Question of Size
Just like his mentor Leopold Kohr, Schumacher discusses the problems of separatism and regionalism in Small Is Beautiful, which he called "the question of size". [10] Just like Kohr, Schumacher calls for separatism and decentralisation of humanity into smaller nations and communities. However, instead of focusing on the cultural and social aspects of separatism, he discusses the economic perspective. He criticises the belief that history is based on unification - that tribes formed a nation, which then formed a union of nations, and that now one could look forward to a world government. [10] He notes that the opposite process is taking place as the number of countries worldwide is growing, as large nations break up into smaller ones, and states that Balkanisation should not have negative connotations. He questions the idea of "the bigger the better", arguing that in fact smaller nations perform better economically than bigger nations, and points out that German-speaking parts of Switzerland and Austria were able to become prosperous without the need to join Germany. According to Schumacher, the German unification was not responsible for German economical success, and most of the world's wealthiest nations on a per capita basis are small, while the largest countries are poor in comparison. He asserts that the smaller internal market area of a small country is not a hindrance, but rather the basis of great economic potential and development. [11] [10]
Schumacher then notes that the myth of "bigness" also appears in case of corporations, as it's "generally told that gigantic organisations are inescapably necessary". [10] For Schumacher, however, as soon as an organisation of a great size is created, it inevitably entails "a strenuous attempt to attain smallness within bigness" in order to remain efficient; he argues that the General Motors was organised as a federation of medium-sized firms, and recalls his experience in the British National Coal Board, which was decentralised into a "federation of numerous quasi-firms" under Lord Robens. [10] Schumacher asserts that while many still engage in "idolatry of large size", in practice nobody can deny the "convenience, humanity, and manageability of smallness". He repeats the arguments of Leopold Kohr - when any body grows too big, it also becomes unmanageable and highly dysfunctional, naming London, New York City and Tokyo examples of overgrown cities, where "the millions do not add to the city's real value but merely create enormous problems and produce human degradation". [10]
He also discusses globalisation, identifying the "idolatry of gigantism" as a harmful belief steming from technological progress - the highly developed communications system greatly increased labor mobility, rendering people "footloose". [10] He notes that everything needs a structure, and while before the advent of mass transport people were relatively immobile, one was still able to move, such as the Irish immigrants in the United States. [10] Once everything has become extremely mobile, all structures are more vulnerable and threatened than ever. For him, fast transport ended up destroying freedom rather than providing it, given how it made every structure vulnerable and made actions that would mitigate the destructive effects of this technological development necessary. [10] He argues that this problem affects both large and small countries, and that the now extremely high labour mobility might not only destroy social cohesion (resulting in alienation and anomie), but also cause instability:
The factor of footlooseness is, therefore, the more serious, the bigger the country. Its destructive effects can be traced both in the rich and in the poor countries. In the rich countries such as the United States of America, it produces, as already mentioned, 'megalopolis'. It also produces a rapidly increasing and ever more intractable problem of 'drop-outs', of people, who, having become footloose, cannot find a place anywhere in society. Directly connected with this, it produces an appalling problem of crime, alienation, stress, social breakdown, right down to the level of the family. In the poor countries, again most severely in the largest ones, it produces mass migration into cities, mass unemployment, and, as vitality is drained out of the rural areas, the threat of famine. The result is a 'dual society' without any inner cohesion, subject to a maximum of political instability. [10]
Schumacher then moves his attention to nation-states, which he also considers endangered by "bigness", defined as annexation or unification into larger states. He notes that Denmark or Belgium being annexed to Germany and France respectively would stunt their growth, cause their economic potential to be completely neglected, threaten their language and culture, and lastly cause their separatist cause to be dismissed by modern media and politicians:
Imagine that in 1864 Bismarck had annexed the whole of Denmark instead of only a small part of it, and that nothing had happened since. The Danes would be an ethnic minority in Germany, perhaps struggling to maintain their language by becoming bilingual, the official language of course being German. Only by thoroughly Germanising themselves could they avoid becoming second-class citizens. There would be an irresistible drift of the most ambitious and enterprising Danes, thoroughly Germanised, to the mainland in the south, and what then would be the status of Copenhagen? That of a remote provincial city. Or imagine Belgium as part of France. What would be the status of Brussels? Again, that of an unimportant provincial city. I don't have to enlarge on it. Imagine now that Denmark a part of Germany, and Belgium a part of France, suddenly turned what is now charmingly called 'nats' wanting independence. There would be endless, heated arguments that these 'non-countries' could not be economically viable, that their desire for independence was, to quote a famous political commentator, 'adolescent emotionalism, political naivety, phoney economics, and sheer bare-faced opportunism'. [10]
Schumacher continues - nations and states are composed of people, and people are only "viable" when they "can stand on their own feet and earn their keep". [10] He notes that people won't become viable when forced into one huge community, and that they likewise won't become "non-viable" when divided into smaller, more coherenent and manageable communities. [10] He argues that separatism should be applauded rather than mocked, as it entails the desire to become a free and self-reliant region. He also mocks unionism, arguing that "if a country wishes to export all over the world, and import from all over the world, it has never been held that it had to annex the whole world in order to do so". [10] He identifies the question of regionalism as the "most important problem", but stressed that regionalism does not mean combining states into free-trade systems, but rather developing all the regions within each country. [10]
Schumacher calls separatism a "logical and rational response to the need for regional development" and argues that there is no hope for the poor communities beyond successful regional development. [10] He states that most modern developments only result in widening the gap between the rich and the poor, as they almost exclusively focus on the capital or already wealthy areas instead, as these yield the most profit. Thus modern industrialists seek to make the already very profitable regions even richer, while the poor regions remain miserable. [10] This keeps the poor in the "weakest possible bargaining position", as the impoverished regions see no development despite needing it the most. Schumacher considers the "economics of gigantism" to be "a left-over of nineteenth-century conditions and nineteenth-century thinking" which no longer applies to modern problems. [10] He argues that modern technological and scientific potential must focus on fighting human degradation, in "intimate contact" with individuals and small groups rather than large states. [10] For Schumacher, democracy is a matter of people, who can only "be themselves" in small and comprehensible groups. He argues that economic thinking is useless if it only engages in "vast abstractions" such as "the national income, the rate of growth, capital/output ratio, input-output analysis, labour mobility, capital accumulation" instead of addressing "the human realities of poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness and spiritual death." [10]
