name: Yossef Ben Meir
Barack Obama, Federalism and a Winning Coalition
26 April, 2008
Barack Obama’s community organizing background in Chicago gives him a special opportunity to expand his base of support to include the millions of Republican and Independent voters who identify closely with the principles of federalism. Federalism, a founding precept of the Republican Party more than 150 years ago and currently often lauded by the party’s presidential candidate Senator John McCain, involves deference to states and localities in the management of their own affairs and social programs.
Community organizing and federalism share many of the same core values, such as decentralized decision-making, capacity-building at the local level in management and administrative functions, and self-reliance. Senator Obama ought to consistently connect his community organizing background to the ideals of federalism by describing how he has applied this deep and intrinsic principle through empowering people at the local level to improve their own lives. His sustained emphasis of how his experience connects with core federalist principles will particularly attract Republicans and Independents who deeply value federalism and who no longer support continuing the devastating war in Iraq as does Senator McCain.
Thus rather than simply mentioning his community organizing experience, which he often does during his political rallies and speeches, Senator Obama should spell out how it relates to the federalist perspective and how, as a result, he is uniquely qualified to apply its principles to dealing with many of the serious challenges the United States now faces and even explaining how those challenges came about. For example, the general failure of Iraq’s reconstruction (when one considers potential versus actually attained benefits) is significantly rooted in the excessive and ultimately self-defeating level of foreign contractors involved, which has disempowered Iraqis, leaving far too many of them feeling that they do not have a stake in this effort. The failure here has in fact helped to feed the violent resistance. The United States has now come to realize its mistake and is working to correct it by involving Iraqis in the design and management of reconstruction projects. But Iraq’s reconstruction as originally conceived and as undertaken up until recently was an affront to core principles of federalism, local control in decision-making, and community organizing. Seen from this perspective, the mismanagement by the Bush administration of the reconstruction effort is quite stark and can be viewed as a betrayal by many Republicans of the federalist ideals championed by their own party. Senator Obama should seize the opportunity to present himself as in the vanguard of federalist ideals; someone who has actually walked the walk as a community organizer, not a hypocrite who espoused the federalist ideals and then trampled on them.
Another example of how Senator Obama can utilize his community organizer/federalist experience and gain further support in his efforts to be president is through how he explains and deals with the social dislocation caused by international free trade. Free trade and globalization restructures economies, with brutal social effects as seen in parts of the United States and in developing economies, especially negatively impacting rural communities, such as in Mexico. When discussing these difficult conditions, Mr. Obama should highlight how community organizing and federalist approaches (i.e., empowering people) he is familiar with from first-hand experience can bring new opportunities to local economies and help create socio-economic initiatives that enable individuals and businesses to adapt and develop. Following this approach will help affirm the principle of federalism that many Republicans and others value and show its relevance in fashioning solutions to modern-day challenges at home and abroad.
The Obama campaign can legitimately conflate community organizing and federalism. After all, federalism is the political structure that enables and encourages local community organizing to occur. By presenting community organizing as a federalist process, the campaign will attract those Republicans and Independents who are disaffected by the Iraq war, but who would otherwise still support John McCain. This is why Senator Obama ought to continually use the federalist lexicon to describe the “bottom-up” strategies for social change that he clearly believes in. If he does so, Republicans and Independents will cross over to him and he will forge a coalition that should make him the next president of the United States.
Yossef Ben-Meir is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of New Mexico and president of the High Atlas Foundation (www.highatlasfoundation.org), a nonprofit organization founded by former Peace Corps Volunteers who served in Morocco and dedicated to the rural community development of that country.
Decentralization in Conflict Areas in The Middle East and North Africa
13 January, 2008
It may initially seem a paradox that national-level governments are strengthened when they decentralize decision-making power by giving local communities control over, or at least a decisive voice in, matters relating to their own development. One naturally assumes that a country’s autonomy is strengthened the more power is concentrated at the national level.
However, in reality, when national governments assist initiatives that enable a community to determine and implement its priority development projects (in job creation, education, health, environment, etc.), they create in the process diverse administrative partnerships at all domestic levels. Everyone benefits. Local organizations and communities are desirous of maintaining these partnerships at the national level because government support helps satisfy their specific needs and better enables the people to shape the institutions that govern them. Central governments also benefit because by creating overall goals that encourage inter-regional balance and competition, they can foster better performance, positively affect areas far from the national capital, and enhance the central government’s legitimacy. The diverse benefits of decentralized development enable it to generate what is particularly needed to help resolve the complex regional conflicts involving, for example, complex regional conflicts involving, for example, Iraq, the Israelis and Palestinians, and the Western Sahara with Morocco.
There are a wealth of examples of decentralizing initiatives with national support from all over the world and in history. As early as 1956, the Administrative Committee of the United Nations stated that a major function of national governments is to unite with the efforts of the people and improve the conditions of local communities. In both mixed economies and socialist societies in Asia, for example, rural institutions became more effective promoters of development because of support from higher levels of government. In Brazil, the process of decentralization and the local participation it encourages allowed citizens to be directly involved with municipal fiscal planning that in turn enhanced transparency and responsiveness of social services. Joint forestry programs in India, organized by local organizations, met with government encouragement, which led to the central government’s enhanced legitimacy. The organization of the United States is also based on the same idea, that is, the principle of federalism or decentralization. The system of federalism is central to the U.S. Constitution, which imposes limits on the national government by giving local and state governments substantive independent powers.
“Participatory development” has become the term used to refer to community planning methods that create decentralization. These methods involve the participation of “facilitators” who organize local community-wide meetings at which participants plan their own development projects. Teachers, government extenionists in the ministries of agriculture, health, education, and so forth, community workers from NGOs, personnel from international public and private groups, and local community members can all be effective facilitators. Once trained, facilitators bring local people together to assess their social and environmental conditions and determine and implement development projects in areas most important to them – such as in job creation, education, and health, among others.
In the case of the Palestinians, their economic structure is extremely dependent on Israel. This dependency makes Israeli-Palestinian relations increasingly bitter and volatile while perpetuating the extreme economic underdevelopment of the Palestinian people. What the Palestinians immediately need are relief and opportunities for livelihood achieved through fostering a self-reliance that restructures their economy, decreases its vulnerabilities to external influences, and enhances regional stability.
Decentralization, it was found, advances local and national self-reliance, which, in turn, is associated with increases in independence from external control, self-help, and self-governance. Palestinian communities will increase their power and the influence of indigenous institutions and of the civil society. Significant democratic foundations will be established, and internal political processes will be more responsive and accountable. Decentralization vests control at the community level and can consequently more quickly generate life-sustaining development projects, which also cost less.
This development approach could work best in some areas where aspects of partnership may be possible with Hamas, since the majority of Hamas’ activities are already in community services. The impacts of working together wherever possible with even perceived enemies can in time affect overall relations between larger groups and even between societies.
In Iraq, the sectarian conflict is placing the central government in jeopardy, with the country breaking apart or a loose federal arrangement seemingly the most likely outcome. The creation of development programs as outlined here offers a third possible outcome, which is Iraq’s central government can increase its chances of survival and utility by supporting reconstruction programs that are driven in their design, implementation, and evaluation by local communities.
Decentralization can readily incorporate local reconciliation processes, which in turn can significantly influence decisions made at the regional and national levels. Another advantage of participatory projects is that they are dispersed, small in scale, and thus are not as strategic of targets as the more visible and foreign-conceived reconstruction projects insurgents typically sabotage. In addition, ample evidence from Iraq itself strongly suggests people do not destroy reconstruction projects that they determine and then manage themselves.
It is impossible to justify in developmental terms the extreme involvement of foreign companies in the reconstruction of Iraq. The opponents of peace, in a context where communities receive the real benefits from their participation in development, may have been dealt with internally by the Iraqi people themselves, and in ways that allowed for the continued benefits of the larger majority. This is why the United States should immediately follow through on the Iraq Study Group’s suggestion to allocate $5 billion for reconstruction, and direct these funds toward assisting local people to come together, plan, and implement projects that meet their self-determined socio-economic and environmental needs. No other approach is now on the table that can enable Iraqis to feel more vested in their surroundings and future, further the reconciliation, development, and political tracks, and provide the national government with legitimacy and purpose (and perhaps save it) through giving this type of projects its full and active support.
As a final example, last April, the Moroccan government submitted to the United Nations Security Council an “autonomy within Moroccan sovereignty” proposal for a resolution to the 32 year old Western Saharan conflict. The proposal catalyzed intensive negotiations among the parties (including Morocco and the Polisario, with Algeria and Mauritania invited to observe) under the auspices of the United Nations.
Considering Morocco’s position to enable the maximum possible autonomy for Western Sahara within the context of its existence within Moroccan sovereignty, it should broadly assist the coming together of Western Sahara’s local people so they can plan and implement their priority development projects. This will create greater autonomy for the Saharan region, bring desperately needed relief and opportunity to the approximate 160,000 Sahrawi refugees, and forge mutually beneficial relationships and institutional connections with Morocco. If the process goes forward, new trust and partnerships among the parties could help to more clearly define the form of regional autonomy within a broader sovereignty that Morocco proposes.
Morocco’s broad support of decentralization of development in the Western Sahara would affect the results of a referendum in Western Sahara that helps to decide its future (that is, if the parties agree to the terms upon which a referendum were to take place). Individuals and organizations that support projects created by communities in the process advance their public diplomacy too. Pursuing the projects communities wanted – that met their self-described needs – wins hearts and minds and will influence who wins the “war of ideas.” It is this kind of action that should form the basis of United States public diplomacy in the Arab-Muslim world.
Yossef Ben-Meir teaches sociology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He is also President of the High Atlas Foundation – a nonprofit organization that assists rural development in Morocco.
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