Subsidiarity and Federalism: An Old Concept with Contemporary Relevance for Political Society

Introduction Historically human societies have never collectively organized, politically or socially, in any singular, standardized and/or universal way. Beginning with the Peace of Westphalia in 1647 the nation-state gradually proliferated as a legitimate manifestation of collective human organization at a global level. This proliferation has culminated in the standardization of a singular means of mobilizing and organizing human societies. The statist age that began in the 16 and 17 centuries consolidated and centralized the political power of the state. Divergent factions and regional power blocks within European states were discouraged, as politics became centralized at the national level. The proliferation of the nation-state represented the standardization of human political organization according to a single model. Given that there are, and have been, a variety of means by which humans identify and organize politically, this suggests that this universal acceptance and entrenchment of one model may be somewhat inappropriate. However, federal political systems offer the opportunity to accommodate these divergent political realities. In a federal political system governance and authority are held and exercised at different levels of government some powers are held by the central, national, government and some powers are held by the social and/or political units that are constituent parts of the whole nation. In so far as the world is organized into nations with a central, unitary, level of government which represents aggregate wholes of vast multitudes of communities it is doubtful that the nation-state model would have the capacity to accommodate for differences in cultures and political realities within