It is the states who create the units, but the Federal government provides most of the funding. There are complex rules regarding makeup and organization, in particular a percentage of guard personnel must also be members of the appropriate federal reserve branch (army reserve or air force reserve). Units that do not follow the rules cannot be designated as national guard, and get no federal funding. States may create separate state defense forces, and many have, but these get no federal funding and tend to be relatively small.
National guard units may be called up in time of local emergency (usually due to a natural disaster such as flooding) by the state governor. In theory the state is responsible for funding in this sort of activation. When units are activated by the federal government the federal government pays the bills. Routine expenses when not called up are mostly paid by the federal government. Most of the small part paid by the states has to do with housing. Since almost all of the actual military equipment is provided federally, there is considerable uniformity of equipment, which is highly desirable when units get deployed as part of the federal armed forces.
To a large degree, national guard organizations are seen by the states as pork barrel projects, i.e. a large amount of federal money gets pumped into the local economy by them with little funding required by the state.
To a foreigner, there may appear to some tension between the federal military and the state national guards. But there isn’t any to speak of. The question of federal control of the military has long since been settled. For almost all purposes, the national guard is a reserve organization of the federal military.
Spain is a very asymmetrical semi-federal system. Some autonomous communities - particularly the poorer and monolingual ones - have little power. Places like Extremadura or Castilla-la-Mancha, for example, rely on the central government for funding. I think education is a devolved matter, but little else is.
Then you have a second tier of autonomous communities. These are generally the ‘national regions’, for lack of a better word. Places like Valencia, Catalonia, Galicia or the Balearic islands. While they still tend to get their money from the central government, they also have almost full control of education - often to encourage the use of local languages - and have the right to establish their own autonomous police forces.
Finally you have the two foral communities: the Basque Country and Navarre. These have historically been quasi-independent, and since 1978 this has been recognised in the Spanish constitution. They have the same powers as the ones mentioned above, such as control of the education system or their own police. However, to that they add taxing powers: rather than getting their money from the central government, they tax their own citizens, give a small portion of that money to ‘Madrid’, and then keep the rest to themselves. If I remember correctly, health care is also fully devolved. When my Basque grandmother moved to Mallorca, she kept complaining about the island’s health care system, which was apparently terrible compared to the Basque Country’s ‘osakidetza’.
But I imagine that even the Basque Country and Navarre have very little power compared to what Dubai has within the UAE, for example.
People may think of Dubai or Abu Dhabi as independent, but they don’t think of Ajman as such… since they have never even heard of it. They are certainly not independent countries on a world scale as they share the military and central bank with the rest of the Emirates.
Thanks for this, but it misses the point I was making. I wasn’t trying to say that it’s unclear how the federal and state military powers interact. What’s unusual about it, from the Canadian perspective, is that the states have any military power at all.
In Canada, the military power is exclusively with the federal government. It’s not that the provinces have chosen not to create militias or military units; it’s that they lack the constitutional authority to do so. A provincial law creating a militia would be unconstitutional.
So, if one’s asking whether US states or Canadian provinces have more power, the military power of the US states, even though subordinate to the federal power, is a power that the Canadian provinces lack.
What about self-imposed limitations on power? Canadian provinces and US states have a lot of powers in common, but the states often bind themselves up with entrenched constitutions, bicameralism, independent executives, mandatory referendums, and municipal home rule, just to name a few things. Of course, a state can’t restrict the use of a power without having it in the first place, but the provinces at least appear to wield their powers more effectively. Something like the forcible amalgamation of Toronto would be impossible in quite a few states, even though local government is something states are responsible for organizing.
I think that when the OP talks about states with “the most power”, they mean “the most power relative to their own federal government”. Though if we instead consider power in a wider sense, the USSR presents an interesting example. It was formally constituted as a federation of fifteen republics. Two of these republics, the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, were granted their own seats at the United Nations (alongside the seat already allocated to the USSR proper), with full voting rights. This made them, in some sense, the most powerful states of any federal country, since they were the only subnational states in the world able to directly participate in diplomatic and foreign policy decisions at the highest international levels.
Though these two states were powerful, they did not exercise this power independently. The government of the USSR was highly centralized, and the central Soviet government always tightly controlled the actions and voting of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian delegates.
As I recall, during the debate over repatriating the constitution Trudeau (the older arrogant-er and gone one) tried to ram his version through the house and ignore objections from the provinces. Among other tactics, the Governor General of the day (Schreyer?) mused about possibly refusing to assent. Various forms of pressure persuaded Trudeau to change his mind so it never came to that.
In high school our history teacher mentioned that the constitution for Canada deliberately placed most power in the hands of the provinces. What was not specifically enumerated for the central government fell to the provinces. This was a combination of negotiations among a group of colonies - like the 13 colonies down south, jealous of their current prerogatives - and a British desire not to create an excessively strong rival in the Empire. They did logically centralize things like armed forces, criminal laws, and import duties, but a lot else falls to the provinces.
The Federal government in time learned the American golden rule - he who has the gold, rules. The central government gets its way by paying for it, except often in the case of Quebec who prefers to take its ball and bat and stay home rather than play nice… so we have a Canada Pension Plan and Quebec Pension Plan, and there’s one province AFAIK that runs a separate income tax system, and so on…
I assume that even by 1867 the chaos of laws in multijurisdictional USA was apparent to the drafters of the BNA act.
The Fathers of Confederation were trying to create a strong union, stronger than the US one, which at that time was being torn apart by the Civil War and whose survival was still in doubt.
As part of that approach, they gave the residual power to the federal Parliament, which has exclusive jurisdiction over “… all Matters not coming within the Classes of Subjects by this Act assigned exclusively to the Legislatures of the Provinces.” So if it’s not in the list of provincial powers (s. 92), then it falls to federal jurisdiction. This is the opposite of the 10th Amendment to the US Constitution, which says that if something is not expressly assigned to the Congress, it is retained by the people or the states.
Now, the list of strong federal powers was considerably watered down by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, but that does not affect what the historical record indicates, that the Fathers of Confederation favoured a strong central government. Macdonald in particular would have preferred that there not be provinces at all, only the national government and regional/municipal governments subject to federal control.
Possibly. Viscount Haldane, who wrote a lot of the judgments emphasising provincial powers, has been referred to as “the wicked step-father of Confederation.” But that’s a criticism from the centralism perspective. There are those, particularly in Quebec, but also elsewhere in Canada, who support the Privy Council’s approach to interpreting the provincial powers broadly.