In her 1988 book 'A Negotiated World', Harriet Rosenberg describes and analyzes the development path of the communities of the Grand Escarton, a federation of five Alpine valleys in present-day France and Italy, which had bought themselves out of feudal burdens in exchange for an annual rent and were able to build up a relatively egalitarian production and governance system over a long period from 14th to 18th century. This Republique des Escartons included practices of common goods as well as an elaborated monetary economy, labor cooperation at the local level as well as regular temporary outmigration, and local autogestion as well as lobbying at higher national level through mediators and legal experts, with simultaneously consolidating a local elite. The economic situation is described as prosperous; surpluses were disproportionally invested in. These egalitarian structures were weakened and destroyed primarily by external macro-tendencies in the context of European nation-state building.
The first question is the reasons for this long economic stability and autogestion. And, in consequence, how this historical trajectory is still visible and what possibilities exist for connecting the historical experience to today's society and its sustainable transformation.
Escarton’s production system is now characterized by overaging and inferiority in favor of a lowland urban clientele. This large-scale interdependence makes a revival of the old autonomous governance and economy unlikely. Nevertheless, the historical experience is an important part of the collective memory. Although the egalitarian model experienced in the past cannot be a blueprint for regional transformation, it can be used for both an intensification of open and cooperative transborder relations and of more equitable rural-urban linkages. This implies a territorial based strategy that is distinct from both communitarist municipalism and footloose market ideologies.
