STATUS OF THE STATE THEORY OF LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT IN THE WORLD DOCTRINE OF MUNICIPAL LAW
Authors: Sukhonos V.V. 
Published: January 2021

Representatives of the “free community” theory were among the first to draw attention
to the issues of local self-government. In the early nineteenth century. Treasury, ie government officials, was responsible for the affairs and property of the communities. As a result, the community economy has been virtually destroyed to nothing. Therefore, there is a need for scientific substantiation of the need to limit the intervention of central executive bodies in the public system of the economy. This task was intended to be solved by the theory of “free community”, which argued that the right of the community to settle its affairs has the same inalienable character as human rights and freedoms since the community has historically emerged before a state that should respect the freedom of public administration.
At the same time, the idea of the inalienability of community rights was sufficiently vulnerable, because, on the one hand, to justify the inalienability of the rights of large territorial self-governing units (departments, provinces, lands, or regions) created by the state was rather difficult and, on the other, to deny them. other types of self-government, except for small rural and urban communities, was rather strange because it did not correspond to the real state of affairs. That is why the social theory of self-government is beginning to emerge, which, as characteristic features of local self-government, has advanced the non-state and usually economic nature of the activity of local self-government bodies. However, the practice has proved that self-government bodies exercise not only private-legal but also public functions, that is, those that are inherent to public authorities, which derive their powers from the state. In addition, the impossibility of clearly separating community affairs from state affairs entrusted to the community was clarified. That is why the state theory of self-government arises.
The basic principle of all legal theories was the recognition of the community, county, city, province, in general, any self-governing local union, as a body of public law. At the same time, all representatives of legal theories recognized that the competence of local self-government bodies is not their independent function, it is a state function, that is, transferred by the state to be performed by independent local communities. Therefore, all cases that are administered by local governments are state affairs. The state government itself sets the limits of its competence, entrusting part of its affairs to local self-governing communities and recognizing them as independent public-law corporations. Local self-government bodies, although performing public duties, are not bodies of the state but of independent self-governing unions of communities, possessing the will and independence of the state and independent entities of public law, independent of the will of the state power, because the power itself wants to make them legally independent.
Keywords: local self-government; state theory of local self-government; the theory of «free community»; public theory of self-government.