Local self-government against the state
Resistance of Polish municipalities to creeping centralization
Borys Cieslak (Gran Sasso Science Institute)
The re-election of Donald Trump worries many people about the condition of democracy in the US. How much pressure from executive power can the country withstand? Yet with America’s rightward turn, authoritarianism is less an exception than a rule in the Global North. In Austria, the Freedom Party won the elections in 2024. The Netherlands had a similar outcome in 2023, with Geert Wilders’ success, and Italy has been governed by Brothers of Italy since 2022. The rightward turn in the West was initially taken in eastern Europe in the 2010s, where the Right rose to power in Hungary, Poland, recently joined by Slovakia.
Many of these governments tend to engage in dubious policies aimed at solidifying their power and limiting the chances of the opposition overthrowing them. Some meddle with the electoral systems, while others undermine civil liberties or limit the opposition’s access to resources, media and fair judicial system. Such tendencies, often referred to as democratic backsliding, can be a harbinger of a regime change and a country’s drift towards authoritarianism.
There is a growing doubt in the resilience and health of state-centered democracy. When thinking about a potential way out of the current dismal political situation, our options seem limited to casting a vote once every four or five years, with the choice of viable candidates usually limited to two opposing parties.
But is democracy an exclusive domain of parliaments, senates, congresses and presidents? Is our democratic activity confined to the ballot box? American philosopher John Dewey claimed that it is not exhausted by the institutions of representative government; that it is an everyday, communicative activity. New municipalist scholars and activists turn away from the detached state institutions and position the city as a promising gateway to such everyday emancipatory democracy. New municipalist initiatives encompass citizen assemblies, cooperatives, the remunicipalization of companies providing public services such as energy or water (the most well-known examples being Barcelona en Comú in Europe and Cooperation Jackson in the US). Often, these bottom-up initiatives are challenged and compromised by state policies. What emerges from their struggles is a seemingly unresolvable tension between seeing democracy like a city and seeing it like a state.
In my paper, I suggest that a different order is possible, and with it a different outlook at the institutions and practices of democracy. My main wager is that we should stop thinking about the state and cities as standing in a hierarchical relation wherein the state supercedes the city. The city can also be a privileged site of formal democracy while other tiers of government can be complementary. Local government, accountable and accessible to residents, can be a bedrock of democratic systems, while regional, state, or national governments could be designed to tackle issues beyond the capacity of the local level but with little to no direct influence on it. Such a system would be based on the subsidiarity principle that underpins the European Charter of Local Self-Government. But how might this affect the Global North’s political scene today?
By a way of historical and empirical inquiry, I show how the autonomous institutions of municipal governance that emerged during Poland’s transition from communism to democracy proved – although not entirely – to be resilient to democratic backsliding advanced by the far-right Law and Justice party that ruled in Poland between 2015-2023. I explain how the institutions of Polish local government were designed to foster democratic practices in the spirit of new municipalism. The literature of the latter suggests that formal institutions of local government are more constraining than accommodating in unruly urban democracies, but I contend that it may be a question of how these political frameworks are designed and enacted.
In the 1950, the Communist party dissolved local government in Poland. From then until 1990, cities were managed by the outfits of the central state bureaucracy. Scholars studying potential changes in this system consider the local level to be the crucial lever to overthrow Communist rule. They construe local governments as institutions not within but against the state and design them to spur civic activity increase their political participation at the local level. The reforms of the 1990, key provisions of which were later included in Poland’s new constitution, created roughly 2,500 municipalities. This shift is often praised as Poland’s biggest success for a democratic transition. The very high levels of trust Poles have in their local governments, as compared to low levels for the central government, attest to that. Currently, Polish municipalities are among the most autonomous in Europe and are for many a synonym for democracy.
But the Polish right is critical of this system, in which the central government has little say on the local matters and local communities are privileged over national communities. Their arguments were ineffective during the transition period. Since the Law and Justice party rose to power in 2015, it sought to curtail municipal autonomy in various, often covert ways. One effort was the centralization of the municipal water tariffs, which were previously set by local councils. Since 2017, they have been de facto imposed by a central water regulator. The Law and Justice party used water tariffs to coerce municipalities, but these municipalities resisted and protested: they filed suit against regulators; took to the streets; formed alliances with labor unions, regional governments and NGOs; and crafted alternative legislation and ran in parliamentary elections. In 2023, the Law and Justice party was ousted, and the current parliament is working to restore tariff-setting capacity to the municipalities.
Polish municipalities were not unscathed by Law and Justice’s assaults on their autonomy, but they resisted it for eight long years and contributed to the party’s poor showing in the last national election. They proved to be an important, however imperfect, democratic stronghold. Municipalities offer inspiration and hope that if we expand democratic practices and institutions beyond state institutions, we may find a promising way out of the current political quagmire.
Borys Cieślak is a PhD candidate in Economic Geography and Regional Science at Gran Sasso Science Institute. He is trained as an economist and an urban planner. His research interests encompass local development, public services, social infrastructure, and philosophy of knowledge, especially pragmatism. He previously worked in the public sector consulting industry.