While I can see your point, I can’t agree in total. Certainly the first 13 states formed a union but after that it gets sketchy. Some states like Texas and Hawaii, definitely joined, but others were in fact carved out of territory 100% controlled by the federal government and they didn’t form anything. They had much less rights until they became a state.
So it’s a matter of semantics.
As the OP of the thread, I was looking for state generally regarded as independent. This can be open to question, as Taiwan is, in fact, de facto independent, but not universally recognized as such. Others like Kosovo and Somaliland also share that. So one could make a case that Taiwan has a lot of independence from China but that’s not really what I was looking for.
I wouldn’t considered the EU or the Commonwealth of Nations as examples either. But then again, there’s no harm in discussing them.
I disagree with Canada’s nomination. The federal government in Canada cannot intervene in cases where the constitution gives the provinces exclusive powers, but anything else is fair game. And it also has full taxation powers, which gives it some leverage in many areas.
In the United States, as I understand it, it’s the other way around: the federal government can’t legislate on matters that were not explicitly given to it by the constitution. Its power of taxation is also limited.
Our provinces have a lot of autonomy, but only in those areas so designated in the constitution. For instance, the Criminal Code is federal so you don’t have different provinces each deciding what constitutes first degree murder, second degree murder, manslaughter, etc.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. But that’s not how it works. The Supreme Court has twisted the Constitution enough that Congress has pretty much unlimited powers, whether on legislation or taxation. Everything under the Sun can fit either under “interstate commerce” or under “general welfare”.
I’m not sure if you are including autonomous regions such as Hong Kong, China and Kurdistan in Iraq. Bosnia and Herzegovina is barely a unified country, with three component regions. Belgium, also divided into three parts, is only slightly more unified – after the last election, it took about a year to form a national government, but this caused minimal disruption to people’s daily lives.
This is more great debate fodder than general question, but as a historical point, the Supreme Court has greatly reined in the application of the Interstate Commerce Clause in the past few decades. Prior to 1930 or so, it was rarely used and federal power was somewhat limited.
While you could make an argument that most anything can fit under ICC or general welfare, it doesn’t mean you’ll win. See US v. Lopez or US v. Morrison.
If the ICC interpretation had continued to expanded, I agree that state autonomy would have waned along with it. Whether you think that’s totally a bad thing or not is a YMMV.
But as it is now, the individual states have a fair bit of autonomy from the Federal government and from each other. They can set their own laws (in a lot, but not all areas), taxes, voting and legislative structure (somewhat). They can set professional license requirements that limit who can legally perform an occupation in their own state (which affects me, so I’m biased). Hell, they can bring lawsuits against each other or even the Federal government.
Still, the UAE looks like a good bet to answer the question. However, its kind of comparing apples to oranges. The UAE was a planned federation of individual principalities that were/are located in a geographically condensed area that had almost two decades to set in motion how their country was to be governed vs. the US in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s where it had to be made up on the fly and in a hurry and where the far reaches of the nation were thousands of miles apart. Geography itself can be a big factor into how a country opts to govern itself. But I’m rambling here.
FATA actually is not a province or a district it’s a territory and it has little autonomy, unlike acme other areas. it is pretty much run as a fiefdom the Civil Service.
Not that I want to disagree with the general thrust of your post, but the borders of the US as laid out in the Treaty of Paris weren’t exactly “thousands of miles apart”.
I worded it poorly but I really meant that the distance from the northern border to southern border was “thousands of miles”. It does appear to only be about 1500 miles though. Point taken.
For comparison sake though, it looks like the total square mileage ceded to the US in the Treaty of Paris was 830,000 square miles. Compare that to the United Arab Emirates at just over 32,000 square miles.
Having grown up in the US and lived for over 40 years in Canada, I am going to disagree that Canada is more centralized than the US. When California wants to make it legal for local people to grow and use marijuana that never leaves the state, the federal DEA will come and arrest them. When Quebec wants to make it illegal to hire a construction worker or contractor from Ontaril or New Brunswick, the federal government cannot force them to allow that.
Now I don’t know about the UAE. The fact that they have a common passport surprises me and maybe the do constitute a very decentralized country. But someone mentioned Switzerland and there is no doubt it is a country. I have lived there for parts or all of three years and learned some suprising things. The first time I was there, I was told the Federal government runs the railroads, the PTT and the army. They also control the currency. The most surprising thing is that Swiss citizenship is entirely under the control of the cantons. When a student of mine accompanied me to Zurich, but was denied a visa, he was advised to stay for three months as a visitor in Zurich and then move to the neighboring Canton of Aargau for three months as a visitor there and then come back to Zurich for another three months.
As far as citizenship, the real step is to beome a citizenship of your local community (Gemeinde in German, communautee in French). This is where you have to advertise to see if anyone objects, demonstrate mastery of the local language, etc. Once they accept you, the Canton rubber-stamps it and then the Federal government rubber-stamps that.
Are we making a distinction between the de jure and de facto situations? I think that de jure, the US is a very loose collection of strong states under a limited federal government, and Canada has a much stronger federal government with a small set of specific powers devolved to the provinces. De facto, the US federal government has the states on short leashes, while the Canadian federal government is unwilling to intervene in a number provincial affairs.