Megelanese model
The Megelanese model comprises the economic and social policies, as well as the typical cultural practices, of the Community of Megelan; even though a few of its defining characteristics date back to the Middle Ages, the greater part of it was developed during and after the Megelanese Civil War, being also influenced by the policies of the Common Sphere in general and of Common Sphere countries such as Cacerta and Gylias in particular.
The distinctive defining characteristic of the Megelanese model is a high degree of decentralization concerning economic and social matters, coupled with a high degree of cooperation between non-governmental organizations and official governmental institutions, a practice that is as widespread locally as it is nationally.
History
The Megelanese model's roots date back to the end of the Megelanese Civil War, in 1943; even though the Futurist Political Party had been defeated, their defeat came more as a result of the regime's economic woes than because of the regime's military performance: indeed, Futurist military forces were still occupying portions of Megelan on the day of the armistice between them and the anti-Futurist front, and a large swath of Megelanese territory, centered on the Commune of Alba, remained relatively safe from widespread invasion for most of the civil war.
Moreover, the anti-Futurist front was not a unified one; some of its members had turned on one another during the civil war, and there was the very concrete risk of another civil war ensuing between the components of said anti-Futurist front. Hardline elements were disposed of through a variety of lethal and non-lethal means, while moderates from a wide array of movements and parties, from the anarcho-communists to the classical liberals, hammered out a compromise.
On one hand, the re-establishment of several political features and societal institutions of old Megelan, up to and including some that had been long dead even before the rise of the Futurist Political Party, brought the more conservative wing of the anti-Futurist front on board; on the other hand, the fact that said political features and societal institutions were modernized and revamped versions of the ancient ones, rather than carbon copies of the same, garnered the approval of the more progressive wing of the anti-Futurist front.
This impromptu hodgepodge of modernity and tradition, formed in a time of severe economic and socio-political crisis, eventually led Megelanese Common Sphere chairwoman Gina Campanelli to describe the country as either the most conservative revolutionary nation in Tyran, or the most revolutionary conservative nation; the aftermath and defeat of the Neoliberal conspiracy only strengthened this arrangement: because of this, even though the Community is among the most radically democratic countries in Tyran, it is also one governed by a relatively narrow cultural consensus.
Aspects and overview
The Megelanese model has been characterised as follows:
- Voluntary access to a wide range of education, healthcare, pension and social safety options, funded by progressive taxation falling on businesses to a far greater degree than on individuals;
- Opposition to big business and big government alike, with associations of small and medium-sized enterprises and local institutions governed through direct democracy or delegates chosen by lot handling day to day business and governance;
- Free trade and little product market regulation, coupled with collective ownership of the means of production and high trade union density in the form of guilds, in which workers are organised based on the particular craft or trade in which they work rather than on the industry for which they work;
- A laissez-faire approach to civil liberty and individual freedom: a high degree of toleration of different beliefs and of different ideas, resulting in a relative lack of anti-discrimination laws, but also a widespread acceptance of victimless crimes;
- A polycentric law enforcement and legal structure, in which providers of judiciary and policing services compete or overlap in any given jurisdiction, with the state being the final arbiter on disputes between different providers and/or their clients.
The Megelanese model has been described as both left-libertarian and right-libertarian, while officially being neither - the consequence of having to provide a framework broad enough to be accepted by all the various forces that were able to survive the war of attrition that was the Megelanese Civil War.
Economic system
The Megelanese economic model shares many aspects of the broader Common Sphere economic model; unlike fellow Common Sphere countries such as Akashi and Gylias however, Megelan has an overwhelmingly private sector economy, tempered by large-scale antitrust regulations according to which craft workers, sole proprietors and small farmers are not taxed at all, while taxation on larger businesses grows exponentially in relation to the size of the business.
To avoid being taxed out of existence, businesses that are too large are forced to devolve themselves into multiple smaller businesses; because of this, Megelan's economy is dominated by small-scale cooperatives and family businesses, that cooperate and pool their resources through one of the many trade guilds that operate in the Community, of whom there can be several in any given field, leading to a great variety of approaches to business.
Guilds
Even though they are modeled after the old medieval guilds of Megelan, the modern guilds of the Community are run according to distributist and syndicalist principles: as there can be several guilds in any given field, none of them is able to monopolize the market as the medieval guilds did, to the detriment of the economy.
Just like their ancient predecessors however, they are granted a high degree of autonomy, to such an extent that they take responsibility for the training of their members and the quality and price of their products and services, they are the sole judges of the qualifications of their members, and have the power to set both standards and prices.
Another commonality between the old Megelanese guild system and the new one is the distinction between apprentice, journeyman and master, that was restored in order to make it feasible for workers to build skills by on-the-job training, as well as being able to earn a living while learning new skills.
Apprentices earn their license and status of journeymen through education, supervised experience and examination; to become a master, the journeyman has to submit a piece of work related to their trade to the guild their workplace is affiliated to, their fitness to qualify for said role being judged partly by the quality of the aforementioned piece of work.
Even though they are private associations of private businesses, Megelanese trade guilds can carry out a variety of tasks on behalf of the Community, some of which would normally be monopolized by the government; these privately owned national champions are not, however, appointed by the government, but elected in the same manner according to which the delegates to the Megelanese parliament are elected.
General Confederation of Labour, Technology and the Arts
At the national level, guilds - regardless of their size - are grouped into one of several sectors, according to the industry they are a part of; since there are a hundred such sectors, there are a hundred guilds that cooperate with the government at any given time. Each year, 10% of all the guilds enjoying such a relationship with the government are replaced, to prevent any one of them from asserting a dominant position in the national economy.
As explained above, the process is akin to the one according to which the delegates to the Megelanese parliament are elected, through a procedure of alternated sortition and election between all the guilds in the Community, with their number being halved over and over again until only one of them is left. Some of the guilds chosen in this fashion have been able to obtain global pre-eminence in their sector during their 10-year tenures, with those belonging to the clothing and textiles sector having been especially influential in Gylias in the second half of the 20th century.
Each and every one of these guilds, called paratici in Megelan, is included in the General Confederation of Labour, Technology and the Arts, a confederation of labour unions that replaced the old, pre-Futurist Credenza in this role once the Credenza was revived by the post-Futurist consensus as the upper house of the Community's bicameral legislature, and whose internal workings are essentially identical to those of the Grand and General Council, with individual businesses being the lowest represented level rather than rural villages and urban districts.
On one hand, some of the biggest Megelanese guilds have been likened to federations of worker cooperatives as well as to horizontal and vertical keiretsu, depending on their driving ideology or their guiding principles, and enjoy friendly relationships with foreign capitalist and socialist enterprises alike. On the other hand, some of the guilds of the Community have been accused of acting like cartels, especially before the early 1990s, and of discriminatory or unethical practices, as Megelanese labour law tolerates a great variety of approaches to business.
Influence of traditional witchcraft
Some academics have theorized that Megelanese traditional witchcraft, the dominant religious tradition in the Community, had an effect on the development of the Megelanese economic model; the strictly local character of the country's religious congregations, and their duty to support infirm or elderly members through their own funds, has been seen as a blueprint for the localist character of Megelan's institutions and for its reliance on NGOs, to which the government devolves functions and powers whenever feasible or possible.
Moreover, the practical and utilitarian nature of the faith, especially in relation to the discourse on the nature of good and evil, could have influenced the Megelanese economic model's emphasis on concrete results over ideological concerns, and its willingness to experiment with a great variety of approaches to business; however, other scholars argue that all those characteristics were born out of necessity - the central government of the Community having been on the verge of bankruptcy after the end of the civil war, and having been forced to rely on external actors during the reconstruction period - rather than out of religious influence.
Megelanese welfare model
Public provision of welfare is less of a factor in Megelan than in the other Common Sphere countries; instead, welfare duties are evenly split between the guilds and the voluntary sector. Guilds are required by law to to devote a certain amount of their resources to free or low-cost services for the impoverished or indigent and, as conscientious objectors and the disabled can earn their right to vote through work in non-governmental, non-profit organizations rather than through service in the military, welfare providers are often well-funded and well-staffed, and cooperate with the private and public sectors on a regular basis.
Moreover, several services - private, public, and voluntary alike - exist to provide training and education to those currently in the welfare system, in order to encourage direct employment to get individuals off the welfare roll and directly into the workforce; that said, several guilds exist for those that are not part of the workforce, as well - job seeking having been recognized as an activity requiring an expenditure of resources on the part of the applicant not unlike that of an actual job.
Education
The Community delegates the authority for the school system to the communes; schools can be structured along several lines, depending on who pays the teachers: in schools where students hire and pay for the teachers, the students run the school, while in schools where the teachers are hired and paid for by the communes, the teachers run the school.
Even though schools can rent, buy or construct buildings specifically for the purposes of teaching, it is not uncommon for classes to be wherever space is available, up to and including the teachers' own homes; neither is uncommon for teachers and scholars to move around: schools often compete to secure the best and most popular teachers.
Health
Megelanese residents are universally required to pay a fixed annual fee to a medical guild of their choosing; in turn, these are universally required to accept every applicant.
These guilds are empowered to establish their own clinics, their own training and education programs, their own pharmacies, labs, administrative structures, and whatever else is necessary to medical practice; as already stated, in exchange for these privileges, the guilds are required to devote a certain amount of their resources to free or low-cost care for the impoverished or indigent.
Direct democracy
Direct democracy has played a pivotal role in shaping the Megelanese model, as political awareness among the common people is quite high, and town square politics have resulted in a wide range of private, public and voluntary welfare activities; strikes, agitations, and stirs are so common as to be almost unnoticeable and, as everything that is approved by the elected legislature has to be approved by the rest of the country through a compulsory referendum, the voting public is effectively granted a veto on laws adopted by the elected legislature.
Moreover, the widespread use of sortition in the electoral process whenever is not feasible nor possible to resort to direct democracy allows ordinary people to have a say on local and national policy even at the highest levels of government, ordinary people that grow in competence by contributing to deliberation; by and large, the Megelanese regard the lot as the most natural and the simplest way of appointment.
Opinions
Even though the Megelanese model has been widely praised due to how the Community was able to achieve a politically engaged citizenry, good social indicators and an absence of deep poverty only a few decades after the destructive civil war that marked the first half of the 20th century in the country, it has also often been criticized due to the persistence of aspects such as a relatively low income and slow growth in Megelan itself; and, if on one hand, a recession in Megelan is, on average, less destructive than it would be in any other country in Tyran, on the other hand recovery takes longer, and growth afterwards is slower.
The Community's commitment to direct democracy and localist politics has nurtured a high level of political and social awareness in the population, and a high level of support for those wealth and resource redistribution programmes that eventually allowed the populace to enjoy a set of high material quality of life indicators on par with those of the most developed countries of Tyran on a fraction of those countries' GDP. However, the lack of strong central institutions has been a drag on development and economic restructuring, with the built-in inefficiency and jurisdictional confusion of the system meaning that even routine matters such as infrastructure repair or snow removal are often resolved through fist fights at council meetings.
