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A state controls and coordinates social effort in various domains. It is always about creating a framework for social life. Sidenote in case ``social'' gives you the creeps: I just use it to neutrally refer to human interaction. Exploitation is a social act in that sense. Are we talking shop?
According to the classical view a state can among others cover the following task complexes or it can at least contribute in these areas:
The other tasks of the state are even less geographically bound. State is mostly about creating and enforcing rules for its citizens and about redistributing the resources of its citizens.
Thus I propose to decouple social organization (i.e. states) from geography. This proposal has several very important implications. For the first time in history people could actually freely choose their society. They don't choose between mostly similar synthetic flavors of the same old thing, but they actually choose their state independently from their residence. This was never before possible because the infrastructure was not there. Big nations always suffered from the distance of the government to the further reaches of the empire. The problem of this distance was less of a geographical nature than of a temporal one. It is hard to govern if you have to deal with a time lag of weeks before your orders reach the outskirts. If everybody has instant access to information from around the world and can reach almost every remote corner of the planet in a couple of hours, then things suddenly become possible that nobody ever even dreamed of.
So why should some religious fundamentalist be forced to endure our modern Gomorrah? Could he not live in a society governed by the book as long as he leaves me alone? Why should people that still entertain some kind of social conscience be forced to live by the rules of neo liberalism? Why must conservatives watch their values - family, unborn life, whatever - being defaced by their fellow citizens? This list could be extended considerably, but I guess the point is made.
If every man could choose his society without having to abandon his home, his friends, his job - in short: his life - then social life could be much more satisfying for everybody.
Social evolution would accelerate considerably. If people have new ideas about how to organize society, they could just try them. I guess the critical mass for a functional society is in the order of a couple of hundred thousand people or maybe a couple of million (that is the size of the smallest nation states in Europe). So any idea that can attract one out of ten thousand people (divide the world population of six billion by ten thousand and you get a sizable society of 600.000) has a chance to be tested. Opposed to that it is all but impossible to test radically different ideas in a democracy. You don't need one out of 10.000, you need half or two thirds of the population (well actually you need the yellow press, but that is rather similar). And good ideas would presumably spread and be adopted by more societies. The development of society would be continuous rather than making minor leaps every couple of decades during social crisis.
A very important problem with this idea is that the resulting systems might be inherently unstable. People have a tendency of not leaving each other alone. Tolerance is still a rare virtue. The system might result in social tensions between members of different societies. These tensions might discharge - as they did in the past - in riots, pogroms and even civil wars. But the system might also educate people toward tolerance so that these problems become less severe in the long run.
There is however a need for preventing these problems. There are also still some geographically bound issues that need cooperation between different - potentially many - societies. To address these issues a Meta Constitution is required. I am not talking about something like the UNO. The UNO addresses mostly global issues and something like the UNO would still be required in a system as the one proposed here. But the Meta Constitution also has to regulate the decision making process of where to build that bypass road (for example local committees that are constituted democratically could decide that) and whom to bill for it. The Meta Constitution also has to regulate which law applies in inter society matters, e.g. the criminal law of the victim's society, in civil cases the law of the buyer, the complainant or whatever. There have to regulations to prevent territorial expansion, e.g. Meta Constitutional rules to prevent land lords from enforcing their society's law with the lodgers. And there are probably many other things a Meta Constitution would have to regulate.
Creating a functional Meta Constitution is certainly not a trivial task but it does not seem impossible either. Especially since criminal law and constitutions around the world are already mostly similar in most countries.
There are however many things, a Meta Constitution does not have to regulate. It does not have to care for human rights or civic duties. It only has to grant the protection of the individual by his/her society's constitution and it has to enforce its first Article:
No man must be bared or impeded in choosing a society of his liking as long as the chosen society accepts him. Accordingly no society must be bared or impeded in accepting an individual that chose the society.
Thorsten Roggendorf 2008-11-06