The global competition between exit- and voice-based legitimacy
Are we going to be citizens, metics or both?
I’m still in Airbnb hell, cursing my inability to exit a dominant platform. Hope you enjoy this quick sketch of an idea.
I suppose the dominant frame for thinking about international relations now is as a conflict between the US and a rising — or peaked? — China. That’s completely accurate: their fight will probably structure much of global politics. The Ukraine war could reasonably be interpreted as a US-China proxy war, and even potentially as the first shot of a bigger conflict. The two countries are competing for sway in the Middle East, in rival international talking shops like the G20 and BRICS, and with rival intiatives to woo the Global South.
A different pair of glasses can also be useful for thinking about international politics today. That is the competition between two forms of political legitimacy: democracy or voice-based legitimacy, and legitimacy based on exit.
Democracy’s usual opponent in IR thinkpieces is autocracy. That’s true in practice. But autocracy is not really a principle of legitimacy. Even if you think autocrats sometimes get the job done, nobody says “well, of course he’s entitled to make the laws — he’s dictator, after all”. His being dictator is the fact that needs justification!
Voice-based legitimacy comes from choosing your rulers by vote. Exit-based legitimacy relies on the same reasons that justify Kellogg’s providing you with breakfast nutrition. You chose the cornflakes. You could have had anything else. It’s fine for you to eat them.
Similarly, states like Dubai and Singapore rely on exit-based legitimacy. Their constitutions don’t say so explicitly: Dubai’s probably says, I dunno, “The Emir is Head of State, peace be upon him”.1 But everyone knows that in practice what really justifies the Emir making the rules is that people choose Dubai. They came there from all over the world — rich accountants from London and Switzerland, poor building workers and domestic servants from Pakistan. And attacks on these places legitimacy usually work via questioning those people’s choices. Maybe the poor workers from Pakistan were fooled by false promises into coming and enduring the brutal heat and working conditions. I am generally suspicious of these arguments since they seem to assume that thousands of people can be systematically fooled over decades; they also regularly fail to ask whether the alternatives in Pakistan are not worse. But that’s an empirical question. The point is that choice if anything is what supports Dubai’s legitimacy, and everyone acts as if that’s so. The same point works for illiberal Singapore. They publicly cane criminals! Sure, but people seem to like it.
The political philosophy arguments over these two sources of legitimacy are very deep. Both kinds seem to involve a degree of idealization, if not chicanery. Democratic legitimacy says our government is legitimate because we voted for it… but why did “we” vote for it if a majority overrules my preference? Choice-based legitimacy seems to pretend that countries are like brands in a supermarket:
when really, moving countries involves huge practical and cultural costs even for the wealthy and privileged, let alone for the poor who most need it. I won’t try to adjudicate these arguments, because in practice they are going to be adjudicated by what people actually accept —the revolutions they push for, the coups they let happen, the seats they buy on Ryanair or in tiny unsafe boats.
Instead, I just want to note how this contest is moving beneath the surface of a lot of changes in the world.
Exit-based legitimacy is spreading beyond its earlier base of Middle Eastern freeports and libertarian imagined cities. Those freeports always lay open to the criticism that they relied on big countries to provide the stable environment in which they could thrive. Now, larger countries are getting involved. Saudi Arabia’s Neom is meant as a hobeypot for international capital and knowledge workers, but its run by a regional power. In the long run, maybe Dubai’s real importance will be seen simply as having provided a demonstration effect to Saudi’s murderous Crown Prince.
Democratic countries themselves are getting into the same game, increasingly seeking to attract the best and brightest, or at least smartest and richest, to migrate. For most, this is just about trying to tweak the mix of immigrants. But for some democracies it is more than that. “Maximum Canada” has been growing like Japanese Knotweed. It’s projected to hit 40 million this year and add another four million by the end of the decade. Canada seems to have taken a collective decision almost to become a rival to the US as a home for huddled masses yearning to be free. Both left-liberals and libertarians want the US to be similarly expansive. It may yet turn out that Trump’s border-wall rhetoric was a slideshow or interlude. You can imagine a US that is tough on illegal immigration coming over the Southern border, and yet takes many more legal immigrants across the Atlantic and Pacific.
For America, this isn’t just economics; there’s a geopolitical strategy angle. Attracting the smartest Chinese engineers is good industrial strategy and great-power competition. It also sends a powerful message to the rest of the world: “No matter how your elites rail against US dominance, we’re still the place they actually want to live.” Exit-based legitimacy on the international stage.
Of course the US commitment to voice-based legitimacy isn’t going anywhere. (That’s not to say its institutions aren’t under threat, just that its elites and its people retain democracy as a key value in their political imaginations.) For the US, exit-based legitimacy is the icing on the cake.
European states are much less likely to lean on exit-based legitimacy. Their populations are more deeply skeptical of cultural differences and the benefits of migration. (Much of US populism is anti-trade, while European populism is more anti-migration.) They also have large welfare states. These create mistrust of immigrants’ motives as potential scroungers: in the US and UK, migrants are net taxpayers, but the balance is less clear on the European mainland. Welfare states also make it harder to offer the low marginal tax rates that are, let’s be honest, a key part of a state’s offer to many potential movers.
Arguably in many ways exit and democratic voice complement each other:
Albert Hirschman on liberalism and nationalism
Exit is a safety valve for minorities fleeing tyrannous majorities (even if “tyranny” just means high taxes). And democracy may make it more attractive to assort with other people like you, so you can have the policies you want. It might not be a coincidence that US democracy first grew and thrived when the land had an open Western frontier.
But exit is probably a rival to democracy in the battle for ideas. People who see themselves as voting with their feet are less likely to feel that voting with the ballot is a political necessity. It could be that Western democracies start to look oldfashioned next to the glitz of Middle Eastern or Asian autocracies. This would be reinforced by countries on democracy’s edges, or recent converts, backsliding towards autocracy, especially against a backdrop of popular apathy. Perhaps some 21st century Arabic Hobbes will update his famous comment on the Italian republics:
There is written on the Turrets of the city of Luca in great characters at this day, the word LIBERTAS; yet no man can thence inferre, that a particular man has more Libertie, or Immunitie from the service of the Commonwealth there, than in Constantinople. Whether a Common-wealth be Monarchicall, or Popular, the Freedome is still the same.
One trade-off which helped spread democracy since the 19th century was the promise of closer connection between rulers and ruled, which rulers had to make if they wanted their citizens to fight for them. Even that may be in hock to changes in military technology. The Ukraine conflict is one of mass armies again, and seems to replicate the conditions of World War One. But drone warfare — highly automated — is developing so fast that noone can know what war will look like at the end, any more than people in 1917 could have predicted Blitzkrieg. And it may be that the side with the cleverest programmers will win. Meanwhile Putin, far from mobilizing ordinary citizens to win his war, has scoured prisons and ethnic minorities for men with little to lose. In a triumph for exit-based legitimacy (in Cuba’s case, exit-based illegitimacy) Cubans have even been trying to escape their prison island in exchange for filling a place in Russia’s armies.
If you enjoyed this, you might like my book Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present. It’s available from Amazon, and you can read more about it here.
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