Page 150 - Culture Society and Economy

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‘LOCALIZATION’ EXPLORED

But the other key part of Maus’s theory could not be applied in the
localization case. This is the proposal to make administrative welfare
agencies subject to local legislatures which would, for example, have the
consequence of placing state social work agencies under the democratic
oversight of their clients. Maus points out that the clear precondition for
this would have to be the maintenance of the sovereignty of the central
legislature over these local legislatures that would exercise a derivative
and in the end a delegated authority. This would be vital for sovereignty
purposes as well as to ensure that standard procedural rules were pre-
served and practised at the local level. 29 In other words, the supremacy
of the central legislature cannot be challenged without endangering the
rule of law, including the welfare rights of the working citizen.
The IFG group seems oblivious to such extremely critical issues of
‘bourgeois right.’ Subsidiarity, which is the opposite of the Maus per-
spective (the central is ‘subsidiary’ to the local and derives its authority
from it) would clearly pose a major challenge in this critical respect.
Although this is exactly what is not intended, the political consequence
of the IFG program would be the stifling of personal autonomy by an
ever-present committee system.
In conclusion, the IFG group seems oblivious of such extremely criti-
cal issues of 'bourgeois right.' Subsidiarity, which, in the current con-
ception as well as practice of the European Union, makes the local
subsidiary to the central, would clearly pose a major challenge to the
decentralization notions of the IFG program. When looked at carefully
from either the economic or political perspective, the existing economic
alternatives of the global justice movement appear ill-thought out and
deeply contradictory. Anti-globalizers want to have their cake and eat it
in the economic sense. On the one hand, they want to preserve private
property and the market and at the same time they wish to restrict these
to the local level. They wish to curb the operations of large transnational
corporations without affecting the viability of many small and medium-
sized business which often depend on these very same transnational cor-
porations for their prosperity. They want to maintain the basic standard
and quality of living enjoyed by many in the developed world and to do
improve standards in the developing world, while proposing measures
which would in practice undermine the global standard of living. They
propose localization in the sphere of the economy and at the same time
assume that this would have little impact on the national, regional and
international economic and political institutions which they favor. In the
political sphere, they drastically underestimate the degree of bureau-
cracy entailed in the implementation of their proposals and do not see

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