One might expect the lower levels of government in a federal
system to act independently of the upper layers. The lower levels in a
devolved system may be expected to negotiate a local interpreta-
tion of national policies within a framework of national statutory
guidance. In decentralised systems the local bureaucrats would
merely interpret national policies according to local circumstances. In
confederal systems the upper tier would be expected to act accord-
ing to a consensus of the views of the lower tier.
In practice, in all systems, some measure of co-ordination, co-
operation and negotiation between levels seems to emerge. Thus
American writers on US federalism have tended to use the term ‘co-
operative federalism’ to indicate the extent to which state authorities
have tended to co-operate with federal policy initiatives partly in
order to obtain access to large subsidies from the federal budget.
Conversely, realistic analysis of the way government bureaucracies
work suggests that even career national bureaucrats have to be
motivated to implement central policies. At the extreme a part of a
central bureaucracy may be so much under the influence of a local
‘mafia’ that national policies conflicting with local interests may be
ignored, as in Italy (Banfield and Banfield, 1967). Conversely, as in
the former Soviet Union, nominally independent state authorities
may be under the almost total political control of a centralised
political party (Schapiro, 1965). The EU is a classic example of the
fuzzy relationships that can emerge between levels of government.
European political institutions
The growing importance of European institutions for so many
countries and their unusual nature, compared with the parliamentary
and presidential models discussed earlier, justifies some further
discussion here. By ‘European institutions’ is meant those associated
with the European Union. However it should be noted that there
are also many separate international bodies which may cover more
of Europe. These include the European Court of Human Rights, the
European Parliamentary Union and technical bodies such as the
European Laboratory for Particle Physics based at CERN.
It is also worth relating the likely future of the European Union to
some of the themes introduced earlier in this chapter and in Chapter
5 on Processes. The European Union is an interesting example of the
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