I attended the Citidem seminar, on Poland. It was addressed by Professor Maciej Kisilowski, who has authored a book/paper collecting his thoughts. The paper is called , Introduction: A Polarized Country in Need of a New Social Contract, Let’s Agree on Poland. A Case Study in Strategic Constitutional Design. The paper is available at the University of Warsaw site. The seminar is available on youtube.
I made a contribution, here are my notes.
Professor Kisilowski spoke of the centripetal forces in Poland and argues that to combat these forces there needs to be new foci of power. He proposes Mayors, who will also meet in a national senate. He described the mayors as guardians of the constitution which reminded me of Labour’s proposals, for a basic law, enforced by a reformed upper house, in the Brown Commission, a topic on which I blogged, and on which little progress has been made.
The problem with populist politics is the winner take all nature of the liberal democracies and their parties. Electoral systems that reinforce the winner take all culture do not serve democracy. In elections of Presidents and Mayors, there can only be one winner which reinforces the anti-democratic tendencies of politicians and weakens ‘loser’s consent’. One counter model is found in Switzerland, but parliaments and committees can and have to negotiate in the open and often they will find more acceptable solutions from the various stakeholders second and third choice preferences. I question whether directly elected presidents and mayors are the superior democratic answer to government.
It was argued that the EU could act as a guarantor or underwriter of human rights law, although it may be that there are those who oppose human rights law, and certainly human rights laws written by foreigners. This is certainly the case in the UK. I can see a role for the EU in this role and have supported the opposition and implementation of measures that the UK parliament would have wanted or not. The EU is operating its own agenda of centralisation which if desirable needs changes in governance rules.
Within the Aquis of the EU, subsidiarity is a relationship between the Union and the States. We, the people, need that subsidiarity to become a right; and that decisions are taken as close to the people it effects as possible.
Devolution is hard to implement because it means the meaningful transfer of power. If devolution is a gift, then it can always be taken back. We can see imperfect implementations of devolution in the UK in Scotland and Wales and in Spain in Catalunya & the Basque country, but also in Italy, Belgium and Finland.
On writing this piece, I add this as a conclusion. The arguments about a new constitution and the necessary conflict resolution mechanisms raises the issue of the freezing of inter-community dialogue and the embedding of the cultural polarisation. This can be seen in a number of places in the world, including Northern Ireland, Belgium, the Lebanon and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Northern Ireland, which I know better than the other locations, the power-sharing has led firstly to increased polarisation and latterly, an inhibition on building cross-community parties.
My conclusion is that constitutions needs both flexibility and boundaries and that representative parliaments/councils are superior to presidents and mayors.
Featured Image: The Polish Sejm by Polish MFA cc-by-nd-2011 via flickr; w750