In a world in which power is rapidly changing hands -- from the increasingly irrelevant nation-state to the boardrooms of a few transnational corporations -- the revival of the city-state seems both inevitable and necessary. We need a local counter-balance to the centralization that comes with global corporatism.
But don't stop there, for the same analysis can be applied locally. As Ottawa-Carleton's 11 municipalities prepare to surrender control to the regional government, citizens must look to their community, to their neighborhood, if they want to avoid being lost in the noise of competing interests at regional council.
For one thing, regional electoral districts are in many cases much larger, and therefore harder to influence, than their municipal counterparts. Though the demand for smaller government assemblies often made by fiscal conservatives has fallen on sympathetic ears of late, the fact remains that politicians don't cost much when compared with multi-billion-dollar operating budgets. Doing away with MPs, MPPs, or municipal councillors will accomplish nothing more than concentrate political power in fewer and fewer hands.
Murray Bookchin, the American scholar and founder of social ecology, makes a forceful case for decentralization of local government in his 1992 book, Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship. He argues that centralized power structures are making "the most elementary human demands for self-expression and self-empowerment highly problematic." What Bookchin is talking about is the undermining of the basic principles of democracy, something he believes is unavoidable if we don't reclaim some of the decision-making powers we're giving to our elected representatives.
Bookchin also detects an embryonic version of just such a power shift growing in North America: "A latent 'dual power' seems to be emerging today in which the local base of society is beginning to challenge the authority of its seemingly invulnerable state and corporate apex."
Heavy stuff for voters who just want to make sure their streets are plowed in winter and their potholes filled in summer. But the best, some might say the only, way citizens can ensure their neighborhoods remain decent places to live is to take a deeper interest in the way they are governed. And that means understanding and playing an active role in their governance.
Bookchin and other democrats say the answer is no further away than our own western democratic traditions. From early Mesopotamia and Athenian Greece, to Paris of the 1870s and early America, the "citizens' assembly" has proved an invaluable tool. Face to face is the only way for citizens to deal with the challenges of organizing their communities.
Of course, direct democracy is not a panacea. At the large scale, society is too complex not to give the reins of government to representatives devoted full-time to understanding the issues. But at the neighborhood level, the problems aren't so difficult to solve. Which streets should be one-way, which kinds of businesses and residential developments should be allowed in which areas, and where should the new community centre be built are questions that can be resolved by citizens on their own. Why do we need to let others make these kind of decisions for us?
Hundreds of towns in New England still employ "town meetings" to sort out their affairs. Most are composed of neighborhood, or "precinct" representatives, but a few still allow all eligible voters in on the decisions. The point is that each community requires its own brand of democratic expression. All would benefit from giving their residents a stronger say.
Neighborhoods, after all, are the oldest fundamental organizing unit in the history of civilization. Older even than the relatively recent arrival known as the nuclear family.
Drawing up the boundaries of these new political units won't be easy. The Glebe might be a logical independent neighborhood, but what about the much larger and more diverse Centretown? The sprawling neighborhoods of Kanata and Orleans will also prove difficult to organize. But finding a rough consensus on the creation of these precincts, even sorting out the constitutional issues involved, should be possible, and it's worth the effort.
Otherwise, we'll all wake up one day to find ourselves residents of a city-state with many of the powers once held not only by federal and provincial governments, but those of the municipalities it replaced as well. Who out there believes such a creature would be more responsive to the needs of a neighborhood?
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