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Comment by tabs_masterrace | Hacker News Reader

The concept of citizenship and passports always seemed so archaic to me. I never signed a contract with anybody, yet the place I was born in ultimately decides the boundaries of the space I'm allowed to live in.

Thankfully there is a lot of freedom of movement if you're lucky enough to have a "good" passport, but recently we've seen the trend reverse a bit due to the refugee-scare. Hopefully one day everything will be open for anybody.

But just hypothetically, if I want to grab a bike, ride to some isolated forest in France, build a cabin and live the hermit life, I can not to that. I'd be forcefully removed and placed back into my designated space. And force really is the only thing that gives basis to the claim of land. Seems kinda weird. Animals don't care and just move where ever they want to.

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>Animals don't care and just move where ever they want to.

A very very high fraction of animals are territorial and will fight to the death over land claims. You can see this in your back yard if you have squirrels or bird nests.

>But just hypothetically, if I want to grab a bike, ride to some isolated forest in France, build a cabin and live the hermit life, I can not to that.

This is actually a result of fairness on the part of the French government - you are a "nice person" and presumably would not ruin the environment for anybody else if you did that, but if it were legal to show up and make houses in French forests it would only be a matter of time before unscrupulous individuals began to show up and clear-cut the forest, overtaxing it and turning it into an unregulated slum city. Indeed if everyone were nice there would be no need for laws or governments at all.

This is obviously correct but also worth noting there is a middle ground. As evidenced by freedom of movement schemes within ASEAN, EU etc. So approaching the ideal of the OP but in a pragmatic way.

Well, Schengen grants me freedom of movement to roam to France and live there! So that middle ground does exist.

We are just slowly working toward more homogeneous soceties among which freedom of movement can be allowed - but currently, if we eliminate all borders tomorrow, it would be quite chaotic. What we first need to address are the struggles that make millions of people want to leave their home country, so they can be happy there, and there is no mass exodus from anywhere.

Yes I'm not that naive to not realize there are very good reasons the world works this way :). But I think its good to sometimes think about the big picture, how we ended up with these structures in place, and how we can improve for future generations - or at the very least try not go backwards.

Why cant i just walk into someone else cabin and say its mine - i find the concept of ownership ridiculous. So what you built it? You left it half an hour ago to collect wood- i assume you want to build another one and are sick of this one. What do you mean, permits and claims? Calling the police? This is all very regressive talk i hear here.

Turns out there are two sorts of Freedom - the good one (mine) Freedom and the bad one (others/your) Freedom. I will rage and fight for the good freedom, while demanding for someone else having his good freedom and parts of mine good freedom to limit your good freedom.

I would argue the concepts of citizenship and passports, along with their Westphalian corollaries of national sovereignty and diplomacy, are a very modern idea that, for the most part, protects people inside of nations from violence, and gives them the stability they need to live and thrive. The whole notion of 'freedom' requires a degree of police protection which doesn't exist, for the time being, without clearly defined national boundaries.

The hypothetical you describe, of free-moving people and nations, was the reality for most of human history. This was the era of marauding bands, violent nomadic tribes which pillaged, burned, murdered and raped, not to mention famine and other constant disruptions to daily life. On your way to the French forest you would be murdered by a highwayman.

It would certainly be ideal if all nations of the world were available to choose from for all people in a sort of geopolitical marketplace, but that would of course require all nations of the world to have identical values which allowed for the sort of cultural and racial mixing which would surely follow, and I think you'd struggle to find any country that's 100% OK with that.

> Westphalian corollaries of national sovereignty and diplomacy

You do realize that long before Europe was 'civilized' other peoples had nations and exchanged diplomats?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0959229010840618...

If we were conversing in the 19th century one could excuse this sort of willful Euro-centric ignorance, but it is now well into the 21st century and information is freely available. I guess one can file this under the 'When Rome Ruled the Known World' category. Hint: What stopped that expansionist power from moving East towards Euphrates and firmly lodged to the periphery of Mediterranean?]

Obviously diplomatic immunity, national borders and such concepts predate Westphalia. But the Westphalian model is the model on which the modern world is built for better or for worse. That's not really a disputed fact.

The key phrase in "grab a bike, ride to some isolated forest in France" being "in France". Shouldn't French citizens, through their laws and officials get to choose who gets to grab a bike and live in the french forests?

I'm probably more to the left as far as national borders are concerned compared to the average, but i don't see how your premise works. The French never signed a contract with you about living in a french forest (and i assume by your mention of a contract that you don't believe all ownership is theft), so why should you have the right to be there.

It's a bit of a double-edged sword.

That same force is what protects you from random people deciding to just take your property.

Imagine those boundaries as the lines a government says "This is as far as I can enforce certain rules".

Now, maybe it should be a little more easy to cross, but you also have the problems of rules of different areas being incompatible. Some things allowed in one country are not allowed in another. Certain standards practiced by one country aren't practiced by another. Etc. You also have ecological concerns and what not. Invasive species can devastate local wildlife.

True, animals do move where they want to, but they are limited by what they can naturally reach. Humans have the ability to go just about anywhere and transport anything with them.

It's not really the same force! And it's very easy to observe that they're not the same by looking at city, county and state boundaries in the US. The governments of those jurisdictions don't require "citizenship", they simply assume jurisdiction over whoever is physically within their boundaries at any given moment. (And yet they still enforce property laws!) Nations could very conceivably operate the same way in the future.

U.S. states certainly do have a concept of citizenship! It defines, among other things, who can vote.

Now, it's been watered down by the well-intentioned Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees citizenship in their state of residence to citizens of the U.S. (the amendment's laudable goal was to prevent the former slave states from denying citizenship to their black residents), but it certainly doesn't have to be that way. I'd very much support an amendment which states that one is a citizen of one's state of birth in the same way that one is a citizen of the United States by birth, and that any citizen of the United States may be naturalised into another state voluntarily and under the laws of that state, such laws being subject to Congressional override.

That would enable each state to ensure that its citizens are actually citizens (i.e., with a knowledge of & hopefully respect for its history & traditions), while preventing states from refusing citizenship to a class of citizens and giving the federal government the authority to correct unjust state regulations.

Yes, because all of those areas are in a covenant with each other. A Union of sorts. They've given up some measure of power to a larger federation in order to reduce their own overhead. But to be a part of that federation, they have to allow certain things.

Nations could technically operate the same way, but only as part of a larger collective. There would need to be some agreed upon rules, some governing body to oversee enforcement of those rules, etc. Certain things would need to be agreed upon. What could each nation have autonomy on, what would they need to give up, what would they need to start doing, etc.

> I never signed a contract with anybody, yet the place I was born in ultimately decides the boundaries of the space I'm allowed to live in.

To the contrary: you never signed a contract, but you still got a free education, roads and libraries and schools, etc. growing up in your own country.

You're as free to live a hermit life in France as you were a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years ago. And somebody else is also free to attack and imprison you for it (more recently French law enforcement, longer ago various peoples/tribes).

But you have this amazing things called rights in your own country, such as due process of law, where the police will protect property rights and the fact that you live in your home. That's not archaic, that's amazing.

This thread is such an interesting look into a worldview very different from my own. I’ve always worked with the assumption that we’re territorial animals and that the claim to territory is backed by force, kinda like on documentaries where two bears/lions/komodos fight it out (with large groups of people forming governments representing the biggest swinging dick).

Someone asked, in what I can only assume was complete seriousness, why they couldn’t just walk into someone’s domicile when they left. Wow!

> To the contrary: you never signed a contract, but you still got a free education, roads and libraries and schools, etc. growing up in your own country.

Yet it's not France that stop you from going away, it's the other countries that stop you from going there...

Why France refuse someone that doesn't cost them a penny for their education, roads and libraries and schools while they were growing up?

I'm Canadian, more specifically, from Quebec. I've met PLENTY of french people that had to go back to their countries because their visa expired. They didn't cost us anything, they gave plenty in taxes, more than many people I know, yet they have to go.

...yet the place I was born in ultimately decides the boundaries of the space I'm allowed to live in.

But not some places. There is the rather awful condition of being stateless for some people, such as many people living in northern Thailand. For example, four of those boys who were trapped in the cave in Thailand. Many people like that were born and lived their whole life in Thailand but are not citizens of any country. So they cannot get an ID card, open a bank account, have an official residence, get married, etc, etc.

Nowadays it would be possible to establish a "virtual nation" not bound to any territory but defined only by a group of citizens and a set of laws resident on a server farm somewhere (hosted by some friendly ally that does have territory). At least one such nation should be established to provide a citizenship of last resort for anyone who is currently stateless. I would call it the People's Republic of Hackistan. :-)

Microstates including virtual ones where a staple of cyberpunk.

They have the problem of fundamentally how do you back up the laws without force against other states who can.

The same way Vanuatu does: by allying with one or more patron states. Or maybe the U.N.

Estonia does something like this, they offer digital passports.

Digital residency, not passports. Very different than citizenship.

That's great for people who have citizenship already. But if you start life as stateless then it may difficult even to access that server where the virtual nation is defined since you can't get internet access (i.e. buy a SIM for a phone) without an ID.

Also, once you go stateless and then decide you can't do things that you want to do, you probably can't go back.

I think the thing missing from the other replies to your comment is the question of who owns your hypothetical forest. If everyone agrees that the forest is privately owned by some particular person, then I agree with you that your nationality shouldn't prevent you from buying a part of the forest from that person and living there. If the forest is publicly owned (i.e. jointly owned by all French citizens) then it's precisely the job of the French government to decide if you can live there.

Of course you could also ask about the example of a forest that was "unowned" (although these days to find land without a property claim you would have to go into space). But personally I'm inclined to treat unowned property the same as publicly owned (by the entire world). Everyone has an equal claim to it. Therefore, again, you would have to find some price at which the government was willing to sell it to you.

For animals, moving to land claimed by others often leads to death, so in most cases, we are doing better than that.

You might enjoy the writings of Lysander Spooner.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Treason

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysander_Spooner

> The concept of citizenship and passports always seemed so archaic to me.

My understanding is that passports are really only about 100 years old, coming into existence (or being required, anyway) during the Great War.

> But just hypothetically, if I want to grab a bike, ride to some isolated forest in France, build a cabin and live the hermit life, I can not to that. I'd be forcefully removed and placed back into my designated space.

It's actually kind of the opposite: it's not that nowhere else will accept you; rather, it's that your country must accept you. It's kinda like family, one definition of which is that your family are those who, if you show up at their door, they have to take you in.

What doesn't make sense to me is dual (or treble) citizenship. My country is my country; I could renounce my citizenship and swear allegiance to another, but it doesn't make sense to be to be a citizen of two different countries. How can one bear equal allegiance to two?

Why should citizenship require allegiance?

For most people, it's just something they're burdened with at birth.

Well I for one thank god I was born a Dutch citizen. I basically struck gold without even doing anything- I am the 10%. Its not fair I guess but I'm not giving up my ticket!

The funny thing is though that in the 19th century some of my ancestors left Eastern Europe looking for a better place. They found it but today that route is closed.

The world existed before you. So... You can't just come and say the concept of passport is archaic, the concept of countries is archaic, the concept of nationalities is archaic, the concept of government is archaic, the concept of birth certificates is archaic (yes, people collected your data before you agreed and became aware). France is the country of the french people who have their culture (that word includes a lot of things), and those people want to decide who they want to see on their territory. So you can't just come to the world naively thinking that you can go wherever you want. And legal system (another archaic concept) is the reason that you can. Otherwise, you would probably end up just like your cat when it ventures into neighbors backyard.

Wouldn't a completely border-less world rely even more on "force" as primary mean to assert claim on land? If anybody could take their bike to get to your cabin, wouldn't you be even more at risk of being removed "manu-militari"?

It is man made. Like any other law. Not because it is perfect or factually right, but because it works, and works well. That is good enough for me.

Not sure, but perhaps if you think this through, you'll come to the conclusion that in order to get what you want, you'd have to get rid of the entire concept of "countries". Also, where would you pay taxes?

I would interpret parent’s “open” as “non depending on birth”. As in people can freely apply to live anywhere with readonable amount of bureaucracy.

I think we have that but in one direction only: if a highly educated resident of a wealthy country wants to move somewhere else it will usually be easy. The farther we move from that spot, the harder it goes: it might require ungodly amounts of administrative work, enough bribing money, or demonstrably unique skills.

I agree with you that it brings up a lot of things to consider.

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