ABSTRACT
Thomas Kuhn (1962) has used the term ‘paradigm’ in scientific discourse to refer to, amongst other things, a conceptual, or theoretical, framework, a model, or a problematic. In the ongoing theoretical literature on federalism, the term ‘paradigm’ has acquired a specific meaning, which should be explained for our purpose here. When looked at historically, federalism has so far been conjoined to liberalism, social welfarism and socialism. At origin though, federalism flourished in liberal conditions because individual liberty was the sine qua non of federalism too. Remarkably, federalism has adapted itself to social welfarism. There is apparently no conflict between federalism and the welfare state because ‘in multi-ethnic federations, social policy may serve as the cement for reducing the depths of political cleavages’ (Obinger et al. 2005: 6). This means that a certain degree of functionality of the social interventionist state in maintaining federalism in multi-ethnic countries is to be recognized. However, the consensus today is that there is a paradigmatic shift for federalism. Watts (2008: 4) expresses this shift when he says that ‘we appear to be moving from a world of sovereign nation-states to a world of diminished state sovereignty and increased interstate linkages of a constitutionally federal character’.
