Devolution not Revolution?

Will the US end up looking like Belgium?

Today, California, Oregon and Washington responded to the furor about vaccines and the apparent disintegration of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) by basically agreeing to collaborate on their own “regional CDC,” enforcing vaccine guidelines for school children in their States. Helpfully, on the same day, the State of Florida took exactly the opposite tack, abandoning all vaccine requirements for school children. What is going on in this split-screen headline?

Some Americans will be surprised that the norm, not the exception, in most Western Democratic countries is a weak central government and strong local governments. These can be Provinces (as in Canada), States (as in Germany), Regions (as in Belgium), Cantons (as in Switzerland) or “nations” (as in the UK). In any case, they all have strong local governments with the national government responsible for a fairly limited set of issues, usually: national defense, the national (or in the case of the Euro) confederation currency, a central bank, and internal/regional commerce. Otherwise, everything from healthcare, education, transportation, land use and even what language is spoken, “devolves” to the regional government.

Belgium is a particularly stark example of this. The internal borders between the French, Flemish and Brussels regions are often clearly marked (these are the three administrative regions). Confusingly, three official languages (French, Flemish and German) don’t align with the regions and their areas are also sometimes clearly marked. In Wallonia, there used to be signs saying “vous depassez la zone de l’expression Francaise/you are leaving the French-speaking area.” This is also true in other countries such as Switzerland and Canada which have some unilingual provinces (Canada) or cantons (Switzerland) and some that are officially bilingual (New Brunswick in Canada and Valais in Switzerland, for example). In Belgium, the linguistic border is often more pronounced than the international border (Belgium neighbors The Netherlands, France, Luxembourg, and Germany). Indeed, many years ago as a foreign student studying in Belgium, I was astonished to learn that the oldest and arguably most prestigious university in the country (today Universiteit Katholieke/KU in Leuven and Universite Catholique de Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve) had divided itself into two totally separate entities along linguistic lines. Especially curious to me (I was doing library research and this was back in the dark ages when libraries had card catalogues), the centuries-old university library with books in many languages besides French and Dutch, had divided its multilingual library not by language but by call numbers; the even numbered books went to one campus and the odd numbered to another. Thus, when doing my research, I had to parse the books I was looking for by their call numbers and plan my day as “even or odd” since the two campuses were about a half hour drive apart (I don’t know if this is still the case). This is, of course, an extreme example of devolution but there are countless other examples, across the democratic world, of similar regionalization. Consider only the “national movements” of Quebec, Scotland or Catalonia, not to mention Flanders and Wallonia in Belgium.

Of course, one major difference between potential US devolution and that which exists in Europe and Canada is that the current situation in the US is less about geography, language and shared history (e.g. Flanders or Scotland) than it is about urban versus rural or at least, the regions of the US which do not conform to state lines, as Colin Woodard described in his American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (2011).

To return to today’s headlines about public health guidelines, in what may be emerging in the US, the three continental Pacific States (or at least, their coastal regions) may have more in common with, say, New England, than they do with their immediately adjacent Western Mountain state neighbors. Non-geographically contiguous devolution is thus likely to be harder to implement. Nevertheless, the extraordinary rupture between the current Federal and State governments, evidenced today in public health but extending to a great many other ares, may well result in precisely just such a devolution. Its worked, albeit not without much grinding of gears, in places like the United Kingdom, Canada, Belgium, Spain and Switzerland – who’s to say it wouldn’t work here?

Sources

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/us/rfk-jr-vaccines-western-health-alliance.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Woodard