Ковалева Маргарита Шагеновна

At the moment, the definition of federalism remains a controversial issue. In numerous scientific works devoted to a federal state, there are certain aspects of the topic under study. However, today, there is no holistic understanding of the evolution of the concept of "federalism". The complexity of determining what constitutes a federal system, as well as identifying the basic principles of federalism, is not an easy task, because during evolution this term was assigned a fairly wide range of meanings, depending on the discipline and views of the researcher studying this phenomenon. If we consider federalism in a narrow sense, then there is a risk to set conditions so narrow for a term that it will be impossible to give an example that satisfies these conditions. At the same time, too broad a definition threatens to cover a huge number of different examples, so comparing them will not give positive results. Thus, the purpose of this study, based on an analysis of the evolution of the theory of a federal state, is the identification of the basic principles of federalism.