Axial Shift

City Subsidiarity and the World System in the 21st Century

Benjamen Gussen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9789811369506
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Public Law
• Index: Law

This book uses historical analysis, constitutional economics, and complexity theory to furnish an account of city subsidiarity as a legal, ethical, political, and economic principle. The book contemplates subsidiarity as a constitutional principle, where cities would benefit from much wider local autonomy.
Constitutional economics suggests an optimal limit to jurisdictional footprints (territories). This entails preference for political orders where sovereignty is shared between different cities rather states where capital cities dominate. The introduction of city subsidiarity as a constitutional principle holds the key to economic prosperity in a globalizing world.
Moreover, insights from complexity theory suggest subsidiarity is the only effective response to the 'problem of scale.' It is a fitness trait that prevents highly complex systems from collapsing. The nation-state is a highly complex system withinwhich cities function as 'attractors.' The collapse of such systems would ensue if there were strong coupling between attractors. Such coupling obtains under legal monism. Only subsidiarity can make the eventuality of collapse improbable. The emergent and self-organizing properties of subsidiarity entail a shift in policy emphasis towards cities with a wide margin of autonomy.

© The Author(s) 2019

B. GussenAxial Shifthttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6950-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. On the Problem of Scale

Benjamen Gussen¹

(1)

School of Law, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Benjamen Gussen

Email: [email protected]

After the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, Europe escaped … stagnation … owing to the formation of European medieval cities. But it was probably touch and go. A new city, to form, requires one or more older cities with which to begin its initial trade … Luckily for Europe, there was a scruffy little settlement on the mud flats and marshes at the head of the Adriatic which discovered, during the very depth of the Dark Ages, when the rest of Europe was still decaying and deteriorating, that there was a city market for salt, then timber, in Constantinople. But Venice, the pioneer city of the European economy, did not remain a mere supply depot. By diversifying its own production, starting on the base of that trade in salt and timber, it proceeded to develop and, thereby, to provide a Venetian city market for depot settlements of the north and west—which then built up city production of their own, each in its turn. As the cities of Europe, passing on the spark of creative economic life from one to another, multiplied, they also drew into their trade the subsistence life about them and transformed it.

—Jane Jacobs (Cities and the Wealth of Nations (Penguin Books, 1984))

End Abstract

The historical role of Venice in sparking wealth creation in Europe is instructive for understanding the axial shift taking place this century. The idea of an axial age can be traced back to John Stuart Stuart-Glennie, Karl Jaspers, Lewis Mumford, and Eric Voegelin.¹ An axial shift ushers a new weltanschauung that emphasizes hypotaxis (or subsidiarity) over centralized power structures. The shift emphasizes a moral imperative where (evolutionary) change is driven more by cooperation than by competition. The descriptive ‘axial’ refers to the emergence of a transformative axis that enables a scale correction through alternatives to existing power structures. Venice is one example of this axial shift (after the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire). The shift is cyclical. Every 500 years, centralized power structures, epitomized by polities with large jurisdictional footprints, succumb to a new axial shift. This explains why the number of world polities has quadrupled over the last 200 years. These shifts are triggered by waves of technological innovation characterized by high-intensity and large-scale changes in socio-economic and political organization. The last axial shift saw industrial revolutions breakdown large jurisdictional footprints such as the British Empire . Historically, every axial shift made smaller jurisdictional footprints politically viable while enabling new forms of sovereignty for coordination between these polities (through federal orders). The problem with these federal orders is that they are unstable. In response to this instability, the axial shift in the 21st century is resurrecting the city as the dominant scale for political organization. Chapter 9 introduces an analytical model to illustrate the instability of federal and even unitary (nation-state) designs and to explain the role of subsidiarity in the stability of polities. Constitutional constructs such as sovereignty and subsidiarity weave an evolutionary dialectic between different organizational scales (the local, national, and global). This dialectic continues to wreak havoc at the local scale and can be interrupted only through explicit constitutional constraints on the size of jurisdictional footprints.² The chapter argues for emphasis on polycentric constitutional orders in the spirit of Spinoza’s understanding of sovereignty.

This monograph builds on this idea of axial shift. It tells the story of an alternation between scale correction and scale distortion, a cyclical process that has been repeating, roughly every 500 years, for the last two millennia. The scale correction, driven by technological innovation, restores the principle of subsidiarity by empowering political organization at the local scale, as epitomized by the city. The scale distortion is driven by statecraft that enlists this innovation to upholster existing power structures, resulting in political organization at the national and supra-national scales. The latter has been intensifying social, economic, and ecological crises, which contribute to scale correction by engendering further innovation. The latest Industrial Revolution , one based on the Internet of Things , is bringing about a new scale correction, which is resurrecting the city as the dominant polity in a new world system. This axial shift from globalization to continentalization, however, can interrupt the cyclicality of crises only by a constitutional underwriting of the legal personality of cities.

The monograph predicts that, by the end of this century, cities will replace nation-states as the dominant polity in an emerging new world system. This vision sees sovereign cities collaborate on a continental scale, eventually, creating a bottom-up global governance network of thousands of sovereign cities. The principle of subsidiarity will provide the governance framework for this network. To explain how cities can become the dominant polity, the principle of subsidiarity is introduced in Chap. 7. The principle reconciles the dichotomy between methodological individualism and methodological holism along a continuum that envisages a vox populi underlying decision-making through multi-level governance systems. This understanding suggests that referenda (qua methodological individualism) are as much a component of subsidiarity as is federalism (qua methodological holism). Subsidiarity does not only envisage multi-level governance but also emphasizes direct democracy practices, including citizen-initiated referenda. As a constitutional principle, subsidiarity necessitates an explicit recognition of sub-national levels of government (including cities), as well as processual outlets for vox populi beyond the formalities of elections. Chapter 8 continues to delineate the rationale for subsidiarity by arguing that legal systems are a footnote to the concept of (social) trust. An abundance of evidence comes from the evolution of the common law legal system. Even more evidence can be furnished from the societal genesis of the law. The latter is what this chapter aims to provide. The chapter traces this concept in the jurisprudence of constitutional law and administrative law. In the former, the concept of trust accentuates the importance of the subsidiarity principle as a cornerstone for constitutional designs. The concept also illuminates the basis of judicial review as deriving from the fiduciary principle. An expectation of a unifying theory of public law renovates on this premise of trust. The chapter reconciles the dichotomy between power and trust by showing how power is based on trust.

Although, historically, axial shift occurred despite regulatory efforts to dampen its political consequences, this monograph is normative. It prescribes constitutional change to bring about the predicted axial shift in contemplation of a first-mover advantage. Invigorating the staccato research agenda on the legal personality of cities can provide further guidance on the envisaged constitutional change. Having the required institutions in place can enable a smooth transition from existing power structures to city-based structures. The vision itself, however, flows from an understanding of complexity—regardless of any policy intervention. The analytical approach is depicted in Fig. 1.1.

Fig. 1.1

The problematization of scale

The problematization of scale is depicted in Fig. 1.1. The title of this chapter, the phrase ‘On the Problem of Scale,’ appears in Ernst F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful.³ There, Schumacher explains the origin and meaning of the phrase⁴:

On the problem of “scale,” Professor Leopold Kohr has written brilliantly and convincingly … Small-scale operations, no matter how numerous, are always less likely to be harmful to the natural environment than large-scale ones, simply because their individual force is small in relation to the recuperative forces of nature.

This Kohr principle is a critique of polities with large jurisdictional footprints and advocates instead political organization on a small scale.⁵ The monograph provides a normative signal as to the nature of such political organization. Through each of its chapters, the book contemplates the rise of the city in this century as a sovereign polity on a global scale.

This monograph furnishes a Copernican shift where localism is brought to the center of any effective response to socio-economic and ecological crisis—and by doing so surrendering all other scales of social organization (from the national to the global) to subsidiarity. Chapter 4 hence investigates the role of localism in relation to the ecological crisis. The first argument suggests that the causes of such crises share a common denominator, namely, detachment of people from their locale, leading to insatiable growth. The prime culprit here is social organizing at the ‘national’ scale, especially after the French Revolution of 1789, although a second, more destructive, wave of delocalization is now ushered by a specific form of globalization—top-down globalization. The second argument examines the role of localism in the historical (pre-Enlightenment) and modern (post-Enlightenment) responses to ecological crises. Historically, localism was the leitmotif of the historical discourse, from legislative instruments right down to policy implementation. The historical response was well withi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. On the Problem of Scale
• 2. Economic Cubism, Economic Surrealism, and Scale Relativity
• 3. Scale Invariance in Constitutional Political Economy (CPE)
• 4. The Tower of Babel Syndrome
• 5. A Décollage of Kropotkin, Mumford, Boulding, Bookchin, and Schumacher
• 6. The Morphogenetic Foundations of Economic Change
• 7. The Principle of Subsidiarity
• 8. The Auxilium Model
• 9. An Economic Model of Political Fission and Fusion
• 10. Case Study: New England and New Zealand
• 11. Case Study: The Territorial Evolution of Australia and the United States
• 12. Case Study: The United States, Canada, and Australia
• 13. Towards an Olympic World System
• 14. Envoi: The Need for Jarlsberg Constitutions
• Correction to: Axial Shift
• Back Matter