If you saw a version of this article posted, for some reason the date it posted was “yesterday”–I think because I started the draft on my phone. I have deleted the prior version and reposted this version so it would correct the timestamp to be “today”. Thank you, WordPress.
What are things that can go wrong with a nation state?
- There’s corruptions of power
- Military Power, powerful generals who want to make a name for themselves and parlay their power into a title
- Ecclesiastical Power, where Church hierarchs enrich themselves and seek more expansive latitude within the state
- Political power, where Nobles and Aristocrats are trying to control more and more of the apparatus of state.
- Economic Power via Corporations, where profit-making entities seek more expansive latitude and occasionally exceptions within the state.
- International power, where foreign entities seek to influence the affairs of Scootland in their favor, perhaps for favorable trade deals or exceptions to a fairly restrictive trade policy.
- Populist power, where agitators drum up popular support among the people in order to change some way of doing things
- There’s corruptions of Justice
- Authorities who are willing to allow injustice for a price or otherwise some personal gain
- Law enforcers who fail to enforce the law for a price or otherwise some personal gain
- Corporations or landlords who engage in unjust or questionably legal practices
- There’s corruptions of authority
- An unjust use of force to enforce a just law
- An unjust use of force to suppress a popular demonstration
- An unjust law which harms the people
- An unjust tax which harms the people
- An unjust international policy which harms the people (or the people of another state).
The second two broad categories fall under matters of law and the specific system of justice. There will always be corrupt people but you hope the culture is such that it roots them out and isolates them. The real concern is the first category, corruptions of power, because these can be very destabilizing. In Ancient Rome, the Senate usurped the power of the King and made themselves primary, ushering in the Republic. Any time you have a body that views itself as being in competition with or resentful of a higher authority, they will gradually seek to reduce that authority and increase their own. So far I have not addressed a legislature for this reason–the fear is that a legislature represents a bastion of classical liberalism. There needs to be a mechanism for crafting and judging laws without relying on a populist conclave.
The absence of classical liberalism does not mean that power struggles will not happen, they certainly will. So here I plan to discuss what the controls or solutions are to these particular problems.
Controls for Military Power
A large standing army gives Generals a significant amount of power. Financial power, as a category on the Sovereign budget, and personnel power in the standing army. There is always a risk of a military coup to overthrow the sovereign. These also happened with worrying regularity in the Roman era.
The first control is that the professional military ought to be small. It is the smallest possible size to be maximally effective at first-line national defense. This means that a military coup, while possible, would be more challenging because the first-line military is the smallest part of the national military apparatus.
The second control is that the Generals serve at the discretion of the King. The King can reassign a general, dismiss a general, or appoint a general arbitrarily, because the King is the chief officer of the Military. A General who is beloved by his troops and is making noise about a coup or some other thing can be dismissed from service or reassigned to another regiment to whom he would be a foreigner. This might make the troops unhappy for a time but as a professional army they would be bound otherwise to serve for a certain term, and their only recourse would be to abandon their service or to revolt against their new general, both of these things being blatantly bad things if not crimes and easy to identify and suppress.
Because during war-time the army would swell in size and gradually increase in skill, the Sovereign has an incentive to keep wars as brief as possible, to avoid giving Generals too much war-time power that mitigates the controls in place in peace-time. This is a two-way control, where the Sovereign controls for the military and the military controls for the sovereign.
The result here, I think, would be a stable relationship between the Sovereign and the military.
Controls for Ecclesiastical Power
The Church is given a much more central and much more expansive role in this model, and the risk naturally being that certain Church hierarchs would abuse this power and seek more of it. This is part of the calculus for not including a Bishopric in the political schema–the Ecclesial hierarchy is parallel to and separate from the political hierarchy. The Church exists within the State, the state is subject to the authority of the Church, the two owe duties of mutual obedience and cooperation.
There are two avenues for Ecclesiastical Power that remain, since they would be somewhat isolated from political power. These avenues are economic power, as they would still receive a Tithe; and legal latitude. The Church could seek to exempt herself from taxes for example, or corrupt hierarchs could bribe politicians to get their way. The primary control there would be transparency–the Archdiocese of Scootland could report on it’s activities to the Sovereign, who could hold them accountable for high incomes but low results. The Church should also not be exempt from Land or Sales taxes, as it conducts business in the name of the Sovereign it should still “give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”.
Corruption and bribery fall, again, under a different species of problem, relating to the specific legal relationships between various entities. I will say only that the Titled Nobles to whom are delegated authority over the Duchies, Counties, and Baronies of Scootland serve at the discretion of the Sovereign, and if the Sovereign becomes aware of unjust behavior by the Nobility he can dismiss them and replace them. He cannot interfere with the Ecclesial hierarchy but that wouldn’t stop him from reporting bad affairs to Rome and encouraging the Church hierarchy to take disciplinary measures on any bad fruit on the Ecclesial vine.
I think this would result in a stable–but not without turbulence–relationship between the Sovereign and the Church.
Controls for Popular Power
Populism is a hard problem to root out. Essentially, an unhappy people without some place to vent their frustrations will rise up in revolt periodically. That’s part of the genius of democracy: an unhappy people go to the ballot box and release their revolutionary frustration, rather than doing so with a glass bottle filled with gasoline.
Especially since the cat of classical liberalism is out of the bag, in Scootland it would be difficult to suppress that knowledge. The first step to avoiding popular revolts is to get and keep the love of the people. This requires a sovereign trained in virtue and intimately connected to the lives of his subjects.
Second, there does need to be a formal mechanism for the people to express their concerns directly to the King. This would be like a consultative council separate from a legislature, but perhaps they provide policy recommendations to the King to address pressing issues.
It feels kind of like a “kids-table” council, especially because there is no binding resolution they can pass, just make recommendations to the King. Perhaps if they can get a noble–a Baron, Count, or Duke to endorse it, the Sovereign would take it seriously, but even with such an endorsement there is no obligation that the King should act on their recommendations. A great thing about such a council is that it would serve as a place for the public to release their political frustrations, and it creates another axis for political power that would need to be managed. Perhaps the ultimate control would be that the King himself convenes the people’s council and so all the work needs to be put in before the King is sitting in front of them to figure out what they are going to say. That way the King can dismiss the council also if they are getting to agitated and wait a while for the heat to die down–or manage some complaint they are raising consistently.
The rules of the “kids-table” council would effectively be that they raise policy recommendations to address specific problems and they take heads-or-tails simple majority votes on whether to present it to the King. If they can’t get a simple majority to agree that a certain thing is a problem or a certain thing is a solution to a problem, then there’s no need to waste the King’s time.
I think this would result in a bit of a political tug-of-war but at least it gives the people a venue to air their grievances, and it gives the King a ritual obligation to convene them and listen. It forces a relationship to exist between them–it is harder to be violently angry at an absent abstraction. This would result in an increase in stability.
Controls for Economic Power
At the time I started drafting this article, my number one concern was Corporations. I think the controls here are very simple: No multinational firms are allowed, Corporations must be independently chartered in Scootland and be majority owned by Scootland citizens or entities, and their cash must be held in Scootland banks. These create strong anchors to Scootland and hinder international gamesmanship. The power of the purse is very real, and there would be a real concern about corporate bribery to receive exemptions from certain rules, but the lynchpin here is that Charters would be certified at the discretion of the Sovereign and if they are misbehaving there would be a danger of the sovereign revoking their charter and terminating their (legal) operation.
But David the Barbarian raised a point that there’s something of an incentive for a guild system or cooperative. Guilds would certify a trade, it would provide a mechanism for ensuring quality and consistency, provide opportunities for apprenticeships. There could even be competing guilds for the same trade–no reason to limit to one per trade, as this consolidates power and introduces some instability–so competition becomes the mechanism for the guilds to differentiate themselves. The People’s Blacksmiths Guild wants to be seen as the highest quality, but the Blacksmiths Guild of Scootland introduces some new training method that increases their production time, lets say.
Cooperatives would also serve as cost saving measures. A certain coop, lets say they are geographically restricted to be local, so a coop cannot transcend a counties borders, lets say. The coop purchases supplies (and pays sales taxes) and then distributes those supplies to the members of the coop, and the members of the coop operate as usual and contribute a portion of their revenue to the coop for continued purchase of supplies. The geographical limitation of coops helps prevent a massive national coop from forming–perhaps they become associated with Guilds but there would not necessarily be a requirement that coops are guild affiliated. It would probably naturally shake out that way.
The Guild and Coop system would be enough to positively affect a lot of industries, leaving Corporations to fill the gaps that cannot be filled by guilds or coops. By limiting their scope, Corporations would be somewhat defanged and have reduced power and influence. The Guilds would be controlled by competition, the Coops would be controlled by geography. All of these factors would serve to mitigate the power of consolidated economic means and the corruption that frequently accompanies this. This would create a stable relationship between Economic organizations and the Sovereign.
Controls for International Power
Minimizing foreign influence can be difficult at times, because there are many clever ways for a foreign entity to infiltrate a nation and influence affairs in their favor. One way is economic, which has been mitigated above through discussions of Corporations (no multinationals) and trade (no depletive exportation). The methods of influence that remain are through information and through diplomacy.
Diplomacy is simple, because the Sovereign is the chief diplomat of the land and all ambassadors serve as delegates of the Sovereign. Non-diplomatic relations, between say a Duke and a foreign nation, would be strictly illegal to begin with, but even if a wayward Duke accepted bribes there’s little the Duke could do to force the matter, as the Sovereign is the chief decision maker. This, and the Nobles serve at the discretion of the Sovereign so they could be dismissed if they violate their oath of loyalty to the King.
Information is more challenging, but a determined propaganda campaign by a foreign power only serves to influence the people, and the people have no direct authority other than to represent their opinions via the “kids-table” council. All of these controls serve to force foreign powers to direct their primary focus to the Sovereign and to ensure the Sovereign is hearing and considering their requests.
A corrupt sovereign could certainly make bad decisions that favor the foreign power, but exemptions from rules would be immediately obvious and receive the immediate displeasure of the people. There’s a negative feedback loop for every bad decision the Sovereign could make, and the Sovereign has all the power to address bad decisions by subjects of nobles.
This would result in a stable relationship between foreign powers and the King.
This has been an exhaustive look at problems with this model for society, as illustrated through the fictional state of Scootland. I am ever at risk of being blind to my own faults, so I welcome constructive criticisms of this model. The more we flesh it out the more coherent it feels, but the law of unintended consequences tells us that there’s ways this kind of society would run completely off the rails.
Let me know what you think!
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 