Dark Spaces, Constitutive Paradoxes and Troubled Histories at the Intersection of Local Democracy, Municipal Activism and Law
(2022) Global Meeting on Law and Society — Location: Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (13.July.2022)
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- Abstract
- Since November 17, 2018, the Yellow Vests movement has shaken France, both by contesting representative government and its policies and by creating new forms of democracy. This contribution analyzes the specific experiment of direct democracy that has taken place in the municipality of Commercy, since the beginning of the Yellow Vests movement. Partly inspired by the ideas of communalism, or libertarian municipalism, of the American thinker Murray Bookchin, the Commercy Yellow Vests have been organized from the first days of the movement in assemblies and direct democracy. Based on several months of fieldwork combining participant observation, semi-structured interviews and textual analysis, the contribution is structured in three parts. The first part traces the evolution of the experiment of Commercy, from the beginning of the Yellow Vests assemblies occupying the city’s public space to the citizens’ assembly going to the municipal elections. It puts forward the reorientations lived by the movement, and aims to show how actors understand, practice and adapt direct democracy to their local conditions. The second part develops the evolution of the relationship with the law and local authorities of the experiment in Commercy. The hypothesis is that of a paradoxical transformation of the relationship to municipal power, first seen as an enemy to their direct democracy project and then as an institution to be conquered to carry out direct democracy. The third part studies the drafting process and the content of the local constitution that the movement has elaborated as the main document that would govern the functioning of the assembly. It will study the terms of the constituent paradox, namely the impossibility to find a source of legitimacy for a constitutive power that is external to the exercise of that power, in order to analyze how this paradox unfolds in the case of a directly democratic experiment.
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Van Outryve d’Ydewalle, S. (2022). Dark Spaces, Constitutive Paradoxes and Troubled Histories at the Intersection of Local Democracy, Municipal Activism and Law. Global Meeting on Law and Society, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/240111