2012-01-02 Under Assemblies what might national, European and global governance look like?

Submitted by Mark Barret

Image credit www.whiteflag.info

Asking this question raises profound questions about sovereignty, representation and justice. In an age characterised by the sovereignty of the nation-state, since the Treaty of Westphalia, globalisation has brought about the rise of the new, unaccountable king, in the form of global bond markets and other undemocratic world institutions. By contrast the Occupy/15M movement recognises the need to reformulate political economy at local, national and global levels, and to put it under people's control.

The first principle of the global movement is therefore the sovereignty of each people's assembly, within certain constitutional parameters. These parameters can be loosely defined with common slogans like "think global, act local", "inclusivity, equality, everyone's voice counts", "they don't represent us, and I do not represent anyone but myself". In short, the assembly is a new political form to bring about a people powered globalisation and democratise all spheres of life.

Talking about global governance is a huge and complex issue, but with the above first principle in place it is possible to sketch out how the process of change, driven by the assemblies might look in practice. First, because we recognise the nation state itself is problematic, and second because of our general belief in participatory democracy and local, decentralised community sovereignty (in Spain the assemblies decentralised down to the neighbourhood level quite rapidly) it is quite likely that the assemblies movement will aim to transform the domestic state / constitution.

So, in England (for example) this might mean the aim of overturning the centralised Parliamentary and Royal Prerogative Sovereignty (the latter now vested in the Prime Minister) and replacing it with sovereignty of the people, via a decentralised, community focused political economy. Under this model, People's Assemblies as new 'institutions of the common' would drive national as well as local policy via a federated, delegate system to the national (and ultimately also transnational) representative bodies. A useful statement about the need to democratise the British Constitution, via the formation of People's Assemblies, was produced in 2006.

Taken to the European level the same could apply, so the post-crisis European nation-state (if we will still chose to call it that, perhaps 'administration' is a better word) gets founded on principles of radical local subsidiarity and common welfare (commonfare) rather than the corporate, bureacratic, anti-democratic model currently being formulated. These transformations would naturally affect both internalities (ie the constitution) of the UK and Europe and its external foreign policy. All would become transparent and radically accountable to the grassroots, indeed they would be driven by altogether new processes and would produce a radically different economic reality. I wrote about one aspect of this, the future of work earlier in the year, here. Alongside these or similar ideas of public and private employment, and a living wage for all one might also imagine the full array of public services being provided by new, commonly owned constitutional arrangements. For example governance itself (local Governing Assemblies), banking and finance, education ('it takes a village to bring up a child'), food production and so forth. In short wherever services can be provided locally and democratically, they should be.

At the fully global level at this stage we need to speak in even more broadbrush terms. However starting again with the first principle, the sovereignty of People's Assemblies and the need to secure a new global settlement in which that principle is honoured, as with the nation state which will be overturned and transformed by the power and voice of these new institutions, here we may imagine the first step in democratising the global institutions.

So, it might make sense for the Assemblies to campaign to end tax havens worldwide, which would not only allow more revenue to be raised by national administrations, it could also perhaps begin the process of democratic global regulation of capital markets. However, there are justifiable fears over the bringing about of world government via such a movement, with sovereignty ending up vested in even worse (centralised, unaccountable and potentially fascist) global institutions. To counter such a possibility, and in order to cement the global sovereignty of people (via the assemblies) perhaps then call for a global tax ('no corporate representation without global taxation!') crucially in which the rate, collection and destination of the funds realised gets decided by the global assemblies might be the way forward. This would allow us to establish the global sovereign as the people, not a global state or other representatives of capital, while also beginning the process of redistributing wealth directly to the grassroots (say to the Horn of Africa to tackle the famine, or to provide water, sanitation and other basic services in the global south) and then being able to go on from there to tackling the people's constitutional relationship with all the other global institutions.

New forms of taxation such as land tax and the ending of income tax, and new local powers embracing parliamentary, public employment, banking and educational functions presently monopolised by undemocratic states could follow in many countries as assemblies begin driving the future culture. However all of these ideas must play second fiddle to the assemblies process. For any of them to come to be they must be agreed and campaigned for by the assemblies themselves and the priorities for this in each territory will of course be very different,

NB this piece is not official Occupy policy, it is just a personal position written to encourage debate within the movement. By contrast, a broad brush and consensus-agreed summary of how of People's Assemblies to bring about real democracy written in 2009 is set out here.