Local Democracy, Centralized Government: Decentralization and Empire.

we had the discussion with my old friend
Mohammed the other day for a couple hours and he asked me a sort of simple and fundamental question about the history of centralization and for most of our history as human being as a planet Earth that comes down to questions of empire questions of nationality local self-government nation states as opposed to larger empires bringing together many different peoples with many different languages and now in the 21st century we deal with many of the same issues and questions but using very different jargon now why did he put this question to me it's because he knows I'm a very unusual person for any white english-speaking person in politics today I mean this is not just unusual for the left for the center or for the right it is unusual anywhere on the white western english-speaking spectrum to openly say that the balance of power is doctrine in European history was a mistake that this was a profound fundamental mistake so what do I mean I mean that just to give an example if you look at the period when Napoleon was ruling Europe look let's say you're gonna study that University course so you'll probably look at the 50 years of history before Napoleon and you'll maybe briefly look at the 50 years after what you'll find again and again and again is this idea that what's best what is best for Europe is for Europe to be divided between several equal mutually antagonistic great powers to have at all times a kind of internecine war and the parties negotiating these bizarre agreements and pacts they don't really care too much if it's the French against the Spanish or if it's the French and the Spanish on the same side against everyone else but that one way or another the kind of the sports team have to be drawn up you know there are the Russians and there are the Dutch and they work so that there are various empires constantly at war with one another that centralization is bad that too much power and in any one place is dead now I think that this philosophy really began with the rule of emperor charles v i think that was the period it's a very deep medieval assumption basically since people gave up on the concept of the Roman Empire the Roman Empire you could say was one kind of delusion of centralization of one Empire ruling all of Europe how you define Europe changes from century to century and then when people give up on that idea of Rome whether it's the first Rome or the second Rome or the third Rome then they go over to this idea that what's best for Europe is to be constantly divided internally and and very briefly you guys may or may not know this but if you were to look at the history of the Caribbean if you were even to look at the history of the islands of Southeast Asia so like Indonesia and beyond into Samoa and so on Europeans exported this assumption with the oh they're really the best way to organize life in the Caribbean is that the Caribbean divided between various mutually hostile antagonistic European empires that are in a constant state of war against one another which includes piracy and slave trading all these things oh you know what the best thing is gonna be for the people of Samoa is if the Dutch and the Germans the British and the French are all they're competing if everyone has a piece of it so on for South America that this is what is best for mankind and to be clear we're not talking about free market competition we're not talking about the idea that in economics it's better for you if you have your choice between Coke and Pepsi and Fanta that there are several different choices for economic competition this is explicitly military competition this is competition between empires so Muhammad knows this about me that I say when you look at the history of China one of the great advantages that they have is that they were not burdened by this delusion that internally dividing themselves and being in a constant state of civil war so to speak that wasn't advantageous that what was really advantageous was having one Emperor one system of exams you know and then a system of Education that's attached to those exams one bureaucracy and yes whenever possible one army for a huge area that had many different Volken languages less diversity in written languages but that's that's another story and you really can look at China as being a a world unto itself in the same way that when you look at all of Europe or all of the Roman Empire it's not one country it's a world unto itself or there's the idea of centralized political leadership in this case so with all this having said about context what is basically my view about centralization and decentralization now in the 21st century this is what I was challenged on are asked about by my friend Mohamed and I think my view is so simple it can be kind of stated in one sentence I think what human beings yearn for and require is a system of local decision making but centralized enforcement what do I mean by this I think people want to meet at their local City Hall to decide where the roads will be built and which buildings will be bulldozed to build the roads they may also want to meet at their local City Hall to debate what the speed limit will be on the road however they don't want to hire a local sign painter to paint the speed limit sign by hand they don't particularly need local workmen to actually build the road or do the demolition most fundamentally they probably don't want local guides with local family connections collecting taxes they would benefit from having a highly professional centralized impersonal bureaucracy that collects the taxes the sign that says speed limit 80 whatever this basement is that might be painted at a centralized factory in a centralized workshop or warehouse and sent to them they voted on what the speed limit is but they didn't make the sign it may be made to standard specifications so that all the speed limit signs look the same for there what a huge huge country or huge empire so that all the stop signs look the same that stuff shouldn't be decentralized shouldn't be localized and again sir shouldn't it need not be that's not what people yearn for that's not what people want in democracy I don't think there's any legitimacy and saying well we have our own local democracy we make stop signs our way we make speed limit signs our way or even even we pave the roads our way I think that local democracy you know you want to be engaging in deliberation at the level of local democracy you want to be engaging in debate at the level of local democracy but when it comes to execution implementation and enforcement those are things that have to be centralized now the only other riddle here I mean that's this is almost everything I've sent out but the one footnote is I think that people do not think often enough about government in terms of research research also must be partly centralized so let's say you have a local government local city council like this and they say well we think the river is polluted we're getting so much but we don't really know so again they can debate it they can discuss it they can vote on it but they need to be able to take a water sample and probably send it to a laboratory that's run by the centralized government it's not going to be possible for every little local city authority to have its own lab staff and to be able to scrutinize and hire you know look at someone's CV and say okay are you really competent to do these tests on the water and are we gonna trust you are we gonna trust this guy they probably need to have access to some kind of you know again kind of independent centralized empire-wide Kingdom high nationwide a laboratory that's going to receive that water sample and give them a standardized test and give them a result and it'll be able to tell them in a scientifically verifiable and valid way you know yes it's polluted no it's not here's your the the contents of the water and you know even kind of historical research even checking records for who owns what property or what happened historically there was a town in Canada it's not worth mentioning why I did this research and had a really interesting history of native people owning the land and then white people mysteriously stealing the land this is recent this isn't 400 years ago or something I think is about 80 years ago you know there were and there are records well you know that local city hall they shouldn't just be in a position of kind of questioning local people who are gonna have strong economic and said if you'll come in and say my grandfather owned this land and he didn't steal it from any native people and you know they're gonna give you they're totally biased perspective even for something like this that maybe local history you have some capacity to reach out to the National Archives or some National Research Institute and say look we need somebody with a PhD to go to the archives and establish how you know how was the land claim negotiated how were these boundaries don't know what's the real lord we have some records here at City Hall but there were complaints from different quarters we don't know what to do about it we need some kind of fact-finding mission we need some kind of investigation so again I don't think I've ever read a constitution of any country that set down research as a crucial part of government but in all these ways and more research establishing the facts when you call it a commission of inquiry or what have you it really is one of the most important functions of government and in this way it has to be to some extent centralized so that's the that's the lesson I come to and I'll be honest to you guys I already came to that conclusion 1998-1999 this is one of my first breakthroughs in political science and I came to it because I was a very harsh critic of everything that was going on in communism and socialism on the far left they have their whole crazy discourse about centralization and then I was also a critic of what was going on in neoliberalism on the far right and at that time they were really glamourizing decentralization in a very irresponsible way where to them decentralization was an excuse to not provide education to the poor and this kind of thing was it well you don't want the central government controlling education it's so on and the reality is this is just gonna mean rich people sending their kids to private school and this kind of thing was this really and would dishonest use of decentralization to justify various sort of right-wing agendas and privatization in general so kind of beasts merging the public sector and nonprofit sector and what-have-you so yeah what you see in an example like Athens ancient Athens thousands of years ago is a society that had created the most fundamental mechanism of the centralized state which is centralized taxation so the head the head money you know in one store house so to speak and if you read constitution of Athens by Aristotle they were very fastidious about who was literally guarding the money day by day who was responsible they were very very worried about corruption and theft from the public purse and then they had everyone in the city come together and decide how they were going to spend the money and both the supporters and critics you know it's interesting they all point out they were they were very libertine they had festival after festival and holiday after holidays you know in peacetime at least they built public baths so that poor people well anyway but the rich had their own ways of bathing apparently but the poor especially appreciate having a place to shower and swim and sauna or whatever they did in these baths that I really know but bath houses and things like the Olympic Games and festivals and things they did actually spend this money it in a kind of profligate or joyous way this is this is partly probably recorded so we have we have a positive example in some ways but what Athens utterly lacked was a concept of having decentralized decision-making and centralized enforcement implementation etc and thus their political system became absurd and even tyrannical when it simply was expanded beyond they own town Athens what it was expanded beyond the walls of the Agora their relationships to even their immediate neighbors and Athens did briefly grow into an empire they were as despicable and hated as any Kingdom or any tyranny when they ran their empire it was it was all the same to the conquered people because you still had the same group of people in one marketplace right here we're here in Athens right here at the Penix making decisions for far-flung cities and so on and so forth they didn't recognize those other cities as making these these decisions and they didn't recognize their government as in this way being a kind of servant of having the whether you think of it as bureaucratic implementation enforcement because indeed this includes law enforcement I mean there's there's no greater evil than having a corrupt police department and this is still a huge problem throughout the United States of America it's a problem in various parts of Europe to various extents you don't want the local policemen to be a guy you went to high school with you might think you do now actually pause to think about the actual people you went to high school class you might think it would be great to walk into the police station but oh yeah if I remember you from high school okay what if you slept with Biff's girlfriend what if Biff slept with your girlfriend what if Biff beat you up after the football game that time the level of corruption of them taking bribes then being married to your sister family entanglement and so on what you'd much rather have is in a sense a professional centralized distant and remote enforcement of the law but where your role is to go down to the Parliament go down to the Penix participate in deciding on what the laws should be and then you centralize how those laws are implemented and forced and so on