The federal state is what?

The federal state is a complex political and administrative entity that has territorial entities in its composition. The latter have fairly wide legal powers, up to sovereignty, close to the state.

The most common features of a federative state are :

1. Territorially, the federation is divided into separate entities: states, cantons, lands, republics and so on.
2. The federal subjects have the rights to adopt their own laws, the constitution, they can have their own legislative, judicial and executive bodies.
3. However, the supreme legislative, judicial and executive authorities concerning the entire state still belong to the federal bodies. The competence between the subjects of the federation and its center in each individual case is delimited by the union constitution.
4. Most federal states have both general union citizenship and citizenship of federal subjects.
5. The main national foreign policy activity can be carried out only by the allied bodies, which officially represent the country at the international level.
6. The federal constitutional state, as a rule, has a bicameral parliament. One of the chambers of the parliament is assembled from representatives of the regions of the country.

Types of the federal state

There are several variants of such politico-administrative formations. So, for example, there are symmetrical and asymmetrical federations regarding the constitutional-legal system. A symmetrical federal state is a state in which all its territorial entities have the same constitutional and legal status. For example, the United States, where all states in this sense are equal to each other. And, on the contrary, subjects of asymmetric federations can differ in their powers. This is the situation in Brazil and India.

Among other things, federations can initially be formed for various reasons. And, depending on these historical conditions, their following varieties are formed:

• Territorial federal state. These are the states whose administrative division is based purely on geographical features. Such, for example, the United States and Germany.
• National federations - here the very reason for the division of the country into administrative subjects lies in its multinationality. And then the division of the territory necessarily takes into account the factor of compact living of peoples. Actually, such a principle lies in the federal structure of Russia.
• Mixed.

By the method of education, they can be contractual and constitutional. If the contractual ones arise from smaller, previously independent countries, to solve common problems: protection, effective economic activity, and so on, the constitutional federal state is often a former unitary state that at a certain historical stage has been transformed in its administrative-territorial division.