Sovereignty/Citizenry; Social Tech/The State
Connect to Check | 5
Citizen and State
Names are a funny thing. They tell us a lot, especially once we add meaning. Yet, at the same time, names tell us so little, a thin veneer and, besides, apparently you never want to judge a book by its cover.
So when attempting to think about the impact that social technology (s.tech) may have on world governance, the nouns “state” and “citizen” are ubiquitous. Immediately we have added our own meaning: government, politicians, elections, the state of things, congress, parliament, power, corruption, the hit 1998 Will Smith movie1 - the list keeps on going. But if we hold onto our meanings for a second, it becomes important to think about the causal relationship between both nouns.
Returning to the Weberian definition of a state given in Part 2,2 and thinking about how and where the ordinary citizen fits into the broader panoramic vista infested throughout with state-based subspaces, we notice that the citizen is the person/people situated by happenstance (e.g. birth, refugee) or by choice (e.g. planned migration) within one of those “given territories” carved out by a state. Funnily enough, both happenstance and choice open up the door to another vista, this one holding the crux of the relationship between state and citizenry.
Sovereignty proves a hard one to nail down. Kinda depends who you ask. In the Conseil d’État – 2024 Annual Study sovereignty is equated to freedom of choice and, as a standard baseline, I like that. At risk of sounding too idealistic and wishy washy, the sovereign, whoever they may be, should be free to choose their own destiny. But to truly understand a concept which quite literally routinely ignites the all-consuming flames of wars, to grasp how it connects with s.tech and stateness, first let’s have a look at what a few big names have had to say about it:
Back in the sixteenth-century Jean Bodin, French politician and professor of law, took a somewhat Domocritian style atomist point of view and concluded that sovereignty is indivisible “– it must necessarily reside in one person or group of persons”. You can’t divide soverignty the same way you can’t divide freedom; take one aspect away, or minimise it, and the rest of the deck comes tumbling with it. Bodin, writing in the aftermath of the Protestant Reforms and feverous religious conflict saw this power of freedom of choice as being justifiably maintained in a central core - a select few. A monarchy, he thought, could maintain a sovereign (well sovereign for back then) dynamic within their sphere of influence.3
But has sovereignty always had this form?
In prehistoric times, sovereignty was contained within the collective good of the tribe. Kin-based social networks existed to maintain the order of the group, and that group was what maintained a sovereign base, determined by elder authority, shamanic wisdom, or warrior prowess. The tribe had freedom to choose what it did, as long as the tribe said so. Survival of the tribe was prioritised over centralised rule. People each held sovereignty, with a freedom of choice and action, as long as it did not damage the well-being of the collective. Sovereignty may have irreversibly changed with the arrival of the first states.
James Scott’s heroic reevaluation of the evolution, as well as staunch critique of stateness in “Against the Grain” suggests that the early state did not emerge naturally from agriculture like popular convention tells us, but was rather a response to specific pressures, like social control and taxation. Means of storing and redistributing grain was for all intents of purposes a type of archaic s.tech that enabled elite control and centralisation. Grain-based surplus created the preconditions for extractive state power. In one sense, the state evolved as a system of coercion and labor control - a system for the “domestication of humans”. In another, states have not only always been interested in controlling s.tech, stateness is a sort of s.tech.
With such a domestication the ability to control food production became a core feature of sovereignty - whichever “group” (because all states are, fundamentally, are powerful groups with large spheres of influence) controlled grain supplies could control populations, armies, and economic surplus. The power and influence this brought them determined the control of the flow of sovereignty within a given space, across a given group of people. And once the state gained a taste for sovereignty, it was hard to wrestle back from the hands of the select few.
Early state-apparati around the Fertile Crescent - Sumer, Akkad, Egypt, and Babylon, and in Asia, most notably China, successfully linked sovereignty to divine authority. Kings and pharaohs ruled by claiming divine right, proclaiming themselves as intermediaries between gods and humans. Sovereignty, at least in part due to the rise of stateness, had transferred hands from the collective to the few. One well-known example from 1750 BCE, the Code of Hammurabi, introduced legal codification, reinforcing a ruler’s sovereignty through law rather than pure divine mandate.
As different governance structures came and went, sovereignty continued to morph alongside the varying array of shapes and sizes. Athens experimented with popular sovereignty, putting some (but nowhere near all) semblance power in the palms of the citizenry through dēmokratia, whereas in the echoing halls of the Roman Republic sovereignty found itself divided between the Senate, consuls, and popular assemblies. This, in turn, changed when the great monuments of Imperial Rome soared above the city. Then sovereignty became highly centralised as the ruler embodied the state once again.
Feudalist systems clashed with religious networks; across Europe the Catholic Church sought control over the disparate battlements and protruding castles of the many King’s and Queen’s who staked claims over the residing countryside. Disagreements about ultimate jurisdiction reigned down until, in 1215, England’s King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, limiting his sovereignty and establishing early constitutional principles. This document introduced the idea that the monarch’s power was not absolute and could be constrained by law. And with law came contracts.
Thomas Hobbes said "Sovereignty is the supreme power in a commonwealth, vested in a single ruler or an assembly, to whom individuals cede their natural rights in exchange for order and security."4 In the previous parts of this series, I defined a global non-unified state system (GNUSS for short) as a way of encapsulating the anarchistic global ruleset by which leading experts in offensive realism like John Mierchiemer sees the state of the world as operating within.
People cannot necessarily opt-in to the GNUSS (remember stateness is pervasive) but Hobbes may have seen sovereignty as the function, or the outcome, of an effective, properly ordered, and well-maintained state system. In the process of taming the monstrous Leviathan (the state), the citizens living within its sharp embrace allow some blood to be drawn in exchange for other freedoms, like protection against other large predators, or support from within its coiled embrace during turmultuous times, which the Leviathan, according to Hobbes, is contractually obligated to provide.
However, the question should be: can we trust a state to enact this Hobbesian contract? The aforementioned work of Scott, which suggests early stateness was a social technology, not an organic progression, also suggests states emerged as a mechanism for controlling populations for grain production, labor, and taxation rather than a voluntary social contract. State power was contingent on constant coercion. Early populations often rejected or fled the state when possible. A social contract was not what states were set-up to uphold.
After witnessing the bloody English civil war in the seventeenth century, Hobbes wanted to believe sovereignty could emerge from such a “social contract”, but the form of governance trusted to uphold their side of the bargain may be the thing causing these contracts to routinely breach in the most inhumane of ways. Ensuring peace and security, preventing the state of nature (anarchy) reinforced by the chaos of war, such a contract between citizenry and state could be vested in,5 at least according to Hobbes, an undivided state system. Locally, such governing stability may have a slither of hope. Undivided state Leviathans can function properly on a local level. But on a global scale the Hobbesian bargain quickly turns Faustian instead.
Sovereignty Sinks
I am not saying all states are bad. At least not on a local level. Public infrastructure, schooling, security, yes, some states do work very well. Well, most of the time, anyway. Where I have serious doubts, however, is that not only can this social contract ensuring sovereignty be upheld globally, but a state system able to remain undivided globally as well? That one is harder to stand behind. State-based anarchy, the GNUSS, is dangerous in its ununification. And it is here where sovereignty takes another interesting turn.
Imagine sovereignty as electricity. Electricity can power your neighbourhood. It can also zap you dead. When sovereignty flows through a closed circuit, say fractions of the geopolitical landscape - in this case, pieces of the GNUSS - the flow has two loads to reach. The first, more local output component is what is experienced by the average citizen. How much freedom of choice do they have in relation to where they live? Sovegnty flows through the global system and, if the system functions well, each citizen within their own unique place within the GNUSS will gain the benefits that sovereignty provides. Be it actual access to electricity, or simply just the opportunity to live a happy and healthy life. Sovereignty is generated, and everyone equally.
However, the flow of sovereignty also has to pass through another, larger, more energy-demanding load. This output component is global - it is found all over the system. Frustratingly, whilst these global components are not necessarily more fragile than the smaller local components (these larger components can last a very long time, to the point of stagnation in some cases) but their high-energy demand means that, when they eventually break, they can blow the entire circuit, and when this happens sovereignty ceases reaching the smaller local components, quite often entirely.
Risking reductivity, whilst most state-level sovereignty may best be boiled down to how much freedom of choice a state has in a given territory (either local or global), a failure of local governance is not just a failure of that individual subspace. Under Bodin’s framework of indivisible sovereignty, if just one iota of sovereignty is taken away, even in order to make space for another iota somewhere else, then sovereignty has been violated and, for all intents and purposes, is no longer flowing like it should. If we look at our current geopolitical system through the lens of the GNUSS, and if we stand by the ideal of sovereignty as inherent to every citizen of Earth, then such a failure is a failure of the system as a whole.6 When that system is stateness, it becomes a failure of stateness itself.
In terms of the previously defined SLM Panarchy, we can imagine that if the GNUSS is not functioning efficiently, locally or globally, then any sovereignty that enters into an individual state subspace may be siphoned off by the state-apparatus at the levels of the social or superstructure before it has had a chance to even reach the infrastructure level - the level at which the citizenry primarily interact with and rely upon. In other words, inadvertently or not, stateness can become a sovereignty sink.
More drastically, stateness can actively facilitate the theft of sovereignty. Just one cursory glance at Sara Chayes “Thieves of State” can provide you with all the context you need to understand exactly how this can happen. Kleptocratic states - states that have been hijacked by malicious agents who have unaligned themselves to the needs of their people and have completely aligned the state apparatus instead to the needs of themselves, their family, friends and political party - from Nigeria, to Egypt to the even the shining beacon of stateness, the United States of America, can all be seen as case studies on how states can steal citizen sovereignty. Clearly, in a well functioning state system, this should not be the case.
John Locke, writing in the seventeenth century, famously countered Hobbes in his 1689 Two Treatises of Government, advocating limited state sovereignty, instead proposing that sovereignty ultimately resides in the people, with rulers serving at their consent. Whilst not the first person to think in terms of what would later come to be known as the “Principal-Agent” framework,7 Locke believed the government (agent) should act only with the consent of the people (principal). The people enter into a social contract, granting the government authority, but this is not absolute, like Hobbes mused, instead Locke envisioned the people retaining the right to revoke the contract if the government becomes a “bad agent” (fails or violates their trust). Locke stood by the necessity for the right of the people to resist or overthrow their state. That idea is a powerful one. But one that is deliberately made hard to enact, mainly because no state wants to lose economic or geopolitical power.
Then the American Revolution came along and, between 1776-1783, views on sovereignty firmly shifted from monarchy to the people, embodied most obviously in the U.S. Constitution signed in 1789. Then the French, always in favour of vive la révolution, conducted their own, and the doctrine of popular sovereignty was solidified through the Declaration of the Rights of Man in the same year, ending centuries of absolute monarchy.8 Whilst Hobbes “social contract” was still at the core of the new governance structure, Locke’s citizen-focussed sovereignty was the new life blood pumping through veins of nationhood. Well, it certainly seemed that way. But states, with their inherent sphere of influence and means of control, are very good at producing propaganda. So I guess it can seem anyway they want it to seem.
EU and UN as a Case Study in Unification
Fast-forwarding to modern times, take everyone’s favourite cluster of disparate countries mashed together into one semi-functioning, semi-unified state system: the European Union (EU), a stick in the spokes of traditional notions of sovereignty.
A complete experiment in political systems, the EU is a highly complex, self-organising system with multiple interdependent subsystems, including political governance, economic markets, legal frameworks, and social-cultural institutions. Because, at its core, is an attempt to unify multiple, local and non-local states, into one cohesive system, the EU serves as a nice case study for the GNUSS. The inverse of the GNUSS, a “global unified state system” (GUSS), would also want to align itself to the same general goals of coordination and cohesion.
One particularly interesting development of sovereignty that we see coming out of the EU system is pooled sovereignty, where states voluntarily share decision-making powers across a unified state system. EU member states delegate authority to supranational institutions, like the European Commission, European Parliament, and European Court of Justice, whilst retaining national control in certain areas. A new governance form has morphed state-level sovereignty.
Yet, while the EU is an adaptive system, meaning it continuously reorganises itself in response to crises, both historic and more recent geopolitical events have exposed fragilities in the system - Brexit systemically shook EU cohesion, the Covid-19 pandemic revealed disparities in healthcare preparedness and financial resilience, and the rise of nationalist movements (e.g. Le Pen in France, AfD in Germany, Viktor Orbán in Hungary) threatens EU unification. When scaled, we notice the system behaves much the same.
The United Nations (UN) should be called the United States (just not of America). Although there isn’t complete unification, the experiment in global diplomatic negotiations, humanitarian aid, and peacekeeping missions does indeed do good in the world, but the collection of states also hedge their actions upon the sharp edge of economic and geopolitical forces.
Already the UN risks becoming irrelevant as powerful states bypass it, historically such as in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or more recently, with the ongoing 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the China-US trade war, and the Israel-Palestine atrocities, just to name a grim few. Unification, it seems, is hard to come across in our current state system. I guess that’s why political scientists like John Mierschiemer and other offensive realists say we exist in a system of state based anarchy (the GNUSS). But states don’t just bypass, they manipulate and attempt to exercise maximum control. Remember, Scott points out that control is at the core of stateness. You add in the threat of nukes, or drone strikes, or jail-broken, weaponised AI, we are, at least in my books, in desperate need of a GUSS.
Surpassing Stateness
I am going to go ahead and name the elephant in the room: stateness might be a bit of a problem. It has got us this far, but perhaps a new add-on, or a new system all together, is now needed.
Besides, what supranational institutions could handle let alone be trusted with complete objective oversight?
How successful could a federalised united states of the world be? Who would be the World Fed?
I know a couple of people that would put their hands up. And I don’t trust a single one of them.
Working towards unification, the Dual Sovereignty Model is at least attempted in the case of the EU. National governments maintain sovereignty but must adhere to EU laws and regulations, sometimes overriding domestic policies. Unlike Bodin or Hobbes’ absolute sovereignty, EU member states’ pooled sovereignty cedes some authority. And that’s good, because they are states aka controlling groups with large spheres of influence, so they should not necessarily be 100% sovereign themselves - but their citizens should be.
Like Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that, "Sovereignty lies in the general will of the people, and the government is merely an agent of the collective will." Unlike Hobbes, Rousseau saw sovereignty coming from the people, not a ruler or state. Whilst the general will represents the collective good of society, Rousseau, inspired by the French Revolution, believed governments represent a “delegated authority” and can and should be overthrown if they violate the people's will. Sovereignty, at least under this model, is contained and maintained by the citizenry and not the state.
Controlling Territory
Today, modern nation-states are the “territory”. Often centred around shared culture, religion and history, these dynamics bind the people of a particular territory together. A state is only effective if it has complete monopoly of control in a given space.
Returning once again to the Weberian definition, these territories (states) and the people (citizens) within them, are governed by a group who, amongst a few other things, hold a monopoly of force (legitimate, or simply effective) in that specific habitable subspace. Usually such a force is maintained by a military, but at the very least a “law enforcement” agency is founded and maintained to, well, enforce the state-implemented rules. Some laws protect sovereignty (e.g. locates and returns stolen property), others violate it (e.g. enforcing systemic racial issues). Both state and citizen enforce these rules, either on behalf of the state (e.g. law enforcement officer solving a case) or on behalf of the people (e.g. a community who police themselves). Groups enact rules on themselves, and if they hold a large sphere of influence, they enforce these rules on others as well.
But if we think of states in their most simple form as a powerful group with a large sphere of influence, we notice that other groups also exist within these habitable subspaces. Yes, these spaces are subsumed in stateness, but these other groups exist and, with the introduction of social technology, are connecting at unprecedented rates. In doing so, these groups are themselves gaining large spheres of influence. These networked-groups, however they choose to communicate, be it in Reddit forums, through Telegram chats, or by good old fashioned email, are becoming tribes of the network era. And these network-tribes are once again reinventing what it means to be sovereign.
Stateness is supposed to protect, moreso enact, sovereignty.
It is failing.
Could social technology act as a maximiser for sovereignty instead?
Who Works for Who?
By its very nature s.tech connects people to people and in doing so opens up freedom of choice. That is not enough to maximise sovereignty alone, but it is a good place to start.
At the moment, s.tech can be susceptible to manipulation by malign actors who control digital algorithms and deploy psychologically-enhanced targeted marketing to provide veneer of sovereignty but really leave you little freedom of choice if you are not careful. Whether it be TikTok (ByteDance) being required to share data with the CCP and censor content critical of the government, or the FBI pressuring Twitter and Facebook to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, from Saudi spies harvesting data from X/Twitter, to the Digital Services Act (2022) which gives the EU power to control online speech and algorithmic recommendations, states want to control and manipulate s.tech, because they want to control the narrative and ultimately their citizens. Thus, the relationship between a state and its citizenry is paramount, pervasive and problematic.
Returning to the “principal-agent” relationship touched upon with the work of Locke earlier, “principals” - the citizenry, accept “agents” - the state, to work on their behalf and to enter into a cycle of mutual reinforcement and support. Principals give part of their earnings (and in some cases freedom) to their agents and, in return, the agents provide the services required as best as possible. Well, in theory that is how it is supposed to go.
The process is most prone to breaking down when both sides of this relationship forget that this relationship is just that - a relationship, something mutually beneficial, unified, aligned and thus upheld accordingly. Principals often forget that they have the responsibility to tell their agent that they think they are not acting in their best interest, or they are getting something drastically wrong.
Perhaps the founders of the United States said it best, maintaining that the most important thing a state can do is to educate its citizens on the mechanism of a constitutional, democratic government. In other words, it is the state's responsibility to make sure its citizens know how the state should work. The state, if it is functioning well, should be not only encouraging but facilitating its citizens to check its power. If power begins to do what power often does, and the absolute power that comes with stateness begins corrupting absolutely, then it is we the citizens who need to do something about it. But that’s easier said than done.
Stateness amplifies power and consequently, because of the hierarchical structure of the average state system, power within a subspace is held asymmetrically. In a healthy state system, this is not a pressing issue. The asymmetry of power does not result in net-negative outcomes. Sovereignty still flows. It does not matter if the state holds all the power compared to its citizens if, and only if, the principal-agent relationship is properly aligned. But, in those instances where the state system is unhealthy, its apparati corrupted, becoming a sovereignty sink, it is then the citizens duty to check the state, because the state is not going to do it itself.
Could s.tech be one tool for citizens to begin to checking the state? Return for Part 6 to find out!
It is actually pretty good.
Namely: a collection of people with a legitimate (and effective) monopoly of force/violence in a given territory.
And, in all fairness, whilst I have never been much of a Royalist, I can entertain the line of argument that says an effective monarch may be more inclined to align their values and success with their citizenry when compared to a state, because with an established monarchy there is more of a chance that the descendents of the royal family would be inhabiting the same space as the descendents of the people who live in the same area. Not married to the idea, but is interesting food for thought.
Leviathan, 1651
Think about those “agreement fields” running through the “socialstructure” layer of the “SLM Panarchy” in the previous articles.
War, which may be the antithesis of sovereignty, is a prime example of how stateness actively counteracts citizen soverignty across the world.
Aristotle, 384–322 BCE, discussed representative governance in his Politics, where magistrates acted on behalf of the people, Thomas Aquinas, 1225–1274, built on these Aristotelian ideas by arguing that rulers should act for the common good, and Charles Montesquieu, in his 1748 The Spirit of the Laws, developed the idea of checks and balances to limit and make accountable government power
Although, in theory, monarchy switched largely to more generalised stateness - not necessarily a “win” for the people.