Federalist in the context of "Cyrenaica Transitional Council"

There is ongoing discussion about the extent to which the European Union (EU) has already turned from a confederation (a union of sovereign states) into a federation (a single federal state with a central government, consisting of a number of partially self-governing federated states) over the course of decades, and more importantly, to what degree it should continue to evolve in a federalist direction. As of June 2024, the EU has no formal plans to become a federation.

Since the 1950s, European integration has seen the development of a supranational system of governance, as its institutions move further from the concept of simple intergovernmentalism and more towards a federalised system. However, with the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, new intergovernmental elements have been introduced alongside the more federal systems, making it more difficult to define the EU. The European Union, which operates through a hybrid system – thus often described as sui generis – of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism, is not officially a federation or even a confederation, although many contemporary scholars of federalism view it as a federal system.

The Coudenberg group (Dutch: Coudenberggroep, French: Groupe Coudenberg) was a Belgian federalist think-tank, it was named after the place where the members met, the Coudenberg, one of the seven hillocks on which the centre of Brussels has been built. President of the organization was the lawyer Jean-Pierre De Bandt.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (/ˈpruːdɒ̃/, also US: /pruːˈdoʊn/; French: [pjɛʁ ʒozɛf pʁudɔ̃]; 15 January 1809 – 19 January 1865) was a French anarchist, socialist, philosopher, and economist who founded mutualist philosophy and is considered by many to be the "father of anarchism". He was the first person to call himself an anarchist, and is widely regarded as one of anarchism's most influential theorists. Proudhon became a member of the French Parliament after the Revolution of 1848, whereafter he referred to himself as a federalist. Proudhon described the liberty he pursued as the synthesis of community and individualism. Some consider his mutualism to be part of individualist anarchism while others regard it to be part of social anarchism.

Proudhon, who was born in Besançon, was a printer who taught himself Latin in order to better print books in the language. His best-known assertion is that "property is theft!", contained in his first major work, What Is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government (Qu'est-ce que la propriété? Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement), published in 1840. The book's publication attracted the attention of the French authorities. It also attracted the scrutiny of Karl Marx, who started a correspondence with its author. The two influenced each other and they met in Paris while Marx was exiled there. Their friendship finally ended when Marx responded to Proudhon's The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty with the provocatively titled The Poverty of Philosophy. The dispute became one of the sources of the split between the anarchist and Marxist wings of the International Working Men's Association. Some such as Edmund Wilson have contended that Marx's attack on Proudhon had its origin in the latter's defense of Karl Grün, whom Marx bitterly disliked, but who had been preparing translations of Proudhon's work.

The commercial state concept (and its important variant, commercial society) is sometimes associated with Adam Ferguson's concept of civil society and refers to a government or political state devoted primarily to the promotion and advancement of commercial interests. Ferguson, Adam Smith and other representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment (and who referred to themselves as the literati) were more likely to use the term commercial society. The underlying idea of the commercial state can also be linked to the American School of Economics (and in particular to the legacy of the political and economic approach of Alexander Hamilton). In its modern manifestation, national, state and local governments which pursue business and commercial development and other forms of economic and industrial development through tax policies and forms of positive incentives and inducements may properly be termed commercial states. Practical commercial state activities include governmental economic development efforts including encouraging plant relocations, tax rebates, zoning easements and assorted other incentives and concessions.

Several lines of thought and action (e.g. Mercantilism) run from ancient Greek and Roman philosophy through Ferguson and Adam Smith. They can be traced through the Federalist party of Alexander Hamilton and more recently Austrian economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Frederick Hayek. An essentially commercial view of the state has continued down to modern theorists including Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard, who argue not only for a limited role for government, but also that that residual role is heavily commercial. The modern U.S. Republican Party and Democratic Party in the U.S. both include significant factions of commercial state adherents, although commercial state rhetoric is usually much more evident in the former. (See, for example, discussions of Reaganomics in Ronald Reagan and the U.S. Republican Party.)

General elections were held in Italy on 5 and 6 April 1992. They were the first without the traditionally second most important political force in Italian politics, the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which had been disbanded in 1991. Most of its members split between the more democratic socialist-oriented Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), while a minority who did not want to renounce the communist tradition became the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC); between them, they gained around 4% less than what the already declining PCI had obtained in the 1987 Italian general election, despite PRC absorbing the disbanded Proletarian Democracy (DP).

The other major feature was the sudden rise of the Northern League (LN), a federalist party that increased its vote from 0.5% of the preceding elections to more than 8%, increasing from a single member both in the Chamber and the Senate to 55 and 25, respectively. The "long wave" (onda lunga) of Bettino Craxi's now centrist-oriented Italian Socialist Party (PSI), which in the past elections had been forecast next to overcome PCI, seemed to stop. Christian Democracy (DC) and the other traditional government parties, with the exception of the Italian Republican Party (PRI) and the Italian Liberal Party (PLI), also experienced a slight decrease in their vote.