Abstract
This contribution explores how federalism is employed for multinational state-building and sheds light on the topic of federalism and ethnic relations at large. The specific objective is to explain fundamentals as to the functioning of some federal systems subsumed in the category of multinational or ethnic federalism. This contribution demonstrates that no global theory of federalism exists and that federal systems encompass also states that formally are not called federations. It explains how federal theory interprets ethnic and territorial federalism, and ethnoterritorial federalism, and it discusses state formation and its implications for multinational state-building. This framework is applied to different world regions and to the analysis of rationales and peculiarities of federal and decentralized systems with ethnic elements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In conclusion, this contribution identifies three common and novel traits among ethnic federal systems, namely, that most are a recent creation and have yet to give sufficient attention to the shared-rule element of federalism, that they have only recently shifted from mono-ethnic conceptions of the state and nation to a multiethnic or plurinational recognition, and that this recognition of difference and the associated holding-together federalization process tend to result in an asymmetrical federalism.