Decentralisation and Territorial Reforms in France: How Constitutional Constraints Impact Strategies for Reform
Résumé
The debate on the right balance to strike between constitutional rigidity and flexibility and on how to organise relations in multilevel systems has become a problem for governments and a major object for academic research in federal states. One of the common beliefs in federal countries is that unitary states have chosen to be constitutionally less stable but more flexible in exchange for a lesser protection of minority rights or of certain territorial interests. Unitary states are supposed to be gifted with more resilient constitutional structures which in turn favour their capacity to adapt to change.