Efficiency in the Multinational Federal Republic

In this paper, I address the division of competences and the selfdetermination of stateless political communities in a less parochial and more holistic way than they have been addressed within political philosophy. To do so, I will attempt to clarify the meaning of Pareto efficiency principle, which stipulates roughly that the well-being of one individual cannot be improved at the expense of another. As I go along, I will try to show how the approach adopted here is distinct from the redistributive and libertarian views. I will argue that liberal philosophers who have discussed redistribution and fiscal federalism have been guilty of approaching these issues through statist and redistributive paradigms inherited from Rawls and his theory of justice (1971). As the capacity of regions to effectively pursue justice depends not only on the ‘basic structure’ of federations, but also on external factors of which many are encompassed by the term ‘globalization’, sub-units need federalism to divide competences in a way that gives them the means to be efficient in delivering public goods and services to their constituencies. I then show the link between this plea for a division of competences that improves peoples’ democratic capabilities to have efficient institutions and the republican ideal of non-domination. I conclude by suggesting that this combination will likely result in asymmetrical federal arrangements which are more likely to increase the size of governments, contrarily to what ‘competitive federalism’ theories predict.status: publishe