SUMMARY:

In his commentary on the article by Olivier Beaud, Andrei Zakharov suggests a more radical reconceptualization of federalism in its relationship to the concept of sovereignty. Zakharov claims, that while Beaud proposes to rethink federation as different from the state, he still retains a notion of undivided sovereignty, which is derived from a specific European continental tradition of political thought and ignores the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Zakharov contends that the conceptualization of relations of authority based on the secularized Catholic concept of the subsidiary keeps European continental political thought from radically turning to the notion of divided or shared sovereignty. Zakharov suggests that the serious analysis of federation and federalism is incomplete without this turn.