Grandeur et misère du municipalisme

Abstract

This article studies the municipalist experience of Barcelona in Common (Barcelona en Comú) between 2015 and 2019, bringing it back to the political horizon of communalism. Unlike the latter, Spanish municipalism does not aim to create new institutions, but rather to subvert existing ones from within, overcoming strictly representative democracy and the professionalization of politics. The article then proposes a sociological analysis of the transformation of institutions, with attention to changes as well as to points of inertia. The main obstacle to this transformation is the sovereign and statist structure of municipal institutions, which prevents any radical change. Creating a new dynamic between those who have entered the institution and those who have remained outside (as part of social movements), without neutralizing the tensions between them, then appears to be the only way to disperse decision-making power and overcome the inertia of municipal politics. As an alternative to electoralism, municipalism is thus redefined as a political project whose objective is to "communalize" the municipality by building a non-state public sphere.

Keywords

• municipalism
• Barcelona en Comú
• self-governement
• social movements
• non-state institutions