ABSTRACT
The question concerning whether federalism is a promising road to take to achieve the political accommodation of national pluralism within a liberal democracy remains an open one. This question has received an increasing research interest in recent years in the fields of political theory and comparative studies. Almost none of the multinational federations (or multinational regional states) is free from structural problems. Canada, India and Spain, to mention only three, have yet to achieve a satisfactory constitutional articulation which is acceptable to all parties in the cases of Quebec, Kashmir, Punjab, the Basque Country or Catalonia. This is in spite of the doses of constitutional asymmetry built into these cases.1
