(Draft version 2.2, February 2008)
The purpose of this text is to be a pretext for an international process for discussion and awareness raising around the question on how the political organization of societies, from local to global, could be improved in order to help building a fair, responsible and truly democratic world. Such discussion, as well as other similar collective dynamics, could contribute in the future to more consolidate actions and movements in favour of implementing new models of political organization.
You are invited, as individual or organisation, to do one of these things:
- support the current version of this text by signing it.
- participate in the discussion that will follow the text's diffusion.
For any of these purposes please write to respolis@gmail.com
PREMISES
1. Politics can be defined as the art of governing and taking decisions. It is the sphere of human organization concerning administration of communal or collective affairs.
2. A responsible form of government of a community is that in which the main purpose is to serve the community members' necessities.
3. The main forms of government of the modern societies, like the Liberal Representative Democracies, or the Communist States, it only have build, along the last two centuries, a superficial, social cohesion, as its response to the disordered technological and economic development. However, they have been unable to instate the responsibility in politics, that is to say, to achieve a real efficiency in the common affairs management, from the perspective of fulfilling human needs and reaching sustainability.
4. In other words, the modern governments has been unable to solve the main social problems like misery, injustice, wars, environmental destruction, rights violations, excess of consumption and competitiveness.
5. The last-200-years political history shows us that Representative Democracy, as well as Communist and Military States, have developed inner limits that impeded the exercise of a full political responsibility. These limits are inherent to the imperfect organizational structure of these forms of government, beyond of the inability and the lack of will of the representatives, the governments or the parties, and beyond of the context of a given country or its economic dependence on the global market.
6. There are many signs accusing this fundamental crisis of Politics, which should be considered as consequences, rather than causes, of the crisis itself. Among them there are corruption and favouritism; the end of the mediation role that the political parties played among the society and the State; "partitocracy"; permanent unfulfillment of promises; lack of citizen control over the government activities; abstentionism; administrative paralysis; banalities, lies and intertwined accusations in speeches and discourses; electoralism; abuse of power; partisan use of public money; lobbyism and in-depth conflict of interests; prevarication; legal or consented impunity; party and party system's hierarchization; connivance with economic elites; control over media, civil society and citizenship… the causes of such a crisis should be found further on, in the fact that our civilisation lacks of a citizen (democratic, ethical) cultural basis, and the consequence of such absence is a hierarchical organization of the whole society, in which the chain of command and the conflict are the norm, while the dialogue and cooperation among equals, the exception.
7. On the other hand the shaking rhythm of globalization has accelerated the imbalances between people, between societies, and between human race and the nature, It has also modified the way of communicating. In such a new and worst scenario, many conventional assumptions are no valid any more and new responses are urgently required.
8. although more and more people are better qualified that in the past, overalls thanks to the universalization of the education, to negotiate the social problems, the humanity is among the sword of the urgency to solve more critical situations that affect larger populations, and the wall of not having an appropriate political model to exercise all her potentiality.
9. For this reason the political rules of the game, from local to global, needs to be reinvented, by giving a major role to responsibility. In other words, politics should change in order to become efficient from the perspective of contributing to the human development goals and those of life in general.
According to all these points, the following principles have been elaborated:
PRINCIPLES
Common Principles for Responsibility in Politics.
1. The international citizen community should promote the right of a plural human citizenship, not related to a given national identity, and guaranteed to all the human beings without distinction of any kind.
2. The territorial management should run under a common ethics concerning political responsibility. Its values should stem from the contribution of the different cultural and social traditions.
3. Politics should set the conditions and the fields of implementation of economy. The current and inverse situation, in which the rules and the evolution of the market define the political agendas, should be reverted.
4. Politics will set up common rules defining how the relationship between humanity and the biosphere should be, in benefit of the proper development of the both of them. The reconstruction of the global environment that has been broken by the industrial development, requires coordination and cooperation among may actors, and overcoming the blind force of the competitiveness.
5.Planning and implementation of the public policies should aim to satisfy short term needs, and to guarantee the survival of the future generations.
Principles of Responsibility concerning the forms of government.
6. It should belong to all the citizens, rather than to some few experts, the so-called politicians, to decide on political management, form of government' planning, and responsibility in politics. The laws, the education, the media, should be prepared in order that such a change of paradigm concerning the political culture of the society shall take effect.
7. Citizens know, better than leaders and experts, which are their own problems and needs, and often, through activating its collective intelligence, they can find better solutions. For this reason the forms of government where citizen involvement is more regular, intense, mandatory, multi-thematic, and in the spotlight, should be promoted in preference, regarding other decision-making processes.
8. In this sense, we need to invent and to draw on a transition process from the current forms of government (representative democracy and others) towards more participatory, fully participatory, or direct models, independently of the differences among these models depending on each culture, society, country, etc. (see the following section about the proposal for managing the transition).
9. Political representation is a service for the represented community, ant not a privilege in favour of any particular interest. The laws, the education, the media, should be also prepared in order that such a change of paradigm concerning the political culture of the society shall take effect.
10. The political activities and the relationship between the actors and the receivers of the public management should be developed according to the essential principles of accountability, honesty and coherence. The discourses, the information circulation, the services, the way these services are offered, the working methods, the technologies, etc. most be coherent with the pursued objectives, realist, and of public knowledge.
11. All the current and future forms of democracy (representative, participative or direct democracy, among others) should develop citizen control mechanisms on accountability, control, evaluation and political, even economic sanction, to be applied to all the political activities and to the responsible persons according to law.
12. The territorial administration (including sovereign states, regional and global levels) should adopt the principle of "active subsidiarity" according to which:
a) Decisions are taken bottom-up, whether the information is disseminated in all directions, including top down.
b) The conception and the operation of these institutions should be managed through an interacting system that should regularly connect the people's sovereign decisions to its execution. This way, a regular process of citizen re-appropriation of politics is guaranteed.
c) All the public organizations' activities should be developed in accordance with the principle of mutual cooperation and cooperation with the citizens. They should establish a state of regular co-responsibility among the different levels and thematic sectors of the public administration, so that all the public institutions from the local to the global level put the work in network among them.
13. The territorial public organizations, especially the sovereign states and the economic and military blocks, should promote reciprocal loyalties and imbricate identities with all the others, regarding the principle of unity and diversity at all levels. They should officially renounce, as well as abandon the practice of working according to the Raison d'État, to the exclusive interpretations of the cultural and religious identities, and to competitive and warlike attitudes
No comments:
Post a Comment