The conditions of a society on a human scale
Tyrants have always hated the estates, corporate bodies and communities. To remove these bodies and communities would ruin the state and turn it into a barbarous tyranny.- Jean Bodin.
I believe in the unique quality of small nations. I believe in small numbers. The world will be saved by the few. – Andre Gide.
For a society on a human scale
We have now reached the time, foreseen by Proudhon, when the nation-states of Europe, because of the decay of the set of values on which they were founded, are almost certain to collapse. The most serious problem for the Europeans confronted with their downfall, is to make sure that internal upheavals and civil wars will be avoided, and to secure a smooth transition, without foreign intervention, from the Second Europe to the Third. It is our belief, as it was Proudhon’s, that the original nations and ethnic groups which had been destroyed and assimilated by the nation-states of today, will greet their disappearance and the dawn of the new order as a liberation. But an essential task of education still remains. The millions of subjects, whom, thanks to their schools, national service and brainwashing, the nation-states have managed to reduce to unquestioning obedience and called “citizens,” will have to be enlightened.
The breaking-up of Europe into smaller political and administrative units of comparable size and power is the only way to achieve a successful federation. It will also make easier, because of the breaking-up of the sources of power and sovereignty, the debunking of the myths that have kept public opinion under their spell for so long. Being nearer the centres of power and called upon more often to take part in the processes of government, the unquestioning drudges will become responsible citizens again. We cannot count on the unitary and centralized nation-states, nor their leaders or hirelings, to remove the poison they have so consistently instilled into their public opinions, nor to reform the teaching in their schools and universities. Interpretation of history, analyses of the present and plans for the future must be freed of all conformism and official orthodoxy. Most of the hitherto accepted economic, political and social notions must be questioned. It would be too much to expect those who profit by the present order to show such revolutionary zeal, nor its doctrinaires to renounce their favourite dogmas.
It will be the task of those “mediocre groups” or “life size” communities, which will have to be created anew if they are no longer available. They alone, associated within a larger, expandable unit, can nourish and safeguard the freedoms that spring from democracy and make culture flourish. They alone, within the framework of a political organization which would be vastly superior in size and power to the nation-states of the Second Europe, can answer the needs of modern economy without endangering freedom.
Power and government must be divided
To question the usefulness of the sacred cows the European nation-states have become, and to attack their taboos, pare down their sovereignty, rectify their wayward frontiers, share out their governmental powers and privileges, still seems sacrilegious to many. The task of reeducating public opinion comes up against the overwhelming inertia and conservatism fostered by the police, the administration and the whole political, intellectual and military establishment of those states. Nowadays all the governments and political parties of the right or left, without exception, including the socialists and communists, keep proclaiming as an act of faith their axiomatic acceptance and unconditional loyalty to the institutions of the nation-state. All are hidebound by the system and the most reactionary type of conservatism, because the reform of European society cannot be divorced from the reform of the whole structure of the state and, first of all, the elimination of the dogma of the absolute sovereignty of the state in internal and international matters. These governments and parties cannot fail to understand that the centralized nation-state has outlived its usefulness, but they refuse to consider the remedy and to question the unitary structure of the state they rule, or hope to rule one day. Public opinion is beginning to feel though—however dimly—that the rulers are more interested in keeping the oppressive state machinery intact than in liberating the peoples, and the ascendency of the political parties is already on the wane.
Power to govern at any level—local, regional and national, can only be wielded by political institutions with the aim of solving the practical problems they were created to deal with. None of these agencies can be identified with an individual, a people or a nation. Their only purpose is to serve them. The state is not the supreme goal towards which all political life must tend. It is not there by divine right to rule over obedient subjects. When the time comes for the democratic states to join a European federation, they will not have to give up their sovereignty, because they have not any. Only the fascist and totalitarian state is sovereign. Peoples have the power to create governments and states to serve them. Nations exist before governments and states and remain independent of them. The French, Spanish, British and Russian states cannot do anything about the fact that Breton, Basque, Welsh and Georgian nations exist; they have no right over them. To create the new Europe by diversifying its political cells at the base and regrouping them into a higher federation will not result in the destruction of France, Spain, Russia, Great Britain and other states. The aim is only to create above them new political institutions which have become necessary, and below them to give back to social and political entities the administrative powers they enjoyed before they were usurped by the states for the furthering of their power politics.
The state is not the nation
Sovereignty has become diversified over the centuries. Cities were sovereign at one time; the Swiss cantons are still sovereign. Small areas and few inhabitants help the practice of pure democracy. Everywhere, parts of sovereignty have been entrusted to larger political units: local, regional, provincial and national. This hierarchy of power is required by human evolution, but the higher organization should at no time assume the use of powers which are not indispensable to the fulfilling of its functions. Therefore sovereignty must not be concentrated but remain divided. Popular sovereignty can be respected and true democracy put into practice only if the practical problems are dealt with by the relevant agencies and at the right level, i.e. local affairs by local authority, economic and social affairs by economic and labour organizations, regional affairs by regional authorities, national affairs by national authorities, and international affairs by international authorities.
The sovereignty of a democratic state only exists insofar as it has been delegated to it by the community, to protect the lives, liberty and possessions of its members. If the state is incapable of fulfilling the functions that have been entrusted to it by the community, it can be changed and removed. This is the meaning of the phrase: “Rebellion is the most sacred of duties.” So the democratic state protects to the full the free use of a number of basic freedoms: freedom of the individual, religious freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of education, freedom of association, freedom of communication, freedom of thought, freedom of personal ownership, freedom of work, freedom of material and social progress. The state must neither limit, check or regulate the use of these basic freedoms of the individual and the primary communities, unless they are abused and interfered with by other individuals or communities. Such clashes occurred frequently before and after the Reformation in religious matters, and in economic and social matters after the Industrial Revolution. Here the role of the state is that of an arbiter whose functions are, like those of any political organization, to coordinate, balance and unite, rather than rule and direct.
These freedoms have been breached repeatedly since the Industrial Revolution and the advent of the individualistic society issued from the French Revolution. In recent history the democratic ideal has been openly flouted by countries like the USSR, Italy, Germany and Spain. Others, like France, pay lip service to it but are at great pains to twist it. The evolution is everywhere the same, whatever the regime or the party in power. The tendency—fulfilled in totalitarian regimes—is for every nation-state to entrust the management of all collective and private interests to a centralized civil service. The result is the erosion of democracy, the citizen is turned into a mere name or cipher on a file, and social life becomes purely mechanical. At the same time, the nationalism and imperialism of the nation-states are responsible for the decline of the European spirit and the parceling out of Europe and the world into walled-in countries where liberty dwindles. It is time for the Europeans to open their windows and give peoples, nations and individuals a little fresh air to breathe.
Intermediary bodies: the condition of a true democracy
J. Bareth explained convincingly that the yardstick to measure the degree of freedom enjoyed by a political society is the amount of freedom it allows to local and regional communities. Both are based on natural territories and because they are on a human scale, they are the best hope there is to fight a totalitarian movement within a state or superstate. Therefore the aim should be to reinforce the powers and freedoms of the regions and other basic communities of our continent. They—not the nation-states—should be the bricks to build the Third Europe, and they would help to counteract the divisive influence of present-day frontiers. If Europe is based on the states alone,’ wrote J. Bareth, “she will become a unitary state at the expense of the nations, or she will be torn apart by the feuding of the states.
Decentralization within, federation without are two complementary aspects of the necessary “withering away” of the state which Marx and Proudhon—though by different means—had been calling for. Real Europe is Europe of the peoples, the ethnic groups and the regions. So she must be based on local and regional freedoms and labour organizations—not around the sacred cow of the nation-state. But if the political infrastructures have to be changed, the remedy is not to enlarge those of the nation-states to a European dimension. The scale of the political institutions of “established disorder,” as Peguy called them, must also be brought down, and Louis Armand drew the list: administrative and state institutions, public and private enterprise and labour organizations, and authorities in charge of the economy, education and information.
The very structure of the nation-states, the stridency of their nationalistic zeal, their centralization, bring about the risks of war. Their unitary and centralized system, strengthened by the work of governments and parties, puts them on the way to dictatorship. All the dictatorships we know have abolished, in law or in fact, parliaments and parties. However they did this after using up all the legal processes. Mussolini and Hitler, Petain and de Gaulle were brought to power democratically or had their power sanctioned by the people. The working of the centralized state helped them to stage their successful coups. Balance and division of powers, internal and external federalism are the technical way to avoid such upheavals. The people itself needs some railings, to protect it against the impulses of the crowd.
“I mean by federal principle” wrote K.C. Wheare, following Proudhon, “a method of division of powers whereby the central and regional governments, each in its own sphere of action, remain at the same time independent and co-ordinated.” If these principles are not applied and Europe is built only with centralized states as they are, the result will not be a European union but total integration and the creation of a centralized superstate in which all the peoples of Europe would lose their identity. The further this integration would be carried out, the more attractive it would be for those who would like to set up an imperialistic and absolutist regime. The greater the concentration of power on the European scale, the greater would be the risk for Europe to become a prey to fascism, communism or any other totalitarian ideology. Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and de Gaulle were all for a united Europe—provided they could rule over it.
Plurality and balance of the centres of power, division and scattering of sovereignty within a political society are the prerequisites of freedom for the communities at the base and their citizens. There is no contradiction between international or supranational federalism and the kind of federalism the Occitan writer Charles Camproux called “intranational” in 1936. The contradiction is only in our minds, if we have not discarded the political ideas of the Second Europe and the ways of thinking instilled into us by the propagandists of the nation-state, always anxious to legitimize its artificial unity and their forcible conquest of power. Sheer political necessity calls for the linking together of the large international organizations to be created, with an effective policy to give the regions the political and administrative self-government they need.
If we are led to dismantle the nation-state at the top, in order to transfer some of its powers to supranational authorities, we are bound to question at the same time the legitimacy of the collection of powers it holds at the bottom of the ladder. If the notion of frontier is devalued internationally it must also be downgraded internally. Therefore the thousands of Basques, Catalans, Alsatians, Bretons, Flemings and Tyroleans who question the international structure and the borders of the states where they live are not traitors. But if democracy admits of different opinions within the state, it must also accept them in the supranational European context. To try to dismantle the nation-state is merely to attack the reactionary forces wanting to keep all the Europeans in subjection. Because, in Guy Heraud’s words, “none of the great problems of today and tomorrow—defence, economic expansion, scientific development—is any longer meaningful within the framework of the sovereign state. National structures cling to an outdated state machinery which puts off the coming of European democracy . . . Federation safeguards a country and completes it. Present-day states are the results of chance happenings in history. What is commonly called a nation indicates the body of people who have the legal status of citizens of the state where they live, but corresponds imperfectly to ethnic nationality—the true nation. If Napoleon had been victorious at Waterloo, Wallonia would have become a French province like any other, for instance Picardy. And without prejudging history, the question must be asked openly: Are not the various peoples of Europe—Flemings, Walloons, Basques, Catalans, South-Tyroleans and others—-equally entitled to self-government with the Algerians, the Cypriots, the Maltese and all the other oversea peoples?” Andre Maurois was also a believer in Proudhon’s mediocre groups when he wrote: “The modern world was born of the local communities and will be saved by the regions.”
The masses are not the people
Though mediocre in size, there is nothing mean about the achievements nor the spirit of these groups. In this respect, they often equal and surpass the greatest. The crisis of our civilization comes from the unprecedented technical and scientific achievements of mankind during the last hundred years, which were not followed by a comparable spiritual and cultural enrichment. They have let loose centrifugal forces which uproot man and tear him out of his natural environment, to become a prey to faceless leveling forces, the slave of machines and techniques. The “masses” are swelled by the growing proletariat, which is no longer confined to the working classes but spreads to the middle classes and the peasantry of the under-developed countries. This civilization of ours, which makes man and human values its prime concern, is doomed to failure and annihilation, unless it succeeds in putting a stop to the proletarianization of man and making technology and science his servants instead of his masters.
We must stress the fact that the masses are not the people. The masses are a crude mixture of isolated individuals, without any social ties, “like specks of dust.” A depersonalized, robot-like mob is the ideal tool for political manipulators and dictators. Nothing is more cruel and deadly than the rule of the mob—so easily fanaticized and whipped up to a state of frenzy by a few agitators using the modern methods of propaganda and brainwashing in the hands of state leaders. Tyrants have always been brought to power by the crowds. Peoples must be protected against the impulses of the masses.
Contrary to the masses, peoples are held together by a complex network of various social ties. These form a natural hierarchy on various planes: familiar, local, regional, trade-unionist, professional, cultural, religious. The acknowledgement and protection of all these intermediary bodies by the political order is the necessary safeguard of the people itself and the guarantee of the liberty of the individual. If these social structures are destroyed or if the state refuses to recognize “the people in its estates” nothing is left between it and the amorphous, atomized mass of individuals. It can then assume every power, undertake every social function, in a word become totalitarian and dictatorial. So the rights of a people are flouted if the centralized and totalitarian state suppresses, instead of protecting them, the free exercise of those intermediary bodies, if it refuses to acknowledge the authorities set up by the citizens concerned and share with the latter its powers and its sovereignty. The hallmark of democracy is the use of many-sided powers by responsible bodies within distinct organizations. This differentiation between the citizens and their powers is a law of nature. “Only robots are equal and identical,” in H. Brugmans’ words. They alone are no problems to a tyrant or the state Moloch. In the centralized and unified nation-states of the Second Europe, which are all to some degree tainted with totalitarianism, the individual is crushed under the monstrous power of modern technocracy and bureaucracy. Bureaucratic machinery of all kinds, the means of pressure and persuasion and the threat of brainwashing are all set to destroy him. But the basic requirement of a democracy is that the citizen should take part in the processes of government. Actually—notably in France—the direction of the state, the economy and the social fabric is nowadays in the hands of a small number of financiers, administrators and trade-unionists. This oligarchy keeps in power by manipulating ignorant and apathetic masses, bewildered by the complexity of present-day problems. For citizens cannot take a useful part in the management of public affairs, unless they are well-informed and able to understand the problems under discussion. They can only be parts of political structures on a level with themselves, i.e. in primary organizations such as trade unions, local and regional administration. Beyond these their interest begins to flag and their understanding falters. This is why it is essential for a healthy democracy to give full official recognition to these primary groups and make sure that they can exercise some essential administrative and governmental functions.
It is at the local level that a working knowledge of democracy is obtained. Government of the people by the people is not possible within a large, uniform and centralized state because of the social dimension, the size of the body politic. It is a problem of political technique, not a question of ideology. Every democratic experiment is a fraud if it does not acknowledge the existence and power of those primary political units, the “intermediary bodies.” In Louis Rovan’s words, “the 19th century regimes were not the perfect embodiment of democratic ideals, and all further attempts, to the present day, have been a far cry from it.” The Club Jean-Moulin is of the opinion that “the present French state feels at ease only in a watered down type of democracy.” This is because the French parliamentary system never gave much attention to popular education, which finds its essential expression in local democracy. The democratic spirit and its checks became part of the political life of the Anglo-Saxon countries through the practice of local self-government.
Small political groups are a factor of civilization and progress
The working of a democratic society where the citizen takes an ever-increasing part in the management of public affairs is bound up with the system of small political units—the ‘mediocre groups’ mentioned by Proudhon.
The most precious possession of a man is his individual freedom, which he can only enjoy in a political democracy. Democracy itself is inseparable from the smallness of the political and social organization where it is put into practice. This again is not an ideology, but a simple law of politics; it is a problem of organization, not philosophical abstractions. In a little state, whatever its regime—be it a monarchy, a republic or a dictatorship—the practice of democracy cannot be avoided. Within its framework, the citizen is never a subject, because the power of the government is limited by the size of the society it governs. The citizen of a small state is always strong, but his government is always weak. Only in a comparatively small political structure can the individual feel at home and thoroughly enjoy his freedom.
If the small state is naturally democratic, the large state on the other hand cannot be democratic. Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin sprang from large states, whose regimes had been brought to power by revolutions and mob rule. The dictator of a small state is harmless to his subjects and his neighbours, he is as weak as the state he leads. If San Marino and the state of Kerala are Marxist, the rest of the world does not mind, but the fact that Russia and China have become communist can be an enormous danger to world peace. If he had only been the dictator of Bavaria, Hitler would not have been the scourge he was to the rest of Europe. Aristotle was already of the opinion that the government of a large state must be strong because a great mass of people must have a centralized government. . . Constitutional government is almost impossible in a large state’. In a large state the citizen becomes a subject; he becomes ‘the man in the street’, a cipher without a face and with no individuality in a depersonalized society where, in Ortega y Gasset’s words, “anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, is in danger of being eliminated.”
Freedom of thought—or at least what remains of it—is more and more becoming the freedom to think what the others think. This is why a large state, a too vast, inarticulate and centralized political unit, cannot achieve true democracy but is bound to end up in collectivism. They will produce above all social workers, engineers, organisers. But to succeed and deserve the praise of the crowd and its leaders, artists and writers will have to produce only what is deemed suitable to satisfy the present needs of the masses and the state where they live. Their opposition or nonconformity could cost them their lives, as in Russia under Stalin, Germany under Hitler, Spain under Franco, and France in 1793 or after the Liberation.
Collective civilizations like those of the East, or conquering civilizations, like the Roman, have produced impressive public buildings, famed generals, civil engineers, strategists and jurists, but few original achievements. Roman culture came from the Greeks, the Jews and the Barbarians i.e. the citizens of small, disunited states, who were bought as slaves by the Romans. “The small societies of Greece,” wrote K. Freeman, “started the intellectual quest which transformed the world . . . Philosophy, science, political thought and the arts all but disappeared when the city-states perished.” Individual civilizations like those of the Celts and their many political communities did not leave durable buildings; but they bequeathed to the West their heritage of the highest human virtues and their tradition of liberty.
All things considered, it seems that democracy, culture and wisdom are found where the mass and size of political communities are limited. Excessive specialization and collective utilitarianism occur where they are too large. This is because culture is not produced by a type of small states and political communities, but by the citizens of these little states. Literature, art, music, philosophy are the products of individual minds. The way to make the arts and sciences flourish is to multiply the political centres and the centres of culture. The metaphor quoted by us— ‘Paris and the French desert’—is just as apt in the cultural as in the economic field. If the world wants to produce many great artists, philosophers, composers and scientists it must also breed many more creative individuals who will be free and safe to develop their individual talent in local and regional communities. The heads of small states have not the material means to indulge in power politics, or build their atom bombs at any cost. Fame comes to them by other means: beautiful buildings, monuments, museums, libraries; modern housing centres, draining of marshes and polders, construction of barrages and industrial complexes; creation of schools and universities. Most of our architectural and artistic heritage was produced by a multitude of small European states and cities. Individual tastes and ambitions can be much more adequately satisfied at local and regional level than in a large centralized state. Forms of government, social legislation, education, protection of local languages and culture, technical training, land exploitation, industrial investment, commercialization of commodities can be made to fit local conditions by the people concerned themselves. The opinions and wishes of many more citizens can thus be respected and satisfied. The institutions of their own choice are tailored to their needs. The learning and practice of democracy come alive in a familiar environment. Uniform systems, however good intrinsically, become totalitarian in time when they are stretched over extensive areas. They are bound to be inadaptable and harmful to many. Variety and diversity, change and plurality are the very essence of democracy and liberty.
The main peril which threatens the personal freedom of the individual does not come from the lack of unity but from too much of it. A free regime is not founded on the abolition of all differences but on their broadening, under the aegis of an accurate legal system. Unity gone too far is a destroyer of man: total unity is only found in death. Likewise, unification ends up by destroying the state. “Plurality is in the nature of the state,” said Aristotle, “By aiming at still more unity, the state becomes like a family, and then an individual. The highest degree of unity would be reached by the destruction of the state.”
The law of the world is balance and harmony, not unity. All the distress and worries resulting from the human condition, all the social and economic crises can be efficiently treated on a small scale only. The setting up of a unitary system in Europe or the rest of the world could only be a regression. Man must aim at something better than the life of a robot in huge, animal-like barracks or some Napoleonic fortress on a European scale. The small state is the ideal system for Europe and her civilization. “Europe,” wrote F. A. Voigt, “cannot survive as a physical and spiritual entity, unless it is made up of small states.” Whatever some may think, only small states can also safeguard her economy and make it prosper by respecting economic realities.