“Make localism great again”: decentralisation and its potentiality
Between December and January, when nobody had heard about coronavirus, there were already some people who started to make others aware of the risks, in order to not arrive unprepared to the crisis. A special mention goes to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of “The Black Swan” — a book in which, apart from the 2008 economic crisis, he also forecast that the world would have been hit by a virus pandemic. Additionally, Joe Norman, New England Complex System Institute fellow (NECSI is one of the few think tank in the world to analyse phenomena such as ethnic violence, economic crisis and healthcare systems from a completely objective point of view) and Balaji Srinivasan, venture capitalist and biotech entrepreneur.
In addition to their ideas about coronavirus, another argument on which those three brilliant minds agree is power distribution. They all claim that, in order to optimise decision-making processes and minimise negative externalities, a huge decentralisation of power is necessary. Taleb, for example, has published several papers in which he proves and comments that a localist society is better at facing uncertainty and fragility, features that are typical of the extremely complex reality in which we live today. Norman has written that decentralisation is necessary to mitigate risks — such as a pandemic — and increase the level of security against them. Finally, Srinivasan insists mostly about the great results of decentralisation in the tech field, but applies the same logic to the political system, too. In fact, the inspiration to write this article comes from one of his comments.
Considering the various consequences which coronavirus could have on our society, the Californian entrepreneur highlighted how decentralisation is already getting the better of centralisation: due to the incompetence typical of the latter, in fact, many regions — or even municipalities — are adopting measures to isolate their virtuous results from the failures in other parts of the same country. In the USA, for example, some states (Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, Rhode Island, etc…) are asking anyone entering the state to quarantine for 14 days. Similar cases, even if in reduced scale, can be seen in Italy: Monteleone di Puglia, a little town in the South, decided to block people from coming in its territory, in order to protect its 1000 citizens from contagion.
Srinivasan also reflects on the fact that many temporary bureaucratic decisions usually become permanent as it’s shown by the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the ’90s; in 1991 the regime tried in vain to reverse the weakening of its centralisation of power, which started in the ’80s. The United States and the European Union, despite their many differences, might soon follow the same path. In the last decade, they have already faced several crisis that weakened the power and the cohesion of their federal structures.
From a classic liberal point of view, the decentralisation of power is always welcome, because it limits its reach and abuse making decision-makers more accountable, increases the democratic influence of single individuals and causes strong fiscal competition between municipalities and regions. It’s no surprise that Switzerland, the only country in the world with a highly decentralised structure, where municipalities detain more power than cantons and cantons have more power than the federal government, is considered the liberal and democratic model, par excellence. Moreover, when Western civilisation started dominating the world, almost all around Europe, the fragmentation of power was immense; its most prosperous era was between the Middle Age and the Renaissance. During this period city-states, enclaves and principalities were the most common form of political organisation however the age of prosperity started to decline when the creation of modern nation-states massively centralised power; the Italian case is the most illustrative.
In a moment like the one we are currently living, during which central governments are taking advantage of the crisis trying to take upon themselves more and more power, we must welcome with enthusiasm any attempt of decentralisation. This is not, indeed, a minor issue: it’s about our freedoms and our democratic capacities. It’s our duty to embrace localism. We have an amazing opportunity to reaffirm the importance of the single communities, against national or global entities, which are abstract, constructed and imposed top-down. Let’s not let it go away, let’s fully exploit it: it’s time to “Make Localism Great Again”.
