When surveying the history of past civilizations that eventually collapsed, it becomes clear political disintegration is rarely, if ever, accompanied by any sort of political liberation. The anarchist anthropologist Harold Barclay notes:
Periods of so-called cultural or organizational decay in history may suggest this sort of trend [towards decentralization]. But what trends do occur in these situations is the creation of a number of petty despotisms out of one which had existed before. Decentralization is not accompanied by freedom. The revolutions and revolts of history and the decay of social systems have invariably entailed the replacement of one kind of despotism by another. Or what is a process of decay of one polity is the basis for the creation of another, so that, for example, the appearance of Clovis’ Frankish kingdom and of the Umayyad caliphate follow on the heels of the decline of Rome.[96]
It may be expected, then, that the eventual collapse and disintegration of the global superstate of the New World Order will result in the emergence of “petty despotisms” of various kinds as the new basis of political organization. Indeed, the parallels between the current era and Rome in its twilight period are obvious enough. Just as the end of the Pax Romana ushered in a whole new era of decentralized politics, technological regression (in the West but not quite so much in the East), and the coming to power of an apocalyptic otherworldly religious movement (Christianity), so might the end of the Pax Americana usher in a new era of decentralized politics, technological regression (at least initially) and the expanded influence of an apocalyptic otherworldly religious movement (Islamic fundamentalism). Just as it was the unwashed barbarians of the Germanic regions who sacked Rome, so it may well be the unwashed barbarians of the modern anti-globalization movement (accompanied by the barbarian hordes emanating from the trailer parks, ghettos, and barrios) who eventually sack Washington, D.C.
What are the implications of all this for the matter of law in an anarchistic social order? Following the collapse of the New World Order global superstate and the nation-states that comprise its provincial governments, the entire panoply of dissident factions who stand in opposition to the NWO will naturally achieve superiority or sovereignty in those geographic areas where they are best organized and have achieved the greatest level of popular support. These factions will then proceed to reorganize their internal political structures according to their own ideological inclinations. Such inclinations will range from the highly “liberal” or “progressive” on one hand to the very “conservative” or “reactionary” on the other. Remnants of the former system would likely continue in certain enclaves or be incorporated into newer
systems in the same manner that elements of contemporary American law include remnants of earlier English law. The laws of the communities, associations, and homelands that emerge following the demise of liberal democracy, state capitalism, the nation-state system, and the universalistic synthesis of these manifested by the New World Order will reflect the preferences and prejudices of organic regions and localities to a much greater degree than what is found in contemporary systems of parliamentary corporate-social democracy.
Fortunately, there exists in the contemporary world a working model of this type of decentralized legal order. The East African nation of Somalia experienced in the early 1990s the type of disintegration of central government that the entire world is likely to experience at some point in the future. Following this political collapse, the sixty clans that make up the Somali “nation” became largely sovereign entities unto themselves. The disappearance of the state has largely resulted in the resurrection of traditional society within Somalia. Political “leaders” are primarily the heads of extended families and religious leaders. Disputes among clans, families, businesses, and individuals alike are handled largely on the basis of mediation and arbitration. Crimes are dealt with in a manner similar to the handling of torts in Western society, with the emphasis being placed on compensating the wronged party. Since the implementation (or restoration) of this system, both economic prosperity and social peace have multiplied considerably in Somalia.[97]
While the laws regulating the subsystems to be found within an anarchistic meta-system would be highly diverse, certain common characteristics would likely evolve into a formally or customarily codified common law for the entire meta-system. This would stem from two factors. One, under a radically decentralized sociopolitical order migration from one polity to another becomes more feasible. If one finds a particular community unattractive, the natural solution is to find another community. This in turn means that communities that wished to prosper and preserve themselves would find it necessary to retain the allegiance of their more competent, productive, and valued members. Consequently, leaders of particular communities would be motivated to make their communities as attractive as possible to those whose loyalty they wished to obtain. Secondly, ordinary economic incentives would provide both individuals and collective entities with the desire to settle disputes in a cost-effective manner. Resolving conflicts through perpetual war is quite costly to polities that lack control over huge populations and resources that can be conscripted or taxed at will. Shifting the costs of obtaining advantages through political means (i.e., coercive legislation) onto a broader tax-paying public is also considerably more difficult in the absence of a centralized, tax-supported “democratic” state that can be lobbied towards such ends. This means that the residents of an anarchistic order will have every incentive to find both peaceful means of settling disputes between communities and individuals and limiting their own petitioning of legal institutions to matters of urgent self-interest, such as cases of violent or invasive crimes and serious breaches of contract.[98]
Although individual communities might maintain strong codified laws or informal social taboos and sanctions against behavior that departs drastically from community norms or ideals, the cultivation of an environment of stifling oppression would likely lead to little more than the departure of the communities’ more desirable members. Consequently, the maintenance of communities as closed as those of the Nazis or the Taliban will take place only where ideological fervor is strong enough to trump virtually all other considerations, including prosperity and cordial relations with other communities. Likewise, communities would, out of the necessity of self-preservation, establish barriers to forms of social decay likely to be injurious to the overall stability and prosperity of the community. As an example, predatory street crime of the type that the Western nations are increasingly famous for would likely find considerably less toleration among most communities in an anarchistic order, save those organized for the benefit of the criminals themselves, such as self-managed communities of exiles from other communities.[99]
It is likely that supra-community institutions or arrangements would eventually evolve for the purpose of resolving disputes between contending communities. This by no means implies the necessary re-emergence of the state in the traditional sense. Instead, it is more probable that evolved traditions would come into being according to which inter-community disputes might be dealt with through a process of negotiation, mediation, or arbitration. Such traditions might serve the same role as conventional “international law” in the current system. A process might also develop whereby individual citizens of one community would be able to effectively file grievances against citizens of another community. In traditional societies, such disputes are typically handled through the compensation of the injured party by the community of the offending party as a whole, thereby providing each community with the incentive to discipline their own members who act in injurious ways towards others, for the sake of preserving both the internal peace within their own community and external peace with other communities.
Disputes between communities or members of different communities would primarily involve ordinary conflicts over territory, resources, or common crimes (such as violence and theft) that are prohibited by all cultures and political entities out of necessity. As for the matter of devi
ation from community norms in a broader cultural sense, different types of communities would obviously handle such questions in their own ways. There already exists in modern states an endless amount of controversy over all sorts of social or cultural questions. Controversy of this type would likely escalate in the absence of conventional states as more and more sociocultural groups would begin to establish sovereign enclaves of their own. These enclaves might maintain wildly divergent cultural, religious, or ethical norms. A seemingly endless list of questions arises. Is abortion a woman’s sacred right or the callous murder of an unborn child? Is homosexuality a natural, healthy expression of human intimacy or a vile perversion? Should the ownership of weapons be allowed for all citizens or only for those charged with specific functions related to security and defense? Is the open criticism or even ridicule of leaders and authority figures a vital check on incompetence or malfeasance among leaders or simply an invitation to disorder and disrespect for natural hierarchies? Is the process of reproduction a matter of societal interests to such a degree that external authorities are to have a say in such matters or are these questions simply a private issue between consenting parties? What is to be the proper allocation of resources and how is the just possession and use of such resources to be defined? Are beliefs regarded as blasphemous a simple matter of individual conviction or do these invite the wrath of supernatural powers towards the entire community? To what degree, if any, can be the individual be properly required to perform service towards the greater good of the community at large?
The important issue for this discussion is not so much the matter of how different communities might answer these questions but rather the manner in which deviations from established norms in these and other areas might be handled. Although it is certainly possible, and indeed likely, that at the initial stages of the formation of various communities the sanctions enacted against deviants would be quite harsh, it is unlikely this will continue indefinitely without alteration or modification. Initially, religious fundamentalist communities might stone heretics or adulterers to death. Communities of political correctness lunatics might engage in the summary execution of racists, sexists, homophobes, anti-Semites, or vivisectionists in a manner emulating the Red Guards of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution or the Khmer Rouge during the Return to Year One. In the polities that would follow the demise of liberal democracy and its institutional appendages, a wave of repression and bloodletting would likely accompany systemic collapse. However, the broader decentralized meta-system would allow the subjects of individual communities to once again “vote with their feet” in the absence of centralized nation-states or the global superstate. This arrangement would have a moderating effect on communities seeking to retain the allegiance of members and subjects. Decentralism, easy migration, and a polycentric legal order rooted in negotiations between communities and associations would produce an eventual scenario whereby “diffuse” sanctions would serve as the primary method of enforcing community standards. These might include everything from ostracism and economic reprisals (“discrimination”) to “private” forms of violence (such as fighting, dueling, or vigilantism) to public censure and reprimand of a non-coercive nature (the so-called “bully pulpit”).
The Death of Modernity
In the early period of the post-NWO world, occurrences resembling those that followed the collapse of Rome would likely transpire. During that period, roving bands of Christian zealots traveled about destroying pagan monuments and artifacts.[100] Similar behavior on the part of various anti-NWO elements is likely as well. A case in point is the destruction of Buddhist monuments by the former Taliban government of Afghanistan. Another example might be the zeal for the destruction of monuments to the late Confederate society of the American South found among the left-wing elements in my own community of Richmond, Virginia. While revolution is usually accompanied by chaos, and followed by a period of reaction, eventually stabilization begins to take place and the ordinary process of natural social evolution resumes. Therefore, the purges, bloodletting, and waves of repression that would naturally follow the disorder involved in the destruction of the NWO would eventually give way to the establishment of a new type of decentralized order such as that which developed in Western Europe during the post-Roman, medieval era. Indeed, the destruction of international state capitalism would in many ways be nothing more than the restoration of pre-modern traditional society with its emphasis on localism, regionalism, tribalism, particularism, religion, polycentrism, and the like. The rapid growth, on a worldwide basis, of Islam in general and Islamic fundamentalism in particular, and the corresponding explosion of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (and to a lesser degree, the growth of Christian fundamentalism in North America), attests to this.56 The specific civilization that is commonly referred to as “modernism” is already approaching a stage of advanced decay. Therefore, the eventual disappearance of modernism in a way that parallels the disappearance of Greco-Roman civilization can be predicted with relative safety.
If current demographic trends continue, it can be expected that a “post-modern” (not postmodernism in the popularized sense) world would exhibit certain predictable characteristics. Islam may well become the world’s largest religion, and continue to dominate the Middle East and many other parts of Asia, and eventually come to dominate Europe and parts of North America as well[101]. The future strongholds of Christianity will likely be found in the southern hemisphere and East Asia, particularly the Pacific rim region. The particularly primitive form of Christian fundamentalism found in North America may come to dominate much of that continent. These expanded or revitalized religions, along with revitalized regional or local organic communities or ethno-cultures, will likely be the basis of the social structures of the future world. This too would be a development that paralleled the society of the medieval period. Once the stabilization of this order became seriously rooted, the foundation for further human social evolution of a genuinely progressive nature would be established. Substantial historical precedent can be found for this simply by looking at the progression of medieval society in the period leading up to the Enlightenment. If classical Greece at its height can be compared with the intellectual culture of the Renaissance, then contemporary modern civilization can be compared with Rome in its geriatric years.
The Enlightenment would have been impossible without the Middle Ages, for it was the decentralized and polycentric order of medieval Europe that inadvertently provided the cultural framework for the intellectual development that characterized the Enlightenment.[102] The most important characteristic of medieval society was the lack of a significant concentration of power. The monarchs had to share power with the popes and vice versa. Different manors, fiefdoms, feudatories, kingdoms, tribes, and other political entities had to share power with one another as none were ever able to acquire the upper hand. This decentralization allowed the individual more latitude with which to “vote with his feet” and placed an enormous check on the power of rulers in the manner previously discussed, and so limited their predations. Perpetual negotiations and renegotiations between kings and commoners and between rival kingdoms led to the intellectual conceptualization of such ideas as “freedom,” “liberty,” and “rights” that eventually became intertwined with Enlightenment political culture.
The Demographic and Cultural Implications of Anarchism
It has been argued that the current world civilization (“modernism”) is on its deathbed in a manner resembling the expiration of Greco-Roman civilization. It has been argued that the dominant political paradigm of modernism (liberal democracy) is doomed due to its own fatal contradictions. Drawing on the past historical experience of the collapse of Rome and the emergence of the decentralized polities of the medieval period, it has been argued that a similar decentralization is likely to transpire following the demise of the New World Order, which is simply the final stage of modernism, liberal democracy, the evolution of the modern sta
te, and state capitalism. It has been argued that a principal characteristic of a post-NWO world will likely be the dramatic re-emergence of particularism. It has also been argued that out of this world order of decentralization and particularism, now matter how retrograde it may be in its initial stages, there might very likely evolve a new politico-economic paradigm whereby philosophical anarchism or voluntary association replaces liberal democracy and worker-oriented productive institutions come to replace capitalism and corporatism. Likewise, a decentralized political order and a polycentric legal order would generate a high level of individual autonomy and responsibility. The removal of parasitical state bureaucracies from human economic life would, in the long run, generate greater economic prosperity and corresponding increases in health and living standards and wider dispersion of economic resources. This type of scenario would then lay the intellectual, cultural, and material framework for the emergence of a new renaissance of human cultural achievement in a manner resembling that of the classical Greek or classical Renaissance periods, and a new revolution in science, philosophy, and politics of the type that occurred during the early stages of the Enlightenment.
There are still other interesting questions regarding sociological, cultural, and demographic matters that are certainly worth considering. One of these involves the matter of immigration.[103]
This is an issue that is becoming increasingly more controversial in the Western nations. Broadly described, immigration opponents regard unwanted migrants as a source of increased crime, competition for scarce employment opportunities, dilution and erosion of established culture, burdens on tax-financed social services and, in some instances, depletion of particular ethnic or regional identities. Pro-immigration forces regard immigration as a source of cultural diversity and enrichment, cheap labor for business interests, a source of strength for favored ethnic groups, humanitarian asylum for refugees from political oppression or deplorable socio-economic conditions, individual freedom of movement and travel, and economic progress derived from the importation of foreigners possessing valuable skills. Both sides on this conflict have a habit of oversimplifying the issues involved. Whatever one’s views on the matter of immigration, it is interesting to look at how this issue might have been handled under anarchistic institutions and what the results would be.
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