In the book “After the State”, published in 2008, Alexei Shustov provides (pp. 66-67) a list of questions that remain unresolved in the panarchic model he proposed. Since then, thought has not stood still, and the Bitarch and I propose brief outlines of solutions to these issues.
1. How to organize border security? How to build and fund armed forces designed to protect the country from external force attempts?
As a reminder, the Shustov model is the construction of a panarchy within Russia as a single entity without dividing it into territorial units; therefore, the problem of external borders in such a poly-state remains relevant.
Border security in peacetime is quite pointless. It is impossible to block or levy duties on the cross-border movement of goods in a poly-state—the existence of a single ECU offering free trade is enough, and the entire flow will go through this internal offshore. The same applies to visa regimes. Individual ECUs may enforce boycotts of certain goods, people, and information for their clients, but this is carried out at the consumer level, not through border control.
Regarding protection from military invasion, the most important thing in the defense doctrine is the presence of citizens who have something to defend. The example of Ukraine shows that even under very unfavorable starting conditions, the self-organization of citizens works wonders. If free arms circulation exists in a number of the country’s jurisdictions, this significantly simplifies the task. However, such a militia plus private military companies are capable of handling territorial defense tasks rather. Meanwhile, a doctrine of preventing an attack by creating a personal threat to the leaders of the aggressor country can further reduce risks. With minimal coordination capabilities, governments will be able to agree on joint funding for a corresponding project of high-precision non-nuclear medium-range weapons, or some other surprises of the same sort.
2. How to organize international relations? Who and on what basis will represent the country in interaction with foreign states?
International relations consist of border demarcation, the procedure for extraditing criminals, visa regimes, and various duties.
Regarding borders, territorial states will find it difficult here, as their citizens will likely also begin to enter into agreements with ECUs—and it would be good if only with those attached to the corresponding territorial jurisdiction, because they might just as well agree with transnational ECUs. Cellular communication works in the border zone in both directions; similarly, regulations in the border zone will interpenetrate, further blurring the concept of the territorial state.
The procedure for extraditing criminals is relevant only in a situation of noticeable differences in legal systems and especially in law enforcement. Bargaining is inevitable here, in which more influential jurisdictions will have an advantage, but influence is an unstable substance and is distributed unevenly. In general, it will be the same as it is now, only more dynamic. At least, in situations of clear injustice, public outrage will be of greater importance for contract jurisdictions than for current democracies.
Duties, as shown above, if they exist at all, will only be unilateral, from the side of monopoly territorial entities; a poly-state cannot afford customs.
3. How to organize an effective rebuff to attempts by external forces of the financial-economic sector to heat up contradictions between different governments [ECUs] and exhaust the country by playing on this?
One can imagine a hypothetical foreign Putin sponsoring conservative ECUs in Russia that advocate for spiritual values, and it becomes more profitable to become a client of such an ECU. Meanwhile, he might, for example, deny visas to clients of liberal ECUs and prohibit investments in his lucrative raw-material economy. Usually, this leads to the “market deciding” to create imitative structures that demonstrate to the outside the traits for which people are willing to pay, but ignore the internal content: first, it is cheaper, and second, there is no internal demand for it.
Moreover, the world does not revolve around a single foreign Machiavelli, so those ECUs that he dislikes will cooperate with someone else.
4. How to solve environmental issues?
Each jurisdiction solves these issues in its own way. A liberal one leaves it to the owners, who, in turn, insure risks with insurance companies. A socialist one supports supervisory organizations that live for issuing fines or shaking down larger bribes (a bribe will not be more expensive than an insurance policy, otherwise the subject will flee to the liberals). Greens may found their own jurisdiction where consumers will support eco-friendly producers with money and boycott those who ignore the environment.
As for negative externalities arising from environmental disasters, they are compensated much more effectively through court in the presence of competing jurisdictions than under a monopoly burdened by a conflict of interest in the form of state ownership.
5. What to do with objects of cultural and historical heritage of the people to guarantee their preservation?
Objects of cultural and historical heritage bring profit because they are interesting to tourists. For them to be preserved, it must be profitable to preserve them. For this, in turn, the owners of these objects must benefit from tourism. This is typical liberal logic, thanks to which the owner of each specific potentially interesting object decides whether it is more profitable to try to earn from the flow of tourists or to use the object in some other way, for example, to demolish it and build something else. As a result of such an approach, a quite diverse building landscape is formed, where antiquity neighbors modernity.
Other ECUs may introduce regulations that prohibit the destruction of historical monuments, but they will have to somehow compensate the owners for this inconvenience, otherwise they will flee to the liberals. Thus, in ECUs for lovers of antiquity, taxes for the maintenance of monuments are inevitable. As a result, through third-party funding, monuments whose direct monetization is difficult can be preserved.
Organizations like UNESCO will also contribute to solving the problem, as they are capable to a certain extent of influencing tourist flows by labeling: this is a world heritage site, and this is not. However, I suspect that soon UNESCO’s influence on the tourism business will become lower than that of a hypothetical TripAdvisor, and there will be no need to sponsor this bureaucratic dinosaur at the state’s expense.
6. How to regulate relations in the field of natural resources, especially specific ones such as water, air, marine biological resources (which move across the territory and are therefore not tied to coordinates in space)?
In its time, hunting and gathering lost the economic competition to farming and animal husbandry due to their low efficiency. Similarly, as free fresh water, free sea fish, and free clean air become more expensive, the industrial production of these resources near the places of their consumption will become profitable. In short, this is not a question of jurisdictions at all, but a purely technical-economic question.
7. How to regulate relations in places with a high concentration of immovable property, where the actions of one owner can affect the essential characteristics of a neighboring owner’s property (for example, the construction of buildings that block existing ones)?
Of course, such issues are more conveniently solved within functional jurisdictions, such as homeowners associations. This is not provided for within the Shustov model, so the issue falls into the sphere of disputes between different jurisdictions, and it is difficult to predict what practices will emerge here.
8. How to organize effective protection against cartel agreements by the strongest players of various markets that have a predisposition to monopolization?
In a free market, a monopoly is formed only if the overall size of the market is comparable to the optimal size of a company in terms of labor productivity. In all other cases, monopolization is unprofitable, and it can either be an entrepreneurial error that will quickly bankrupt the company, or this monopoly is imposed by means of violence, which no longer has anything to do with a free market. Thus, the effective protection against monopolization is precisely the free market, and in a situation of competing jurisdictions with free entry and exit, the prerequisites for the market being free are far greater than under the current state of affairs.
9. How to counter attempts by socially maladjusted individuals (those currently called criminals) to undermine the public safety system, built on the principle of equal rights agreements, and achieve a chaos profitable for them?
Freedom of gun ownership and the right to self-defense work wonders in this regard. Individual ECUs that do not recognize their clients’ right to independently offer armed resistance to violence will be forced to indeed make every effort to suppress armed violence using professional police; otherwise, they will lose the loyalty of their clients, who will move to jurisdictions that at least do not get in the way.
Furthermore, a potential offender cannot always immediately determine which jurisdiction their potential victim belongs to, and consequently, whether they are ready to fight back. Thus, even a single ECU that allows its clients to arm themselves becomes a positive externality for the others.
