Earned Legitimacy
Discussion
Jonathan Hollis:
"There are three paths to sovereignty: demand it through force, negotiate for it diplomatically, or earn it by creating legitimacy. Attempting to use force to obtain territorial sovereignty is morally questionable and practically impossible without significant military resources, which are usually constrained to existing states. Negotiating for forms of sovereignty diplomatically is increasingly possible (Buterin’s four concepts of network sovereignty outline some of the most compelling cases) but is not accessible to most people. In this essay, I have argued for a third path, functional sovereignty, which eschews top-down violence and diplomacy in favor of bottom-up collective action that can be practiced by anyone anywhere.
The practice of collective action creates value and reinforces norms, which earns the scarcest resource: legitimacy.[31] This is not the traditional sovereign legitimacy of brute force, but an earned legitimacy of continuity, fairness, process, performance, participation, attention, function, and value creation. It is not the sovereignty of a Leviathan, but a reclaiming of popular sovereignty by the people.
While the federal government of the United States has ossified into a Leviathan, the democratic ideals of America are fundamentally rooted in the legitimacy of popular sovereignty.[32] In democratic republics of the American tradition, ultimate sovereignty is held by the people: “the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors & sovereigns.”[33] Because of these roots, and because the ideals of American democracy have been exported to many other modern nation states, a reclaiming of earned legitimacy via collective action has the potential to grow from the bottom up into a powerful force of sovereignty.
There’s a nagging question that some people believe to be a sort of trump card against this line of reasoning: “What happens when the government shows up with guns?” I have largely ignored this question because I believe it to be a fanciful fantasy of those overly steeped in Hobbesian ideology. New network sovereignties are not fundamentally antithetical to nation states—they operate in parallel to existing systems and don’t necessarily lead to armed conflict. Using the analogy of blockchains, new network sovereignties can become Layer 2s that still rely on Layer 1 nation states for basic international diplomatic and military services.[34] Historically, various forms of suzerainty[35] have created these kinds of relationships.
At first, new network sovereignties will have so few people in a given jurisdiction as to be illegible to the state—a type of security through obscurity. This is especially true if they operate using privacy-preserving tools for communication and coordination. At the local level, they will be viewed positively to the extent that they create public goods for participants and adjacent community members. Most of the collective autonomy people want does not significantly conflict with the desires of the state in the first place, and this type of autonomy won’t attract significant opposition as long as it continues to provide local value.
New network sovereignties will grow most effectively in jurisdictions where principles of autonomy and functional sovereignty are upheld by culture and law. For instance, countries[36] sub-national states[37] and special economic zones[38] with a high freedom index are most likely to be the substrate for the strongest hubs of new network sovereignties. This naturally leads to the biggest, most legible hubs of new network sovereignties forming in places where they have the least potential conflict with their jurisdictions.
As these hubs grow and become more legible, they become a political force of earned legitimacy in their home jurisdictions. They can also provide examples of effective functional sovereignty and a credible exit option for people in less free jurisdictions. Effective alternative examples and a credible threat of exit (physically and virtually) create the space for voice—and, as a result, greater potential for loyalty—in jurisdictions that are more hostile to the practice of functional sovereignty.[39]
Sovereignty is a spectrum, and people can form together and push their position on the spectrum. Collective action that creates valuable public goods will find a path towards greater earned legitimacy and recognition along the spectrum of sovereignty in relation to existing power structures. In existing liberal democracies, this may manifest within the existing power structures: the formation of new municipalities, local elections, and courts siding with the constitutional legitimacy of functional sovereignty. In cases where autocratic power remains strong, new network sovereignties can grow outside of existing power structures through privacy preserving network tools, the practice of de facto parallel governance, acts of collective action and nonviolence, and exit to other jurisdictions. In cases where existing state capacity is declining, functional sovereignty can simply grow to fill the vacuum.
The tools for building local capacity and global coordination are in our hands. If we can use them to grow valuable relevance to people’s day-to-day lives, parallel systems of self-governance can earn legitimacy. This earned legitimacy builds the foundation for the practice of functional sovereignty. Through this practice, we can grow more resilient bottom-up systems for human flourishing."