In Unifying Europe the Balkans are Still the Achilles heel

No one genre of thinking, talking, or writing enjoys the privilege to best represent a progressive, programmatic imagination. We can think discursively, prophetically, systematically or by fragment and parable with a particular context in mind or on a worldwide scale, linked to particular parties and movements or disconnected from them, extending actual experience or anticipating possible experience, for the here and now of immediate feasible changes or for the remote and speculative future of unborn humanity, with a wealth of empirical detail and justificatory argument or with nothing but the suggestive and dogmatic invocations of a manifesto. These forms have different uses. They complement one another. It is a mistake, for example, to oppose short-term and context-oriented proposals to the tentative exploration of long-term alternative futures, or moderation to radicalism, in programmatic thoughts. Any trajectory of cumulative structural change can be considered as points close to present social reality or distant from it. The direction matters more than the distance.

What counts is to populate our imaginative world with more such practices, and to free ourselves from the superstitious inhibitions that prevent us from doing so. The following theses amount to one such experiment in discourse. Although placed at an extreme limit of the repertory of programmatic genres, they address directly the problems that have been central in this book.

First thesis: On the history of democratic institutions

The dominant constitutional tradition in the West draws today upon two sets of arrangements and ideas. The first set consists of a preference for constitutional forms that fragment power, favor deadlock and establish a rough equivalence between the transformative reach of a political program and the seventy of the legal constitutional and practical political obstacles set up in the course of its execution. Both the system of checks and balances in American-style presidential regimes and the need to base political power upon broad consensus within the political class in parliamentary regimes exemplify this inhibiting preference. The second set of arrangements and ideas in the dominant tradition is the adoption of rules and practices maintaining society at a relatively low level of political mobilization. These practices gradually replaced the institutional devices of proto-democratic liberalism—the limits to the suffrage and the recourse to multiple levels of representation—that secured property against populism. Progressives must reject and replace both parts of this tradition.

Second thesis: On the constitutional arrangements of government

A constitutional style designed to accelerate politics and to favour the repeated and frequent practice of basis reform should combine a strong plebiscitarian element with a broad range of channels for the political representation of society. Example: a strong parliament coexists with a directly elected president with substantial powers of political initiative. But the standard hybrid form of presidential and parliamentary regimes (as in the constitution of the Fifth Republic) is replaced by a system that avoids weak government and the perpetuation for deadlock. It does so according to the following principles. First, reform programs enjoy priority over ordinary, episodic legislation: they must be agreed to, rejected, or negotiated quickly. Second, when under such a system, president and parliament disagree on a reform program, they may agree to plebiscites or referenda. Third, if the political branches of government are unable to agree about the realization or the terms of popular consultation, or if the result of the consultation is indecisive, either the parliament or the president may call anticipated elections, but the elections must be simultaneous for both branches of government. The general principle is rapid resolution of impasse through direct involvement of the general electorate. The aim is to quicken democratic experimentalism by facilitating the repeated practice of radical reform. Change in the formative institution and practices of society as well as in the beliefs sustaining them. In many countries, with strong political parties, and informed electorates, the reform of a parliamentary system of government can produce similar results.

Third thesis: On the reorganization of electoral politics

A sustained heightening of the level of political mobilization is required for the acceleration of democratic experimentalism in all fields of social life.  The level of political mobilization is not a natural fact about a society or a culture; it is, to a large extent, an artifact, responsive to changes in the rules and instruments of politics.  Among such changes are: public financing of political campaigns, expanded free access to the means of mass communication for political parties and social movements; multiplication of the forms of ownership of the means of communication; rules of mandatory voting: and changes in the electoral regime. Although a system of closed lists and proportional representation is usually most effective in strengthening political parties as the agents of structural proposals, the temporary adoption of majority elections may in certain countries help shake up a rigidified party system and reveal underlying progressive and conservative coalitions. A politics of repeated structural change is necessarily a high-energy politics.  For the high energy to persist beyond interludes of collective enthusiasm it must find sustenance in arrangements friendly to the rise of popular political engagement. For the high energy to exercise a lasting productive effect it must leave its work inscribed in the institutional and imaginative order of the society.

The Organization of Civil Society and the Protection of Rights

Fourth thesis: On the conception of fundamental rights

Progressives should reinterpret rather than reject the idea of fundamental rights.  There is a dialectical relation between the protection of individuals in a haven of vital interests and the capacity of individuals to flourish in the midst of a quickened experimentalism.  The role of the rights is to assure people of the political, economic, and cultural equipment they need in order to stand up, go forward, and connect.  Such rights must safeguard them against the insecurities that might tempt them to abandon their freedom.  We must take the definition and assignment of this equipment out of the agenda of short-term politics so that we can broaden this agenda effectively.  Thus, the relation of fundamental rights to the generalized tinkering of a deepened democracy is like the relation between the love that children receive from their parents and the capacity of children to make and remake themselves through moral adventure.

People should inherit from society rather than from their parents; they should have a social-endowment account.  Inheritance upon death or through gift should be limited to the patrimony required by a conventionally set standard of modest independence.  The social-endowment account should include both a fixed and variable part.  The variable part should increase by one measure according to a principle of compensation for special needs, for physical, social, or cognitive disadvantage, and by another countervailing principle according to a criterion of reward for special capability, through competition among individuals for increments to their accounts.

Education, continuing through a lifetime, rescuing people as children from the imaginative hold of their families, their class, their country, and their time, and giving them as adults access to a repertory of generic practical and conceptual capacities, is the most important enabler of individual and collective freedom.  It is therefore the principal object of the social-endowment account.

In keeping with the experimentalist impulse, we would try out and compare different ways of composing the accounts and of restricting their use.  Thus, some part may be received as cash grants from the government, and some part held as tradable but not cashable stakes in productive assets. Some part may need to be spent in predetermined ways according to fixed rules, and some part may be available for choice among alternative uses and alternative providers.  Moreover, if these inheritance-replacing arrangements impose a cost upon output and prosperity, let us find out what the cost is, and let us decide how much of it we want to bear for the sake of a form of life better equipping and connecting us. Let us redefine as social choice what would otherwise remain institutional fate.

Fifth thesis: On the protection of fundamental rights

Rights, especially social and economic rights, should not be viewed simply as resource-dependent schemes of social welfare and social insurance. Claims of right enter into conflict with particular social organizations or areas of social practice when (a) a structure of inequality or exclusion emerges in particular organizations or practices, threatening the effective enjoyment of rights and (b) the individual cannot readily challenge this citadel of privilege by the normal forms of economic and political activity available to him. We need a type of corrective intervention and reorganization that is both (a) structural and rights defining and (b) episodic and localized.  Examples: intervention in a school system to correct the disfavouring of children with certain skills or disabilities; intervention in a factory or reorganize a system of work imposing extreme forms of hierarchy in the interest of control and surveillance rather than as a requirement of technical coordination and efficiency.  None of the existing branches of government are entirely well suited, by reason of political legitimacy or practical capacity, to serve as the agents of such intervention.  A new branch of government must be designed, elected or co-chosen by the elected branches. It should have budgetary and technical resources appropriate to its reconstructive responsibilities.

Sixth thesis: On the legal organization of civil society

A vigilant and organized civil society is indispensable to the advancement of democratic experimentalism. A disorganized society cannot generate alternative futures or act upon them.  Disorganization is surrender to accident, to drift, to fate.

It is not enough to call for an intensification of voluntary association without re-imagining and remaking the institutional context in which voluntary association takes place.  We can call the spirits, but they may not come.  There are two paths of institutional reform that can strengthen the capacity of civil society for independent self-organization.  Call them private law plus one and public law minus one.  Far from being mutually exclusive, they can complement each other.

Private law plus one accepts the conventional body of contract and corporate law as the basic framework for the self-organization of civil society. However, it supplements this framework by establishing a branch of government responsible for localized intervention in organizations or practices corrupted by entrenched forms of social exclusion or subjugation. The evil to be redressed by such corrective intervention is a social disadvantage people are unable to escape by the normal forms of political and economic action.  Left unchallenged, such disadvantage prevents its victims from effectively exercising many of their other political and economic rights.

The work of the reconstructive branch of government is neither to promulgate general laws like a legislature not to settle rights disputes among individual litigants like a traditional judiciary.  Its work is to repair a localized obstacle to capable economic or political agency.  To this end, the intervening branch may have to run the offending organization for a while, placing it in a kind of social receivership, the better to lift it past the threshold of acceptability. The new part of government may need to investigate, invest, and reform, but always with a focused scope and for a limited time.  Thus, it must enjoy the political legitimacy that comes from being elected by the people or co-elected by political branches of government, and the practical capacity that results from having financial and investigative resources at is disposal.

Public law minus one means a public-law framework for the organization of civil society outside the state, around jobs, neighborhoods or shared special concerns (like health care or education).  There would be a right to opt out of this framework and fashion alternative arrangements under certain conditions.  These readymade public-law provisions should help establish a bias toward inclusive organization in civil society.  However, they should, remain free from any taint of governmental control or tutelage.

For example, the contractualist labor-law principle of complete freedom of the unions from the government may be combined with the corporatist principle of automatic unionization of everyone. Automatic unionization may sound coercive until you realize that the choice may be between unequal organization, reinforcing the advantages of the advantaged, and inclusive but democratic organization. Creating a structure over which everyone can fight on relatively equal terms.  There is internal democracy in such a unitary and all-inclusive labor-union system; indifferent labor movements, whether or not affiliated to political parties, compete for position in this union system just as political parties compete for position in government. The same idea can be produced on territorial principles: a system of neighborhood associations, outside the structure of local government and parallel to that structure.  In yet a third domain the principle can take a functional direction: the organization of civil society around certain shared concerns, such as education or health services. Associational depth and diversity are conditions of cooperative competitions in production and of deliberative capacity in politics. They diminish the terrors of innovation by sustaining trust and containing risk. To promote them is the proper object of a body of social law expanding and shaping the space between private initiative and public policy.

People should be able to exist this public law system of social organization and create alternative arrangements so long as two basic conditions are satisfied: The first condition is that those who withdraw be in a situation of rough equality relative to one another. The second condition is that they not use their power of exiting the framework to establish another little citadel of entrenched subordination.

The Organization of Public Finance and of the Economy

Seventh thesis: On public finance and the tax system

Some significant element of indirect taxation bas been shown to be necessary in most contemporary societies to guarantee substantial tax revenues and thus to ensure a high level of public investment in people. The least regressive of the indirect taxes, and the one least likely to distort and disrupt economic activities, is a comprehensive flat-rate value-added tax.  On the secure basis of the revenue collected by this tax there should be two principal direct taxes. The first is a Kaldor-style consumption tax, taxing the difference between income and savings-investments, with a large exemption for a basic level of consumption and a steeply progressive scale.  The second is a wealth tax, of which the most important part is heavy taxation of family gifts and inheritance.

In this way, we distinguish clearly the two targets of standard-of-living (for the consumption tax) and economic power (for the wealth tax) and address them directly rather than accepting the relatively confused and ineffective machinery of the income tax.  The organizations of civil society described in the sixth thesis should be engaged in the allocation and super-vision of public spending. At a later moment in the deepening of democracy, when, according to the ninth thesis, traditional unified property rights have given way to a system of fragmentary, joint, and residual rights in productive resources, taxation may cease to be the mainstay of public finance. Instead of taxing, the government may impose differential rates of return for the use of the productive resources of society. The semi-independent organizations responsible for broadening the decentralized allocation of social capital (ninth thesis) would pay such charges, recovering them from the firms and work teams who would be the ultimate resource users.

Eight theses. On the reform of the production system and of its relation to the state

The reformation of production along more experimentalist lines need not have democratizing consequences, but it offers democratizing opportunities.  The most promising path to the realization of such opportunities lies in a growth strategy combining the following attributes: (a) within firms, the practice of production as learning and the softening of rigid contrasts between tasks defining and task-executing activities; (b) among firms, cooperative competition – small and medium-sized firms, or decentralized divisions of large firms simultaneously compete and cooperate, pooling financial, commercial, and technological resources; (c) between firms and governments, a wide range of forms of partnership with decentralized pluralistic and socially inclusive forms of strategic coordination between government and business.  To prevent such partnership from degenerating into collusion between bureaucratic and entrepreneurial elites and from falling victim to rent-seeking and dogmatism we need to diversify the cast of economic agents and to screen governments from particular firms while affirming, in novel form, the idea of association between public power and private enterprise.

Democratizing the partnership between government and business requires the development of a level of organization standing in between the state and the firms; competitive social funds and support centers. Enjoying broad independence, and subject to competitive pressure and financial responsibility, such funds would operate with the resources of an original endowment, supplemented by their own gains.  Their task would be to associate private initiative and public power in a decentralized form, calculated to minimize bureaucratic prejudice and economic privilege while promoting experimental innovation in the institutional forms of market activity.

From the outset some of these organizations would be charged with taking a view beyond the short term, in the fashion of a public venture-capital business.  A characteristic concern of theirs would be to invest in a productive vanguard capable of producing, in customized fashion, the materials and machinery the productive rearguard of the economy needs. They would also work to lift up this rearguard, helping it identify and assimilate better practices and more advanced technologies.

Ninth thesis: On property rights

The decentralized and democratized partnership between governments and firms described in the eighth thesis can in turn advance through the dismemberment of traditional property rights. The powers now brought together under the label “property” would be torn apart, step by step, and vested in different tiers of right-holders; governments, intermediate organizations, and firms Democratic governmental institutions may mark the outer limits to inequality of benefit or position in the workplace, shape the alternative means for the decentralized allocation of capital and set the basis underlying charge for the use of capital.  The intermediate organizations—social funds and support centers—would coordinate access to productive resources under different legal regimes.

Under some such regimes the funds would have an arm’s-length relation to their client firms: assigning resources, in exchange for debt and equity, to those with the best prospect of assuring over longer or shorter periods the highest rate of return.  Under other regimes the firms would develop a more intimate relation to their client firms, as centerpieces of little confederations of cooperative-competitive businesses.  The ultimate capital-takers and users—the client firms or the terms of professionals or workers moving in and out of the firms—would share with the intermediate organizations and with local governments or community associations joint residual rights in the businesses they established.

Thus, we qualify property rights to make them proliferate. We achieve more decentralization of economic opportunity as well as more diversity in the legal forms of the market at the cost of weakening the absoluteness of the command right-holders enjoy over the resources at their disposal. Different systems of contract exist over the resources at their disposal.  Different systems of contract and property law, amounting to alternative methods for the decentralized allocation of capital, come to coexist within the same economy. An active, informed society can then evaluate their respective merits for each sector of economic activity, their economic benefits and social costs.

We diminish the tension between private initiative and public control by changing their institutional vehicles. Moreover, we diminish it simultaneously in many different ways, the better to see and to judge the practical consequences of each way.  By such devices we turn into recognized and replaceable artifice what had been mistaken for practical or conceptual necessity in the institutional design of a market economy.  The result is neither ”capitalism” nor “socialism” but the market economy made more inclusive, more pluralistic, and more experimental.

Democracy and the left

Tenth thesis: on what it means to be progressive today

To be progressive today is to insist upon crossing the boundaries of the established institutional settlement in a democratizing direction. Anyone who accepts the established institutional framework as the horizon within which interests and ideals—including egalitarian ideals—must be pursued is not a progressive.  The European social democratic parties are not progressive.  A pessimistic, socially concerned but institutionally conservative reformism is not progressive.  The error lies in believing that the alternative to resignation is the total substitution of one “system” by another.  Revolutionary reform—the part-by-part substitution of formative institutional structures and ideas—is the exemplary mode of transformative politic. The idea of revolutionary change has, by its impracticality, become a pretext for its opposite. The first nine theses give examples of revolutionary reforms crossing the frontiers of the established institutional settlement.

Eleventh thesis: on the interpretation of the democratic cause

The democratic cause is the effort to identify and to realize arrangements exploiting the area of potential overlap between the conditions of material progress and the conditions of individual emancipation. Thus, it moves toward the generalization of experimentalism in social life. It subjects the institutional forms of representative democratic and of the regulated market economy to this same experimentalism.  It is not anti-liberal; it realizes liberal hopes by changing liberal forms: It defuses to sacrifice the plurality of human interests to a single-minded egalitarianism. It wants us to be less unequal and less disconnected from one another in ways that also make us bigger, energizing and empowering.

Twelfth thesis: On the social base of the progressive parties

The progressive parties cannot accept the choice between clinging to the favored representation of organized workers in mass-production industry and redefining themselves as middle-class “quality-of-life” parties.  By choosing the first path the sink into the defense of ever-narrower factional interests. By choosing the second path they betray their transformative and democratizing mission. They must find in a program of structural reconstruction both the focus and the basis for an enlarged popular alliance. What makes this effort possible is (a) the internal or dialectical relation between die redefinition of interests and ideals and the remaking of institutions or practices and (b) the asymmetrical relation between social alliances and political alliances. Social alliances are built through the transforming work of political alliance and sustained by structural reform that turn tactical convergences into lasting combinations of group interests and identities. However, political alliances do not take social alliances for granted, they have the development of social alliances as a task.

Thirteenth thesis:  On the focus of institutional innovation and ideological conflict in the world

The democratic project advances through conflict the inherited ideological divisions lose their living connection to real concerns and possible alternatives. They must then be reinvented. The conflict between statism and privatism is dying and being replaced by a contest among the alternative institutional forms of political, social, and economic pluralism. Representative democracy, free civil society, and the market economy can all take forms different from those they now assume in the North Atlantic world. The choice among such alternatives is fateful because it represents a preference not just for certain arrangements but also for the possibilities of individual and collective experience these arrangements sustain. The involuntary institutional experimentalism of the post countries (that invent when imitation fails to work) sheds light on the suppressed opportunities for transformation in the rich countries. The albatross of state socialism has been lifted from the neck of the left. However, the attempt by institutionally conservative social democrats to reduce progressive politics to the reconciliation of social protection with market flexibility leaves democracy unrealized and fails in its own objective. The time for progressives to reinvent themselves by driving democratic experimentalism forward is now.