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. It holds that political authority should begin at the smallest viable scale and cascade upward only where necessary, and that the social relationships people maintain within walking distance are more politically real than those coordinated from distant capitals.
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. Municipalities are incorporated settlements with defined geographic boundaries and autonomous governance, varying in scale from a few hundred people on a remote island to urban communities of several thousand. Metropolises serve the same function for larger urban concentrations, divided internally into departments. Together they form the incorporated layer of Vekllei settlements, distinct from provinces, which are unincorporated rural areas under direct republican administration.
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. On small islands, the entire population may form a single municipality. On larger republics, dozens of municipalities divide the settled territory, each with its own assembly managing civic and economic affairs and supplemented by specialist councils.