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Title: Green Municipalism
Author: Ulli Diemer
Date: June 1991
Language: en
Topics: municipalism, green parties, Canada
Source: Retrieved on 23rd January 2022 from https://www.diemer.ca/Docs/Diemer-GreenMunicipalism.htm

Ulli Diemer

Green Municipalism

The concept of ‘Green Municipalism’ as a strategy for social and

ecological transformation is receiving increasing attention. I would

like to offer a few reflections on this strategy and on how it is being

formulated.

I am critical of some aspects of Green Municipalist strategy, but there

is a great deal which I find valuable and positive in this perspective.

I am in whole-hearted agreement with the emphasis on local grassroots

organizing, on the importance of building organic links with many

different sectors in the community, on the development and nurturing of

truly democratic processes and institutions, on human scale economic

activities, and with much else. In these remarks I am concentrating on

points which I think need to be criticized, not for the sake of dwelling

on disagreements, but because I want to contribute to developing this

perspective by drawing attention to what appear to me to be weaknesses

in it. I hope that what follows will be received as a constructive

contribution from someone who is in substantial agreement with most of

the underlying principles.

To begin with the word: Municipalism. I know that many of those who use

this term readily agree that rural and natural areas must be integrated

into our social and ecological vision, but the fact is that the word

municipalism inescapably suggests an urban-centred perspective, one

which appears to exclude people who do not live in a municipality. To

most people, and in most dictionaries, municipality means “city or

town”. Saying that ‘of course we also include rural areas in the concept

of municipalism’ is rather like saying ‘of course when we say “men”, we

also include women’. People are sensitive to issues of language. Like it

or not, people who don’t live in an urban area are going to think that

something called ‘municipalism’ is not for them.

An Urban-Centred Perspective?

I suspect, however, that the problem with the term ‘municipalism’ is not

simply a matter of choosing a more inclusive-sounding word. It is my

sense that the analysis underlying green municipalism is in fact

primarily an urban-centred perspective, drawn out of urban experiences,

with an acknowledgement of non-urban realities tacked on as litle more

than an afterthought. For example, Dimitri Roussopoulos, a leading

spokesperson for ‘libertarian municipalism’ in Canada, refers to the

vision as “city-specific.” In articles and discussions on green

municipalism, the most commonly cited sources of inspiration include the

ancient Greek city-states, the self-governing cities of the Middle Ages,

the Parisian ‘sections’ of the French Revolution, and the town-hall

meetings of New England, as well as Jane Jacobs’ theory that cities are

the natural units of economic life.

I am in not finding fault with these models per se. On the contrary, I

have referred to them myself again and again in trying to indicate how a

libertarian, radically democratic, decentralist, and egalitarian society

might work once freed of the oppressive weight of capital and the state.

But what concerns me is the tendency to assume, based on these models,

that our strategy for change must therefore be a municipalist strategy,

and that our model of future society must necessarily be a municipalist

model.

One Model Fits All?

Again, I have nothing at all against movements for change rooted in

local municipalities, nor against federations of self-governing

municipalities. What I am critical of is the tendency to see this as the

strategy, the model, which fits all situations. Many good ideas have

been shipwrecked because people insisted that they were universally

applicable, failing to distinguish between situations to which they

applied and ones to which they didn’t. I’m afraid that many green

municipalists are so smitten by the very considerable virtues of green

municipalism that they see it as the answer, rather than as part of the

answer.

This creates a danger of attempting to force the model onto patterns and

relationships to which it doesn’t readily apply. For example, how do you

municipalize the railways, or the Trans-Canada highway, or the St.

Lawrence Seaway, or an airline, or a satellite-based telecommunications

system? How do farmers and other rural people fit into a federation of

municipalities? How do you ‘municipalize’ the Labrador fishing grounds,

or the Grand Banks?

One answer I’ve heard, but one which I don’t find terribly persuasive,

is that you define everywhere as being in some municipality or another.

You don’t live in a municipality? Voila! Now you do! We create them out

of thin air if necessary!

Well, sure, if your idea of municipality is broad enough to encompass

thousands of square miles, and rural and wilderness areas with almost no

inhabitants, then by definition we have a planet consisting entirely of

municipalities. But then we’re getting pretty far away from Jane Jacobs’

ideas of what a city is and how it works, or from those medieval free

cities, or from the ideal of face-to-face direct democracy at

neighbourhood meetings as the model of self-government. It’s going to be

tough to get much of a turnout to those neighbourhood meetings when the

residents of the ‘neighbourhood’ have to travel a hundred miles by

snowmobile to get to the meeting.

The truth is, trying to force the ‘municipal’ model on the non-urban

parts of the country could wind up looking uncomfortably like the

‘regional municipalities’ created by Ontario’s former Conservative

government: units of administrative convenience which often had nothing

to do with people’s own sense of place. In fact, the Conservative

approach was also based on a city-hinterland model, with people living

in the rural ‘hinterland’ being assigned to the jurisdiction of the

‘regional municipality’ – wiping out dozens of long-established

self-governing rural townships and counties in the process.

Maybe there are ways of bureaucratically forcing the municipalist model

on every situation, but to me it seems obvious that some kinds of

activity are more appropriately organized along other lines, such as

regionally, or provincially, or nationally, or internationally.

The autonomous municipality vs. the transnational corporation

In fact, I feel more than a little concerned at how green municipalism,

which in other respects contains such a radically different social

vision, starts coming uncomfortably close to the rhetoric and agenda of

the new right on this point. For what has the agenda of the Mulroney

government been over the past seven years, if not the dismantling of all

national economic and cultural institutions in Canada? What we have seen

has been a systematic assault on the railway system, the postal system,

national social and medicare programs, unemployment insurance, federal

transfer payments from the better-off provinces to the poorer ones, the

CBC, the National Film Board, the National Research Council, the

Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS), the Canadian

publishing industry, and native broadcasting.

To me, part of the value of these institutions – and an important part

of why they are being attacked by the right – is the fact that they are

national in scope. They provide mechanisms, however inadequate, for

transferring resources from the ‘have’ to the ‘have-not’ provinces. They

place a barrier in the way of provincial governments seeking to gut

social programs: for example, a province which doesn’t meet the

requirements of the Canada Health Act loses a portion of its medicare

funding. And there are certain kinds of economic and cultural activities

which because of the economies of scale only make sense on a national

level in a country with Canada’s population: for example, a railway

system or the CCOHS, or a set of minimum environmental standards.

The new right’s strategy of dismantling or gutting national programs and

institutions (with Free Trade and Meech Lake as key components of that

strategy in Canada) needs to be seen as part of an international

strategy by corporate capital. The goal is to create a world-wide ‘free

market’ in which no government will be strong enough to pursue policies,

for national or social reasons, which run counter to the interests of

transnational corporate capital. Hence the arguments from the new right

that ‘the age of the nation-state is over’. In the Canadian context, ten

or more relatively autonomous provinces are seen as easier to manipulate

than one central government. Part of the strategy of the transnational

corporations has always been to play country against country, province

against province, city against city. Whoever offers the most tax

concessions and the fewest environmental restrictions gets the

investment.

Seen in this context, adopting a radically decentralist municipalist

strategy while an economic system based on immensely powerful

transnational corporations remains in existence could simply be a means

of subordinating our towns and cities even more completely to the

corporations. If environmental standards are the same across the whole

country, it is at least impossible for a company to use economic

blackmail to pit town against town.

Two strategies

These considerations help to highlight the fact that there at least two

possible versions of a green municipalist strategy.

The version which I have critiqued above is formulated as a strategy of

‘municipalizing’ the economy and creating self-reliant but federated

cities. I share much of the underlying theory but I question what I see

as the overly narrow strategic focus on economically and politically

autonomous municipalities.

An alternative ‘municipalist’ strategy would be to see the locality –

the neighbourhood, the town, the city, the workplace, the county, the

bay (e.g. in Newfoundland) – as the logical focus of acting, educating,

discussing, and organizing for social, economic and environmental

change. The emphasis would be on creating a social and political

movement with strong local roots, but one which would not necessarily

see the locality as the primary unit of all forms of activism, nor the

municipal model of government as the Procrustean bed which everything

has to be made to fit. Movements not organized on the basis of locality,

such as those focused on particular issues or groups, would also have a

greater place in such a strategy.

Isolated by the ‘Party’ label

The adoption of any strategy raises the question of how to implement the

strategy.

In this context, I want to touch briefly on the question of how Greens

should relate to this fall’s municipal elections in Ontario, and to the

role of an electoral party generally. Many of my feelings have already

been expressed very cogently by Brian Milani and Mike McConkey in their

article “Is This Green Politics in the Loblaws Era?” As someone who

lives in a constituency in which the reactionary incumbent squeezed back

in only a handful of votes ahead of the NDP challenger, and in which the

couple of hundred votes collected by the Green Party candidate might

have made the difference, I found myself unable to understand what

purpose the Greens had in running.

I am by no means a supporter of the NDP (See my article Let’s Stop

Kidding Ourselves About the NDP in Canadian Dimension.) but I would

still prefer to have an NDPer get elected than a Mulroney Conservative

or a right-wing apologist for the development industry. Do the Greens

think they are doing anyone a favour by playing the spoiler in close

races? If there was some remote hope of Green candidates winning or even

turning in a respectable finish I could see some point, but why

deliberately expend money and energy in creating the image of Greens as

a fringe party?

Beyond this specific point there is a more general one. For a political

movement to be able to legitimately proclaim itself as a party, it first

has to become a party. A popularly based political party would be one

formed by the coming together of a broad cross-section of social and

environmental movements with significant popular support. The formation

of such a party would be preceded by wide-ranging discussions of

principles and program. This never happened in the formation of the

Canadian Greens, and as a result the Green Party continues to be seen as

another small unrepresentative sect by most popular organizations and

most environmental groups.

Or a part of the movement?

If Greens in the Green Party are serious about changing this state of

affairs, they need to back up and start playing a different role,

emphasizing the building of local organizations and broader networks, as

one participant organization or coalition among other organizations and

coalitions, rather than as a party which claims to represents the

interests of many other movements who in reality play no part in the

Green Party.

This perspective should be of particular relevance to those Greens who

identify, as I do, with the libertarian or libertarian socialist

critique of representative democracy. As libertarians we argue that our

system of government is not truly democratic because people are reduced

to choosing every few years among representatives who are not answerable

to them. Yet the Green Party has entered the same game: it too puts

forward the claim to represent, or to offer representation to, people to

whom it is not answerable, people to whom it relates as passive voters.

The Green Party needs to backtrack, to give up its claim to represent

the movement. It needs to see itself as a constituent part of a movement

which still needs to develop a shared program, let alone declare itself

as a party.

Accordingly, the Greens need to shift their focus of activities from

pursuing an elusive electoral goal to (a) developing a clearer and more

coherent program, and (b) working to win acceptance for that program –

or to modify it – in the wider movement.