Which Is Better, the Unitary or the Federal System of Government?

Unitary State vs. The Federal State

Unitary vs. Federal

A unitary state government is one in which the state's entire affairs are overseen by a single central governing authority. A federal state government is one in which governing powers are shared between a central government and a local or state government(s). France offers us today an example of a unitary state, while the U.S. offers us an example of a federal state. To judge which type of government is better, one could look to these two examples -- but as neither appears to be ideal in its present-day condition (both are broke), this paper will instead look at the dynamic of both types of states to show why a federal state is preferable to a unitary state.

The unitary state solution is one that lends itself to the Weber-based system of modern bureaucracy, and for that reason is bound to lead to corruption, waste, inefficiency, slowness, and disconnection. Such, of course, is the opinion of this author -- but others do disagree: According to Macionis (2006), bureaucracy "is an organizational model rationally designed to perform tasks efficiently" (p. 120), one on which German sociologist Max Weber wrote a seminal work lauding the bureaucratization of society as a goal for the revolutionizing of public administration. Weber's ideal state was one in which a single authority (like a monarch) oversaw all aspects of a state -- except Weber's "monarch" was itself run by a system of oversights, ensuring that the central authority operated optimally and that its working parts performed as expected of them. Weber attempted to translate human affairs into a mechanical process and the state into a kind of business. No longer did the state have a king, who might be a philosopher/warrior/father-type, such as Plato identified in The Repbulic. The modern unitary state should have a central authority overseeing the laws and affairs of every village. There could be no such thing as local authority or responsibility unless that authority were taking its cues from the central overseers. One can see that the idea of personal responsibility (I must look after my town, my county, my village, my home) is given over to the idea of nanny statehood (I must do as the central government tells me, it will take care of me, and all I need do is follow its lead).

The federal state, however, allows for the local or individual state governments to conduct their own domestic affairs and set their own internal laws, while the central government looks more towards foreign policy. That is the case in theory, though in practice (as the U.S. has shown) the federal state appears very similar to the unitary state in all but name, which just goes to show how money corrupts politics (local governments will in many cases conform to the will of the central government in order to receive federal money). However, state legislation regarding marijuana is showing that the U.S. is still a federal state to a certain extent -- but that extent is a dubious one, as some states legalize marijuana yet the central government still considers it illegal (thus placing in a tricky position business owners and banks who wish to traffic in a good that local governments have deemed acceptable). Nonetheless, the federal state, when the central authority is not overreaching its mandate (which does happen quite often in the U.S.) does allow for a degree of local responsibility on the communal, grassroots level. For that reason, the federal state should be preferable to a unitary state, as it allows for the growth of personal responsibility in its citizens and fosters more of a personal relationship among locals, who must get together to hash out the laws that they will abide by.

No government is better than one which fosters virtue, however. The Founding Fathers of America were cogent enough to realize that man left to his own devices can tend towards a practice of selfish individualism. Thus they devised a system of governance based on checks and balances that would "ensure" that no one party or group or sector ever gained tyrannical control over another. A system had to be devised that would guarantee liberty for all -- because, as the medieval age had expressed, life is a war between two opposite tendencies: that which moves towards the good and that which moves towards the bad. The system of checks and balances was an attempt to stem the tide of movement towards the bad and to ensure that only movement towards the good would be possible.

However, Washington saw that the system could make no such guarantee, because legalism, the practical fruit of liberalism, itself the philosophical off-shoot of Calvinism, the root of Weber's bureaucracy philosophy (Ritzer, 2009), could easily be subverted by men who lacked virtue. Thus, Washington called for a tenable return to the virtue ethics of the old world: "Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue ?...It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government… Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct" (Washington, 1796). Thus, while it may be argued that the federal state is preferable to the unitary state -- it is so only so long as citizens practice virtue, as Washington advocated.