It is natural, when thinking of democratic federalism, to begin with the classic and most successful examples – the United States, Germany, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, India, and even the more economically underachieving ones of Brazil and Argentina – and to assume that designing a federal state is a well-understood exercise of finding a suitable balance between regional autonomy and federal authority. But focusing on such examples obscures the fact that of seven European federations of the last decade of the twentieth century (Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Russia, the USSR, and Yugoslavia), three (Czechoslovakia, the USSR, and Yugoslavia) no longer exist, one is hardly guaranteed to remain democratic or federal except in name only (Russia), and another (Belgium) is arguably surviving as a linguistically divided state largely by virtue of its position as the bureaucratic “capital” of a nascent federation, the European Union. Add to this the fact of the American Civil War, Canada's struggle with Quebec separatism, the bloody conflicts that plagued the Swiss Confederation in the first half of the nineteenth century, India's descent to virtual despotic rule under Indira Gandhi, the earlier near disappearance of meaningful Australian federalism, wholly dissolved or disrupted federations (e.g., Mali, Uganda, Cameroon, British West India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Ethiopia), and Europe's often bumpy road to integration, and we can only conclude that the requirements of a successful design are neither trivial nor well understood.