It is argued that Harper’s failure in Ottawa may lead to decentralist alternatives.
The problem of center-periphery relations in a society, and of how a geographically extensive country extending beyond the confines of a city-state, is to be effectively governed, are some of the most pressing problems in political theory.
One of the failures of the Ancient Greeks was that they found it difficult to extend their political units beyond the city-state. One of the reasons for the prominence of Athens was that the surrounding area, Attica, had been forged into a quite unified entity, a solid home base for the empire. However, the Athenian Empire did not meet the challenge of governing divergent cities beyond Attica, successfully. Some political thinkers have believed that democracy outside of a small city of tens of thousands of citizens, was virtually impossible, and mostly meaningless. Certainly the ancient empires ruled geographically extensive areas through various kinds of governors, with little popular consultation.
As more republican as well as (eventually) democratic societies arose in the West, representative rather than direct democracy became more widely practiced. With the establishment of what eventually became continent-wide polities such as the United States of America, and the Dominion of Canada, there arose the necessity of federalism. Such continent-wide polities have had to balance the interests of the various states or provinces, against the general national interest, not always successfully. Indeed, the fratricidal American Civil War/War Between the States arose out of many factors, not the least of which were different conceptions of the balance between federal and states’ interests. The Dominion of Canada arose in the wake of the American Civil War, and its Constitution (the British North America Act) (1867) consciously sought to avoid some of the constitutional problems which were seen to have led to the American Civil War.

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