Ulrike Guérot, Politikwissenschaftlerin und Publizistin, hat es schon wieder getan. Sie hat ein extrem streitbares Buch zu einem eigentlich wenig emotionalisierten Thema veröffentlicht: Europapolitik. Ihr Essay Der neue Bürgerkrieg. Das offene Europa und seine Feinde ist im besten Sinne des Wortes eine Streitschrift. Frau Guérot gelingt es erneut in einzigartiger Weise, das Thema der zukünftigen politischen Gestaltung Europas mit Leben zu füllen. Bei der Beschreibung der aktuellen Zustände, welche sie mit den Worten Verteilungs- und Kulturkampf oder gar Bürgerkrieg umreißt, schießt sie rhetorisch allerdings einige Male deutlich über das Ziel hinaus.
What rules apply? EU Citizenship and Scotland
To Liza
If there is a citizenship, you would all owe a duty of allegiance to the new Union. What else is citizenship about? There will be a duty to uphold its laws. What will happen if the allegiance to the Union comes into conflict with the allegiance to our own country?
Margaret Thatcher, speech in the House of Lords, 7th of June 1993
In 2014, it was reasonable for a Scot wishing to further enjoy the benefits of her country’s EU membership to vote “Remain” at the Scottish Independence Referendum. In 2017, her variety of options is virtually narrowed down to choosing between the least of the evils. Resisting the Scottish secession and the addition of “r” (“rest of”) to the remaining parts of the state once called “the United Kingdom” will only lead to Scots leaving Europe aboard with their English, Welsh and Irish compatriots. Supporting the campaign for the second independence referendum and, if successful, the case for Scottish independence may eventually lead to securing the future of Scotland in Europe. However, this path is far from being clear.
Panarchy: The State 2.0
The dominant “Westphalian” model of the state, based on sovereignty over territory with borders and monopoly of violence over the people who happen to live in the territory, is obsolete. It fits seventeenth-century technology and pre-global societies when geographical distances could not be traversed easily and information took months to travel the globe. Instead, states may be founded on social contracts rather than sovereignty, service to citizens instead of monopoly over the use of violence in a territory. Panarchy, a political theory of non-territorial states founded on social contracts, introduced in 1860 by Belgian botanist and economist Paul Émile de Puydt, offers an alternative. It proposes that citizens may literally sign a social contract, a constitution, with a state, and may change their states without moving, just as customers can change their insurance policies. Explicit and voluntary social contracts have several advantages over standard social contract theories: They are neither mythical nor hypothetical, but explicit and actual, voluntary and reversible.
Panarchy allows political agents to make reversible political mistakes and then exit and join another state. In Panarchy, the incentive for political innovation and improvement comes from competition between states over citizens-customers. Politics would then develop its own version of creative destruction, when failed states disappear and are replaced by better managed ones, generating a general progressive trend. „Panarchy: The State 2.0“ weiterlesen