This subject needs a whole book. What it gets here is headings, assertions, conclusions, reached after 60 years of hard experience with reading to match. It is 'work in progress'.
It began with the compass needle in the C14th. For the first time oceans were there to be crossed. It culminated in the invention of the satellite of the Sixties. Today all-the-world is next door a nd the transnational companies, militarism, fundamentalism and our response to them make nonsense of frontiers. After 500 years the nation-state is on the way out. The question is the nature of its successor. Is it to be replaced by the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and the Pentagon? Or by some forms of peoples global action that we now have to devise? And upon which we made a start in November 1999 at Seattle? Not to mention since the Sixties.
We have a huge new asset that we are being slow to recognise - the rise and rise of indigenous peoples. In our own time we have seen one great super-power defeated by the people of Vietnam in arms, and the other great super-power meet the same fate in Afghanistan. Arrogance has is own bridge too far. Today the military-industrial complex of the USA is riding for a fall, but it might take years before it happens and we have to meet the challenge as it comes; and to do so in the cause of freedom, justice and accountability so as to minimise the suffering, before empires finally disappear from the earth.
In England it took several hundred years for the Ango-Saxons to work out that government was best done in shires, counties, regions - some 40 of them. Most, if not all other countries in Europe, had a similar experience. It may well have been universal. It bears on travelling time. Accountable government requires people to meet frequently, easily and without great expense. Thus every county or region has its own metropolis. They lost out when feudal wars discredited them, when the nation-state (created to put an end to political feudalism), imposed a new centralism instead. Now that that centralism has lost its raison d'etre, it is time to resurrect the region, city-region, province or lende as the authentic base of government and the answer to any move in the direction of the super-state The region is the largest political unit at which personal accountability can be made to work. At that geographical-political level it is still possible for the decision-makers and the people to meet each other face-to-face. The removal of the impersonal is a central task of future government. We will all then register as people with names and faces, not as mere units.
At the moment communities and neighbourhoods are getting a great deal of lip-service from politicians - when what they need is effective empowerment. This they are denied. There is even great difficulty over what these words mean! A community is any body of people who live within walking distance of a major shopping centre that also features all kinds of services from the professional to the cultural,convivial and political - i.e. a Town Hall. A community of place (as considered here) is quite different from a community of interest that has no particular geographical limitation. A politcal community of place will commonly number some 10/30,000 souls, a feasible tax base.
A neighbourhood is much smaller and may number twenty or more to a community. A neighbourhood is a subtle unit of infinite variety, commonly based on a street or a collection of streets, a housing estate (public or private), or a catchment area round a pub, a small parade of shops, a school, a community centre or church. No one officially defines a neighbourhood. It has no political substance and perhaps for that reason it has an enduring quality lost to communities that have been so disempowered by central goverment over recent years that many people deny their very existence.
The community and the region have all the makings of the tax-base of the decentralised future. This is doubtless why, in Britain at least, their empowerment is so fiercely contested by central goverment. In Germany, Italy, Spain, Scandanavia and the Low Countries the situation seems to be much better. Britain and France continue to suffer from their over-mighty capital cities. The political future belongs to communities and regions, given the final eclipse of the militarism of the nation-state, made acute by current US policy. Everything is inter-connected.
Back in the Sixties we rediscovered personal responsibilty for the Bomb, Vietnam, life-style, the arts (dress, music, theatre, fashion et al) them we threw most of it away on drugs, faith in Party politics and sheer personal-political inability to think and act in depth. Today is is that depth that is imperative. Above all we never solved the question of how the individual relates to the family, the group (single-issue or multi-purpose), the community, the region, the continent of Europe and the wider world - in some structured, dynamic, feasible way, leaving party politics behind. Now with several extra decades under our belts we have a second chance, with a new sophistication and high tech to help us. We lost last time. We cannot afford to lose this time - the stakes being what they are. We are social beings with the power of individual genius. The challenge is to understand, achieve and sustain their match.
PETER CADOGAN
December 21st 2001