The changing faces of federalism is an extraordinary book that provides a rigorous and original view of what will be the future of the European Union. It describes and discusses the tradition and the institutions of federalism in the Eastern, Central and Western European countries and deals thoroughly with many innovative issues about federalism such as multi-level-governance, network government, devolution, subsidiarity, asymmetry and functionalism.

A fundamental assumption of the book is that the European enlargement and the new European constitution could result in two major evolutions in the future: one is a full federal state in the traditional hierarchical sense, the other is an institutional response to the effects of the technological innovations of our epoch, which would be established through the insertion of the European Union within the emerging broad network of local, national, continental and intercontinental bodies at world level.

Sergio Ortino is Professor of Economic Law at the University of Florence and at the European Academy in Bolzano/Bozen, Italy. Mitja Žagar is Senior Reseach Fellow and Director of the Institute for Ethnic Studies and Associate Professor of Comparative Government and Ethnic Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubliana, Slovenia. Vojtech Mastny is a member of the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Essen, Germany, and Research Associate of the Woodrow Wilson International School for Scholars in Washington DC, USA