H T Scott Gibbons

The Crisis of Nationality, National Identity and The Social Contract in the 21st Century H T Scott Gibbons

The core of modern society and daily life is the nature of the state, or nation state. Modern states have largely been understood as nations, but that implies some form of identity that is shared by those who are associated with a nation, and identity which is commonly understood to be nationality, or ironically, also know as the tautology as those who merely live within the nation's boundaries or jurisdiction. Yet, nationality is more than mere physical presence - or even residence. So what then is nationality? There are two main traditions of nationality: English Common Law and Westphalian/European. In the United States, the absence of a concept of nationality in a constantly changing and growing country resulted in ad hoc merging of those traditions with very recent ideas about so-called 'international law', the response to the freeing of slaves as a result of the War Between the States, and the massive human displacement and mobility after World War II. The concepts of domicile, residence, nationality, citizenship, refugee and asylum have become blurred with the increase in pressures for globalization. The human scale of modern nation states has now reached a level which has no historical precedent. When so-called democracies and republics had existing in the past, they actually depended on community scale and common identity to function. As these ceased to exist, democratic institutions provided some method of popular input into government and legitimacy validation. As a result, it was not democracy but the form of function of institutions that came to be defined everywhere as democracy. Elections and public consultation were a form of participation - and not always with any impact, but not actually a form of government. The form of government that has emerged in the contemporary world is actually the administrative state, or statism, that incorporates democratic institutions some of which have an influence on the state, but most of which are only side shows. The administrative state is actually a separate branch of government that can be influenced by some democratic institutions, but which is ultimately its own democratic institutions assumed that those institutions were sponges for public input, and that they could operationalize public wishes even if they wanted to. Now it has become clear that the administrative state actually operates on its own to change, implement and obstruct public wishes, and to use its influence via the Overton Window to guide the public into a synthetic 'general will' rather than a 'common will. The result of this is that there is no social contract except to follow the general will promoted by the administrative state. Since this general will is not a common or shared will, it actually requires the suppression of authentic individual and community wills, and as a result abrogates the social contract. The administrative state then becomes the arbiter of general will, of residence and of nationality. Since so-called 'international law' at its heart does not accept the sovereignty of the nation state, as it has been adopted by the administrative state, the nation state has become a component of the international order rather than an organic unit of its own. Since nationality is now determined by the administrative state rather than by 'natural' identity, it can be and is being used as method of social control in the absence of an organic or volitional social contract. The only solutions to restore the power of democratic institutions and even republican governance lies in the reduction of scale and state overreach by returning to community independence and federation only for mutual interests - not for the interest of the administrative state itself.