Is Lisbon still capital?
Is it necessary for Portugal to have a capital in 2021? Actually, it’s just a symbolic characterization, but precisely unnecessary. Portugal does not need a capital, it needs a well-managed territory that offers opportunities and justice to all its inhabitants. Nothing justifies the existence of capital today, and Portugal could be the first state without capital. There may be physical spaces where the government and other organs of sovereignty are based, as well as most public public services, but nothing, by itself, automatically requires the label of capital city for any urban space.
A good serious measure, therefore, is to do away with the concept of capital, because nothing is needed. But it wouldn’t be much more than symbolic. At the same time, it would be necessary to prepare a serious reflection on our administrative division, which, as a result of several successive layers of history, is today certainly more out of step with reality than it has ever been.
We have parishes with 50,000 inhabitants and municipalities with 2,000 or less, where the biggest employer is the municipality itself. We have administrative realities from a geographical point of view that are small and other large dimensions. And this means that the various public service networks and their decision levels are somehow hostage to this formal division, preventing in some cases the profitability of their resources and, in others, simply their better allocation, for more in the process of additional decentralization of services depending on the municipalities that we have in progress.
Do I, citizen, want to be defined, understood and classified from the point of view of rights and duties, in my structural relationship with the State, by the simple fact of living in place x or, alternatively, according to my actual needs and circumstances? Is it so important to belong to the municipality or the parish y? Right now, it is. I don’t think it should be.
Portugal, at least its mainland territory, is, on a European scale, a region. A small jurisdiction. A territory of extraordinary uniformity and cohesion, even considering its internal differences.
Defenders of exacerbated regionalization and municipalization believe that decision at the local level brings benefits, due to the possible adequacy and additional inquiry that the location of decision-making power, from the outset on the contents of fundamental public services, may imply. However, this means the additional risk of unnecessary inequality between citizens and territories and of an increase in implicit nepotism and its associates. And it would require a more enlightened local decision, more impartial and less dependent on successive public sinecures. Unfortunately, I don’t think we have it today, in general terms.
The very practice of exercising consecutively to “locally relevant people” of responsibilities in public services devolved in the territory, in terms of the environment, health, agriculture, social security and many others, and technical in the sequential logic of the exercise of the parties of power, I think is good attestation that an underlying maxim that “the place is good” is not enough by itself to resolve the issues of adequacy, inequality or effectiveness, despite the desirability of the process for the central state. We have been regionalizing and municipalizing for many years and now in a more specific way – but the assessment of this must be done, without belief bays devoid of reality and from the perspective of the taxpayer and due recipient of public services. “Centralism” has also taken on a systemic explanation: no one should be deprived or limited in what is rightfully his due by living in a given circumscription; there is a duty of balance and redistribution between territories; and, in a limited space like ours, it is not possible to multiply qualifications, availability and decision-making competence in an unlimited way. We will see the result.
Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon
