Political Theories of Non-Territorial States
* Book: Panarchy: Political Theories of Non-Territorial States. Edited by Aviezer Tucker and Gian Piero de Bellis. Routledge, 2016
URL =
Review
Vlad Tarko:
"When states had an official religion, religious diversity was a serious, often deadly, problem. A major institutional advance was made when we realized that we didn’t need an answer to the question “Which religion should the state have?” and we allowed instead a multitude of churches to coexist on the same territory. Panarchy is the idea that the same institutional solution applies for much more than just religion, perhaps to all issues. As defined by John Zube, panarchy is
The realization of as many different and autonomous communities as are warranted by volunteers for themselves, all non-territorially coexisting, side by side and intermingled, as their members are, in the same territory or even world-wide and yet separated from each other by personal laws, administrations and jurisdictions, as different churches are or ought to be. (p. 90)
The idea can also be understood by thinking of identity. In practice, a person’s identity is based on a bundle of many attitudes. One’s identity involves belonging to many different types of overlapping communities. But, if we tie up each of these communities to the administration of the territory, only one available identity remains for everyone living there. Everyone is forced to compromise on various margins, which, in effect, undermines everyone’s sense of belonging. According to supporters of panarchy, this is unnecessarily restrictive for a wide variety of issues.
Taken to its extreme, panarchy is the view that all governments should be non-territorial, and that “it should be possible for each individual to choose his own government without moving from place to place” (p. 92). Under such a view, today’s governments, claiming territorial monopoly, are illegitimate. This being said, the authors of this collection view panarchy as anti-utopian: “It does not advocate any particular model of the perfect state or social contract. On the contrary, it presupposes there is no such model” (p. 149). Instead, they try to broaden our institutional imagination by noting that the currently neglected idea of deterritorializing some state functions has the potential to reduce conflicts both within states and between states. But the exact institutional arrangements need to be discovered by trial-and-error. We don’t really know the limits of panarchy.
As such, more moderately, panarchy is the view that many government functions that are currently provided on a territorial basis could be provided more efficiently by overlapping providers -- in the same way that religious services are now provided in a non-territorial fashion. Many disputes about what “our” government should do about X could disappear as different people living in the same geographical area would have the option to use different providers."
(https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=1253)
More informatoin
Related literature:
"The authors make some important connections to other strands of literature, in particular to
- Vincent Ostrom’s brand of federalism (chapter 12) and to
- Bruno Frey’s idea of Functional Overlapping Competing Jurisdictions (he is one of the contributors, chapter 20), as well as to
- the Jeffersonian concept of self-governance and to
- David Friedman’s anarcho-capitalism (chapter 19).
Other relevant connections are unfortunately ignored, for instance to
- the idea of polycentricity
- Elinor Ostrom, 2010, “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems,” American Economic Review 100(3): 641–72;
- Paul Dragos Aligica and Vlad Tarko, 2012, “Polycentricity: From Polanyi to Ostrom, and Beyond,” Governance 25(2): 237–62) or to the works of
- Chandran Kukathas’ Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003) or
- Jacob Levy’s Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015).