- Author: Pedro Tellería
- Date: 01/01/26
- Website: PedroTelleria.com
- Topic: Critical-Thinking, Liberal-Mindset
- Series: Liberal-Mindset; Subsidiarity
- Version: v1.0 (2aEN)
- URL: pedrotelleria.com/article.php?id=37&lang=EN
Subsidiarity is one of the most powerful political ideas of modern Western thought. And, at the same time, one of the most distorted.
It is not a technical term. It is not a fancy word for European speeches. It is not an excuse to “coordinate administrations.”
It is a conceptual bomb against the hypertrophied State. And that is precisely why it is avoided. Or emptied of content.
Subsidiarity touches the central nerve of power: who decides, from where, and with what legitimacy.
It speaks of the individual, the family, the company, the community. It speaks of efficiency, responsibility, freedom. Above all, it speaks of limits. And power hates limits.
1. What subsidiarity is (strict definition)
Subsidiarity establishes a clear and non-negotiable rule: A higher authority should intervene only when the lower one cannot effectively perform a function on its own.
Not “whenever it wants”. Not “whenever it thinks it can do it better”. Not “for the sake of coordination”. Only when it is indispensable.
This implies an inverse order of precedence, always starting from the bottom: Individual, Family, Company, Municipality, Province, Autonomous Community, National State, European Union, diffuse supranational entities.
Power is not born at the top. It only moves upward when necessary.
Subsidiarity does not seek decentralization because it is fashionable. It seeks to protect the autonomy of lower spheres from the natural appetite of higher ones.
Because power has its own physical law: it tends to grow, to concentrate, and to justify itself.
2. The core idea (and the usual confusion)
Subsidiarity does not say: “let all administrations cooperate”, “let the weakest prevail”, “everything must always be decentralized”. That is a caricature.
Subsidiarity says something far more uncomfortable: Freedom and responsibility must reside at the level closest to the citizen. And everyone else must refrain.
It is not a theory of cooperation. It is a theory of power containment.
It does not reward the weak. It protects what is closest.
3. Where this idea comes from (and why it is solid)
Subsidiarity was not born in a modern office. It has deep and cross-cutting roots.
- British liberal-conservative tradition: Edmund Burke saw it clearly: “Civil society knows how to do things that the State destroys when it tries to replace them”. Alexis de Tocqueville was even more precise: “When the State replaces local action, democracy degenerates into a soft, paternalistic, suffocating centralization”.
- European Union (in theory): The principle is explicitly included in Article 5 of the Treaty on European Union: the EU should act only when Member States cannot achieve the objective.
- Catholic social doctrine: The encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931) states it bluntly: “What individuals can do should not be taken over by society; what small groups can do should not be assumed by larger ones”. It is not progressive. It is not conservative. It is logical.
4.Three simple rules:
- Proximity: those closest to the citizen decide.
- Efficiency: if the lower level works, the higher one abstains.
- Limitation of power: an institutional brake on State expansion.
The problem is not the principle. The problem is that it is not applied.
Pedro Tellería
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