There’s a question that crops up in Chinese political debate: “Can democracy be eaten as food?” It points to a weak spot in the rhetorical armour of liberal democracy. Do our commitments to abstract theories of rights and democratic principles really trump our basic material needs? Or are they only contingent upon them? Where do they sit in the hierarchy of needs? Would you rather, to borrow from Chinese political imagery, have an iron ballot box or an iron rice bowl?
Like most people reared in liberal democracies I have a natural revulsion to these kinds of questions. There is something pharisaical and implicitly authoritarian about forcing someone to choose between freedom and survival. And yet recently I have started to think that maybe this question is more urgent and more complex than we might like to believe.
I recently emigrated from Britain to Switzerland. I did so for conventional reasons. The flight time is less than an hour. I am still in western Europe. Most people in this part of the country speak perfect English. As emigrations go this is one of the least traumatic culture shocks one could hope to experience. The transition was so smooth that it takes some cognitive effort to realise that while my life has outwardly changed very little my legal and political status has been utterly transformed.
I can not vote in Switzerland at any level — federal, cantonal, municipal. My visa is linked to my employment and so if I lost my job I would have a short period of time to find new permanent employment or I would have to leave the country. Speaking of jobs: I am barred from certain positions which are reserved for Swiss citizens. After ten years I will be able to apply for Swiss citizenship, although there are fairly exacting requirements. If in the intervening time I were to have a child then they would have no automatic citizenship rights and would have to be naturalised after a ten year wait.
Does any of this matter? After all, Swiss citizens living in Britain are in a similar position, albeit in a country with less stringent citizenship requirements and more liberal access to the welfare state. And yet as we are observing two hundred fifty years since the outbreak of the American Revolution it might be worth reconsidering this question from the vantage point of eighteenth-century political philosophy which, after all, forms the basis of contemporary democratic thought. It was Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1774 and channelling John Locke, who asked King George if he expected his subjects to “give up the glorious right of representation, with all the benefits derived from that” and make “themselves the absolute slaves of his sovereign will?” Jefferson was arguing that, in a Lockean sense, anyone who loses the “glorious right of representation” becomes a slave as they forfeit all control over the legislation that governs their lives. This was a commonplace of eighteenth century political rhetoric. Have I then, in moving to Switzerland and losing those glorious rights, also become a slave?
This might be an absurd question to ask in Switzerland but what about the United Arab Emirates? There are currently 240,000 British citizens living in the UAE, up from 100,000 in 2010. These people have chosen to live under a hereditary monarchy, where there is no free speech, no right to protest, no path to citizenship, no voting rights, the internet is censored, elective abortion is illegal, homosexuality is criminalised, alcohol consumption is constrained, drug use is harshly punished, labour protections are nil, and the threat of peremptory deportation hovers over every expat. This is not to mention that the entire economy is based on the peonage of largely South Asian migrants. A similar list could be drawn up about Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Bahrain, Qatar, and other no- or low-tax environments that attract European expats. And there seems to be no sign of this trend slowing down. Saudi Arabia — an hereditary monarchy bound to a Wahabi clerisy — is building a whole new city, Neom, in the desert with the express aim of attracting white collar workers from the West to live in the Arabian sands.
Brunch beats democracy, or so it seems
There has been much commentary concerning the plight of the proverbial Nick (30 ans), on whose shoulders the entire British state teeters. There has been a parallel discussion about the disastrous fiscal consequences should Nick and his cohort decide to relocate en masse to Dubai. Absent from these debates are the political connotations of Nick’s hypothetical expatriation. Migration is a classic case of revealed preference (the economic theory that choices reveal actual preferences, not stated ones). What does Nick’s departure for Dubai reveal about his true preferences? These are live questions discussed by real people on forums like Reddit’s /HENRYUK, where HENRYs (“High Earners, Not Rich Yet” — people earning £150,000+ per annum) ponder the trade-offs of moving abroad. While there are sincere discussions on /HENRYUK about the lack of western freedoms in, for instance, the UAE, that’s not the principal complaint about expat life there. The heat, the job insecurity, and the vulgarity of everyday life (in something like that order) seem to be far more of a burden than their putative loss of rights. On the other hand, people rave about crime rates (low), tax rates (lower), schools and healthcare (good), which all sum up to a higher quality of life. Brunch beats democracy, or so it seems.
It may well be that the Nicks and HENRYs of the world are just selfish, money-hungry brutes who never cared about democracy or freedom or other people at all, and that Dubai actually conforms to their ideal of government. If the fiscal impact of their expatriation was nil (which it very much isn’t) we might well be tempted to say: let them go! But this, I suspect, is a coping mechanism. As with any large-scale phenomenon we have to assume that for every person who actually moves to Dubai there are any more who want to but can’t. We have to reckon with the prospect that millions of people from the homeland of Magna Carta, parliamentary democracy, and the hallowed Anglo-Saxon tradition of individual liberty would rather live under Lockean conditions of slavery. The air of liberty is not so sweet, it turns out, nor are the rights of representation so glorious as to stay their departure.
The economist Albert O. Hirschman argued that in any situation where their needs are not met consumers have three choices: they voice their concerns, they maintain their loyalty irrespective of declining standards, or they exit. His “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” paradigm offers another perspective on the flight of democratic citizens to authoritarian polities. It may be the case that the British state’s indifference has ignored their voice and its mismanagement has exhausted their reserves of loyalty. Exit is a cry for better governance, not an endorsement of petro-monarchy. Most of them would rather, to quote the inimitable Thomas Skinner, “live in England than a skyscraper in the middle of a desert any day of the week” and would return posthaste if either party or any member of parliament actually worked to improve the country along the metrics of quality of life that matter instead of continuing to impose the grab bag of hobby-horses and pet policies that pass for “sensible government’ in the purlieus of the Palace of Westminster.
Nation-states have become migration-states. Citizenship is transformed from a bond to a transaction
I fear, however, that this is not the case and that the expatriation of hundreds of thousands of educated and thoughtful people from democracies to conditions of pre-modern tyranny signifies the end of one system of international organisation and the beginning of another. This is because what Nick is doing is part of a larger global trend in mass migration. Since 1945 an unlikely mix of rising social spending, neoliberalism, and the consolidation of international law has encouraged migration from poor states to rich states. This has subtly changed the nature of statehood and the terms of citizenship. Since the Treaty of Westphalia it has been taken for granted that the state was the highest form of sovereign actor making statehood the highest aspiration for nations seeking recognition on the international stage. The allegiance of the citizenry was given to the nation-state which guaranteed the rights and welfare of the citizens in turn. Thomas Jefferson famously enshrined these principles in the Declaration of Independence. But now that states not only permit migration, but court it, encourage it, and foreground it in their national stories, that earlier model is obsolete. Nation-states have become migration-states. Citizenship is transformed from a bond to a transaction. States want migrants to build their economies and fund their fiscal obligations; migrants want a better standard of living. In the process the hard principle of national self-determination (which, lest we forget, lay behind two world wars and the decolonisation movement) has been ceded to an amorphous and chaotic notion that the highest good lies in opportunistic lifestyle arbitrage. This is the rejection of citizenship all-round in favour of marginal gains in living standards. It is not just that people can’t eat democracy but they don’t care to. The migrant to the West prefers the iron rice bowl to subsistence in the developing world, Nick prefers the iron brunch in Dubai to the iron rice bowl in Zone 4 — and nobody cares about the iron ballot box at all.
