I absolutely do not understand how, in a polarized society, the Ural Federal District and the Southern Federal District would agree on, say, the criticism of oatmeal cookies, because some have a liberal attitude toward oatmeal cookies, while for others, insulting oatmeal cookies is haram. It is obvious that judgments applicable to classical panarchy cannot be applied to FOCJs, since the conditional Ural Federal District is driven not by a desire for profit, but by other forces—the political goals of the elites of this Ural Federal District, for example. What should be done if a federal district continues to play at isolationism (which is impossible in classical panarchy); how should federal authorities react in this situation?
Old friend
The question refers to a translation I published quite a long time ago of a work on functional overlapping competing jurisdictions. However, it demonstrates a lack of understanding, quite traditional for a modern person, of how functional jurisdictions differ from territorial ones. A conditional Ural Federal District is a territorial jurisdiction. A conditional Ural University is a functional jurisdiction: although it has a certain territory, the university’s jurisdiction is defined not by territory, but by the function it performs. Its jurisdiction includes the process of its students obtaining higher education and certain related issues. Universities can play at isolationism, up to the extraterritoriality of campuses and their own security services, or they can remain dull agencies under the subordination of the Ministry of Education.
The FOCJ model was proposed by the authors primarily for the EU, as a development of the idea of federalism, in order to take away some powers from the states comprising the EU, but transfer them not to the level of the European Union, but to functional jurisdictions. A rather flexible model is proposed, with the possibility of forming FOCJs from the bottom up, and exactly in the sphere that covers the scale of the problem being solved.
Relationships between FOCJs can be competitive if they perform related functions; they can be reduced to relationships between a customer and a client, as, for example, between an FOCJ serving nuclear power plants and an FOCJ serving the power grid; they can be conditionally neighborly, like the police and the fire department in one city; or they may be completely absent, as between a consortium for the certification of boiled sausage production and an association of kosher food producers.
Since the interests of different FOCJs can indeed come into conflict, legal proceedings between them are possible. Within the original model, it was not intended to shift the judicial system onto FOCJ rails, so most likely one arbitration or another, such as the Stockholm Arbitration, will be used. Police interference in FOCJ activities is also possible if some higher jurisdiction, such as a relevant ministry, sees abuses or simply errors in reporting.
In some ways, FOCJs look like an under-panarchy, since they may imply not only contractual relations with those people whose lives they regulate within their function, but may even collect targeted taxes from them if the state delegates these powers to them. In other ways, they are ahead of the panarchy model, because under panarchy we have something like contractual extraterritorial states regulating a more or less arbitrary set of life areas, while the powers of FOCJs are strictly limited by their function, which makes them similar to Friedman’s ancap model.
