influence over the governance of the larger power. Real-life examples include Arab Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, Serbia and Kosovo, or the United States and Puerto Rico.

An associated state arrangement (also called a “compact of free association”) is similar to a federacy, except that either member can unilaterally decide to pull out of the arrangement (rather than needing mutual agreement). Consequently, the member states have even less influence on each other than under a federacy. Examples include the United States and Micronesia, and (for a time, until they withdrew) the U.K. and several of its former possessions in the Caribbean.

Common markets are confederations that focus on economic cooperation, rather than broader political cooperation—such as the Caribbean common market, CARICOM. That said, a common market can sometimes act as a precursor to broader political unions, with the key example being the European Economic Community’s transmogrification into the European Union.

We can also usefully compare federalism with a different political model, the consociation, in which a country is divided not into territorial subunits, but into religious, cultural, ethnic, or ideological groupings, each with its own privileges. Elazar comments, “It is generally agreed that consociational regimes are based on the agreement of elites, each of which must be capable of maintaining control over its own segment in the grand coalition. Thus the segments have to be organized internally on hierarchical lines but governed by the people selected to be at the top.” This is a common strategy where a country is subject to dangerous tensions between communities that must nevertheless figure out how to coexist.

For example, Lebanon features a power-sharing agreement between its Sunni, Shia, and Maronite Christian communities, under which all three must agree on major policies and the appointment of political leaders. Moreover, it has been agreed that the president must be Maronite, the prime minister must be Sunni, and the speaker of parliament a Shia. Consociational arrangements are often more fragile than federal ones, as the Lebanese example shows; but that is often more the fault of the existing tensions between communities that consociationalism is meant to manage.

****

Summing up, we have a whole range of ways in which political units can associate with each other. We can also imagine ways in which the federation members might come into conflict. Subunits might demand more autonomy, or one subunit might block a national policy that other subunits might want, or vice versa. Independence movements might strengthen in a subunit based on linguistic or national identity, if the larger federation does not adequately respect the community’s desires. And on and on.

As a worldbuilder, can you think of ways to use these concepts to make your story conflicts more compelling?