Abstract

For someone who for many years has been working on federalism, decentralization and other aspects of spatial politics from a critical rather than conformist perspective, the (re)discovery of federalism by critical research and scholarship can only be welcome. More recently, the focus of this critical scholarship has been on three main and interrelated areas of inquiry: on a critique of what has been labelled the “conformist federalism” of intergovernmental relations; on the prospects of a democratic federalism in the post-Maastricht European Union; and on the principle of “subsidiarity” as the conceptual as well as institutional linchpin for such a decentralized federalism.