Sovereignty Is Not Property

In arguments about open borders or immigration reform generally, the analogy of sovereignty to property is often invoked. “Should anyone who wants be allowed into your home?” the question often goes. This is an erroneous question. Unlike many libertarians, I am not about to claim that nationhood or sovereignty are lies, or nonexistent. But I will argue that the analogy with property is a bad one; it is not just false, but useless. It sheds no light on the actual nature of sovereignty, how it works in practice.

This line of argument is often advanced with the idea that democracies in particular make a nation something like property for its citizens. Just as we can decide who gets to come into our house or who to associate with, we can collectively decide who to associate with or allow into our country. This analogy fails to illuminate in a number of ways.

First, policy and citizenship simply do not operate like property for a citizen. I cannot sell or rent my right to vote, or buy someone else’s. I cannot sell my citizenship. Analogies may be drawn specifically with neighborhoods that require residents to sign a contract giving the local homeowner’s association certain administrative authority. In New York co-ops, the board even has the power to approve or reject anyone you want to rent or sell your apartment to. But again, there are too many crucial differences. In both cases you can rent or sell your home, even if there are additional constraints on who you are able to transact with. I cannot rent or sell my slot in America to an impoverished individual who wishes to get in.

More to the point, collective decisionmaking through any kind of voting process—direct or representative—simply does not work like individual property decisions. We have a literature dating back to Condorcet, who inspired the more famous Arrow Impossibility Theorem, which demonstrates this robustly. Small changes to voting rules can have drastic effects on the outcomes; democracy is not so much about a choice the way that we choose what brand of cereal to buy at the grocery store, as it is about establishing a procedure by which specific decisions are made.

Institutional reality is much more complex than blackboard property dynamics. The perceived authority of a particular station, accepted rituals for arriving at and legitimating decisions, ground level norms, and inherited institutional dynamics, all come together into a number of particular forms. Take the President of the United States as an example. The station of President holds a number of characteristics—it is a civilian position, it is filled through a procedure that is fairly unique to the United States but in broad outlines is essentially an election. Terms are of a particular length. Bills are not treated as legitimate law until they have his signature, unless Congress can get enough of a consensus to go around him.

And he is the Commander-in-Chief of the military. But as I mentioned in my discussion with several members of the neoreactionary community, this is so only because the branches of the American military recognize the civilian government as exercising legitimate authority over them. This fact, which we Americans take for granted but the citizens of many other countries do not have the luxury of so doing, is contingent on a high degree of buy-in into a particular ethical framework on the part of people in the military. The relationship of the President to his military authority cannot be described in terms of ownership, for the authority only exists so long as the buy-in continues.

Nor can the voting public be considered to exercise ownership over their military. Their role is crucial only because the members of the military subscribe to an ethical framework in which the role of the President and the civilian government is legitimated by elections, in which citizens cast votes. Even with our lower turnout relative to other nations with other forms of democracy, this relationship—of voters to President, President to military, and military to voters—appears, from my vantage point, to be quite strong. It is rare that anyone even thinks of the possibility that that multipart relationship might one day rupture.

That relationship is nothing like property. When elected to the station of President, Obama was not then granted the right to sell the role of Commander-in-Chief to the highest bidder. What he was granted was a certain authority and a set of obligations, legitimated by a bundle of moral stories shared widely among the citizenry. Meeting those obligations and effectively making use of that authority require a great deal of persuasion and the maintenance of coalitions.

Most of the institutional environment around property, which defines its scope and its limits, look more like the multipart relationship described above than like the simple model of property rights in most introductory economics texts. I am not an open borders dogmatist—I find the position attractive but I understand why some people think it is a risky proposition. But I do not think the nationhood-as-property critique can hold water, because it is simply false. Nationhood, sovereignty, and citizenship are not at all like property. The discussion cannot be meaningfully advanced by insisting otherwise.