Third and last part of the lecture on “administrative regionalization and local development”, which Professor António Covas gave, in November, at the Public Library of Faro, at the invitation of the civic association CIVIS:
1. The eighth note
You spoke of municipalities as centers of power. If you remember, there was an attempt to reform the Municipal Electoral Law, to transform municipal executives into monocolor executives, removing the contradiction from the Municipal Executive and passing it on to the Municipal Assembly, where it already exists, but much mitigated.
Obviously, if the executive were to become monocolor, the municipal parliament would itself have to be reinforced with other powers of hearing and control.
It is an interesting question, because participatory democracy is not indifferent to this electoral reform in terms of representative democracy. There is more participatory democracy if we are blocked from accessing the municipality, because, as I understand it, participatory democracy is practiced “from the inside out and from the outside to the inside”. On the contrary, representative democracy is done “from the inside to the inside”.
In participatory democracy, we are outside the municipality and there may be several access channels. There may even be a local council or several local councils by area and by sector, and then with digital platforms, it can all work.
But, another thing is our participation through the constituted bodies of the municipality. I'm imagining a local mini-parliament in the image and likeness of the national parliament, with specialized committees and hearings where the lobbies and corporations complain and denounce what is going on outside.
If this were to happen in the municipal parliament, this privileged channel would end up distorting, in a way, participatory democracy, although I believe that both ways are possible, that is, having participatory democracy working with technological platforms and local councils and , then, to have another institutional framework of the autarchies, where the power of lobbies can make sense and be practiced more directly than it does today.
Briefly, if, as it still is today, the executives are not single-colored, the pressure is exerted directly on the City Council, if they are single-colored, the pressure is exerted on the Municipal Assembly.
This balance between participatory democracy and representative democracy has a lot to do with the accountability and control of citizens, and if, as I mentioned earlier, the “four democracies” are functioning, the pressure on the executive is enormous and there will therefore be , a plurality of communication channels between the municipality and the local community.
2. The ninth grade
In the case of the European Union, the doubts are even greater, as the scale of a union of parishes has nothing to do with a scale of 28 states. But there is one merit that no one can refuse the European Union, do you know what it is? It is being able to “turn a serious illness into a chronic illness”.
Do not pose, in the first instance, the problem of whether the European Union is successful or not. Rather, pose the problem of knowing, if the European Union did not exist, where would we be?
Paradoxical as it may seem, one of the merits of the European Union is the “institutional inertia”. Faced with the imminence of the so-called “black swans” – a serious, unexpected, surprising and random occurrence – the system's inertia may be the lesser evil or the most realistic approach.
I refer, for example, to the victory of Mr Trump or the eventual victory of Mrs Le Pen in France in four or five months' time, or the consequences of the UK's withdrawal from the European Union, or a serious conflict between Spain and the UK because of Gibraltar, or, not to go too far, a smaller swan, because of the Almaraz plant, a serious territorial conflict with Spain.
What do I mean by this? Scotland, Catalonia, Wallonia or Flanders feel comfortable belonging to the European Union and its Europe of Regions, because their inertia, the inertia of the European Union, is able to accommodate serious conflicts due to a series of institutional negotiation procedures and processes, which cushion shocks, especially in the present time.
This is also the pure reason for associativism and decentralized territorial cooperation. That's why I say that unions, associations and communities are always welcome because, by making the practical pedagogy of the contradictory, they dampen adventurous projects, whether de facto unions or de jure.
Moreover, in the open and global world in which we live, variable geometry always better adjusts to the volatility of problems and solutions.
In this line, the municipality must be thought of from the inside out and from the outside to the inside. Therefore, the municipality needs to have a “minister of foreign affairs” and diplomatic relations, because the municipality is so small that its most pertinent activity ends up taking place outside the municipality's borders.
3. The tenth grade
The same is true for the Algarve region. The Algarve is a city-region and a paradox as a region because it has 430 inhabitants. It is not a region with five million inhabitants, nor is it a compact city with 430 inhabitants, it is more like an archipelago city.
It is, if you like, a hybrid, a regional hybrid, and that's why I say that the Algarve had everything to gain if it projected itself in the Southwest Peninsular, between the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Seville, which also include the Alentejo and Western Andalusia.
In other words, that the AAA Euroregion is an adventure with weight, weight and measure, which we must seek and pursue today.
But not just in the Peninsular Southwest in the strict sense. I am also thinking of the Maghreb countries, the CPLP countries and Brazil/Mercosur, not to mention the implications that Brexit will bring to transatlantic relations.
When we look at the Southwest Peninsula from this more open perspective, many other development scenarios open up that it is imperative to explore for the benefit of the AAA Euroregion and the Algarve.
Final Notes
In this same line of reasoning, there is an article that I invite you to read, if you have the opportunity, published in the online newspaper Sul Informação, about the Europe of the Regions.
The European Union created a regulation, the regulation of the EGTC, which means European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation, to carry out cooperation between territories in a decentralized manner. A Eurocity can be an EGTC, a Euroregion can be an EGTC.
The upper region, between Galicia and the north of Portugal, is already a European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation. There are European benefits to these groupings.
One last note about the immaterial value of a territory, the so-called factor (i). Nowadays, one of the most attractive immaterial factors of a region is its literary landscapes. If I have a local writer or a local poet who has celebrated his land or region, I can, from there, organize visits and literary and artistic events, as does, for example, the Eça de Queirós Foundation in the municipality of Baião , with The City and the Mountains by the writer Eça de Queiroz.
In other words, the writers and poets who sang about our land can be an excellent pretext for tourist visitation, therefore an immaterial factor that gives rise to a pretext for tourism.
Still on factor (i) and the recent vacancy of start-ups and technology-based entrepreneurship. In recent years, we have already destroyed several “thematic agendas”. For example, equal opportunities, sustainable development, local and territorial development to some extent, we now place enormous hope in technology-based entrepreneurship.
I mean, we create, at certain times, “thematic agendas” that seem to solve all the country's problems, and then we go on burning, burning, burning, because, after all, it wasn't the magic solution we all expected.
With start-ups and entrepreneurship starts all over again. Here come the incubators, the FabLabs, the spaces of co-working, we are going to create a technological bubble, to our measure, that will grow and explode.
The balance will always be positive, because, despite everything, innovation in the administrative area will also grow, at the administration's own pace.
I am thinking of the great “institutional dinosaurs” of the modern era: municipalities, universities, unions, churches, parties, the great social and cultural institutions of the welfare state.
We are going to witness, on the one hand, the digital transformation of the great bureaucratic institutions of the 2nd industrial revolution, on the other, the taking of testimony by digital natives through digital platforms and social networks of the 3rd industrial revolution. The big change has already started.
Author António Covas is a full professor at the University of Algarve and a PhD in European Affairs from the Free University of Brussels
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