Transnational Federalism: Problems and Prospects of Allocating Public Authority Beyond the State

Today it is widely accepted that the international system is undergoing rather dramatic changes—changes that have a strong impact on the status and role of the state as the once-sole political entity vested with the power to exercise sovereign public authority (Hoheitsgewalt). This unique status of the state, characteristic of the so-called classical period of the international system, began to be modified in the era of the international organization of states that gradually overlaid the classical international system in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. State independence increasingly gave way to interdependence and institutionalized cooperation. Interestingly though, the growth in the number of universal and regional international organizations during the first half of the twentieth century was not seen as beginning a process of federalizing the international system. Under the influence of state sovereignty—the leading paradigm of the classical period—federalism was not a matter of international