A Society of Rejects: Individualism, Liberalism and the Nature of Democracy in the Rejected Realms

[Manson]

A Society of Rejects:
Individualism, Liberalism and the Nature of Democracy in the Rejected Realms


Introduction

As I write this paper, a paper I had intended to write for months, Lazarus stands now as a shining example of the importance of civil rights, democracy and constitutionalism; rising above its crisis and recovering from an awful imperial occupation (from the New Pacific Order), Lazarus’ path towards liberation was always a battle fought between those who wanted to see Lazarus as an open liberal democracy and those who would have rather it been a client-state of the New Pacific Order. In fact, the entire conflict originated when Stujenske voided the Bill of Rights and the Constitution – proving the power and the legitimacy that these legal and political instruments of democracy can hold – they take on an immaterial value of their own as a ‘line in the sand’; often the international community and natives will tolerate quite a lot of upheaval – the People’s Republic of Lazarus and the Osiris Fraternal Brotherhood were both, after all, created with upheavals, but Stujenske found out the ‘hard way’ that without constitutionalisation and a promise for political independence and open, transparent governing institutions, a transition will face extreme opposition.

This paper discusses that ‘red line’ that Stujenske crossed; a year ago, Lazarus was embroiled in another unfortunate conflict with Osiris – the Osiran-Lazarene War – which seems like a distant, forgotten memory from so long ago now.  As with every crisis, every other featured articles get tacked on near the bottom with the Rejected Times – in it, I had penned an article called ‘The Divided Defenderdom’ (TRT XXVIII) which lay quiet beneath the drama and fury surrounding the Osiran-Lazarene War. I’d like to take some time to revisit that article, however. In that article, I argued that defenderism is often erroneously identified as the main ‘political ideology’ of defenders – instead, I found that liberalism was in all actuality, the dominant ideology of defenders and the principles and practices of defenderism simply just followed naturally from liberalism. In doing so, I argued that liberalism was the superior alternative to independentism, because independentism (which is effectively ‘realism’) only provides a normative framework for foreign policy, not strictly domestic policy – whereas liberalism provides a normative framework more holistically which covers domestic, martial and foreign policy – and throughout this essay, I hope to demonstrate more clearly how that is the case!

I believe that the Rejected Realms is the ideal example of what I meant in that article: it is an unequivocally liberal state – a true embodiment in practice of liberalism in terms of its public policy and its constitution, including its conduct abroad. Do note that throughout this paper I will use the term, ‘liberalism’ as a broad political ideology which is based on a number of tenets; most notably, the concept of individualism, the idea that society is divisibly made of individuals with their own claims to rights and freedoms from one another, egalitarianism, the notion that individuals are equals of one another and deserve equal treatment, universalism, the idea that rules and standards should apply to everyone ‘universally’ (e.g., we all have the freedom of speech), and a fancy term that Professor John Gray uses called ‘meliorism’, which suggests that society can improve; that is to say, that the quality of life can progress if society wills it and acts to develop these processes (as opposed to sheer cynicism about the value of collective action). From these four principles, it stands to reason that liberalism is normally deontological, in that it bases matters of right or wrong on principles of fundamental equality and individual autonomy, plus liberalism is also supportive of popular sovereignty and praises the full breadth of rights and freedoms that can be accorded to the individual, especially with respect to a free market and a respect for each other’s ‘conception of the good’ (a political philosopher’s term for ‘way of life’).

While liberalism itself isn’t new by any means – it’s originally from the ideas of the Enlightenment, especially – there have been some challenges to liberalism over the years in real life. Because liberalism emphasises the distinction between private and public spheres of life to protect the freedom of individuals to pursue their own lives and personal activity, liberalism’s distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ is integral to the liberal system of government, society and life – it’s how the world is effectively divvied up into spheres of life, public or private, to reproduce a stable society. This distinction, however, has been controversial. First, some early critics argued that liberalism had failed to acknowledge the importance of maintaining economic and material equality in its pursuit of open economic freedoms – this created a division between Classical Liberalism, which supported extreme economic freedom, and Social Liberalism, which advocated for the creation of a welfare state and the regulation of industry to protect the general wellbeing of society. During the seventies, feminists went further and argued that the distinction between ‘the private’ and ‘the public’ was wholly false (i.e., ‘the personal is political) in the sense that domestic settings and home lives had often been protected from government and police intervention under the guise of personal privacy and freedom, despite the fact that ‘the home’ had long been a site for the domestic oppression of women.

I would argue that the distinction between Classical Liberalism and Social Liberalism is only marginally relevant in NationStates and rarely complicates matters because NationStates does not possess goods or scarcity, at least not internally (between regions, recruitment may be seen as an interregional market, perhaps), so the distinction between Classical and Social Liberalism rarely manifests itself, because in a post-materialist society, the overall concerns of liberalism as a whole, liberty and equality, are equally realised without contradictions arising with economy or commercial activity or profit, for that matter. Meanwhile, the inherent social contradiction between liberty and equality was long resolved by Victorian philosophers who argued liberty required personal limitations to flourish. I also don’t think that the feminist challenge to liberalism plays a prominent role in NationStates because there is no ‘home life’ in NationStates and even when an institution of marriage is present, it’s fairly transparent and open compared to real life, because partners do not share a living space, nor is there an equivalent concept of domesticity or home life and home work. However, I think it’s possible that on some issues, marginally, the issues with ‘the private’ that feminists have identified can be problematic for liberalism, even in NationStates, especially with cases of sexual abuse and harassment, where NationStates courts and regional moderation can fail to adequately respond to problems as they arise.

Moving forward, therefore, through this essay, it is important to bear in mind that I will compare the Rejected Realms to a broad constellation of liberal thought, which, in my view, cannot be narrowly considered ‘classical’ or ‘social’ or ‘radical’, because of the lack of economic and domestic activity in NationStates.

‘A Society of Rejects’

How and in what way might we consider the Rejected Realms, a liberal state? To me at least, this isn’t an uncontroversial question to ask – the Rejected Realms was not necessarily made by political progressives and it will continue to serve as a region for all rejects, not just simply those who identify themselves as liberals – in fact I can think of at least a handful of key players who helped develop the Rejected Realms in its early days after the departure of Kandarin who are not liberals. Nonetheless, I would argue that the Rejected Realms follows a consistent pattern of liberalism in every facet of its institutional structure and its public policy.

Let’s begin an analysis into the Rejected Realms with the mythos of ‘the reject’ first….

In the eyes of many, the reject is strong-willed, able and eminently independent. The title of this piece, a ‘A Society of Rejects’ refers to what one might think of the Rejected Realms – a society made of social and political gadflies – swatted, ejected and left here to sink into obscurity; rejects can progress in the Rejected Realms along our fairly horizontal social ladder as people with minds of their own, independent, that is, of collective opinion. That’s, in my mind, very different than the local mythos that some other Game-Created Regions are promoting, where their collectivism praises ‘the sycophant’ or ‘the social butterfly’ or ‘the pastoral’ – those who build and reproduce social cohesion – whereas the Rejected Realms often celebrates and welcomes the very same users whose basic existence frustrates attempts abroad to build socially harmonious communities. While it may be a severe over-exaggeration to regard the entire caucus of regular members in the Rejected Realms as a pack of grumbling, miserable curmudgeons, the mythology of the reject appears to be deeply and profoundly rooted in a strong individualist structure present in the Rejected Realms; this is to say that when we speak of the ‘reject’ we imply that they are individuals. While each member is connected to one another with a mutual stake in the governance of the region, they maintain a robust sense of intellectual freedom and hold no obligation with one another to agree with what they believe on the hopes of preserving a semblance of communal harmony and order – rejects don’t tie their identification of others as rejects based on their silence on the opinions of the majority, but instead, the moniker of the reject is a mass expression of the importance of the role that political minorities play in the Rejected Realms, almost as far as to suggest even that each individual user is their own minority.

Speaking on a more institutional basis, it should be said that over the past few months since March and onward, my government has been working to craft a Bill of Rights, the latest proposal, ‘Charter of Civil Rights and Responsibilities’, for which voting is currently underway. This Charter of Civil Rights and Responsibilities protects the rights and freedoms of citizens; it’s become clear, especially with the crisis in Lazarus, after all, that rights legislation acts as a legal barrier against tyrannical government – the dissolution of the Lazarene Bill of Rights was a move that immediately challenged the legitimacy of Stujenske and his administration. The Charter outlines the rights and freedoms which the Rejected Realms recognises as inalienable – rights to free expression, open participation and equality. The latter, egalitarianism, is a different concept to articulate in a post-materialist society; equality in this sense means strictly legal equality such that the law applies to all equally without the use of ‘arbitrary or discriminative criteria’. Bearing this in mind, egalitarianism and pluralism seem to follow one another in NationStates, because the Rejected Realms’ longstanding practice of encouraging members of all ideological positions to join the Rejected Realms reflects the equal nature of all members, the valued differences of opinions and the universalism of legal equality.

With the Charter of Civil Rights and Responsibilities, there will be no ‘supreme authority’ in terms of interpreting what is and is not a violation of the Charter; instead, the Assembly will comb through different opinions on controversial matters to converge on a final opinion as to whether any future initiative or executive action contradicts the rights and freedoms of members enshrined in law. I had originally intended for the Charter to exist like the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms – a throwback to another liberal, Pierre Elliot Trudeau whose constitutional amendments implemented a document similar to Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights (a statutory law) into the Canadian constitution, thereby ensuring that the Supreme Court could strike any general law as contradictory with the constitution if it violated the Bill of Rights. Trudeau, operating from the same background of liberal rights and individualism as I have described here, sought to transform the makeup of Canadian society from classes and religious denominations, into individuals with a mosaic of ethnicities and sexualities.

It became increasingly apparent however that a constitutional amendment would not be appropriate in the Rejected Realms, partly because the enumerated rights would seem out of place and also because there existed no supreme legal body to interpret the rights enshrined in the document anyways, so the speaker had suggested looking towards Victoria’s Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities, in addition to the United Kingdom’s Human Rights Act – these proposals, acting as statutory documents, removing the power of courts to effect government policy, which in effect, better reflected what would happen with our Charter of Rights, because there is no judiciary in the Rejected Realms, of course.

The Charter of Civil Rights and Responsibilities, however, is not only legal protection that citizens have of their individual rights; take for example, the new Regional Message Board Act which establishes that members have the freedom to post on the Regional Message Board, which acts as a ‘common site of conversation’.

Indeed, several major institutions in the Rejected Realms have been established as a part of its liberal programme – first and foremost, members universally and equally have the right of suffrage – to vote and decide their leader and the members of the executive which reflects the significance of popular sovereignty in the Rejected Realms. While the executive does have great power, the one thing that the executive cannot decide is who is a citizen and who is not – this decision is made by an independent political body, the Citizenship Council, which represents an important balance of power that maintains the liberal (as opposed to illiberal) structure of the Rejected Realms government; too many regions, after all, see their democracies eroded when executives manipulate the citizenship process in a way that is tantamount to sheer electioneering. The Citizenship Council is itself all about balance – councillors are each individually decided by various methods – it, like the courts in a traditional liberal government, is an appointed body that balances the spheres of power between the Assembly (whose citizenships are decided by them) and the executive (who are elected by the Assembly).

Kandarin once remarked that the Rejected Realms Army was so prominent in the Rejected Realms that it appeared to be a region built around an army for many.  Milograd also joked, years later, that the Rejected Realms was a region built around a newspaper. So it seems to me that the Rejected Realms’ pattern of growth traditionally centres around a major institution – historically, the Rejected Realms Army and contemporarily, the Rejected Times. What both of these institutions have in common is that they are private monopolies with a public relationship with the Rejected Realms – the Rejected Realms Army has a monopoly on armed forces in the Rejected Realms, while the Rejected Times has a public monopoly on regional journalism in the Rejected Realms. The army is run by its commanders and the Rejected Times is managed by the Rejected Realms Media Corporation. The separation of state from these institutions as a working public-private partnership represents liberalism emphasis on property and the freedom of private initiative. Playing a role in the liberal state, the Rejected Times is an outlet for free expression for citizens, while the Rejected Realms Army protects the region’s delegacy and its popular sovereignty dutifully and advances the cause for freedom abroad.

Foreign policy in the Rejected Realms itself boldly fits with traditional liberal foreign policy, or even liberal intergovernmentalism, a set of ideas closely related to the European Union. Liberalism in international studies, often called ‘idealism’, is the opposing view to realism in foreign policy. Liberals as foreign policy experts believe that the world is not in relative ‘zero-sum’ competition between world powers or that balance of power is needed for security and peace; instead, liberals see world powers as able to achieve gains simultaneously and even cooperatively in a ‘positive-sum’ manner. This leads liberal foreign policy to emphasize the importance of improving mutual dependencies between partners and bolstering the influence of multilateral organisations and spheres of international governance to bring peace, stability and policy convergence between regions. Nowadays, the Rejected Realms is a major player in international dialogues with a large network of allies, friends and partners. It is involved in two major (and currently) multilateral organisations, the Founderless Regions Alliance and the XYZ Treaty, meanwhile it is linked with Lazarus through a complex layer of multiple treaties. Additionally, the Rejected Realms also maintains alliances with a number of different regions from various backgrounds like Taijitu and The Independent Order, while also maintaining agreements of non-aggression with Osiris and The Pacific.

The Friendship Agreements, a recent initiative, has also allowed my government to advance a new network of allies with newer regions who may not have been chanced with a full treaty previously – the inspiration of friendship agreements came from my own studying of European Union foreign policy and liberal intergovernmentalism, where the European Union has advanced its own ‘Neighborhood Policy’ across the European continent. Indeed, the Rejected Realms is not a warring, competitive, exceptionalist or realist state, it is a liberal one – it plays a role as a peacemaker, builds friendships openly and genuinely, and believes in the power of multilateral governance to transform our interregional politics. The latest constitutional amendment even notes that the Rejected Realms ‘shall uphold the principle of self-determination and refrain from the invasion of other regions outside of times of war’ which in turn reflects the Rejected Realm’s universalism in seeing a right of self-determination that applies abroad universally as an international ‘law’ of sorts where other regions might be inclined to expect you to not invade them, while they invade others.

We may ask why the Rejected Realms is such a liberal state? To me the answer lies in the history of the Rejected Realms – something that academics might call ‘path dependence’ which allows us to study how antecedent conditions (things that happen) effect the path of a region’s institutional development: one choice leads to another, which suggests that the path of development for a region is nearly deterministic. In the case of the Rejected Realms, our region is particularly vulnerable to security concerns (we cannot eject members), unlikely to be couped by a group of professionals with a long term vision for the region (because they would not be able to hold the region easily), and home to any and all rejects from across NationStates. As of consequence, it took a centralised figure (Kandarin) to organise the region politically and bring stability to the region, while he notes that he and the Rejected Realms Army (RRA) sought defending to improve the region’s image abroad, while he built a foreign policy based on ‘being friends with everyone’ to secure the region especially from an early threat from Atlantic Alliance. As a home to rejects, the Rejected Realms was also uniquely affected by the occupation of the Pacific, because opposition to the New Pacific Order naturally became locals in the Rejected Realms.

From this it follows that the Rejected Realms would develop a natural inclination towards multilateral institutions like the Alliance Defense Network which provided security for our region and opposed the New Pacific Order, from there it follows that the Rejected Realms would also later become a member of the Founderless Regions Alliance, despite its lack of focus on the New Pacific Order, because the Founderless Regions Alliance inherited the Alliance Defense Network place as a leading multilateral defense alliance. As major institutions in the Rejected Realms reflect these peaceful, liberal norms that the Rejected Realms gravitated towards, naturally the privatisation of these institutions, the army and the press, has aimed to protect them from unwanted political change – i.e., the spread of independentism. Furthermore, it could also be said that the Rejected Realms’ path dependence reflects Warzone Codger’s Peacezone theory; with no reject allowed to be re-rejected, the Rejected Realms has to solely rely on native and foreign support for security and cannot take aggressive measures to secure its delegacy – that to me is one of the significant factors, if not the most significant, in explaining the Rejected Realms’ transition to a constitutional democracy in the wake of Kandarin’s departure, because a constitutional democracy can bring legitimacy to new delegates with each leadership transition and in an uncertain security situation, legitimacy becomes extremely important for gaining popular and foreign support.

Challenges

Certainty there are some challenges to this theory and the notion, that is, that the Rejected Realms is a liberal state. The first and foremost challenge would be that the Rejected Realms does not have a judiciary – a judiciary in a traditional liberal state is a check on the democratic processes because liberal democracy is skeptical, if not critical, of the judgement of the majority, where if not checked, a liberal may argue that minorities are not protected from the tyranny of a majority. A judiciary is also extremely significant in the liberal criminal justice system where it plays a role as an independent figure to carry out the course of justice, determine guilt and ensure that defendants and complainants’ rights are respected.

However, I would argue that the absence of a judiciary in the Rejected Realms is not a rejection of the value of judiciaries in the abstract per se, but a decision made in light of realities – limitations of NationStates – the experiences of the constitution’s drafters, who had found judiciaries in NationStates to be effectively useless. The problem with judiciaries in NationStates is politicisation – the vast majority of offences are summary offences which can be addressed without judicial oversight through forum moderation, which means judiciaries usually only address highly politicised indictment cases (i.e., treason) or judicial reviews (i.e., legal questions); positions on judiciaries become a lucrative seat for politicians and ‘statesmen’ who use the powers of judicial review to undermine the Assembly and use their position as justices to undermine the justice system. Instead, the Rejected Realms balances issues of justice between four different major institutions: the administration, the executive, the assembly and the citizenship council – the assembly and the executive work together to resolve ambiguities in the law and the administration and the citizenship council enforce memberships in line with policies set by the assembly. This process, instead of being statutory, is consuetudinary and a polycentric legal order, where power is shared and problems are resolved organically.

Another challenge that some might make against the Rejected Realms is that as a ‘defender region’ it is exclusive to others; however, I would argue that the Rejected Realms does not exclude others and in fact invites players of all stripes to join the Rejected Realms – its own forum description, ‘the region is nonetheless welcoming to invaders, defenders, and neutrals alike’ strikes at the heart of the region’s fundamental pluralism and its respect for differences. Our foreign policy is instead guided by the principle that others too have that same right to diversity and self-expression and not be trampled on or repressed from outsiders – it is not a position that is against invaders as people, but a humanitarian spirit that supports natives and their self-determination; the ethics of defending are not the ethics and politics of war, but the ethics of the physician –  primum non nocere (‘first, do no harm’ – the principle of non-maleficence – wherein, like the Red Cross, defenders cannot hold personal judgement of invaders, but act only in a personally neutral fashion to help those in need. While my understanding of defending is not the position that all hold, I do believe it is a reading of defending that can explain why, at least in my mind, the pluralist defender state is not contradictory: it welcomes all at home and helps all abroad.

On a final note, some may criticize the fact that many residents in the Rejected Realms cannot vote (because they have not signed up as citizens) and are, as of consequence, divorced from the democratic process to some extent. While this may be true, I would note that I do not believe that this challenges the notion of the Rejected Realms as a liberal state – liberal democracies have always been suspicious of the masses and has made use of representatives and state officials to ensure tyranny does not ensue. This is a distinction between liberal democracy and direct democracy. I do think however, if the Rejected Realms is attempting to achieve a representative democracy it could in the future do more to achieve an overall ‘representativeness’ – I’ve pushed in the past for measures like resident-wide officer elections, and in light of some other Game-Created regions experimenting with measures like this too, including the North Pacific, the South Pacific and Balder, I hope that we too at the Rejected Realms can build on our democracy in the coming months with a plan to democratise our governing structure further and see to it that our residents can easily and openly participate in our region’s politics as informed denizens.

Conclusion

Liberalism stands as a coherent and comprehensive ideology that has allowed to The Rejected Realms to flourish.

While some have criticised defenderism for not forming a cohesive domestic political ideology, their criticism has been thoroughly misplaced because defenderism has never been the dominant ideology of the Rejected Realms – it is a set of principles which stem from our foreign and defence policy, but which only play a role in the grand schematics of the Rejected Realms’ public policy as precepts of liberalism.

[Manson]

Interesting article, Mr Delegate.