ABSTRACT
Federalism is currently ‘in the air’ in Europe. To be sure, it has suffered some dramatic reverses. The very modest reference to the ‘federal goal’ of European unification that was included in the draft treaty debated by the European Council at Maastricht in December 1991 roused fierce opposition from the British government and was finally deleted from the text. The fate of the Maastricht Treaty itself is, at the moment of writing, still in doubt. Meanwhile, at the other end of Europe, the Federation of the Soviet Union has finally collapsed after a life of sixty-nine years; it was formally wound up in the same month as the Maastricht meeting. In south-east Europe the Yugoslav Federation disintegrated amidst bloodshed in the course of 1991 and 1992 with the secession and international recognition of Croatia and Slovenia and civil war in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Only the federal rump of Serbia-Montenegro remains. In east Central Europe a third federal state, that of Czechoslovakia, is currently under severe strain, and may well fall apart in 1993.
