2. Decentralism is the historic norm, the underlying system by which people live even where there arises, from time to time, those centralizing empires that historians like to focus on and pretend are the principal systems of humankind. Empires are infrequent, do not last long, and are sparsely located. Yes, there was a Greek empire, for example, but it lasted effectively for less than twenty years; the real story of Greece is long centuries of decentralization, each city-republic with its own constitution, its own social life and cultural peculiarities, hundreds of separate communities that created the Hellenic civilization that is still a marvel of the world.
Even in the belly of the large nation-states of today, even in this Age of Authoritarianism, there is an underlying current of separation, of localism, of regionalism, of tribalism. On every occasion when the power of the state is dissipated--in revolutions, for example--the power of localism is reasserted, sometimes in the form of militias and warring bands, sometimes spontaneous popular councils, sometimes regional independence movements, but always giving expression to a spirit of decentralism that does not die.
3. Decentralism is deeply American, from the anti-state Puritans, through the communalistic Quakers and Mennonites and religious sects, and on to the original colonies, independent bodies protective of their special differences and characters. A unified state did eventually arise, the product of powerful banking and mercantile forces desiring centralized authority--and helped along even by Thomas Jefferson, who made the United States twice its original size even as he kept talking about the value of "small republics"--but even then the contrary forces were powerful, too. Emerson and Whitman and Thoreau gave voice to the old New England traditions of town-meeting democracy and parish rule; Utopians and communards like Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and Josiah Warren gave voice to the yearning for community control and villages free from outside interference; the emancipation movement, the women's rights movement, and the populist movement all were impelled by a decentralist anti-statism throughout the 19th century.
In the 20th century that tradition continued with the Country Life movement and other communal impulses; with Lewis Mumford and the original Regional Plan Association, devoted to a resurgence of regionalism; with the Southern Agrarians, determined separatists explicitly, and eloquently, opposed to the national government and its economic hegemony; with the various organizations and movements we now call "the Sixties," attempting to redress the balance of power even against the most potent government in the world.
4. And it continues even now, it is alive and well in this country and around the world. I cannot say it is a dominant mode, anywhere, but I can point to all those ineradicable threads to be seen throughout the American scene: the wonderful bioregional movement, for example, with representatives in all parts of the continent, holding its seventh biennial congress this year; the resurgent Indian tribal societies and organizations for tribal culture; the growth of worker-owned firms from 1600 twenty years ago to more than 10,000 today; the phenomenon of local cooperatives, numbering 47,000 in 1995, up from 18,000 in 1975; the spread of such schemes as community land trusts (100 of them today, at least ) and community-supported agriculture outfits (some 450 today) and local farmers' markets (an estimated 3,000); the burgeoning of the intentional commune movement, now with more than 500 members. All of this is evidence that this great tradition, this basic human impulse, is still to be found in America, no matter how autocratic a power it has become.
And in the rest of the world, as well. Separatism, of course, is a powerful force in almost every land, famously in Canada, Spain, Italy, France, and virtually everywhere in Africa, existing in a hundred splinter movements and "independence" parties and groupings wherever you look. Yugoslavia, in its sad way, is evidence of the power of tribalism, of separatism actually in the hands of the thugs, the worst sort of face this tendency could have but not denying its deep resonance; the disintegration of the Soviet Union is another, somewhat more benign. A handful of recent books has attested to the decentralist sweep abroad: Hans Magnus Ensenberger has called it a Civil War in all advanced societies; Samuel Huntington finds a Clash of Nations both between and within modern states; Benjamin Barber's Jihad Against McWorld is an account of how fundamentalist and other local movements are working to undermine Western hegemony and the power of states in thrall to it; Robert Kaplan's Ends of the Earth details the collapse of government throughout Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; and Noviko Hama, in Disintegrating Europe predicts "a giant patchwork of 100 or more city-states" in Europe "within the next twenty years, in which cultural and national difference, divergences and identities are asserted and maintained, and the brief experiment in federalism is abandoned."
There is the picture for you, there is the reality of the world: of the power, the eternal, resurgent, inevitable power of decentralism. Let it fill your hearts; let it guide our deliberations this weekend.
Now of course that doesn't mean that I am telling you decentralism necessarily will prevail, considering all the stark force of the nation-state to prevent its triumph. I am telling you, however, that it can triumph--it should triumph--or the sake of the earth and all its species, including the human, it must triumph. We here must help build that movement so that it someday prevails--starting now, this weekend, starting right here. Think locally, act locally, think locally, live locally--it is, really, our only hope.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
