Glocal Democracy

* Paper: Glocal Democracy; a Philosophical Platform for Democracy 2.0. By: Leif Thomas Olsen (Rushmore Associate Professor, Int’l Relations) (2011)

Please note this is a version without notes, tables and references.

Abstract

‘Glocal Democracy’ attempts to lay down the cornerstones for a new approach to participative democracy. This new approach intends to support current systems, i.e. today’s parliamentarian, representative democracy - not replace it. As an integrated part of this, it also proposes a new conceptual framework for the ultimate incentive any government can offer, its tax regime, the reason being that current tax regimes block paradigm-shifts. As access to the interactive world wide web grows by the day, will not only new opportunities, but also new threats, emerge. Opportunities include (but are not limited to) dramatically improved access to both information and dialogue, while the threats include scams, deception, hidden and/or false identities, and propaganda posed as facts. Moving from general-content to specialised-content media consumption also adds to the risk of the ‘public sphere’ being divided in easy-to-rule single-issue communities. Glocal Democracy’s aim is two-fold: (i) to re-define the ‘public sphere’ in three virtual and ‘less virtual’ meeting places, and (ii) to re-design national and corporate, as well as private, accounting and tax regimes.

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Introduction

‘Glocal Democracy’ is not a new political ideology. Instead does Glocal Democracy suggest a new political philosophy, one that involves the ‘public sphere’ not only as an electorate, casting votes every third, fourth or fifth year, but also as a participant in the on-going political process, serving as elected parliamentarians’ ultimate day-by-day and / or issue-by-issue reference point, eventually - but not exclusively - through an expansion of the current parliamentarian model with what in this paper (as well as other texts by its author) is referred to as ‘Reference Parliaments’. In this way will indigenous electorates be empowered to influence national government’s positions also on (national) crises and supra-national issues, where ‘issue-driven timetables’, under most current models, do not encourage - or even allow - governments to consult their constituencies.

The ‘public sphere’, first identified by Habermas (1962), has come a long way since its Parisian ‘salons’ and British ‘tea houses’. The interactive internet, often referred to as Web 2.0, has revolutionized the way in which the public sphere can inform, participate, share and influence. However, self-organisation is not only about access, it is also about structures - just as change is not only about desires, but also about incentives.

Glocal Democracy is about ‘influence’ and ‘incentives’. How can the public sphere gain a sufficiently strong influence over the world’s political (economic, social, military, etc.) development, needed to re-direct the global path away from current ecological, financial, social and military malpractices, towards the sustainable development we all talk about? Throughout the world have our elected politicians, blaming ‘real-politik’ as the ultimate stumbling block, failed to create the progress they publicly promote and the public sphere demands, as voiced by NGOs, street rallies, blogs and internet-forums alike.

Political and intellectual ‘silos’ struggling for ‘power’, results of the parliamentarian model based on political partisanship we have today and the intellectual protectionism that developed from the privatization of knowledge - represented by e.g. patents and the secrecy still surrounding academic work-in-progress - are inherited from the heydays of Modernism’s industrial era. However, such silos do not constitute a positive environment for receiving day-to-day input and feedback from the general public in a Post-Modern era. The silo-systems were deliberately designed to allow ‘specialists to focus’, based on Modernism’s idea of deductive reasoning also in the social sciences. But just as Modern Art became so specialized in the mid 20th century so the general public turned its back on it - instead embracing more popular and accessible artistic expressions, as represented by e.g. Andy Warhol (Harrison) - has the general public shown its dissatisfaction with these specialists in their silos, through civil action and lay opposition, from ‘anti-war’ in 1969 (Washington DC), via ‘anti-globalisation’ in 1999 (Seattle), to ‘climate-watch’ in 2009 (Copenhagen). Furthermore is the ‘general public’ too large - or is the bureaucracy (as custodians of our elected politicians’ and public sector knowledge-brokers’ powerbase) either too small to ‘love all and serve all’, or too entangled in running their own supply-driven activities, aimed at the very same general public, to even have a chance to respond positively to public demand for participation under our prevailing democratic models.

However, as noted above is ‘influence’ not enough. Another key is ‘incentive’. As it is true that the world, especially under the spell of neo-liberalism, is heavily influenced by economic factors, we must look at how these economic factors are addressed. Any CEO will know that she will have a problem to retain her job if her company does not generate a good enough ‘bottom line’. But ‘good’ is a subjective term. What used to be a ‘good enough’ bottom line for e.g. Philips or Bank of America twenty years ago will not suffice today, even if adjusted for inflation. Much research and debate have gone into this issue, but this paper will instead claim that the underlying problem is the way we define ‘profit’, and the way such profit is taxed. In fact, when it comes to economic activities, we are all subject to man-made industrial era definitions of what constitutes that desirable goal: the Profit. Take two simple examples. Just because the purchasing cost and asset value of ‘space’ was based on two-dimensional measurements 100 years ago, does not mean it cannot be re-defined in three-dimensional terms today, to reflect e.g. the volume of air necessary to heat, cool and/or treat it in order to make use of it. This would have a direct impact on company’s corporate infrastructure investments. And just because the book-value of a tree fifty years ago simply was its timber content, does not mean that this value today cannot be outstripped by the same tree’s co2 absorption capacity when assessed in monetary terms. By establishing a way to account - on the national level - for the wealth trees then would represent, would nations with large forests become as wealthy as those with oil and gas reserves. We are all ‘victims’ of whatever incentives we are subject to, and by re-defining how we calculate costs, assets and profits - in turn being the basis for how we calculate taxes – we will ultimately change our ways of doing business, without removing or tinkering with the ‘competitive elements’ of the market economy concept.

It is time to review our democratic models, overhaul corporate and national accounting models and to rethink the philosophy behind our tax systems. Only when all this is taken on as a package can we break away from the vicious cycles currently leading to resource exhaustion. Glocal Democracy targets both the ‘influence’ and the ‘incentive’ issue.

The Term ‘Glocal’

The term ‘glocal’ has Japanese origin (Khondker, 2004). First used by Japanese farmers adopting rice strains to local conditions, it became more widely known as a term used by Japanese multinationals to refer to products developed for global markets, but modified to suit the expectations of the individual markets where it was to be consumed.

In ‘the West’ the term first surfaced in the 1990’s, initially in commerce, but eventually as a cultural term (ibid). A typical translation of it is the slogan “think global, act local”. The term’s popularization in academia was much due to Robert Robertson’s work in the field of sociology. Following e.g. Anthony Giddens, Robertson argued that globalisation did not only involve economic and political streamlining, but also a methodological streamlining – in reality equating to methodological imperialism (Robertson, 1994). In sociological terms that threaten local cultures’ possibilities of expression, and eventually their outright existence. Hence must ‘the local’ be recognised not only as a mere recipient of global influences, but also as an interpreter of the same, mixing such influences with its local culture. From this follows, as Bordieu (1993) also suggests, that the ‘local’ not only plays the role of the ‘receiver’ of global influences, but also that that of a ‘sender’, impacting the shape and form of global influences as they hit the ‘local’, are mixed at the ‘local’, and then continue their flows around the ‘global’, now in a partly modified state (Robertson, 1995; Khan 1998; Kraidy 1999; Raz 1999; Khondker, 2004).

Robertson stresses that ‘glocal’ does not assume global to be pro-active and ‘local’ to be re-active. Since there is mutuality in the relationship will both remain dependent upon the other (Robertson, 1994; 1995). Critics of Robertson’s (et.al) work however point to the fuzziness and fluidness of the ‘local’, making it difficult to identify the ‘locals’ that make up the ‘global’, in turn blurring the analysis as such (Agnew, 1997). In fact, this criticism developed into an entirely new debate surrounding the term ‘glocalism’, now focusing on ‘scale’. This debate tried to specify the exact relationship between ‘local’ and ‘global’, and was to quite an extent (albeit now subsiding) conducted among ‘human geographers’.

The leading voice in this ‘new’ debate was Eric Swyngedouw. To Swyngedouw - who had studied under Marxist geographer David Harvey - are scales historical constructs, mediated by social relations, making up the playing fields for ‘action’ and ‘inaction’ (Swyngedouw, 1997:1). Swyngedouw is critical to the effects of glocalism, noting that as long as the ‘local’ (i.e. the ‘smaller’ scale) is seen as a component of the ‘global’ (the ‘larger’ scale) - which is how the scale-debate typically comes down on the local-global relationship, often with reference to ‘nested scales’ (Swyngedouw, 1997:2; 2004; Ash 2002; Collinge 2005) - will the capacity of ‘place’ (i.e. the ‘local’) be dependent on the control of ‘space’ (i.e. the ‘global’). By this follows that those controlling ‘space’ (e.g. Big Business and Global Politics) can - and possibly will - also control ‘place’, reducing the ‘local’ to a dependent rather than a contributor (Swyngedouw, 1997:2; Merret, 2001).

In essence does this view suggest that the ‘local’ is subordinate to the ‘global’, which is quite the opposite of what Robinson et.al. claim, when they argue that there is ‘mutuality’ in the relationship - one that makes both sides dependent upon each other.

Although these are the two key trajectories that have dominated the academic debate on ‘glocalism’, there are also at least two other trails to follow. One can be seen as an effort to actually negate Swyngedouw’s scale-thesis, by arguing for “human geography without scale” (Marston, et.al, 2005, 2008). Another is the efforts to link the term ‘glocal’ to the neo-liberal agenda, putting an economic rather than a social or scalar emphasis on how to interpret this concept. Since neo-liberalism views globalisation as a primarily positive development, is also this approach negating Swyngedouw’s arguments; the latter viewing glocalism as a threat to the ‘local’, while the former typically views it as an opportunity.

Starting with ”human geography without scale”, it must be recognised that this is a niche-debate that although it spanned over several years, it attracted only a small number of contributors. In order to understand the philosophical platform of Glocal Democracy it is nevertheless important to understand the ideas brought forward by Marston et.al. Their main arguments stem from what they refer to as ‘flat ontology’ (Marston et.al, 2005, p 422). Here they refer both to historical thinkers such as Spinoza (2000) and contemporary ones such as Latour (1997), suggesting that flat ontologies consists of self-organizing systems ‘where the dynamic properties of matter produce a multiplicity of complex relations and singularities that sometimes lead to the creation of new, unique events and entities, but more often to relatively redundant orders and practices’. In differing from what e.g. Smith (2003:1, 2003:2) refers to as a ‘horizontal ontology of flows’ (building on, among other influences, the ‘actor-network theory’, see Marston et.al, 2005, p 423), Marston et.al. argue that a flat ontology ‘consist of localized and non-localized event-relations productive of event-spaces that avoid the predetermination of hierarchies or boundlessness’ (ibid pp 424, 425). By this they mean that permanent borders between binaries such as ‘here / there’, ‘us / you’, ‘now / then’ (etc) are non-existent – but may appear as consequences of the events actually taking place. In other words; such fixed scalar hierarchies are simply imagined. In ontological terms they would hence qualify as ‘a priori’. By ignoring them, they could just as well either turn out not to exist at all, or to have very different scope and content as compared to what had otherwise been ‘a priori’ assumed, why it would only be possible to recognize their true relationships ‘posteriori’. As will be briefly elaborated on below, is this an - although small – fairly important detail of Glocal Democracy’s philosophical underpinning.

Turning to the neo-liberal take on glocalism (Courchene 2001:1, 2001:2, Friedman 2005), are economic advances in the ‘local’ often seen to be driven by smart utilization of the ‘global’. The global influx, of which the local can make such smart use, is often seen as a part of what Storper and others refer to as ‘untraded interdependencies’ (Storper, 1997). By this is meant that apart from traded relations (or ‘traded interdependencies’) such as labor, input materials and commodities of various types, traded in the open market, there are other competitive advantages that certain sub-national levels (e.g. regions or cities) can plug into and benefit from (Taylor 2000, Sassen 2002, Brenner 2004, Heiden 2007). Such competitive advantages could include universities and/or government institutions located in the same region or city as the actor enjoying these untraded interdependencies. It could also involve multilingual populations, strategic geo-location, good infrastructure provided by the national government, or particularly well connected regional leaders.

This approach brings us to the only application of ‘glocalism’ that public life (here seen as separate from academic) has actually trialed. The next chapter will look closer at this.

Region-to-Region and City-to-City Collaboration

In the dawn of the new millennium an initiative was taken by Uri Savir, a former Israeli diplomat then heading the Peres Center for Peace in Tel-Aviv. This initiative lead to the setting up of the Glocal Forum in 2001, a stakeholder-body aimed at promoting peace and mutual understanding, ‘while striving to create a new social and economic balance through city-to-city cooperation’ (The Glocalization Manifesto, 2004). This initiative came to blend with the neo-liberal ideas of glocalism (see above), although the manifesto itself lacks any such ideological or academic references, and/or -analysis. The manifesto is nevertheless based on a joint study by the Glocal Forum, CERFE (Centro di Ricerca e Documentazione Febbraio ’74) and the World Bank Institute. This study (Glocalization; Research Study and Policy Recommendations, 2003) is full not only of such analysis and references, but also of recommendations.

It highlights e.g. the following (ibid, pp 1-4):

1. that it intends to outline a new strategy of international cooperation,
2. that it recognizes that actors and social relations at the local level have acquired crucial importance,
3. that no serious [ … ] sustainable development can ultimately succeed if an adequate degree of stability is not attained at all levels, from local to global,
4. that ‘governance of globalization’ requires bringing the benefits of globalization to local levels and empowering local realities so that they can contribute to the global decision-making process,
5. that the movement towards glocalization is strengthened by the characteristics of the knowledge society.

When it comes to more concrete recommendations, this report lists the following:

a)City diplomacy and city-to-city cooperation;

b)Socio-economic local development, aiming at an appropriate and well-balanced management of relations between the local and global dimension;

c)Culture, as a key factor in breaking down the barriers between peoples and human groups and as a powerful instrument of balancing the global and the local (in another part of the document referred to as ‘real multiculturalism’);

d)Tourism, at the same time a crucial force for local social development and a key instrument for peace and mutual understanding;

e)Sport, as a vehicle to deliver strong peace-building models and to provide concrete psychosocial dividends, especially to youth;

f)Youth empowerment, as a way to activate and support those who can be considered as key actors in glocalization policies;

g)Information and Communication Technology, as an instrument to foster relations and contacts between cultures and, at the same time, a key catalyst for economic development;

Although both these lists reflect high ambitions, there is little new to be found in terms of how all this shall happen. That ‘sports’ can help people in general and youth in particular to learn about social interaction is well known. Tourism and cultural exchange is already known to create familiarity, often leading to more positive feelings, while IT and ‘youth’ probably are the by far most recommended vehicles for ‘a better future’. What remains as novel areas are city diplomacy and (to some extent) ‘city-to-city cooperation’.

Nevertheless, as the main use of this joint study turned out to be the Glocalization Manifesto, it is worth focusing on what that document ordains. Unsurprisingly does the manifesto take the above joint report’s recommendations (a–g) as its starting point.

From here the manifesto takes on to elaborate on these recommendations, stressing for example the following (The Glocalization Manifesto, 2004, pp 8-10):

1) ‘… cities and local authorities represent the focal point of glocalization.’

2) ‘Glocalization is not only to address individual cities and their administrations, but also … associations such as the United Cities and Local Governments, the US Conference of Mayors, the Summit Conferences of Major Cities of the World and Sister Cities International.’

3) ‘… glocalization practices generate positive returns for the private companies involved, through exposure, public relations, networking and local support’

4) ‘In addition to the many kinds of support that national governments could provide, perhaps the most important is the granting of a greater autonomy and empowerment of the cities and local authorities …’

As for further guidance, the manifesto lists thirty areas where action is required.

Out of these are four specific enough to evaluate, while the remaining 26 suggests ‘promoting’, ‘supporting’, ‘recognizing’, ‘exploring’ and ‘facilitating’ various areas of concern.

The four areas that can be evaluated are:

• Building a legal framework to support the efforts of city diplomacy,
• Institutionalizing the role of youth with the mayors so that the youth have a constant voice,
• Removing legal, administrative and bureaucratic barriers to foster the growth of activities by civil society organisations,
• Systematic introduction of financing mechanisms [such as] providing credit to actors involved in glocalization initiatives, including local communities and civil society organizations.

Comparing the Glocalization Manifesto and its underlying joint study with the above analysed debate on glocalism, there can be little doubt that the manifesto is a product of the neo-liberal view on glocalism, where the ‘local’ (here specifically interpreted in geographical terms of a city or region) draws heavily on the ‘untraded interdependencies’ that its ‘global’ surrounding can offer. There is hardly any evidence in the manifesto that Robinson’s more social and mutually oriented approach to glocalism has influenced this document, since virtually all points of reference - and points of action - presupposes that the ‘higher’ level (of whichever levels are involved) shall take initial action, whether in terms of facilitation, support, empowerment, etc. A higher level taking the cue from a lower level is not listed anywhere, supporting the neo-liberal view that the ‘local’ stands to benefit from the ‘global’, if / when it (re-)acts in a smart manner, making the ‘global’ the active party and the ‘local’ the re-active one – in direct contrast to Robinson’s view.

The main difference between this ‘grand initiative’ and Glocal Democracy is exactly that; The Glocalization Manifesto assumes the neo-liberal view on glocalism, which in turn is a political statement in itself. Neo-liberalism is not neutral to political ideologies, but is in fact a clear political ideology in its own right. Glocal Democracy, as explained below, is ideology-neutral, instead focusing on how the general public (‘public sphere’) shall go about expressing whatever ‘political’ opinions they may harbour.

Tracking all events following the launch of the Glocalization Manifesto is not within the scope of this paper, but the following can nevertheless be noted:

• In 2008 was a ‘new’ manifesto issued, now called The Glocalist Manifesto. This manifesto focused entirely on the city of Milan (Italy), otherwise echoing many of the ideas of the original document.
• The homepage of The Think Tank on Glocalization, forming a part of the Glocal Forum, is closed. Trying to contact this body in May 2010, all emails came back with the message that the address did not exist. Finally, contacting Glocal Forum in Rome (May 2010), the reply stated they were currently in a restructuring phase.

From this can be deduced that this ‘grand initiative’ did not survive its 10th anniversary, even though some of its recognised spin-offs still can be traced via the Internet. Given the above quoted joint study’s first highlight (see (i) above), noting ‘that it intends to outline a new strategy of international cooperation’, it all seems like a serious lack of success. One attempt to explain such a ‘lack’ is to look at how regionalism tends to develop. As Lagendijk (2001) points out, it is not only the existence of the ‘region’ and it’s potential that matters; the rhetoric power applied by its backers is equally critical. The ‘potential’ must be ‘explained’. If ‘explanations’ trump reality, momentum eventually fades away.

Another discouraging outcome is that although this ‘grand initiative’ intended to foster ‘real multiculturalism’, have European efforts to develop multicultural societies truly failed by example in Holland, France and Switzerland, and even been publicly declared failures by Germany’s Angela Merkel (al-Jazeera, 2010) and Britain’s David Cameron (al-Jazeera, 2011). Once again ‘real-politik’ seems to obstruct rhetorical commitments.

To add bad news to the above misery, a study on a handful of European cities engaging in the type of ‘city diplomacy’ discussed above, found that the democratic aspects of these activities rated far below par. In fact were most of the decisions made, and most of the implementation-work undertaken, carried out by the cities’ civil servants, not by the local parliaments (if any) or its elected leaders. The international activities these cities engaged in were also, in most cases, bankrolled by non-earmarked funds, meaning that it is almost impossible for the citizens to influence and follow-up on these activities (Heiden, 2007).

Glocal Democracy

Glocal Democracy wishes to offer possible answers to the following three questions:

4.1 What is the meaning of - and problem with - the ‘democratic void’?

4.2 How can the ‘public sphere’ become politician’s ‘ultimate influencer’?

4.3. How can we re-design some of our societies’ most entrenched incentives?

4.1 What is the Meaning of - and Problem with - the ‘Democratic Void’

The term ’democratic deficit’ is commonly used to point to democratic institution’s (e.g. national governments’) inability to live up to expectations in terms of democratic order. As Levinson (2007) notes: “a democratic deficit occurs when ostensibly democratic organizations or institutions in fact fall short of fulfilling what are believed to be the principles of democracy." So are many governments in the Global South (and East) charged with such deficits, by governments, media and NGOs in the Global North (and West). However also UN is sometimes accused of this, its decision-making bodies being more power-driven than democratic in its true sense (Wikipedia: ‘Democratic deficit’).

By ‘democratic void’ I however refer to something different. Here I refer to the supra-national level, at which national governments participate as minority players, most of them with no control whatsoever over the actual outcome. At the very best they can form alliances with likeminded governments, and try to block developments they consider negative, or, if the alliance is large enough, lobby and negotiate their priorities to fruition. It is nevertheless obvious that, to most governments, the outcome does not rest with them. Only if or when a given government has VETO power can that player, if it cannot get what it bargains for, at least block what they consider being a negative development. The most recent occurrence of this (as I write) was when the US used its VETO to block a resolution condemning Israel’s settlements on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in spite of 130 other countries either having sponsored the resolution of voted in favor of it (‘The Christian Science Monitor’). The democratic void is here obvious. Assuming these 130 governments actually represented the majority-position of their respective electorates, could these governments still not assert the political power they gained from national elections, simply because another country decided otherwise.

This is not only how our current democratic order works, it is also how it is designed to work. Trailing the history of the parliamentarian system that the West not only clings to, but also exports with the help of heavy weaponry, it was designed to meet the needs of those truly sovereign states that emerged from the Westphalia Peace-Treaty in 1648 (Olsen, 2010, Chapter 8). Without debating this model’s pros and cons here (for which this paper is too short), it cannot be anything but obvious that the world has changed also in terms of geo-political relations since 1648. The way the world has since ‘agreed’ to deal with this change (if any such agreements actually have been made - rather than forced) is by developing a series of multinational treaties, laws and institutions. But just as was noted above regarding UN suffering a ‘democratic deficit’, are all supra- and multinational treaties, laws and institutions part of the democratic void, simply because the electorates under our current democratic models (with elections only every 3rd, 4th or 5th year) are unable to influence their governments as and when needed. Most supra-national decisions neither can nor will wait for all national governments involved to be re-elected, running on that particular issue-platform, before the supra-national level needs to vote on the issue. Referendums could help, but are not common outside Switzerland.

No doubt is ‘trust’ the key to this dilemma, which also is what Tilly (2006) noted: “As Putnam and others have contended, trust is the central component of the social capital that greases the wheels of democracy.” Voters are simply expected to put their trust in whoever s/he thinks is the most trustworthy. It is thereafter up to the elected person and government not to breach this trust, but always act in the best interest of their electorate. There is however a dilemma here. The above Tilly-quote unfortunately continues to say that “… trust, in almost all of its guises and virtually everywhere, from the industrially advanced West to the remote confines of the Third World, appears to be in decline. This development, in turn, is thought to place democracy … at considerable peril.” This is also what both Newton (2001) and Pohorila et.al. (2005) argue, the latter opening their article stating: ‘[h]igh expectations of the political elite run parallel with disappointment and distrust of politicians’. But to make bad things worse; when a government belongs to the international minority on a supra-national issue, it can do nothing but accept. Trust or no trust in their own government, here the electorate is left with whatever the international majority decides, or without what a government with VETO decides against. According to media there is also no shortage of people’s mistrust of politicians. The majority of the world’s citizens actually seem to consider this trust lost (see Reference list: ‘No Trust’).

This is why Glocal Democracy aims at finding a way to at least reduce this democratic void, something this paper will discuss below.

4.2 How can the ‘Public Sphere’ become Politician’s ‘Ultimate Influencer’?

As noted already in this paper’s introduction was the concept of a ‘public sphere’ first conceptualized by Jurgen Habermas (1962). Although early definitions of what the ‘public sphere’ actually constitutes may feel irrelevant in today’s internet-society, it was an important contribution to democratic theory, since it highlighted the influence of the general public also beyond its role as electorate. It is interesting to note that in academic papers by African authors the ‘public sphere’ is more in focus than in ‘the West’ (see e.g. Ayinde, 2009; Okolo, 2009). Although this may partly be because of the risks linked to publishing more critical papers targeting the incumbent in authoritarian regimes, it may also reflect a wider reliance on the community as a collective than what is typically found in ‘the West’, where individualism rules. The knock-on public uprisings in North Africa in early 2011 also prove that African ‘public spheres’ are indeed ‘alive and kicking’.

According to Tapscott and Williams (2006; 2010) can the ‘public sphere’ nowadays be spelled ‘wiki’. They argue that the web is not only a tool for interaction, but also a force in its own right, actually driving developments towards a more interactive and democratic society. Many arguments presented by Tapscott and Williams are indeed compelling, but the question remains: Can self-organisation survive if based on a technical infrastructure alone? Also F.B.I. and C.I.A. are by some sources claimed to feed e.g. Wikipedia with information they wish the ‘public sphere’ to take in (Horowitz), and a wide range of interest groups of various colors and shades prime-pump the web with their not-always-so-objective views on the State of the World. Bloggers are also to an increasing degree hired not only by NGOs and other interest-groups, but also by governments and other political bodies. As most web-surfers surf in solitude, they have little or no way to defend themselves against more deceptive messages using accepted and professional rhetoric to promote dubious causes. Only well-educated and well-read consumers of the media can detect well crafted propaganda from objective information. Although we would wish to think otherwise, the majority of web-surfers are unlikely to fall into that category. A point in case is the Horowitz blog on C.I.A. and F.B.I. quoted above. Is this ‘the real truth’, or is it ‘entirely false’, or is it somewhere in between? The lonely surfer in front of his/her screen cannot tell for sure, but will still be consciously or unconsciously influenced by it when crafting his/her own view on the world around him/her.

Understanding the web’s limitations is crucial when discussing democracy. Democracy is not simply about having the possibility to express your view. Democracy is also about listening to opposing views, and to take the time and effort to discuss them - with the true ambition to find the commonalities from which you as a collective can move onwards.

The web is good, but limited. First and foremost it is limited because it is so easy to turn off. If the ‘other’ gets too hard to convince you simply log off. As it is so easy to conceal your real identity (except to companies providing your IP address and ‘identity-thieves’), is a vital part of the democratic process also obscured by the internet. As transparency is hard to assure when you are involved in an exchange with anonymous people - or people whose identity it is difficult to trust – accountability becomes the next problem. Hence, if the ‘public sphere’ shall gain enough credibility to challenge the ‘establishment’, it must create also less virtual meeting places, as is discussed below. However, in preparing for getting involved in these less virtual meeting places, it is hard to think of anything better than the wiki-world of Web 2.0.

But coming to a point where public opinion serves as the ultimate reference point for our elected politicians requires much more than just a few million bloggers. In this paper it is argued that two ‘less virtual’ meeting places must be established in order to achieve this objective. The first one is established by creating a ‘third role’ for the universities. As we live in the knowledge-era, it’s not possible to engage in governance-related issues without having sufficient knowledge.

Without undercutting their current tasks to conduct research and deliver higher education, universities shall also be assigned to do out the following:

1. Become champions for the public’s lifelong learning also without enrolment
2. Become champions for internal cross-faculty exchange and co-operation
3. Become nodal points for 3rd Sector Group’s (NGOs, etc) cross-sector interaction
4. Establish a forum for interaction between the ‘players’ in 1, 2 and 3 above
5. Engage this ‘forum’ for the advancement of (for example):
   • democratic alternatives and developments
   • enculturated governance and alternatives
   • conflict prevention and peace-building
   • national and corporate accounting, including social accounting
   • ‘eco/eco’ (economic / ecological) modeling, including demographic outcomes

For the two latter issues, please refer to the discussion on ‘incentives’ below.

Since the general public is already ‘online’ will this new role for the universities be a matter of organizing ‘exchange’, rather than to educate in the traditional sense. Bringing people with different agendas, ideas and backgrounds together, charging them with tasks of more governing than technical nature, will build immense momentum. By using the universities’ massive knowledge-resources - rarely exposed to lay enquiry – in processes aimed at bringing the general public (as opposed to their enrolled students) up to speed on how our post-modern world looks and works, would have a resounding effect on how that very same general public views society and acts in public.

This would also revitalize the universities - ‘silos’ for compartmentalized and privatized knowledge as they have become (with a few and encouraging exceptions). No doubt, also academics are quite aware of their silo-like existence (Smith, 2009). This would be a life-changing experience to them as well.

The final step in establishing the ‘public sphere’ as our elected politicians’ ultimate point of reference is to organize yet another ‘less virtual’ meeting place - which I here (as well as in other texts) call ‘Reference Parliaments’. By this I mean a kind of ‘Chambers of the Public’, distributed institutions linked to the national parliament where the general public debates the same issues as the elected parliament debates. The Reference Parliaments formulates its views with the help of the same ‘mechanisms’ as the elected parliament, and passes them on to the elected parliament where elected parliamentarians decide how they shall relate and possibly adjust to these views before voting. Elected MPs still make the decisions, but they also engage in a constant dialogue with the ‘public sphere’ via the Reference Parliaments, in which they also take turns to act as speakers, secretaries, etc.

In summary, it would be the role of the Reference Parliaments (paid for by the State) to:

1. Enroll all citizens for 1-3 months, once or twice in a lifetime

2. Engage the enrolled citizen in an area mirroring a ministry’s

3. Engage the enrolled citizen in debates matching parliament’s

4. Formulate a qualified majority-opinion on governing issues

5. Forward this opinion to the elected parliament as ‘guidance’

6. Debate resolutions already made by the elected parliament

7. Formulate a qualified majority-opinion on such resolutions

8. Give elected parliament feedback on already made resolutions

9. Serve as an official body for considering proposed legislation

10. Become the ultimate reference point for elected politicians

No doubt would this be an uphill task to organize if not preceded by the general public’s tendency to surf the web for information, debate and exchange (with likeminded), and it participating in the activities organised by the universities - where they would learn how to encounter also opposing ideas, as discussed above. Participation in these Reference Parliaments would probably be best achieved if it could be done both physically and virtually (not either/or), where physical attendance would be highly desirable at least during a few initial sessions, during which both the participant’s identity and the common ‘rule-book’ could be made known to - and properly recognised by - all session members.

To those who think this idea is ‘too extraordinary’ to have a chance to materialize; let us look back in history and see what has already happened. The current system of elected representatives was in itself almost an ‘unthinkable’ in most societies before the French Revolution. It was equally ‘almost unthinkable’ that students using hammers and sickles would simply hack down the Berlin Wall in 1989, or that a whole string of North African dictatorships would crumble over a period of just a few months, triggered by a desperate student turned street-vendor’s self-immolation over police harassment. This idea is also not entirely new. A former Secretary General of the Commonwealth Foundation, Colin Ball, rhetorically asked already in 2002: “Rapid and sometimes fantastic change has occurred in almost every aspect of our lives over the past decades – in communication, technology, the ways we work and the ways we live. But the processes and institutions of democracy today have hardly changed at all. It is high time they did. Why do we not start lobbying for a true second house in which civil society can debate and discuss the same issues as the lower house is proposing?” (Olsen, Chapter 10). No doubt; it can be done!

4.3. How can we Re-design some of our Societies’ most Entrenched Incentives?

Think about average life. Most people either do what they ‘like’, or do what they ‘must’. Nevertheless, in both situations they allow their own priorities to influence. Priorities are sometimes cultural/collective, sometimes personal/private. In all/either case are priorities tied to incentives. The more appealing the incentive is the higher will the priority be. The less appealing the incentive is the lower will the priority be. As is also well known, from the field of psychology, can incentives be either positive or negative. No matter which, incentives drives our behaviour and way of life.

As a former financial and organizational (corporate) ‘controller’, as well as a former management consultant in both the private and the public sector (in Europe as well as Asia) and a researcher in the field of cultures’ impact on multilateral interaction, it is hard to envisage any man-made globally common denominator that drives individual behavior as strongly as taxes. Not to say that taxes are all the same across the world. Facts on the ground actually points to the opposite. Nevertheless, across the globe people try to adjust to whatever tax-regime they are subject to, with the intention to pay as little as possible. This applies to both the corporate and private sector, and in high-tax jurisdictions as well as in low-tax ones. Taxes even drive migration - corporate migration. Since corporate migration also changes the conditions for people’s private lives, as the gain or loss of job opportunities also follow in the tracks of tax-driven corporate migration, this also matters.

This said it is worth noting what the basis of modern taxation is. Post-modern societies are crowded with taxes basing on income, profits, spending and assets. This means that those trying to minimize taxes (i.e. most of us, including those with significant wealth) will try to optimize (visible) incomes, profits, asset-holdings and spending in a way that minimizes the overall tax burden - given what priorities they have in life. This entails that not only do taxes influence how we live our lives; those designing our tax systems also have an almost unlimited possibility to ‘drive’ our behaviour, adjusting taxes up or down depending on whether that behaviour is considered favorable to society or not. This fact is however not made any significant use of, since most tax systems are primarily built to maximize tax revenues - not to optimize behaviour. Although it is true that many tax systems also intend to help reduce negative effects caused by uneven income-distribution among tax-subjects, and (at least to some degree) discourage behaviour that may cause known negative effects to the society, by e.g. elevated tobacco-, liquor and petrol-taxes, are the majority of taxes still driven primarily by the State’s desire to generate revenues.

It is also true that tax-collection is based on whatever accounting rules the society applies. Although some societies may still, to some extent, apply the ancient system of collecting taxes in kind (e.g. 1/3 of the harvest), will also these - along with the rest of the world’s tax authorities - rely primarily on monetary tax revenues. This means that any accounting system in place will serve as the assessment criteria that lead to the actual tax collection. No surprise, we are all familiar with that - even if we are normally unaware of how other accounting systems, in other tax-jurisdictions than our own, are designed. This is also the core point I wish to make: Different jurisdictions have different tax regimes, and to some extent also different accounting regimes. This means that there is not any ‘given’ system to apply. It is man-made - not an ‘a priori’ factor to which we as humans must submit.

Given these two arguments in combination; i.e. (i) that taxes are strong incentives and de facto ‘drivers’ of tax subject’s behaviour and (ii) there is no ‘a priori’ factors that decide how accounting and tax systems must be designed, this paper urges a debate about how both accounting- and tax-regimes can be fundamentally overhauled, in order to usher in a new era where ‘good’ consumption is encouraged and ‘bad’ consumption is discouraged. The below table outlines the key conceptual changes proposed, where the column to the far right suggests the revised approach, as compared to the exiting one, noted to its left.

Table p. 25, not available

This conceptual reorientation entails fundamental change for both the public and private sector. This is not a matter of ‘fine-tuning’ our current systems. The conceptual changes proposed in the table above are not meant to alter nations’ or communities’ tax revenues up or down - unless so required for other relevant reasons. The above listed changes are only meant to remedy the fact that we still assess and tax national, corporate and private economic activities in the same basic manner as we did when (i) there were no shortages of oil and gas, (ii) when there were no traceable problems with co2 emissions and carbon footprints, (iii) when there were no significant corporate flights to low-cost jurisdictions, (iv) when there were no problems with global brands exhausting local efforts to compete, (v) when there were no tax-havens and/or advanced tax planning industry, (vi) when the national level was the highest relevant jurisdiction that (most) companies and individuals had to take into consideration, (vii) etc, etc. Since neither of the above applies today, it is now time to rethink the way we define our carrots and sticks - before the administrative burden of our tax-regimes becomes impossible for tax authorities and tax subjects alike, or our tax-regimes, all by themselves, help exhaust crucial human and natural resources - simply because they fail to protect them.

A Philosophical Consideration

Without doubt is Glocal Democracy closer to Post-Modernism than to its predecessor Modernism. As Modernism strived for the ‘deductive truth’, where both premises must ‘entail’ the conclusion, is Post-Modernism also open to the ‘inductive truth’, where one of the premises can simply ’support’ the conclusion. Since Glocal Democracy stresses the importance of input from the ’public sphere’ (as a condition for real democracy), and this ‘public sphere’ is unlikely to contribute truly ‘deductive’ input (which only can be achieved in laboratory-like environments, in turn a driver for the silo-syndrome discussed above), can this process not reject arguments simply because they are not proven beyond doubt to be ultimately true.

In scenarios like these it is however important to be skeptical against ‘a priori’ premises, since they risk grinding the democratic process to a halt, should they be argued for on erroneous grounds, blocking an open debate. Instead is the ‘flat ontology’, as advocated by Marston et.al (see Chapter 2) tempting here. As this ontology questions whether or not permanent borders between binaries such as ‘here / there’, ‘us / you’, ‘now / then’ (etc) really exist - or if they only appear as consequences of events actually taking place - are ‘a priori’ factors considered dubious contributors, just as they are for Glocal Democracy.

Summary and Concluding Remark

In brief is ‘Glocal Democracy’ proposing a re-definition of the ‘public sphere’ as a flow of three virtual and ‘less virtual’ encounters, consisting of the interactive web, 3rd Sector / Universities, and Reference Parliaments, together with a total overhaul of both national, corporate and private accounting- and tax-regimes. While the former intends not only to advance the interaction between electorate and the elected, but also enhance electorates’ ability to feed ‘quality input’ to those elected, the latter constitutes the most universal of man-made incentives that drives human action that also affect global health and wealth. No doubt will traditional media also have an important role to play as part of the ‘public sphere’. However, as ‘media-studies’ is a discipline in its own right, has this aspect not been elaborated on here. This is hence for media-researchers and -specialists to dwell on. Finally, this paper invites those who wish to contribute to this development to do so. As this development is truly interdisciplinary must all aspects mentioned be further explored."

More Information

• Glocal

Author contact via leif_thomas_olsen@yahoo.com