linguistic:voice_change
Europe vs. the United States

In Europe, "federalist" is sometimes used to describe those who favor a common federal government, with distributed power at regional, national and supranational levels. The Union of European Federalists advocates for this development within the European Union, ultimately leading to the United States of Europe. Although there are medieval and early modern examples of European states which used confederal and federal systems, contemporary European federalism originated in post-war Europe; one of the more important initiatives was Winston Churchill 's speech in Zürich in 1946.

In the United States, federalism originally referred to belief in a stronger central government. When the U.S. Constitution was being drafted, the Federalist Party supported a stronger central government, while " Anti-Federalists " wanted a weaker central government. This is very different from the modern usage of "federalism" in Europe and the United States. The distinction stems from the fact that "federalism" is situated in the middle of the political spectrum between a confederacy and a unitary state. The U.S. Constitution was written as a replacement for the Articles of Confederation, under which the United States was a loose confederation with a weak central government.

In contrast, Europe has a greater history of unitary states than North America, thus European "federalism" argues for a weaker central government, relative to a unitary state. The modern American usage of the word is much closer to the European sense. As the power of the U.S. federal government has increased, some people have perceived a much more unitary state than they believe the Founding Fathers intended. Most people politically advocating "federalism" in the United States argue in favor of limiting the powers of the federal government, especially the judiciary (see Federalist Society, New Federalism).

The contemporary concept of federalism came about with the creation of an entirely new system of government that provided for democratic representation at two governing levels simultaneously, which was implemented in the US Constitution. In the United States implementation of federalism, a bicameral general government, consisting of a chamber of popular representation proportional to population (the House of Representatives), and a chamber of equal State-based representation consisting of two delegates per State (the Senate), was overlaid upon the pre-existing regional governments of the thirteen independent States. With each level of government allocated a defined sphere of powers, under a written constitution and the rule of law (that is, subject to the independent third-party arbitration of a supreme court in competence disputes), the two levels were thus brought into a coordinate relationship for the first time.

In 1946, Kenneth Wheare observed that the two levels of government in the US were "co-equally supreme". In this, he echoed the perspective of American founding father James Madison who saw the several States as forming "distinct and independent portions of the supremacy" in relation to the general government.