In the context of liberal theory and practice, federation refers to a distribution of state power to various levels. Federal systems such as the one adopted by Canada consist of a national government, based in Ottawa, which devolves certain powers to provincial and territorial governments, which in their turn devolve powers to the municipal level. Statist federations have the purpose of integrating disparate elements into a single state formation. Again, Canada is typical, in that its structure hopes to bridge differences that are linguistic (French vs. English), regional (West, Centre, East), and national (European/French/English, Indigenous, ethnicized ‘minorities’).
While this mode of federation does generate a certain amount of autonomy, it
does so only while preserving the fundamental characteristics of the system
of states. A province can choose which capitalists it will allow to rape the
land it controls, but it will have a hard time choosing to reject capitalist
exploitation as such. And, of course, a province is itself a state structure,
which means that it cannot do anything at all to address state domination.
The federations in which we are interested are stateless, that is, they work
from the ‘bottom up’ rather than the ‘top down’, or
they strive to eliminate the top/bottom dinstinction entirely. Examples of relevant
theory and experiments can be found within various traditions, most notably
those of anarchism and Native American Political Theory .