More actions
Main article: Community
We envision ratings-based communities as voluntary organizations. People choose to join them voluntarily and can leave them at will. The US, as well as many other nation-states, have a joining process (ie green card, citizenship, etc) and a process of citizenship renunciation. For individuals, community-based processes will exist for these although we anticipate that it will be less bureaucratic, faster, and more informal. The ratings system itself will be able to do much of the vetting for joining a community. We also anticipate individuals having membership in multiple communities.
So the right to renounce a group membership seems relatively undisputed. We might invoke here the caveat that under extreme circumstances the right to leave might be restricted. A group member may have strategic knowledge and wish to provide it to an enemy, a group member may be so valuable to the community that his departure would significantly harm the liberties of everyone, etc. But under normal circumstances the right to leave seems uncontroversial.
It would then seem that the right of an entire group to leave would be the same and again, there doesn’t seem to be much dispute over this. Marginalized ethnic groups have migrated to other, more hospitable countries, throughout history. We might again invoke the caveat of extreme circumstances and note further that the ability to harm rises as the number of people choosing to leave rises. Thus it might be easier to reach the limit at which a community begins restricting the ability of a group to leave. Nevertheless, here too, it would appear that a group right to leave is mostly intact.
Why then would secession, which seems somewhat like a departing group, cause problems? Throughout history, seceding regions are often the cause of civil war. One clear difference is that the seceding region is taking with it valuable resources, such as land. It also takes with it citizens who pay taxes, serve in the government/military, etc. More fundamentally it renounces the laws of the parent nation and so takes with it all of the parent’s legal power over an entire sector of its territory. Citizens who renounce their citizenship but remain in their original country cause, by these measures, only a fraction of the loss that secession does. If they leave their original country, they may cause more loss but also do so at considerable expense to themselves. It is unusual for large blocs of people to agree to renounce their citizenship and move to a different country. Indeed, it is even unusual for them to renounce their citizenship en masse and stay. But even if they manage to do it (eg the Jews who formed Israel) they mostly leave behind the land and capital assets of the parent nation.
So the crux of the difference between secession and group renunciation of citizenship seems to lie in the economic and legal ramifications. A nation-state is nothing if not the ability to impose a legal framework over territory. And territory can be viewed primarily as an economic asset.
We’ve discussed that our ratings-based society will not necessarily have territorial boundaries. This may be the case, but it will certainly have control over economic assets in some fashion, whether this is land, productive assets like machinery, people (members), etc. It will no doubt have some legal binding of its members despite the fact that everyone agreed to it voluntarily and is free to leave. Secession therefore seems eminently possible in the community context. How would communities solve this problem?
One way would be to not worry about it and simply allow it. Or not mention it at all in the body of law that they create. The latter is similar to the US which never mentioned secession in its founding documents. The US example of ignoring the matter entirely led to the Civil War which adjudicated the issue on the battlefield and, only post-war, adjudicated it legally to favor the view that the Union is perpetual and unbreakable. That is, states could not secede, but this seems to have truly been decided by force.
But either of these situations (allowing it or ignoring it) sends us down a tricky path. Clearly ignoring it in plain sight (in the US case) is a bad idea. But simply allowing it causes problems too. If communities create a binding body of law for their members, as we presume they will, what does it then mean if secession is allowed? At any point of inconvenience, a member or a group thereof can simply throw off the yoke of oppressive law and start anew. And what does secession entail under this principle? A group of members could presumably “secede” by whatever process they see fit and start ignoring (ie violating) the laws of their parent community with the justification that they are now a new community. It would appear that this wouldn’t work either.
The only solution then is to codify in the body of law, along with the process for joining a community, the steps by which members can leave the community and, more importantly, secede from the community. This is what the EU does. It codifies in its own constitution the process of separation. And we saw recently with Brexit how this works and leads to a peaceful conclusion. Britain today lives side by side with the EU, is still friends with it, and has many other treaties which make it part of a broader European community. We might argue that Brexit was a bad idea but it did reveal how a relatively harmonious separation from a larger state can occur.
This brings to light a basic property of law which is that it must contain its own exceptions for those exceptions to be valid. The exception doesn’t exist by default if it goes unmentioned because if this were the case then anyone can break the law by “seceding” first and declaring the law void in their newly seceded “country”. Let's suppose John wants to kill his wife Linda but is afraid of the law. He "secedes" from his country and declares his house and property a new country, Johnland. Since there's no law about murder in Johnland, he proceeds to kill Linda. No doubt, the police would arrest John anyway and prosecute him. John would argue that the law on murder is not valid because he seceded and committed it in another country. Clearly, John's argument is ridiculous unless some codified process for secession actually exists.
This is apparently what the Confederate States (CS) ran up against when they tried to secede from the US. The US constitution ignores secession but the 10th Amendment provides that powers not given to the federal government are reserved by the states (or the people). Therefore, the argument goes, the CS could legally secede. So when they did, Lincoln, who did not believe that secession was legal, nevertheless allowed the seceded states to maintain slavery and was open to some type of negotiated settlement. So the CS’s procedural act of secession (declaring the fact, signing a new constitution, electing new leaders, etc) didn’t seem particularly harmful in and of itself. To the US, nothing much had changed, and constitutional law (and federal law) continued to be applicable in the CS. But then South Carolina decided to fire on Fort Sumter (a US fort), as it was being resupplied, in an attempt to drive US troops from CS territory. Now a law had been dramatically broken and the US had little choice but to counter it with force.
The Civil War truncated an interesting debate on whether states really had the right to secede. The answer, by the victor, was clearly no but this was only a conclusion drawn after the war. It seems fairly clear that if the US constitution had established a procedure for secession, the armed conflict could largely have been avoided. It also seems fairly clear that, by ignoring the subject entirely, the US made secession intolerable for itself (because we cannot have exceptions to the law that go unmentioned in the law) while permitting the other side just enough legal space to realistically entertain the notion.
This history is troubling and should be to a community of voluntary members. We normally would think, as the CS did, that we have a right by default if nothing in our law says we don’t. At the same time we can see the folly of unilateral separation as a means by which to break the law. This is why it is imperative that secession (and separation by members) be spelled out by the community.
But what if a community spells out terms that are so onerous that they can’t be practically fulfilled? Clearly, this is something a community must be aware of when it drafts its basic laws. But of course it could still happen, and we might find ourselves with seceding groups within communities that simply do so without attempting any legal justification of their actions. At the end of the day, if conditions are bad enough, force will prevail over any legal debate. However, given the potentially tragic outcomes of failing to address it adequately, it behooves any community to build a reasonable system of secession in from the beginning.
In general, communities should be aware of any potential for armed revolution, not just secession. The essence of preventing revolution is to allow a peaceful alternative that gives the revolution what it wants at less cost. Why has the US, for instance, been a relatively stable country for so long? One reason is that our democracy, and particularly our federal system, gives dissenters a path to get what they want at lower cost than armed struggle would. In other words, to anyone contemplating armed revolution against the US, it is likely that standard political action is more effective and a lot cheaper. It is also likely that if standard political action fails, that armed revolution would fail too. We may doubt if these conditions hold anymore in the US, but they did at one time, and if a conventional nation-state is capable of it, a direct ratings-based democracy should be too.