La organización territorial del Estado austríaco¿un caso de regionalismo o federalismo unitario?

Abstract

The Constitutional order of the Republic of Austria, after the collapse of the Hapsburg Monarchy, involved the relationships of the central state authority to the individual Länder into which the was divided from the beginning as a continuation of the territorial structure of the Empire. Article 2 of the 1920 Federal Constitution organized Austria as a federal state consisting of nine independent Länder, The Austrian federal state had an extremely centralist quality, so there have been serious doubts in Constitutional Theory as to whether Austria is correctly designated by its constitution as a federal state, or on the contrary is a mere decentralized central state. However, during the seventies Austria, for several reasons, experienced trends towards decentralization which went far beyond just the relationships between the federal government and Länder and which manifested themselves largely at rather different societal levels.