Size matters

"Kohr principles" is an interesting article (from the NYT's equally interesting "Borderlines" series) about the ideas of Leopold Kohr.  Kohr was a 20th-century academic interested in how the size of countries determines their interaction with other countries.  He proposed various new maps for Europe and North America which he figured would be closer to an ideal setup than what he saw before him.  Wrong or right, it's worth checking out.

Wikipedia sez:

Kohr described himself as a "philosophical anarchist." Kohr protested the "cult of bigness" and economic growth and promoted the concept of human scale and small community life....His vision called for a dissolution of centralized political and economic structures in favor of local control.

From Leopold Kohr's most popular work The Breakdown of Nations:

[...] there seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. Oversimplified as this may seem, we shall find the idea more easily acceptable if we consider that bigness, or oversize, is really much more than just a social problem. It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation. Whenever something is wrong, something is too big. [...] And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units.

Personally, I found a lot of merit in these ideas....at least insofar as I can see here.  Not having read the man, I can't endorse him wholeheartedly, but he seems to articulate things which I have been thinking about quite a bit over the last few years.

I think Kohr would agree that "bigness" is an obsession of Imperialist, Fascists....and the kind of Predatory Capitalists that have recently run the global economy into the ground.

Growth is the key to survival, according to these businessman gamblers....making a profit is no longer good enough.  I can't tell you the number of times over the years that students of mine in management positions have repeated this mantra.  A small company can stay small and survive, but once it gets to a certain size it must grow even more....or die.  And it cannot simply be profitable, it must make more profit every year.  And even more the next, and the next, etc.  It seems self-evident that unemployment, inflation and environmental destruction are the inevitable outgrowths of such a position.

This article from The Guardian puts it nicely:

Bigness, predicted Kohr, could only lead to more bigness, for "whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions". Beyond those limits it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible endpoint: collapse.

We have now reached the point that Kohr warned about over half a century ago: the point where "instead of growth serving life, life must now serve growth, perverting the very purpose of existence". Kohr's "crisis of bigness" is upon us and, true to form, we are scrabbling to tackle it with more of the same: closer fiscal unions, tighter global governance, geoengineering schemes, more economic growth. 

It's all about the coin....European Union had a common currency before a political constitution....a constitution, btw, rejected by the French people in a referendum but then later rammed through parliament.

Ask Spain, Ireland and Greece how it's all working out for them.

Too big to fail you say?  Where've we heard that one?  Bigness is not the key to survival.  Whither the dinosaurs whilst the insects live on?