Bjørn Stærk blog - Larry Sidentop on decentralization and active citizenship

Thursday November 11, 2004 by Bjørn Stærk

Larry Siedentop on decentralization and active citizenship, in Democracy in Europe:

There is a sense in which the dispersal of power, through local autonomy and maximizing opportunities for political participation, forces the issue of character. By giving individuals not only basic civil rights, but the experience of excercising political rights - the experience of addressing issues of public policy and bringing knowledge and judgement to those issues - a policy which disperses power helps to change the nature of the relationship between the state and civil society. Instead of being merely the passive bearer or recipient of rights or civil liberties, the citizen becomes an active agent - one who seeks to identify the public welfare for him or herself, learning to strike a balance between advantage and disadvantage when considering public policy proposals. The active citizen is thus led insensibly to combine theory with practice, ideals with facts, and in doing so his or her judgement is refined and knowledge extended, and the moral expansion of the agent through citizenship derives from a constant confrontation with the needs or wants of others.
Clearly, this process does not merely yield knowledge. The citizen's judgement is refined through the need to estimate the character of others and, in particular, the claim of those who seek to lead. Active citizenship is not only anti-utopian in its effect therefore, obliging the mind to consider the duties which correspond to rights, the "hard" cases which limit or qualify the application of rules . It also constantly draws attention to the role of character in political life, and works against the assumption that "strangers" are to be preferred - that public policy is the domain of others, more or less expert.

The willing suspension of disbelief which I have already described as a prerequisite for a political culture of consent - a belief that the law can be our own parent and child, insofar as its norms both shape our intentions and lead us to identify defects in the law which can be remedied - is in fact the most important constituent of a sense of community. It makes possible an almost familian relationship with the law, a relationship which stands in contrast with the view of law as a remote and alien thing, something imposed by "others" at one's own expense, something to be foiled or circumvented whenever possible.

For that is the irony of étatist political cultures, political cultures shaped by a bureaucratic form of the state. On the one hand, such cultures foster a view of law and public policy as the domain of experts, of "strangers" who, almost by definition, have an advantage over locals. To that extent, locals are expected to be submissive and passive, mere spectators of the political process. On the other hand, by neglecting the active dimension of citizenship, étatist political cultures store up trouble for the future. For the passivity and patience of any population are not unlimited, and so such political cultures are tempered by violence - by outbursts against the state w hich is seen merely as an external agency, a physical and coercive force. Such sporadic violence can easily become a kind of revolutionary tradition, which, at intervals more or less frequent, interrupts orderly constitutional life.

In fact, both sorts of political culture have in the past adhered to different forms of the state in Europe. They have fostered very different types of political ethos and psychology. But if that is so, then the question which confronts us today is what kind of political culture and political psyche is likely to develop as European integration proceeds.