The queen of England is, de jure, the sovereign ruler of England. She retains almost all of the formal powers that the English monarchs have held since the establishment of parliamentary monarchy. In fact, however, her rule is mostly symbolic.
I have been reading about Somalia due to the recent unrest going on there. It appears that Somalia’s stateless heyday is coming to an end, what with the interference of international Islamists, Western spooks and the emerging “anti-terrorism/anti-piracy” narrative being constructed around the hapless inhabitants of Somalia. But I stumbled onto the case of one Michael van Notten (Google if you’re not familiar with his name) and his attempts to establish a natural order society in Somalia.
One of the central problems of any attempt to escape democracy, which Mr. van Notten writes about, is that the world’s major democratic governments view any region which is not a democracy as a threat to their own power*. They spare no expense in trying to ‘correct’ the problem of non-democracy by imposition of democratic government onto peoples who have repeatedly rejected democratic rule. The Somalians are an excellent example of this brutal process.
Mr. van Notten says here:
"The Somali experience shows us that there exists a political system that is better than democracy. It is called kritarchy, appears to be viable and promises to have universal application. The Somalis have shown how to effectuate the changeover to this new system despite the massive efforts of the UN to re-establish democracy in Somalia.
The main lesson to be learned is probably that democracies will never give in to pressures to abandon that system. Rather, they will resist until their system collapses. It is common knowledge that when a dictator emerges in a democracy and doesn’t try to conquer other countries, the democracies of the world will be patient. They will simply wait for the day that the citizens of that country have mustered enough powers to revert to democracy. But if a nation wishes to try out kritarchy, it looks as if no cost is too high to re-establish democracy."
He notes elsewhere:
"… the demise of the central government [in 1991] did little to end the ravaging of Somali society and culture that it had set in motion, especially in the area around Mogadishu, the former capitol. The reason is that the expectation, actively promoted by the United Nations, that a central government would be re-established in the near future led clan militias and remnants of the former government into armed conflict, often in disregard of customary law and their elders. Each group manoeuvred to be in the most favourable position to capture the formidable array of powers of the future government when it was re-established. Because any clan that controlled the government could be expected to use it in the interest of its own members at the expense of all others, each felt compelled in self-defence to enter the fray. In this situation, order could only resume when the expectation of a central government receded. But the United Nations has spent billions keeping that expectation alive."
Aggressive democracies, such as all Western governments, will spare no expense to ensure that new non-democracies are not permitted to emerge. This is a serious obstacle to any design to re-establish a natural order society through peaceful secession. Without fail, the imperial democracies will bring the fight to the would-be free society with the same formula that has been applied to all other would-be free societies for at least the last century or two. As van Notten notes in the above quote, even the mere prospect of the imposition of a central government is sufficient to decivilize a free society into a state of all-against-all warfare in order to be in the strongest position when the central government comes into being.
This all made me think that perhaps the establishment of a symbolic democracy could provide cover for the establishment of a truly natural order society. Essentially, it would be composed of a symbolic President or Prime Minister along with symbolic, elected district representatives who choose the President or Prime Minister and symbolic ambassadors. Since taxation cannot exist in a natural order society, all symbolic-government positions would be unpaid and would have to be filled by volunteers. Such work could be considered as good-will/philanthropic work performed by business leaders who can benefit from the little bit of free press that would accompany the holding of symbolic offices. Of course, regulations and statutes also cannot exist in a natural order society, so all symbolic-government persons would have zero additional authority, powers or responsibilities beyond their own, private-party business.
The symbolic ambassadors could, by custom not by formal obligation, agree to travel as cultural emissaries to foreign countries to explain life in a free society to those still under the oppressive rule of democratic tyranny. The symbolic heads of state could - again, by custom, not obligation - receive foreign ambassadors or heads of state or take calls and send and receive diplomatic correspondence with foreign governments. All of this would be purely cultural, heritage, museum-style work, not real business. The purpose, as stated above, is to provide cover for the free society and to frustrate the “it’s not a democracy, so it’s not free” propaganda pushed by democratic governments. If the US or UN or UK or EU or some other tyrannical government (or their lackeys in the national press) begins messaging their subjects that the “non-democratic Libertania” is a threat to their national security or whatever, a Libertanian symbolic-ambassador could dispatch himself or herself to the country in question as a diplomat to answer the accusations by pointing out that Libertania does, in fact, have a democratic government, even if it is symbolic. People are free to vote, if they wish to so waste their time, as to who shall be their symbolic representatives to choose the symbolic President/Prime Minister.
The key would be to initially make this symbolic government appear to be a real government so that other governments will accept it as a “real” government. It must appear to outsiders be intent on taxing and regulating all private commerce, establishing a central bank and monopolizing law and security within its borders, ready to be subjected to the international imperial syndicate. Once it has been seated at the UN and recognized by most governments, then you could pull the mask off and reveal that the government has no real, formal or binding powers whatsoever and serves as a purely symbolic stand-in to permit democracies to propagandize their subjects that this truly free society is “a democracy too.”
With the ability to pretend to their subjects that this free society is a democracy, the single greatest reason for aggressive imposition of central government on the fledgling free territory has been removed. This could just be the deciding factor that would make it not worth the expense and effort to the imperial syndicate to infiltrate the free territory and destroy it through the actual or even threatened imposition of a central government.
Clayton -
*This has more to do with maintaining the Democracy mythos (that ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’ are synonyms) than any real belief on the part of democratic governments that non-democracies are greater military threats than democracies