Left and Right, An Introduction to Decentralism
Throughout human history, there has been a persistent yearning among ordinary peoples to live under comprehensible social, political, and economic conditions that afforded them shared customs and memories, agreed-upon standards of right behavior, recognized status, security against brigandage and invasion, and reasonable prospects for achieving economic security.
For millennia, the most promising route to this happy condition was incorporation into a larger, centrally controlled entity that offered security and profitable commerce, at the price of political subjection and taxation. Hence, the subjection and incorporation of Gaulish tribes into the Roman Empire, the entrance of the mini-kingdoms of Dark Age England into the unified nation of Alfred; the creation by independent cantons and colonies of Switzerland and the United States; and the submission of Indian principalities into the empires of Akbar and Victoria.
But equally persistent has been backlash against centralization, whether voluntary or forced. At first, centralism may provide tangible benefits. But over time, local sentiment comes to believe that “they” at the Center are governing ignorantly or unfairly; “they” are in the grip of corrupt and greedy special interests; “they” think naught of our hallowed customs and traditions; “we” have little or nothing to say about it; “we” have been forced to send our wealth to the decadent Center, and give up “our” soldiers to defend its imperial frontiers. This centrifugal tendency was first described as historically inevitable by the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun in his Muqaddimah, published in 1377.
This anti-centralization backlash naturally takes many forms, depending on which sort of centralization is complained of. It often is described as “decentralism,” but that word generally connotes not so much a defined philosophy, as a label for arguments that sketch out resistance against the manifold ills caused by the centralization of power. Consider these varied examples of “decentralism”: the Lutherans who walked out of the Roman Catholic Church; the “Velvet Revolution” that peacefully separated Slovakia and the Czech Republic; the jealously guarded economic independence of Hong Kong from Communist control in Beijing; the secession of the Austrian village of Woergl from that nation’s failed national currency system; charter schools opting out of state public school systems; or naturopaths and ayurvedics rejecting the prescriptions of allopathic medicine.
To these examples must be added the secessionist Second Vermont Republic, whose adherents want to take the state out of George W. Bush’s American Empire. (Whether this secessionist ardor will survive a possible Obama presidency is an interesting question.)
All of these examples evince a determination of some group of people to “do things our way,” independent of control from the Center. History is rife with examples of cruel repression of decentralist movements – the Cathars come to mind – and, unfortunately, history is generally written to glorify the winners.
But despite the triumphs of Caesar, Alexander, St. Peter, Mohammed, Innocent III, Genghis Khan, Alexander Hamilton, Bismarck, J.P. Morgan, Lenin and Franklin Roosevelt, the Center rarely maintains its grip for long. And through the ages there have been numerous works written to explain, promote and defend the decentralist impulse that breaks down that grip.
This impulse tends to take two forms.
The liberal form tends toward the utopian: we’re doing all this wrong now, but there’s no reason why we can’t redesign our world to usher in an era of happiness and prosperity! This version places great faith in the good nature of common people and their capacity to redesign their world if freed from the annoying and costly mandates from the corrupted Center.
The conservative version, on the other hand, often offers a gloomy foreboding of creeping collectivism gathering all social, economic and political power to the Center, dragging society into a totalitarian dystopia. Somehow society must work its painful way toward mutually acceptable customs, governance, and ordered liberty.
The definitive universal work on decentralism, alas, has yet to be written. But here are a selection of works that together offer useful insights into the decentralist tendency.
Kirkpatrick Sale’s Human Scale (1980) is as close to a classic as can be found. The central point of Sale’s work is that when things grow too large, trouble inevitably begins. He examines the “burden of bigness,” what happens when bigness overpowers the human scale in society, economy, and politics, and how it can be countered. Sale, a veteran of Students for a Democratic Society in its glory days of the 1960s, observes that government breakdown leads to “a resurgence of locally based forms, most often democratically chosen and scrupulously responsive, that turn out to be quite capable of managing the complicated affairs of daily life for many months, occasionally years, until they are forcibly suppressed by some new centralist state less democratic and responsive.”
A work of special inspiration to me is Herbert Agar’s Land of the Free (1935). Agar was the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Louisville Courier Journal. His enthusiasm for a United States delivered from the evils of concentrated Finance Capital and its handmaiden Big Government is tied to the circumstance of the Depression years, yet the book exhibits a timeless Jeffersonian passion for distributed property ownership and protected liberty that, alas, is rarely emulated today.
Leopold Kohr is a name little known today, but his works have been published in at least five languages and have been an inspiration to many, notably Fritz Schumacher. Perhaps his most representative work is The Breakdown of Nations (1957). In it, Kohr points out that many of the world’s problems come from political entities that are simply too big, and that such entities will inevitably fragment. With great wit and charm, Kohr makes a good case for a world of small translucent mini-states where the human spirit can flourish.
E.F. “Fritz” Schumacher is celebrated as the author of Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973). Schumacher became something of a cult figure in the 1970s, pioneering intermediate technology and new patterns of ownership (influenced by the UK Scott Bader Commonwealth plan). His essay on “Buddhist Economics,” built upon a worldview of simplicity and nonviolence, was perhaps the most influential in this book, which is admittedly an uneven collection of lectures. George McRobie’s Small is Possible (1981) is an enthusiastic recital of people acting on Schumacher’s ideas. A later and similar work is Richard Douthwaite’s Short Circuit (1996).
Another German-born scholar with more libertarian leanings is Wilhelm Röpke. His most influential book is A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market (1958). Röpke is not an advocate of decentralism per se, but his courageous commitment to a free society fighting to survive against fascism, communism, and the suffocating welfare state shines through half a century after he wrote. He is much in tune with Catholic social thought, which has always feared great concentrations of secular power as destructive to the human spirit and human community. Another valuable Röpke volume is The Moral Foundations of Civil Society (1948).
Similar to Röpke in his concern for the effects of mass society upon the individual is the conservative American sociologist Robert Nisbet. His most-quoted work is The Quest for Community (1953), which analyzes the human urge to recreate meaningful communities when overrun by the forces of centralized mass society. A similar but more optimistic work is Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave (1980).
A classic work of anarcho-decentralism, one that exerted a powerful influence on such diverse thinkers as Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mao Tse-tung, is Peter Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899). Though dated and derived from Russian experience, Kropotkin’s readable and enthusiastic work paints a hopeful portrait of happy, self-sufficient, autonomous communities spread across the vast expanse of Russia.
Gilbert K. Chesterton was a renowned British author, a Catholic much influenced by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical De Rerum Novarum of 1895. He and his fellow thinker Hilaire Belloc founded a Distributist League to promote widespread ownership of property. Alas, the League never became a force in British politics, but Chesterton’s witty writing – What’s Wrong with the World (1910) and especially Outline of Sanity (1926) – made him a household word in the UK. Belloc’s most prescient work was The Servile State (1912), well worth reading today for its analysis of the development of industrial society toward a few rich owners, a larger middle class of skilled technicians, and a vast body of unskilled laborers whom the state must compel to labor. Allan Carlson’s Third Ways (2007) is a lively account of Chesterbellocian distributism and other family-centered economic movements. Especially interesting is his description of perhaps the most decentralist of all national governments, that of Alexander Stambolisky’s Bulgarian Agrarian National Union. It was in power (under desperate circumstances) from 1919 to 1923, and expired when Stambolisky was murdered by the Communists.
For a clear statement of criteria for a free society, and an antidote to rigid ideologies of both Left and Right, Henry Calvert Simons’ trenchant essay “A Political Credo” remains a classic. It appears as the lead chapter in his collection, Economic Policy for A Free Society (1945). While not an explicit plea for decentralism, it recognizes the importance of voluntary associations and distributed property, and the evils of collectivist centralization. If I were asked to recommend one short piece to a reader interested in acquiring a foundation for understanding U.S. social and economic policy, this would be that piece.
Modern political decentralists of the Left face a problem that does not much afflict their conservative counterparts. The Left is concerned that no self-governing locality makes doctrinal mistakes. Thus, Left decentralists tend to endorse lots of centrally established ground rules: no ecological damage, no racial oppression, full equality for women and gays, living wages and protection for labor, no Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, etc.
Right decentralists – sometimes grudgingly – agree that there must be some overarching rules to prevent grassroots tyranny, but they are darkly suspicious of a Center imposing ever-more-alien mandates on cultural communities seeking to evolve in their own way. For instance, the Right has little concern over locally prescribed manifestations of conscience, such as obligatory affirmations of faith and values, an established church, and exclusion of “undesirables” from civic life.
Two recent works from decentralist-oriented Leftist authors make serious efforts to avoid excessive centralist mandates upon local communities. Michael Shuman’s Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in the Global Age (2000) synthesizes the arguments for why communities should resist the temptations of globalization and instead strengthen their economies through locally owned companies, import substitution, new community financial institutions, and smart local policymaking. He makes the case, from a progressive political viewpoint, for devolving political and economic power.
America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy (2005) by my longtime friend Gar Alperovitz is a sweeping analysis of what’s wrong with modern-day America – globalization, financial concentration, opulence, imperialism, etc. – and makes a well-argued case for creating a “pluralist commonwealth” in its place. Alperovitz founds his argument on the need for universal state-guaranteed economic security, an expansion of civil society, and (surprisingly) the necessity of people having more free time. True to the socialist tradition, his prescription requires a redistribution of wealth enforced from the center, but it abandons the Leninist insistence of totalitarian control from the center by a correctly thinking vanguard. Alperovitz has been thinking on this subject for 40 years, and has a very creative and inventive mind. His wide-ranging book deserves serious attention even from those who believe that a government made powerful enough to achieve such redistribution will inevitably use its power for inhumane and destructive purposes.
Finally, I hope I may be excused for mentioning a homegrown volume, The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale, by Frank Bryan and me (1989). This (if I may say it) interesting work proposes to decentralize Vermont into some 40 self-governing shires, to which the state would devolve perhaps three-fourths of its present responsibilities. “Let forty flowers bloom” as an example to the nation and the world! With the passage of two decades, some of the policy discussion has become obsolete, but the basic decentralist philosophy and the description of the proposed Vermont of shires remains valid and – Frank and I still hope – inspirational.
This quick tour of decentralist thought necessarily neglects many valuable English-language works by such authors as Paul Goodman, Ralph Borsodi, Andrew Greeley, Louis Brandeis, Allen Tate, Wendell Berry, Arthur Morgan, Jane Jacobs, Edward Goldsmith, Ivan Illich, Henry George, James Warbasse, Michael Zwerin, Herman Daly, Morgan Doughton, and James Robertson. It also overlooks two authors whose indispensable writings celebrate, among other things, the decentralist vision: Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Jefferson.
Centralism’s apologists will always find an eager audience among those who seek to win supreme power, whether in government, finance, industry, labor, religion, education, and other arenas. The decentralist appeal to keep power and property widely distributed among people and communities has little appeal for the Alexanders, Napoleons, Hamiltons, Lenins, Mao Tse Tungs, and Nassers of world history. Thus, decentralism is never likely to become a reigning philosophy. Indeed, it is difficult to find any modern American politician who has made an explicitly decentralist appeal, untainted by the “states’ rights” defense of racial segregation. (The best recent candidate may be Ronald Reagan, but his accomplishments failed to match his inclinations and occasional rhetoric.)
But the decentralist tendency never goes away. Like grass growing up through cracks in aging concrete, the human urge to “bring things home where we can watch over them” is always likely to be with us. Perhaps the best we decentralists can do is constantly strive to give it room to flower.
…
This selection addresses the issue of secession of small states from larger ones.
“Secession Now (Maybe).” Fourth World Review: No. 81, 1997.
The world, it seems, is increasingly wracked with the demand for secession. The precipitous break-up of the former Soviet Union is perhaps the most spectacular disintegration of a great empire in world history. Bosnia-Hercegovina, tormented by brutal ethnic conflict, is currently the most newsworthy example, but there are many more. Secession is on the lips of the people of Chechnya, Euskadi, Corsica, Transdniester. Catalunya, Padania (the newly coined name for the North of Italy), Abkhazia, Ossetia, Scotland and Quebec. The surprisingly peaceful divorce of Czechia and Slovakia gave some hope to secessionists that the rulers of their nation states may see the wisdom of just letting dissenting regions slip away; but in most cases the advocates of secession are at least contemplating force of arms.
The Oscar-winning film Braveheart, recounting the tragic 13th century struggle for Scottish independence, can scarcely help but stimulate secessionist sentiment both in Scotland and elsewhere. The impact of the film is reminiscent of the motto of the 18th century Scots patriot Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, who courageously opposed the union of Scotland and England: ‘I care not who makes the laws, if I can write the songs.’ The secessionist sentiment is even alive, if not yet a major political force, in the United States. The Alabama-based Southern League is actively reviving the real and supposed glories of the Confederacy. People on both sides of the California-Oregon border are thinking wistfully about a new state of Jefferson. Their neighbours to the north, including some in British Columbia, are starting to think in terms of a self-governing eco-region called Cascadia.
The ideal state
All of these movements originate in an ancient notion: our people should have our own state. The 19th century liberal ideal glamorised, at least among intellectuals, the vision of autonomous citizens of diverse cultures and languages, united in ever-greater agglomerations. Its Marxist counterpart envisioned a world where class consciousness would supersede anachronistic loyalties to race, language and religion. Both ideals are now starting to feel the sharp insistent pressure of ethnic and cultural separatism.
This recrudescence of secessionism again raises questions that had once been
settled in favour of the giant multi-national states whose various citizens would gradually lose their cultural identities and become state and even world citizens. Chief among those questions is a redefinition of the ideal state.
Aristotle was perhaps the first among Western philosophers to focus on this question. Thinking of the Hellenic tradition of city states, he wrote:
A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one. Moreover, experience shows that a very populous city can rarely, if ever, be well governed: since all cities which have a reputation for good government have a limit of population. We may argue on grounds of reason, and the same result will follow. For law is order, and good law is good order: but a very great multitude cannot be orderly: to introduce order into the unlimited is the work of a divine power, of such power as holds together the universe.
Like Aristotle, philosophers and historians ranging from St. Augustine to Ibn Khaldun to Lewis Mumford to Arnold Toynbee to Leopold Kohr have recognised that a polity grown too large will come to exemplify what Kirkpatrick Sale has labelled the Law of Government Size: ‘Economic and social misery increases by direct proportion to the size and power of the central government of a nation or state.’ As history moves forward, in Toynbee’s apt metaphor, peoples everywhere will be subjected to ‘the slow and steady fire of a universal state where we shall in due course be reduced to dust and ashes.’
There are numerous formulations of proper size. Aristotle formulated it thus: ‘the best limit of the population of a state is the largest number which suffices tor the purpose of life, and can be taken in at a single view.’ That, however, is probably not a sufficient guide for the 21st century.
Human need
If one were developing a set. of criteria for a happy little polity, here are some pertinent considerations:
First the polity ought to be a place of broadly and deeply shared cultural values. As Yael Tamir puts it, it would be a ‘public sphere in which individuals can share a language, memorialise their past, cherish their heroes, and live a fulfilling national life.’ In addition, it would necessarily be governed through some sort of consent process by people like us’, not the overlords of the Kremlin, the British Raj or the dull-witted bureaucrats of distant Washington. Notwithstanding the appeals of liberal nationalists and Marxists, people have a human need to feel that they are a part of an enterprise which is operated by ‘people of my stock’, and in which they have an unchallengeable place, an unstifled voice, a respectful hearing, and an incontrovertible standing.
Second, it would be helpful if the polity coincided with some recognisable ecosystem boundaries. Such a congruence would help to emphasize the connection between humankind and land, and thus the importance of acting responsibly
toward that land. Ecosystems can, of course, be small, as in Swiss mountain valleys or the Gambia, or enormous, as in the Canadian Arctic or the Sahelian desert. An entire ecosystem does not need to be contiguous with a polity; but any polity that comprises two or more sharply different ecosystems is a polity which will almost inevitably feature cultural and economic differences that may prove debilitating or fatal. This problem is exemplified by the historic juxtaposition of the pro-Union small-farm Appalachian South versus the pro-Confederate plantation flatlands.
Third, a polity ought to be economically viable. This consideration raises important questions about the larger global and regional economy and the governmental attitude toward trade. A fully autarkic nation state, making do with its own resources, is now hard to imagine. Indeed, the last person to imagine it seems to have been the late unlamented Enver Hoxha; his determination to make Albania go it alone consigned four million of his countrymen to 40 years of pathetic 19th century poverty.
Social adjustments
At the other extreme, small polities can do quite well if incorporated in a large transparent free trading area, especially if that area can avoid centralised administrative bureaucracies like those of the overgrown European Common Market. As Kohr suggests, ‘the most sensible course is to decentralise, devolve, and dissolve (large nation states) into the lifeboat structure of a loosely linked free trading system based on… regional markets composed of easily manageable and even self-manageable small units.’
A special economic advantage of small polities was noted in 1960 by Simon
Kuznets. Keeping pace in a rapidly changing global economy, he observed, means facing continual stresses and dislocations. Because small nations have greater homogeneity and closer internal ties, they ‘may find it easier to make the social adjustments needed to take advantage of the potentialities of modern technology and economic growth.’ In other words, those who lose out in an economic process of unequal change have an agreed-upon social safety net to fall back upon; this is far less so in large multiethnic states. The virtues of national pride, spirit and energy may also invigorate the economies of small homogeneous polities more than they would a large heterogeneous country.
However, a world of fully independent Swiss-style canton-republics is not likely any time soon, even if those we amusingly call ‘world leaders’ thought such a model was a good idea. The best the world can hope for is probably a growing number of good federations. A good federation is one, like Switzerland, in which the social and political vitality of the component units is such that those who would naturally centralize more and more functions in the federation are thwarted, if not politically ostracized.
Unnoticed virtues
That happily seems to be a political philosophy on the rise in Washington, at least rhetorically. Speaker Newt Gingrich and his allies have taken up the banner of devolution, former Republican Presidential candidate Bob Dole at least intermittently extols the long unnoticed virtues of the Tenth Amendment, and ‘new Democrat’ Bill Clinton (the August 1996 version) signs a welfare reform bill ending a 61-year federal welfare entitlement, and announces with a straight face that ‘the era of big government is over’. This is scarcely believable on its face, but it is interesting that a President extremely responsive to voter opinion found it advantageous to declare that sentiment at the beginning of his re-election effort.
A federation of relatively homogeneous units that feeds lightly on, and interferes little with, the people of those units has a strong chance of success. A federation that becomes an ever-growing and costly burden on the liberties, energies, customs and livelihoods of its people can look forward to increasing demands for secession.
When grievances against the central government and a desire to re-establish a government responsive to the people become overwhelming, as for example in the Baltic states, Croatia and Slovenia, the most obvious remedy is secession and the creation of a new state. A less drastic remedy is regional autonomy within a federal structure. Yet a third variation, implemented in Estonia between 1923 and 1931, also deserves mention.
Ethnic government
This fascinating variant was called (regrettably) ‘corporate federalism’ by its inventors, 19th century Austrian economists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer. Its essence is dividing governmental functions among a caretaker central government and self-identified ethnic communities (in Estonia, Jews, Germans, Swedes, Russians, etc.) whose members are so intermingled that no geographical partition is feasible.
Under corporate federalism, the ‘mechanical’ functions of the state, such as transportation, postal service, water and sewerage, and central bank, along with the foreign affairs and defence, are carried out by the majority-dominated government (Estonians) and paid for by taxes collected from everybody. But the social and cultural ‘people centered’ collective functions – education, health care, museums, recreation, social services, etc. – are supervised for each ethnic group by a government chosen by that group’s self-identified membership wherever situated, and paid for with revenues raised from that group alone.
Corporate federalism is built on the idea that nobody much cares who manages the sewerage system, but in an intense multicultural society everyone cares whose cultural values are taught in the schools.
The Estonian parliament is reportedly moving toward restoring its earlier system for the benefit of the 35% of its people who are ethnically Russian, and who resent the idea of sending their children to schools where Estonian is the instructional language.
The tendency towards secession is growing. If it is to be curbed, central governments will, one way or another, have to start backing off. If those governments retreat into a sharply reduced role, at least with respect to governance of their own people, the impetus for secession will die out. If the friends of centralised government persist in clutching all power to themselves, then secessions will proliferate, with unpredictable and quite possibly far from salutary results.”