Live and Let Live

Adam Taylor of the Washington Post says there are 250,000 people eager to migrate to a country which may not exist, at least not in the conventional sense. The country, called Liberland,  is based on territory nobody wants. Disputes in the Balkans left a kind of no-man’s-land there for the taking.  “Since the Yugoslav Wars … a few other territories went unclaimed by either side.” One of those unclaimed territories is a 3 square mile patch by the Danube River.

This created an opening for  Vít Jedlička, a 30 something Czech Euroskeptic who believes “socialism is the false belief that the state will spend your money better than you would”. He decided to establish a country based on the contrary principle.  Liberland consists of a woody area with no known residents and but a single old shack in evidence.  The Washington Post says that Jedlička, “realizing that the land was claimed by no one … claimed the approximately 3 square miles by the Danube river … set up a Web site, created a flag, a coat of arms, a motto (“To live and let live”) and drew up laws and a constitution.”  According to Wikipedia, “there are plans for an official cryptocurrency system, although all other currencies will be allowed … politicians will be constitutionally forbidden from indebting the nation … an electronic voting system will be used to elect members.”

Territory, a quarter million immigrants, investors.  What more do you need? Apparently much more. Adam Taylor says that “with most of these self-proclaimed states, there’s an element of the absurd. Often, the states seem less of an attempt to make a functioning state than just an attempt at a provocative statement.” In the conventional view Liberland is not a serious country because of its dissimilarity to ‘real’ states, which have capital cities, bureaucracies, presidents who travel in vehicle convoys and the other trappings of statehood.

But why can’t Liberland — or something like it — be a state? There are probably millions of people literally roaming the planet as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ whose only relationship to their country is a passport and a tax return.  To them Liberland might be as good or better than, say, Uganda. One could imagine a state whose primary existence is virtual yet which can perform all its function by contracting individuals. It would never need more than 3 square miles of woods and a shack.

The objection can’t be size or population.  After all, the Vatican is nearly 18 times smaller than Liberland and has a population 300 times smaller than the 250,000 applicants for citizenship in Liberland.  If the problem is lack of diplomatic recognition then why is ISIS, to all intents and purposes, something like a state?  Wikipedia says ISIS (or ISIL if you prefer) is “an unrecognized state  that seeks the establishment of a transnational Islamic caliphate. The group controls territory in four countries, including Iraq, Syria, Libya, Nigeria, with operations or affiliates in Lebanon, Egypt, and other areas of the Middle East,  North and West Africa,  South,  and Southeast Asia.”

While nobody formally recognizes ISIS over 60 countries are directly or indirectly waging war against it, including NATO and the EU.  That is a kind of recognition by negation. Why is it absurd to apply for citizenship in Liberland while Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter and countless others can apply to ISIS for citizenship with a straight face.  “I formally and humbly request to be made a citizen of the Islamic State,”Hasan says in a document addressed to “Ameer, Mujahid Dr. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.  It would be an honor for any believer to be an obedient citizen soldier to a people and its leader who don’t compromise the religion of All-Mighty Allah to get along with the disbelievers.”

People might regard ISIS as unspeakable, but most would regard it as real. The mechanism for joining ISIS is pledging allegiance through what is known as the bayat.  If you make your bayat and are accepted, you’re in.  Then you have to conform to policy and fork over a percentage of whatever loot you take. Dr. Theodore Karasik describing how the Islamic State views itself and the process of expansion, emphasizes that ISIS is not strictly based on territory.  Individuals from discontiguous places can apply for inclusion by pledging allegiance to one of the vilayat or administrative subdivisions.    Karasik writes:

the Islamic State is not surrounded by a wall to keep commerce and people in nor out in the field of “Caliphate” economics.

ISIS uses bayat to create local alliances with tribes with extremist leanings. We have seen how ISIS uses its local influence, probably with financial payout from their huge financial reserves from oil exports, taxation, and the illegal selling of antiquities, to seek alliances among tribes along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in Syria and Iraq. Now ISIS representatives are using bayat in Libya and Egypt in order to place communities under their control. This economic model is easily exportable, with or without oil reserves, to other parts of the region where Caliphate expansion is planned by the ISIS hierarchy.

Popular pledges of bayat on the local level construct a more interconnected area of governance out of the territorial patchwork under ISIS control. The unique ability for ISIS to traverse rival tribal coalitions is known as “blood pledges” (bayat damm) in order to forge blood-based alliances. Of course, tribes will use these so-called legal instruments to their own liking but ISIS knows how to make the most out of such an arrangement, especially execution for those who do not follow the practice. This practice has been demonstrated repeatedly in the so-called “Caliphate.”

ISIS operates very much like a transnational affinity group whose decisions are enforced by a kind of Murder Incorporated, in the manner of a criminal syndicate or intelligence agency. Its constitution is a set of principles.  It is held together by the pledge of loyalty, money and arms. Actually this model was once very familiar in the West.  In the late 19th and early 20th century, the revolutionary Left in Europe organized itself into a Communist International.  It was an organization open to anyone in any country.  Ho Chi Minh for example, made his bones in the International.

The early days of the International were in many ways powered by characters who would not look out of place in ISIS.  And so it remained until the organization became dominated by a single nation-state (the Soviet Union) which from 1924 onward progressively converted it into an instrument of the Russian politburo. But for a while the idea of proletarian internationalism (which is intuitively very similar to the Global Caliphate) was quite powerful.  “Imagine there’s no country.”  That’s what the International was all about.

Proletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as international socialism, is a socialist form of internationalism, based on the view that capitalism is a global system, and therefore the working class must act as a global class if it is to defeat it in class conflict. Workers thus should struggle in solidarity with their fellow workers in other countries on the basis of a common class interest, to avoid continued subjugation via divide and rule.

Proletarian internationalism is closely linked to goals of world revolution, to be achieved through successive or simultaneous communist revolutions in all nations. Marxist theory argues that world revolution would lead to world communism, and later still, stateless communism. Workers of all countries, unite! thus became a Marxist cry.

Marxists regard proletarian internationalism as the antonym of bourgeois nationalism but the term has been subjected to different interpretations by various currents of Marxist thoughts.

Who can think of the ISIS in the Syrian civil war, filled with recruits from all over the world, without recalling of the International Brigades in the 1930s Spanish Civil War. Like ISIS, “the International Brigades were military units, made up of volunteers from different countries, who travelled to Spain, in order to fight for the Second Spanish Republic, in the Spanish Civil War, between 1936 and 1939.”

The number of combatant volunteers has been estimated at between 32,000–35,000, though with no more than about 20,000 active at any one time. A further 10,000 people probably participated in non-combatant roles and about 3,000–5,000 foreigners were members of CNT or POUM. They came from a claimed “53 nations” to fight against the Spanish Falangist forces led by General Francisco Franco, who was assisted by German and Italian forces.

The point is that there is nothing inherently absurd about Liberland, unless both ISIS or the Comintern were similarly laughable. About the only truly absurd idea is president Barack Obama’s conviction that you need the trappings to be real. Speaking about ISIS to The New Yorker in January, Obama dismissively said: “the analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.” Recently the Stars and Stripes quoted a source who claimed that the forces of ISIS are now frighteningly professional.  They are the Lakers.

Comintern would easily have understood how bayat and enforcement by transnational terror worked. But the house of militant Bolshevism has since degenerated into what George Orwell called the “fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist” set.   Now, nobody can remember how it was in the old days. Stalin would have understood how ISIS worked. Perhaps Putin still does.  The Democratic Party, not so much.  Recently the White House proudly announced it had a gender neutral toilet.

Perhaps the last echoes in modern literature of how bayat worked is in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale.  James Bond is being tortured when the man from SMERSH comes in to enforce discipline on Le Chiffre.  The French Communist had forgotten that it was “Communist” part of his identity — and allegiance to Moscow that mattered.

It was extraordinary to hear the third voice. The hour’s ritual had only demanded a duologue against the horrible noise of the torture. Bond’s dimmed senses hardly took it in. Then suddenly he was half-way back to consciousness. He found he could see and hear again. He could hear the dead silence after the one quiet word from the doorway. He could see Le Chiffre’s head slowly come up and the expression of blank astonishment, of innocent amazement, slowly give way to fear.

‘Shtop,’ had said the voice, quietly.

Bond heard slow steps approaching behind his chair.

‘Dhrop it,’ said the voice.

Bond saw Le Chiffre’s hand open obediently and the knife fall with a clatter to the floor.

He tried desperately to read into Le Chiffre’s face what was happening behind him, but all he saw was blind incomprehension and terror. Le Chiffre’s mouth worked, but only a high-pitched ‘eek’ came from it. His heavy cheeks trembled as he tried to collect enough saliva in his mouth to say something, ask something. His hands fluttered vaguely in his lap. One of them made a slight movement towards his pocket, but instantly fell back. His round staring eyes had lowered for a split second and Bond guessed there was a gun trained on him.

There was a moment’s silence.

‘SMERSH.’

The word came almost with a sigh. It came with a downward cadence as if nothing else had to be said. It was the final explanation. The last word of all.

‘No,’ said Le Chiffre. ‘No. I …’ his voice tailed off.

Perhaps he was going to explain, to apologize, but what he must have seen in the other’s face made it all useless.

‘Your two men. Both dead. You are a fool and a thief and a traitor. I have been sent from the Soviet Union to eliminate you. You are fortunate that I have only time to shoot you. If it was possible, I was instructed that you should die most painfully. We cannot see the end of the trouble you have caused.’

The thick voice stopped. There was silence in the room save for the rasping breath of Le Chiffre.

Somewhere outside a bird began to sing and there were other small noises from the awakening countryside. The bands of sunlight were stronger and the sweat on Le Chiffre’s face glistened brightly.

‘Do you plead guilty?’

Bond wrestled with his consciousness. He screwed up his eyes and tried to shake his head to clear it, but his whole nervous system was numbed and no message was transmitted to his muscles. He could just keep his focus on the great pale face in front of him and on its bulging eyes.

A thin string of saliva crept from the open mouth and hung down from the chin.

‘Yes,’ said the mouth.

Perhaps it is the “Islamic”, not the “State” part that matters — for now.  You aren’t necessarily a “jayvee team” if you lack a motorcade.  And maybe some people realize that a flag of convenience, even one from Liberland, is more valuable than Obamacare if you can make your own arrangements.  Better perhaps to live in a country where the motto is “live and let live” than trust in real motorcade riding statesmen  whose watchword is “live and let lie”.

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