Part of the government series of articles.
Read more: The Good, The Municipal
Municipalism is the political philosophy underlying Vekllei localism – a belief in community self-governance, subsidiarity and the neighbourhood as the primary site of democratic life. Its basic claim is that a town should be governed by the people who live in it, and that only what a town cannot do for itself should be passed up to the republic or the Commonwealth.
Nationalism, [and] here I mean the relationship with the nation, is a basis for modern schizophrenia, where flags and presidents become parents and lovers.
– CΓ©leste Martineau, former First Secretary of Karu
The practical expression of this philosophy is the municipality, which is the foundational unit of Vekllei’s cascading democratic structure. A municipality may be a village of a few hundred people on a remote island or a town of several thousand, and it is one of the incorporated areas that hold a charter from their republic. The cities are incorporated instead as metropolises, which are divided into departments. The country between them belongs to the provinces, which are farmland, outposts and stations run by the republican government itself.
The municipal assembly is where most Vekllei people experience democracy directly, and meet about local issues with people they know. Assemblies elect delegates to Republic Assemblies upward, and downward they are the primary economic actors in the commons system through municipal corporations, which aggregate community output and negotiate trade and investment with superior bodies.
The sum of Vekllei municipalism is expressed in the Atlantic Municipalist tradition:
Principles of Atlantic Municipalism
- Local employment, or “commutelessness.”
- Slumlessness, beautification, and a will to architecture.
- Property stewardship.
- Open air and clean water.
- Land usefulness (“friendliness”).
- Private ownership of private needs.
- Public ownership of public needs.
Municipal boundaries follow literal geographic demarcations rather than administrative borders – walls, berms, rivers or forests that make incorporation visible in the landscape. A small island is often a single municipality, and the larger republics are divided into dozens of them. Besides its assembly, a municipality generally has a civic and an industrial ecclesia, a heliaea for local disputes and a number of voluntary councils.