Two Sovereignties, One Compact

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

Federalism does not ask which government is supreme. It holds that neither is, within its own sphere. The idea is older than any one state: the Old Swiss Confederacy bound member communities together without erasing them, and by the mid-fourteenth century the Swiss cantons were already governing themselves this way. But the theory that gave the arrangement its modern force came out of a single, urgent argument. Essays written to defend a proposed constitution that many Americans thought asked the states to surrender too much, and collected as the Federalist Papers, argued that a federal government need not choose between serving the union and serving its parts. Each level would hold a sphere the other could not simply override, guaranteed not by the goodwill of the centre but by the founding compact itself, the written constitution the states were being asked to ratify. That compact theory, not the confederacy that came before it, is what nations from Germany to Nigeria still build on.