Rights And Citizenship
Posted on February 11th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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The bottom line is that the conservative position is pro-citizenship and the libertarian position, as I understand it, is anti-citizenship. ~James Poulos
Raimondo would quibble with defining that as “the libertarian position,” but otherwise I think James is right. Fundamentally, the disagreement between James and Will Wilkinson (and between myself and Wilkinson in the past) centers on a few basic things: we think citizenship entails certain rights and privileges non-citizens do not receive, and we think national sovereignty is a legitimate element of political organisation and the enforcement of it is a proper function of national governments. Further, we think that such a government can both legally and morally deny to non-citizens the rights and privileges that citizens possess, because non-citizens have no necessary or inborn claim on the goods of another polity, just as American citizens have no such just claim on other polities. While I can’t speak for James, I would say that this is because people have rights only as citizens of a particular polity, and that the actual polity to which Americans belong at present is a nation-state (albeit one that maintains certain forms and fictions of being a confederation of several states), while “human rights to movement and free association” as such do not exist.
Now Wilkinson is confused by people who would prefer to privilege smaller, more local communities, but who also insist on affirming national sovereignty. Of course, were we to call for establishing a ”tightly-knit gemeinschaft” we would be confronted by Wilkinson, champion of the leveling and expansive nation-state that transcends the petty bonds of region and town, because as sure he today deems the nation-state the vehicle of arbitrary limitations on these “rights” he would have made the same argument on behalf of the centralising nation-state 150 years ago, and the logic of his position is one that favours ever-larger political entities governed by ever-more remote, centralised political authorities, lest we have any untoward rubes somewhere denying someone “access” to the goods to which they are allegedly morally entitled. The implied profusion of rights and the attacks on institutions as barriers or threats to those rights must necessarily lead to the empowerment of a superior authority that will check and police the lower authorities in order to guarantee these “rights,” and so each additional “human right” is another invitation for a central or continental or, eventually, global government to step in and “protect” individuals from one another and from their more local authorities.
As Dr. Fleming observed quite correctly in The Morality of Everyday Life, the more rights we assert the more power we must give to an authority to adjudicate disputes over those rights. Thus, as ever, the pursuit of liberty through the weakening of intermediary institutions subjects the individual to the remote, centralised power of a distant government over which he will have negligible influence, and it is, of course, always wrapped in gauzy sentimentality and liberal use of epithets such as “chauvinist.” For my part, I would sooner defend national sovereignty than support the weakening and undermining of it in the name of internationalism or moral do-gooding, because the nation-state serves as the smallest-scale form of political organisation capable of resisting worse and more pernicious transformations of our country. Nation-states that lose or abandon their sovereignty for the sake of some transnational politics or moral goods eventually lose control over their own futures, since they yield meaningful control over most major policy decisions to higher levels of authority and will never be able to recall it once given.
Filed under: immigration, politics
Hello Daniel, I am a long-time reader, first (maybe second) time commenter.
you assert,
but can you give an example of this being the case? Apart from the EU, which was explicitly designed to be such (and to which nation states must actively apply rather than be compelled), i dont see any examples in history of a nation truly losing “meaningful control” over “major” policy decisions merely by virtue of assent to various treaties.
Since the US Constitution treats treaties with same force of law as itself, obviously treaties should not be entered into lightly, but I dont think Ive yet seen a case that Kyoto or the Sea treaties or any others would really devolve policy control to gnomes n Zurich or some Illuminatus cabal elsewhere.
incidentally, AmConMag is deeply foolish not to feature your blog as central content on ther main page, as Washington Monthly has done with Kevin Drum. But I digress,
So, if it was practically feasible for a state to secede, you would support that as long as it was “the smallest-scale form of political organisation capable of resisting worse and more pernicious transformations of our country”? Do you believe the United States was a mistake that you are now forced to live with?
No doubt you realize (in our “country” we use ‘z’s) “chauvinism” means exactly what I was using it to mean.
The EU would be the prime example that comes to mind, and I see the same assumptions behind what are effectively “open borders” arguments at work. In my view the EU represents the logical conclusion of the kinds of arguments advocates of the free movement of workers are making, and arguments for a free economic zone are ultimately arguments for some kind of political union that will regulate the common market of member states.
I think that a federal system from which a member state cannot voluntarily secede is not really a federal system, and that the consolidation of power in a central government is injurious to the division of powers that the federal Constitution was originally supposed to ensure. The original federal system was not a mistake, even if the earlier Confederation was not as bad as it is made out to be, and had it not been transformed into a consolidated government it would be a very good system. And, yes, I would support a state’s secession if it could provide for its own defense and could function as a viable independent state.
Chauvinism has a much older, more precise meaning, which refers to an undue attachment to the cause of a particular person. Chauvin himself was specifically a fanatical Bonapartist. Since then it has been attached to any strong nationalism, but that is not what it originally meant. Were it not such an obviously loaded and pejorative term, I wouldn’t have objected to it at all, but it seems to me that people use the word chauvinist when they wish to discredit a position as inherently unreasonable.
The Eu is not a good example,however, because it doesnt represent an example of a slippery slope of gradual loss of sovereignity but rather an outright super-federalist state by design.
The basic point needs to be made that there are certain goods that cannot be extended to infinite numbers of people. Aristotle talked about the goods of friendship in this context. I cannot be friends with everybody and the goods of friendship would lose their meaning if anyone tried to extend them to all people. The goods of self-government are similar. Learning one’s rights and duties as a citizen takes time, education and effort. The Framers of the Constitution wondered if a country the size of the United States could really produce the goods of self-government, or if it might not be too big. Obviously, modern technology has facilitated the educational processes and voting processes that define a modern nation state, but that doesn’t mean we can do away with borders and citizenship or that those who would maintain borders and citizenship are selfish bigots.
I find this libertarian analysis of power and oppression perplexing.
Its not that it is wrong or off base, so much as that it only address one half of the liberal question.
Government is not the only agent of oppression, oppression comes from all sorts of groups nad people be they religious, ethnic, tribal, regional, or racial.
For minorities that experience oppression at the hand of their neighbors, the government is seen as the only viable form of protection.
How do you address non-governmental oppression?