[995] Of liberals and the problem of citizenship

As a person hostile to the excessive state power, I’m currently grappling with the idea of submitting to the state whereas membership is forced upon me in the first place. I could accept deterministic reasoning in some sense, that we as human beings can’t choose on certain matters. For instance, we can’t choose our parents, or worse, our siblings, no matter how hard we want it. As a libertarian, most likely as other liberals, the state is established by the people to protect the rights of the people. It is merely an instrument of the people. That idea is alright if a person or a group is establishing a new state. Problem arises when a person is born into the state and citizenship is forced upon him. So, how do I as a liberal solve this problem?

Somebody might have written on this earlier. I know for a fact the individuals like Rousseau have tried to justify the existence of the state. I however would like to make an attempt at rationalism.

At the moment, I see that this problem is caused by mismatch of timelines; the life length of an individual — the citizen — and a state don’t match more often than not. Specifically, as mentioned earlier, the state is established first while a person is born into it. The person will be the citizen of the pre-existing state until his citizenship is taken away from him or a switch in citizenship occurs. If that is the case, if the problem is really caused by timelines mismatched, the most apparent solution to me — and perhaps dangerously naive — would be a revolution each time a person deterministically become a citizen of the state. Such solution is costly and I dare not visit it in the real world. Doing a revolution every second of everyday of the year is beyond rationality and in fact, madness.

A liberal democratic system provides an alternative to constant revolutionary madness. It’s a democracy that keeps tyranny of the majority in check by guaranteeing certain inalienable rights to citizens of the state practicing liberal democracy, enough rights to discourage real revolution as such those that occurred in 18th century France or 20th century China. In a away, a free election is a small peaceful revolution. Through this, free election partially solves the problem of timelines mismatch while reducing the need for violent strength that is ever so necessary in the face of tyranny. It’s only when the democratic system is corrupted, when liberty of the citizens are no longer guaranteed, is a revolution, a forceful change of the state, is inevitable. As Victor Hugo once said, when dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.

A simpler solution would be anarchism. An anarchy is a stateless situation of free people. Anarchy is the true condition of being free. Unfortunately, it’s not a stable state as more often than not, a state of anarchy, unlike of a state as an institution, lacks a social contract to govern, at the least, minimally, interactions between individuals. The social contract in a libertarian sense is a rule of law that guarantees negative rights of a person. Without this social contract, a person’s total freedom, limited only by his physique, environment and mind, would be inequitably limited and eroded by stronger others. The social contract — every person is the absolute owner of his own life and should be free to do whatever he wishes with his person or property, as long as he respects the liberty of others — ensures an equitable rights, where such rights won’t be eroded by other individuals, based on implicit agreement. The condition that is stable vis-a-vis anarchy. As so often seen in any libertarian material, that social contract must be at the most minimal level and acts only to prevent the negative rights of a person from being infringed by others.

Though I don’t claim the three solutions as exhaustive, that there could be other options, between the three, I prefer the second option for reasons stated above, I hope, clearly.

With the second option from my point of view however, it becomes a burden for liberals to participate in the political process of the state, either directly or indirectly. Non-participation is not an option for if liberals fail to participate, their rights would be determine by other people that wouldn’t necessarily hold liberty dearly and seek to throw liberty into a dungeon cell far below the earth, beyond the grasp of sunlight.

If the assumption of the cause of state establishment is true, then a person’s participation in a process would be important to partially undo the problem of mismatched timelines. For if every free election is a revolution, active participation in free election is a revolution to rectify the mismatched timelines problem without bloodshed.

This however, of course doesn’t work at all for those with stances very different from the mean. For them, proportional representative democracy such as practiced by the German state currently is crucial to further rectify the problem of citizenship.