Unitary Vs Confederate Government

The government is the formal institution through which a land and its people are ruled.1 However, many different countries have many different ways of organizing their system of government. In the United States, we are said to have a federal system with two sovereigns. Federalism is the halfway point between a confederacy and a unitary system. These three systems all differ in the way things are decided and more importantly who makes these decisions. The confederate system is a system in which states retain sovereign authority except for the powers expressly delegated to the national government.1 This means that the central government has no power that the states have not given them which in turn means that whatever the states say goes.

Comparatively to the original constitution, the Confederate Constitution retained far more than it changed. However, these changes portray the system of government it was to look like. The Confederacy was to be founded on the principle of the sovereignty of the states. The preamble to the Confederate Constitution was the phrase "We, the people of the Confederate States, each state in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent Federal Government."3 The version employed by the Confederate delegates emphasized the sovereign and independent character of states and the association of individuals with them, and made it clear that the government of the Confederacy was being created out of the sovereign power of states. Consequently, the central legal issues with which the members of the Confederate Congress concerned themselves during the Civil War were issues connected to the conduct of that war. Taken together, the issues demonstrated the need for Confederate policymakers to impose a superstructure of federal military power over the local and state institutions whose autonomy had been emphasized in the Confederate Constitution. Although that superstructure was necessary to the Confederate war effort, it was periodically resisted by members of the Confederate Congress, who retained their commitments to the interests of their own states and their theoretical

France provides an excellent example of what this sort of government would look like when acted out. The minister of education was once able to look at the time and be able to say what each child was learning at that moment.1 In addition, Nigeria provides an example of a unitary system. Both in its first (1966–79) and second (1984–99) phases, military rule in Nigeria was defined by the subordination of the federal structure to the soldiers’ unitary command system, with the army headquarters deploying officers to the states as governors or administrators like any other routine military appointment.4 This meant that the local governments were all overseen by the central government. The Federal Military Government could make laws for the peace, order and good government of Nigeria or any part thereof with respect to any matter whatsoever. Such laws routinely included clauses that barred the judiciary from investigating or invalidating any actions of the military. Instead, military-facilitated administrative tribunals, which often co-opted members of the bench and bar, usurped many of the judicial functions of government, while the regular judiciary suffered neglect, manipulation, humiliation and intimidation.4 These