Municipal self-government calls for the regions
In order to become, at last, the school of liberty which Tocqueville saw in it, the commune must become self-governing. But the means of this self-government—knowledge, technique and financial power—are in many cases beyond local resources, even where the Central Government does not cream off 80% of them. Must they be begged back from the State? No, because giving them with one hand it would claw back our self-government with the other. Whether it is a matter of having our school, of conducting our local struggle against speculators and polluters, of cleansing our rivers or of improving roads and railways without destroying our crops and our streets, the problem remains the same for neighbouring communes and the self-evident answer is an association of municipalities. Now this system finds its place and its formula in the “Region”, which it allows us to define, in a first approximation, as a cluster of communes, then, with slightly greater precision, as the combination of several associations of communes, each meeting the requirements of a specific field of action—schools, environment, transport, local planning, etc.—each bringing together those communes which desire it or need it, without committing the rest.
Local planning (amenagement du territoire) is only realistic on a regional level
According to one of the great geographers of the past century, Vidal de la Blache, “a region is not something which has to be defined, but something which we should recognize.” And what does local planning imply, if it is not a matter of recognizing these local and regional differences, and of trying to adapt the siting and development of urban housing and of industry to them, while preserving the environment and cultivation, so as to achieve optimum proportions between population and resources, agricultural area, areas to be built up and “unspoilt” areas.
It follows that this activity is pointless on a national level and only becomes meaningful on the level of the region, which it incidentally helps us to identify. But in that event the regional entity, a complex of functions carried on within a space which is limned by the very conditions required for their balance has the best chances of becoming a factor in the regulation and the harmonization of growth.
Let us assume that the region takes an entirely logical decision to use, so far as possible, its local sources of energy (coal, water, winds, sun) and that it adapts the nature and rhythm of its production to these sources. The extent of control by the central government will be correspondingly relaxed, wastefulness will decrease, and with it financial pressures and the need to keep on borrowing; there will be less in the way of publicity by the major State undertakings, therefore a better adaptation of production to the real needs of the consumers. This will replace the magical belief in unrestricted growth at any cost, which gives rise to permanent dissatisfaction on the part of the consumer population, and a permanent flight into the unknown on the part of producer industries.
The fight against pollution only becomes effective in a regional context
On a national plane, failure is self-evident. For we do not only have to fear the “omnipotence” of the State, where it should not exist (as in the case of censorship, for instance) but also, and still more, its impotence (motor traffic, multinational companies, pollution of rivers, the soil, the atmosphere, etc.). In all these cases the regional dimension or the continental dimension alone are operational. Ecological problems never correspond to the territory of a Nation-State. Pollution knows no frontiers, and our children are well aware of it. But we can also see that our ministers ignore it, because they regard State interests as more important, in absolute terms, than the “fussy statistics” of ecologists, who are exaggerating, as everybody knows.
The energy crisis argues for the regions
The West has learnt a great deal from the minor panic caused by the oil crisis in 1973-74. And in particular, it has learnt one thing: that the State collects up to 65% of the price of petrol (and oil) sold to industry and to garages, and is therefore the major beneficiary from any increase in the price of crude. This places it in a condition of partial dependence, economic and financial, on the Arabs. This danger provides the Nation-States with their best excuse for pressing their arguments in favour of nuclear power stations, put forward as the guarantee of a regained national independence. We have seen earlier what this “independence” is worth.
In fact the central Government is interested in nuclear power stations first of all as instruments of power. They would not merely ensure us monopoly over the production and distribution of energy, but give it a powerful lever for the manipulation of investments, and the best possible reasons for extending still further its preventive police supervision of everything and everybody—a raiding terrorist commando can arrive so quickly . . .
This situation, fraught with the gravest danger for our freedoms and for peace, calls for measures to conserve the human species and Nature as a whole—measures already being demanded by tens of thousands of associations for the protection of the environment, and by all those who are clear-sighted enough to see, in the present dissemination of nuclear weapons by three or four European States, the orderly and disciplined establishment, with suitably cautious guarantees, of the peaceful means to wipe out our species—these means being guaranteed peaceful, and profitable as well.
The principle of the conservation measures, which should be proposed, may readily be inferred from the state-national programmes we already know, by standing their objectives and main characteristics on their head.
The programme of the Nation-States is to build an unlimited number of ever-larger power stations, defined by decree as being in the national interest, and making it possible to reinforce continually the nuclear weaponry of countries which will have solemnly undertaken never to use it.
The programme of “environmental cranks” is to replace the major power stations, which the capital wanted to impose, by thousands of small-scale plants, rightly defined as being of local interest, using hydraulic, wind or solar energy, so as to enhance municipal and regional self-government and avoid state-national concentrations of power, while protecting the environment.
This programme involves the “regions.” It promotes them, in so far as it shows them to be necessary. Furthermore we see the regions coming into existence, through an exemplary dialectic, in the struggle against the big power stations.
The European Federation calls for the regions: they will create themselves in creating it
In the same way as the person needs the community in order to become real, in the same way as the commune needs the region, so the region calls for the European Federation.
I think I no longer have to prove that the Europe of the States is no more than a squared circle, a contradiction in terms, a “Misanthropists’ Friendly Society.” If the obstacle to Europe is the Nation-State, as the Nation-State itself has shown with a fine degree of consistency for the past three decades, its regional antithesis is today the bearer of all our hopes for a federation of our peoples, and not a coalition of their tyrants.
The World calls for the regions as an antidote to the European virus
As a colonial power Europe has spread, through the entire world, the formula of the Nation-State (of which 160 working models have been constructed) together with belief in the 2500 calories required every day, and the morbid desire to possess not only nuclear power stations, but a great many sources of pollution, as parameters of social status and of industrial maturity. It is therefore Europe’s duty, in these closing years of the twentieth century, to show through the living example of the regions that the Nation-State is an obsolete, murderous and colonizing formula, imperialist by its very nature.
Peace calls for the regions, as war calls for the Nation-States
The engine of political life is power, as soon as it is no longer freedom. If one wants power, one wants the Nation-State, that is, war. If one wants freedom, one wants the regions, that is, peace.
For it is clear that autonomous federated regions would make so-called national wars impracticable, that is, the wars declared (or simply started) by the Nation-States, through the voice of their governments, without their subjects ever being consulted. That is why the servants of the State and all those who share their tastes, which they mistake for the realities of life, refuse to consider, I will not say the possibility, still less the necessity, but even the concept of self-governing regions. That is Utopia, they say without even troubling to think. It is Utopia, indeed, since it would do away with war. “But there have always been wars” so they tell us.
There has not always been the H-Bomb. It exists nevertheless, and it requires that there should be no more national wars, if we want human history, or simply life itself, to continue.
But if we reject nuclear war we must, as a matter of urgency, discard and transcend our criminal Nation-States. They have just qualified for the death sentence, the penalty until recently for premeditated murder, by selling nuclear power stations and plutonium reprocessing plants to several Third World countries, which have no possible need for them, except in order to produce their own bomb. Everybody knows this, even our “Heads of State”. But everybody lies for all he is worth: it is a matter of creating jobs, safeguarding national prestige, protecting interests which are by definition legitimate, even if they are indefensible, etc.
Until 1976, the Nation-State was to be condemned as a usurpation of popular sovereignty, as a war machine, as a nameless and faceless tyranny, as an organ of decision-making generally unsuited to the realities of the twentieth century: too small to play a part on the world stage, too large to give life to each of its regions. Henceforth it is a self-confessed criminal. The irrevocable verdict is about to be returned. By signing contracts for the sale of bomb factories with several governments in North Africa, Asia and Lain America, the Nation-States of the West have signed their condemnation before history. They will perish dishonoured by the very thing they sold for the sake of prestige.
But if the Europe of federated regions disarms unilaterally, you will object, will that be enough to ensure that the other “great powers” soon follow suit? Nobody knows, but nobody has found a better way of inducing the others to disarm: it is hazardous, but it is the only way and the risk involved in doing nothing would be far greater.
Summary
- The need for the regions appears to be anchored in man himself, that is, in the requirements of the human person. The person calls for the regions and for freedom, without which there is no responsibility, in the same way as the selfish individual, feeling himself threatened, calls for the State and its power, which he accepts for the sake of security.
- The regions are the necessary and possible alternative to the Nation-State, or to put it in a different way, the present crisis calls for the regions, because it arises from a system whose engine is the Nation-State.
- The region has to be made: it is not given as a fact. It is not preformed in the heaven of ideas, but potentially alive in our needs and desires. In the same way as the person, which creates itself every day through its unforeseeable acts, it is never a finished product, it is always in the process of self-creation, always to be invented from day today as time goes on. The region lives and wants life, and that is why the Nation-State abhors it, being made only through war and for war.