Canadian Confederation created a federation, not a confederation
Canadians celebrate Confederation every 1 July, yet by modern definitions their country is a federation, and a notably decentralised one. In 1867 the word simply meant joining together. Today political scientists reserve confederation for leagues of sovereign states, a looser and historically less stable arrangement that tends to tighten over time.
A confederation is a union of sovereign states, usually created by treaty, to handle shared problems such as defence, foreign affairs, trade or currency. Members keep their sovereignty, so they are generally assumed to retain a right to leave, though legal rules or creeping centralisation can make exit hard in practice. The eighteenth-century philosopher Emmerich de Vattel argued that states could bind themselves in a perpetual league without any of them ceasing to be a complete state.
The weakness is built in. The central body is typically a council of member governments whose decisions must then be implemented by each state, so they work more like interstate agreements than laws binding individuals, and they often require unanimity. That limits effectiveness, and pressure tends to build for a stronger federal system, which is what happened in the American, Swiss and German cases. Member units can be republics, such as Serbia and Montenegro in their short-lived state union from 2003 to 2006, or monarchies.
Canada's Confederation refers to the Constitution Act of 1867, which united three British North American colonies into a self-governing dominion under Sir John A. Macdonald, with other colonies joining later. At the time the word carried no sense of a weak centre. Belgium runs in the opposite direction: once unitary, it became formally federal in 1993 after reforms beginning in 1970, and scholars such as Patricia Popelier describe it as a federation with confederal traits, thanks to extensive regional autonomy and linguistic veto powers. Most of its parties operate within a single language community.
The European Union defies easy labels, resembling both a confederation and a federation and sometimes called a supranational union. When Valéry Giscard d'Estaing chaired the drafting of an EU constitution, British opposition kept the word federal out, replaced by Community or Union. Most major groups in the European Parliament favour a federal model, while the ECR group, including Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy, argues for a confederal Europe of sovereign states.
Source: Confederation
