ABSTRACT
Assignment of specific duties either on a territorial or a functional basis, imposes a difficult task on the political leadership: to differentiate, however flexibly and approximately, between general, collective issues to be handled by the central authority, and special or territorial ones to be taken care of by either functional agencies or noncentral territorial authorities. The history of all great empires is full of examples of crises precipitated by provincial lords who used their territorial power for the purpose of capturing the central imperial authority or of successfully seceding from it. The processes of decentralization and territorial association by consent or conquest may be expressed graphically. In communist Eastern Europe, where the problems of ethnoterritorial or dispersed ethnic communities have traditionally been sensitive issues, the otherwise clearly unitary constitutions guarantee the autonomous development of those communities.
