Towards an Embodied Citizenship - Part II: Distributism as Europe’s Social Covenant

Chesterton and Belloc warned that without widespread ownership, democracy is a fiction. Europe's housing crisis and vanishing farms are proving them right. By Europos.

“Every man should have something that he can shape in his own image”— G.K. Chesterton

Earlier I traced the idea that membership in a political community should accompany co-ownership over that community in a tangible sense, from Numa Pompilius, the early king of Rome, to Plato and Leviticus.

Economic Populism

G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc’s “distributism” provides us with the best known modern terms for the principle we’ve been exploring. As Belloc summarised it, the term described:

“A state of society in which the families composing it are, in a determining number, owners of the land and the means of production…”

—Belloc, An Essay on the Restoration of Property

That a “determining number” of persons own means of production was, to these authors, an “institution,” that is, a social arrangement—the very shape of society—no less defining than that of slavery:

“If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.”

— Belloc, The Servile State

This is certainly relevant to us today. A widespread sense of disenfranchisement and the rising tide of so-called “economic populism” is set to define the coming years, with electoral outcomes in Europe and Western countries in general hinging on falling purchasing power, rising costs and the ability of foreign hedge funds and private equity firms to buy up assets and essentially compete with the body politic of any given country.

Indeed, promoting widespread asset ownership is, on one level, analogous to placing one’s pieces on a chess board, occupying space so others cannot.

Another key issue is that of mass migration and changing demographics, with the attendant strain on cultural cohesion, welfare and social services, and increasing violent crime that it entails. Right of centre parties making this their flagship issue have been rising across Europe and will be a permanent part of the political landscape going forward.

There is no reason, however, for these two issues (economic and demographic concerns) to divide along opposite party factions. As the preceding discussion has highlighted, understanding political membership as entailing a share in the economy is precisely traditionally connected to the articulation of a local identity. It is quite artificial for it to be championed by an ideological internationalism that supports lax borders, the breakdown of traditional institutions and the importation of cheap labour (be it today’s Far Left or Europe’s establishmentarian centre-Left). Any politics of identity should, in fact, emphasise economic enfranchisement and widespread ownership over the resources needed for life.

Identity is not merely what excludes others, but what includes you, after all.

When we hear of “remigration” and the possibility of offering economic incentives to persons with less of an ancestral connection to European in order for them to move back to the land of their parents or grandparents, for example, we should add that this must ultimately be accompanied by an “internal remigration,” so to speak, that is, a repossession by the local population of material resources.

Farms and Housing

We may consider a few areas in which this can be applied today. According to Eurostat, the EU lost about 5.3 million farms between 2005 and 2020 from around 14.4 million to 9.1 million, with the number reaching 8.8 million farms by 2023, representing a loss of 5.6 million farms, or 39% of EU farms overall. And it’s small and family-operated farms that have been hurt the most.

Obviously rising costs are a culprit here, and this has partly been the result of policy, resulting from sanctions on Russian energy and taxes on fossil fuels. Larger and corporate-owned farms can absorb high input costs and capital investment and weather the storms of market volatility. Small farms cannot.

But even beyond this, according to some estimates, 80% of the EU’s direct payments to farmers have gone to about 20% of the bloc’s farms, and mostly to larger ones, giving those who already benefit from economies of scale an even further advantage in crowding out the competition and surviving economic downturns.

Pressure mounting on this front has caused some movement in Brussels, so that the Commission’s post-2027 proposals for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is set to increase support toward small family farms. This would include simplified lump-sum payments for small farmers and capping funds for large recipients to redirect these to smaller ones. Member States will also be able to fund farm-relief services using CAP funds, and a new dedicated generational-renewal strategy aims to double the share of young farmers by 2040 through national plans and at least 6% of agricultural spending.

The housing crisis presents another area in which the above should inspire policy changes. Since 2010, EU-wide house prices have risen by 55.4% and rents by 26.7%, significantly outpacing wage growth. This mainly hurts younger Europeans who typically have lower incomes and less secure employment.

In Bulgaria, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, and Spain, renting a two-room apartment can require 80% of a young adult’s median wage. As a result, around 30% of 25–34-year-olds across the EU live with their parents, reaching nearly 50% in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Poland. Delaying family formation on account of not having physical space in which to raise a family, or even the requisite privacy in which to cultivate married life, cannot but be a contributing factor to the continent’s low birth rates.

Beyond this, the psychological restriction and lack of independence resulting from not living in or owning one’s own home cannot but cause the young (young men, especially) to stagnate in the long run and become alienated from a hearty sense of power, mastery and participation in life. Again, property has a use-value, but also a psychological, symbolic and spiritual value. As Chesterton puts it:

“Property is merely the art of democracy. It means that every man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is shaped in the image of Heaven … The average man cannot paint the sunset whose colours he admires; but he can paint his own house with what colour he chooses.”

—Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World

In December 2025 the European Commission published its first European Affordable Housing Plan, aiming to remove regulatory barriers to building new housing and to mobilise investment for social/affordable housing, including through an investment platform partnering with the European Investment Bank, as well as through cohesion funds. However, social housing is generally being built for economic migrants whose massive arrival only worsens the situation for native youths. The key here should be to increase supply without increasing demand by reducing overall immigration.

I’ve cited the EU’s forthcoming CAP and 2025 Housing Plan because the point is not to reject every existing attempt (timid as it might be) at the European or national levels to solve our problem, but to amplify those elements that make the most sense and scrap the rest.

Looking Forward

Tax incentives for low and middle-income first-time buyers, massive reduction of income and inheritance tax, increased property tax on older persons with more than two properties to incentivise them to sell these or pass them on to younger members of their family, assign more EU funds for affordable housing, and balanced regulation of short-term rentals to preserve urban affordability are all potentially sound policies that could be pursued.

Beyond family property in the form of housing and generally purchasing power, which is the priority, we should disrupt political categories and discourse by proposing policies that support local communities in restoring the commons, that is, in establishing communal property for its members.

If individual economic interest corresponds to the modern ideal of “liberty,” and state ownership is the guarantor of general “equality,” with these representing the modes of property favoured by the Right and Left in a stereotyped sense, then the commons corresponds to “fraternity” in the French Revolutionary triad that inaugurates political modernity. We might understand it as the bridge between the excesses of Right and Left.

Concretely, it could be cultivated by policymakers legislating to make it easier to set up Community Land Trust (CLT), for example, and local government can enact ordinances or bylaws that formally recognise community rights to manage its local resources. Local governments can also donate or sell land (or tax-foreclosed properties, unused schools, parks, highway remnants, etc.) to a local representative entity (a CLT, community stewards, or something similar) at below-market rates or for free. They can also implement “community right to bid” or “assets of community value” laws, giving residents priority in buying or refusing to sell local resources and infrastructure (surplus land, empty buildings, parks, forests, etc.) to unwanted buyers.

All of this applies not only to physical space, but also to cyber space, as I’ve developed elsewhere in terms of the three-node model for AI (supercomputer, national node and edge or personal node).

Community requires ownership as the material foundation of identity. Any identitarian or conservative project for Europe should offer the continent’s population a positive vision in which they can more easily obtain a real share, a piece, of Europe—in place of the tattered social contract, a new covenant that grounds us in solid philosophical principles and material reality.