Basis for International Interactions
Utopian societies, like any other society, will interact. These interactions are typically initiated either by citizens of the society or by an organization within the society. For any interaction that involves money or sovereignty, the society is indirectly involved. When society is involved, its financial infrastructure is involved on behalf of the society. There are many such interactions that cross society boundaries and each such major kind of interaction is a topic under "International Topics".
Activities like importing, exporting, visiting another society, international money transfers, international investments, becoming a dual citizen, etc. are all examples of interactions between societies. Each one of these activities can be conceptually categorized under some international topic.
This chapter discusses the ideas underlying all these international topics. The ideas are:
- Boundaries and Independence
- Sovereignty and Jurisdiction
- Agreements and Cooperation
- Unions and United World
For every international topic, we will discuss ideas, make choices, develop concepts, and design systems. All these are strongly influenced by the ideas mentioned above; either because we use the idea or because we refrain from using the idea.
The next section "The Ideas in Brief" introduces these ideas together. The next several sections discuss them further.
The Ideas in Brief
The first pair of ideas are "boundaries" and "independence" of societies. Utopian societies have well defined and uncontested boundaries and within those boundaries they have independence. These two ideas lead us to the idea of "sovereignty" and that leads us to the idea of "jurisdiction". These four ideas fully determine the sphere of control of any Utopian society. For any two Utopian societies, this sphere of control does not overlap. That means a Utopian society has no control over the choices made by another Utopian society.
The next two ideas are "agreement" and "cooperation". When Utopian societies need to accomplish something together, they will have to agree to do it and cooperate in doing it. When societies interact, they have to agree to the specifics of those interactions. These interactions are possible because of the agreement and cooperation between Utopian societies. Thus, it is important to know what those agreements are and the nature of the cooperation. The agreements and cooperation exist because the participating societies derive some benefit from them.
Boundaries are intended to present hindrances to some activities across those boundaries. The presence of boundaries and resulting hindrances will be an impediment in the well-being of some citizens. There will be a natural tendency of those getting adversely affected by these boundaries and hindrances to ask for those hindrances to be eliminated. Utopian societies are primarily focused on the well-being of its citizens. In serving this purpose, Utopian societies will eliminate hindrances that serve no purpose towards the common good and also minimize other hindrances. Usually these elimination and minimization of hindrances is accomplished by agreements and cooperation. However, there is a limit to reducing the hindrances because those hindrances exist to respect the notions of boundaries, independence, sovereignty and jurisdiction.
The only way those remaining hindrances can be eliminated is if those societies choose to unite in some way and eliminate those boundaries. This is the idea of a "union". In present times, we have no more than a handful examples of such unions; The European Union and the European Monetary Union being the two primary examples. As we make progress towards building Utopia, we will have tighter unions which will culminate in complete mergers of societies. Over time, with more unions and mergers, we will reach the stage of a "United World". Till then we will have international topics, their underlying concepts and systems, and we will need to design them well.
The next few sections discuss the ideas of boundaries, independence, sovereignty, jurisdiction, agreements, cooperation, unions and the United World.
Boundaries and Independence
Every society has physical boundaries. In Utopian societies, within those boundaries, citizens of a society have independence. With independence, we can do the following kinds of things in our society:
- We can set up social systems for the common good of citizens within the society.
- We can adopt a taxation model and set up infrastructure to collect them.
- We can make laws and regulations and expect them to be followed by members of the society.
- We can formally acknowledge our freedoms.
- We can grant ourselves rights and specify our responsibilities.
- We can allow or disallow entry to people from other societies into our society.
- We can allow or disallow our people to visit other societies.
With freedoms, within our own society, we can live anywhere, visit any part of our society, take up employment, start an enterprise, produce something, provide services, etc. The preceding list is just for illustrative purposes; there are many more things that we are free to do in our own society.
We can have rights in our society only because a majority of the citizens in our society agree that those are indeed "our rights" and are prepared to do "whatever it takes" to ensure that those rights are upheld.
When a society does whatever it takes to ensure and uphold those rights, the society incurs expenses. These expenses are paid for by collecting taxes. These taxes are one instance of our basic responsibilities. That the citizens have to follow the laws of their own society is the second instance of our basic responsibilities. Corresponding to this responsibility we get the right to make the laws as well.
Other societies cannot give us our rights in our society. Other societies are not responsible for the well-being of citizens in our society. Only our own society can give us what we call "rights". To collectively give us our rights, we collectively fulfill our responsibilities. Rights and responsibilities cannot exist without each other.
Without independence, citizens will have scant freedoms, inadequate rights and oppressive responsibilities. In present times, almost all countries claim independence. Mere independence is not enough to assure the well-being of all citizens of such independent countries. Independence has to be wielded well by the citizens to eliminate existing suboptimal situations regarding freedoms, rights and responsibilities of citizens. This independence has to be used by citizens to advance their society towards Utopia.
Sovereignty and Jurisdiction
From citizens' perspective, the extent of our power to make laws and give ourselves rights is limited to our own society. Within our society, we are the only decision makers. Within our society, we are the only enforcers of the laws that we make. That is sovereignty.
Our sovereignty delimits the boundaries of our ability to impose laws and enforce them. When we feel that some law is broken by someone, we can legally judge them only within our society. That is the idea of jurisdiction.
Sovereignty is our ability to claim and enforce our collective opinions like "this is right" and "that is wrong". Jurisdiction is our ability to view an event and classify which parts of the event are consistent with our understanding of "right" and which parts of the event are consistent with our understanding of "wrong". Jurisdiction also implies our ability to recommend a corrective action for some event that contains some "wrongs" and enforce those recommendations.
Our society has jurisdiction only over our own society. Our society has no legal standing to express a judgment about something in another society. Other societies have no jurisdiction over what happens in our society.
We cannot give citizens of other societies what we think of as their rights in their own societies. We cannot take responsibilities for citizens of other Utopian societies; those societies are more than capable of doing that on their own. We cannot expect other societies to help us in our responsibilities towards our own citizens. That is the nature of boundaries. That is the nature of sovereignty and jurisdiction.
Agreements and Cooperation
Our world is constantly developing. Our level of specialization, mechanization and automation is ever increasing. This makes some people better at doing some things than others. This makes these people (or societies) more proficient than others. This enables some to offer unique goods or services or offer standardized goods and services at a better price. They either gain a niche or a competitive advantage. All this makes trade happen. In the context of "international topics", it makes foreign trade happen.
Foreign trade is just one example of international interaction. International Travel is yet another. There are many other examples.
Any kind of international interaction cannot be "random". We will have some intuitive expectations. This implies that there are some rules associated with those interactions.
Each society is sovereign, it has jurisdiction over only what happens within its boundaries. So, who is in charge of making these rules that work across boundaries? The answer is "by agreements". Who is in charge of enforcing these rules? The answer is "jointly by cooperation and coordination".
Across society boundaries, we need to have conversations and discussions to eventually agree on shared models of allowed and disallowed, shared models of rights and responsibilities. Across boundaries, to do anything we need agreements and cooperation. We already are doing this when we engage in things like foreign trade, international travel, etc.
Since there are boundaries and since there may be differences in what are considered as rights and responsibilities, interactions across boundaries will not be exactly the same as interactions within the boundaries of a society. There will be restrictions and limits.
In the context of Building Utopia, Utopian Financial Infrastructure and International Topics, there will be several instances of these interactions. For these interactions and their associated models and agreements, there will be differences between current versions and the Utopian versions; watch out for these in the chapters related to international topics.
Unions
Within boundaries, we have the most freedoms and least restrictions. Across boundaries there are less freedoms, restrictions and limits. As societies evolve their thoughts about what is good and what is common good, some of these restrictions, limits and rules start seeming baseless, start seeming more as barriers and eventually they get discarded. A few good examples of this are: the concept of "Octroi" has mostly vanished, the "European Union", and the "European Monetary Union".
The idea of "eliminating barriers" can work only when societies across a boundary seem almost similar to each other, when the citizens of those societies have a feeling of "belonging together".
A simple application of the thought of "we belong together" was enough to discard Octroi because it did not "feel right" for transport of goods across state boundaries within a country to be taxed. An advanced application of the thought of "we belong together" led to the formation of the European Union and removal of trade barriers.
A much more advanced application of the thought of "we belong together" led to the formation of the European Monetary Union. The member countries of this union agreed to discard their local sovereign currencies, adopt a common currency and agree upon the principles, policies, rules and mechanisms for the common currency. Forming such a union demonstrates a serious commitment to the feeling of "we belong together". It is a big achievement.
From the perspective of monetary sovereignty, one should consider the European Monetary Union as a single society. Obviously it is not a single country. But, it is a single society formed from the union of several countries. These member countries collectively decide on admittance of other countries into their monetary union. The European Monetary Union could be considered as one more step towards building Utopia for these countries.
On the other hand, the United Kingdom decided to disentangle itself from the European Union. Brexit was due to disagreements; it was due to the reduction of the feeling of "we belong together". Perhaps, the United Kingdom entered into the European Union prematurely. Whatever the reasons, Brexit is not an impediment for the United Kingdom in achieving its Utopia. The United Kingdom is a monetary sovereign society. It has the independence to decide for the common good of its citizens and it will conduct trade with European countries with newly agreed terms.
Two Utopian societies may have differences in the laws and policy parameters within their boundaries, but they can always agree upon some rules for their international interactions. In the upcoming chapters related to International Topics, we will see several instances of such agreements.
United World
The discussion about ideas like "eliminating barriers", "we belong together", and "Monetary Unions" leads us to the question: what preconditions need to be satisfied for two neighboring countries to decide to merge and call themselves a single country - not just a monetary union? This question is complicated to answer and we will discuss it in a future version of this book.
We could call such a union a "complete union of societies". These kinds of complete unions will occur. At present, this may seem a bit hard to believe, especially since over the past century we have seen many "exits", "partitions" and "separations".
One of the major milestones in the path to building Utopia is a United World. The United World is the situation when we dissolve all boundaries and humanity will exist on Earth as a single society. The United World is just a milestone; it is not the end of building Utopia; it is a major milestone though.
Before we can get to a United World, we will go through a process of willingly consolidating several societies and countries into larger societies and countries. In this process, due to disagreements, some larger societies and countries may break apart into independent societies and countries. This is part of the process. It is a process of trying out different scenarios and discovering better scenarios. It is a process to distinguish between the more important and the less important.
Eventually we will get there. Eventually we will reach the milestone of a United World. No one knows how long that will take.
Until then, we will have countries, each of these countries will seek to maximize the good of its citizens, we will have international interactions, and the financial infrastructures of societies will agree upon various mechanisms for these international interactions.