Federalism as State Formation in India: A Theory of Shared and Negotiated Sovereignty
| Author | Lloyd I. Rudolph,Susanne Hoeber Rudolph |
| Published date | 01 November 2010 |
| Date | 01 November 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512110388634 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Corresponding author:
Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA
2 Ardmore Road, Kensington, CA 94707
[email: srudolph@midway.uchicago.edu]
Federalism as State Formation
in India: A Theory of Shared and
Negotiated Sovereignty
Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph
Introduction: Sharing, Layering and Contesting
Sovereignty; An Alternative to the Monopoly
Sovereignty Narrative of the Modern State
In the master narrative of the formation of the modern state, its unified, monopoly sovereignty is
presented as universal, the natural culmination of a teleological process. We challenge the natural-
ness and universality of that claim by historicizing the sovereignty concept. We do so by examining
the history of state formation in late medieval and early modern Europe. When, why and how
sovereignty concepts were constructed and contested are questions that engage the politics of cat-
egory formation.1 After historicizing the sovereignty concept, we turn to the study of federalism in
India as state formation process rather than studying it constitutionally or comparatively.
Federalism as we theorize it in the context of state formation is a way to share and negotiate
divided sovereignty. From our perspective, a federal state is an alternative state form. From the
conventional perspective of unified, monopoly sovereignty, a federal state becomes at best an
anomaly and at worst an aberration.2
Many stories can be told about sovereignty. One is by Hendrik Spruyt. In The Sovereign State
and Its Competitors3 he argues that there was nothing inevitable about the displacement of feudal
institutions by modern states.4 State forms in play in late medieval and early modern Europe
included sovereignty-seeking dynastic monarchies exemplified by France, self-governing urban
leagues exemplified by the Hanseatic League, and city states exemplified by the Italian city states,
Venice, Milan, Florence, Genoa. But Spruyt in the end succumbs to the ‘inevitability’ of the sover-
eign territorial state that he had set out to challenge. Invoking a Darwinian struggle for survival
among the variety of state forms he had depicted, he tells us that in a ‘subsequent selection phase
of institutional evolution,’ ‘sovereign territorial authority’ had ‘significant institutional advantages
over its rivals.’ According to Spruyt, it proved more successful in ‘organizing domestic society’
International Political Science Review
31(5) 553–572
© The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512110388634
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554 International Political Science Review 31(5)
(a euphemism for crushing regional and cultural differences), and in ‘structuring external affairs’
(a euphemism for waging aggrandizing wars).
A recent study by Joon Suk Kim, Making States Federatively: Alternate Routes of State
Formation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,5 challenges Spruyt’s ultimate embrace of
the received wisdom. Kim remarks that in the standard story of the formation of the modern state
the two dimensions, domestic society and external affairs, were closely interrelated, external strug-
gles spurring internal homogenization and vice versa. In the federatively formed states that he
studied this connection did not hold. While facing expanded geopolitical competitions in the 15th
and 16th centuries, they remained decentralized and continued to retain loosely integrated political
and institutional structures.
How was this possible? Some late medieval and early modern European states came to adopt
different, alternative strategies of state building in the face of mounting geopolitical pressures.
Decentralized or federative state formation was made possible by processes that integrated diverse
constituent units rather than organizing them hierarchically. Federative states provided ‘efficient’
or ‘rational’ solutions to internal order, economic activity and external security that enabled them
to survive and prosper.
Kim makes his case by reviewing the new historical analysis of the (‘German’6) Holy Roman
Empire, the Swiss Confederation and the Dutch Republic in the late medieval and early modern
period. They have been given scant attention in the existing state formation literature because they
have been regarded either as a non-entity (the Holy Roman Empire) or, in the cases of the Swiss
Confederation and the Dutch Republic, as exceptions of little significance. Kim regards this neglect
as mistaken in an era when many believe that the heyday of the modern state is over,7 traditional
territorial sovereign statehood has been ‘spontaneously’ relinquished for power sharing in supra-
national polities such as the European Union (EU) or the World Trade Organization (WTO), and
states are ‘failing’ in the face of challenges by sovereignty-seeking nationalities, sub-national
regions or minority ethnic groups.8
Kim draws on a fresh view among a new generation of European historians, that what happened
did not have to happen; that the imperial form need not have been extinguished.9 The presumption
that a polycentric Europe based on shared sovereignty, an EU, is a possibility has cast a new light
on predecessor models, such as the Holy Roman Empire. A conclave of scholars of the Holy
Roman Empire, assembled to reflect on the 200th anniversary of its disestablishment after Jena,
remarked:
Scholarly assessments of the Old Reich and its significance for the evolution of modern
Germany have undergone several transformations each shaped, to various degrees, by current
political agendas. While some have seen the Holy Roman Empire as a medieval anomaly
whose prolonged existence into the early nineteenth century delayed German national integra-
tion, with fateful consequences … others have seen the Reich as a model for polycentric gov-
ernment and regional diversity, even as a blueprint for the European Union.10
The loose federative forms of late medieval and early modern polities, damned by enlightenment
historiography as ineffective historical detritus, are once more read as relatively successful in their
time. Kim writes:
What needs to be stressed here is that these federative political organizations were created as
a result of conscious and deliberate efforts to cope with intensified geopolitical competition.
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