Power the Centre Can Take Back

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Devolution looks like federalism from a distance and behaves nothing like it up close. Both hand governing authority to a regional body, and both let that body legislate on matters that concern its own territory. The difference is what backs the arrangement. A federal system's division of power is constitutional, which means changing it usually requires something harder than an ordinary vote, an amendment, a supermajority, sometimes ratification by the very units whose power is at stake. A devolved territory's authority rests on an ordinary statute passed by the central legislature, the same kind of law that created the devolved body in the first place, and what an ordinary law creates an ordinary law can amend or repeal. That is not a hypothetical risk; it is the express legal position in every devolved system, including the United Kingdom's. Spain complicates the picture without erasing the distinction: its regions now hold so much practical authority, with the central government accounting for only about a fifth of public spending, that observers sometimes describe it as federal in substance. But Spain remains constitutionally unitary, which means that substance, however extensive, still rests on power the centre gave and could, in principle, take back.