What is the content of that collective function which consists simply in the organization of daily life? The Dutch, the Germans, the Swedes, the British, the Austrians, hold similar objectives and a similar view of this subject. For them, the responsibilities of the region and of local collectivities extend to areas such as health, the well-being of families, children and adolescents, the old and the sick; education; housing; fire-fighting; sports and recreation; museums and libraries; the physical environment and land use; roads and transportation. A Frenchman is stupefied by the richness of the authority granted, in all those countries, to powers other than the central government. And he may be even more stupefied that we have put up so long with our own backwardness, without reacting against it.
It is time. In the last generation, fundamental changes have occurred, of which institutions must take account. Efficiency begins, in our time, with decentralization. That is true of business. Roger Priouret characterizes traditional French business by the centralization of decisions in the hands of the boss, by its mistrust of competitive worth, even internally; by the taste for secretiveness: “Any enterprise directed according to those principles is assured of failing. The only way for business to succeed, to bring more services to the collectivity while consuming the fewest resources, consists in applying exactly opposite principles. That is what is today called management.”
This is even more true in the public realm. Centralization, whose arbitrator is the seal of state, divorces solutions from problems, and reduces that which is living to the dryness of the dossier. Today, it favors both waste and demagogy. From the moment at which a representative of the citizens is deprived of his responsibility by a hierarchy whose job it is to say “no,” there is no very loose bridle on the demands of the hierarch.
Decentralization, on the other hand, places its rope on creation through initiative, and equilibrium through responsibility. In a word, it makes citizens and their elected representatives more responsible for their actions, recognizes the merits of their efforts, and sanctions their errors and their failures.
Modern society, through its extraordinary communications technology gives us a unique chance to restore true democracy. With decentralization, effectiveness and democracy are rejoined.
This is not a miracle; both assume the importance of information, as essential to the proper exercise of power; both rest on a distribution of tasks which gives each person opportunities appropriate to his competency and his vocation. Decentralization avoids the obstruction of “centers” condemned by teeming problems, overwork, and congestion.
Finally, democracy, decentralization, and effectiveness, unlike the power of the state, express confidence in better informed and more capable human beings. To break the administrative yoke which paralyzes France, we need to adopt a new architectural plan, and to specify how it could be put into practice.
This plan must be general to be coherent. But the proposed organization should be neither theoretical, nor uniform. It must, to the contrary, be founded largely on experience; it must permit practical action arising out of free initiative to fill the gaps in the plan, to chance its fortunes on the inventive genius of life.
This is particularly true for the region. The principle of the region matured, in depth, in the life of the countryside, but the region cannot be the result of a sudden amputation from the whole.
The region is not made; it does not need to be made. It will create itself. At the same time, the natural food of initiative is the resources which permit it to exist. This is why no autonomy of local collectivities is possible without autonomous financial resources.
Reform will therefore be based on two principles.
- Redistribute to local collectivities a significant portion of financial resources presently monopolized ty the central government. This measure will not involve the creation of any new tax or the increase of any existing tax. The necessary supplementary resources will be released by a moderate and progressive surtax on the benefits which come to the central government through economic expansion.
- Reestablish the full powers of the citizen in the framework of his daily life, through the greater collectivities which represent him, which express his views, and work for him: local communities with enlarged responsibilities, associated through communal unions to cooperate in their new missions, with the aid of Departments, in the new framework of autonomous regions, centers of decision which would endow each province with its own structure and personality.
The countries which have a powerful tradition of local government have less need of regions between the central power and local collectivities, because geographic associations with initiative and common interests have been permitted to form spontaneously over the course of their histories. France, itself, could not have free local communities unless it accepted the necessity of intermediate public bodies constituting a level of administration and democratic government between the central authority and each of the communities, even if the later were associated in federations.
The question of the scale or the titles of these regional bodies is less important than their true autonomy. The Region is a logical choice, because it would have the means to be more powerful, to take over and continue responsibilities, powers, and financial resources.
The French ought to be able to govern themselves, direct their own actions, and make decisions themselves, without a guardian. They constitute France, henceforth to be a polity which is nothing other than its citizens.
(Le Pouvoir Regionale. Paris: Charles Grasset, 1971, Pp 68-71, 119-120.)