Rothbard’s Defense of Border Control

In his article “Nations by Consent,” Murray Rothbard reiterated his argument that individual liberty does not envisage atomistic human beings isolated from the societies in which they live:

Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one of several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions. He is generally born into a “country.” He is always born into a specific historical context of time and place, meaning neighborhood and land area.

He was writing in 1993, not too long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, at a time when the former Soviet Republics featured regularly in political debates on nationalism and national borders. In that context, Rothbard wrote,

In the last five years, however, we have seen, as a corollary of the collapse of the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, a vivid and startlingly swift decomposition of the centralized State or alleged nation-state into its constituent nationalities. The genuine nation, or nationality, has made a dramatic reappearance on the world stage.

Although most of Rothbard’s examples are drawn from Eastern Europe, it is important to note that the central argument in his defense of self-determination isn’t at all dependent on the specific events in Eastern Europe. The gist of his argument is in the last paragraph:

In sum, if we proceed with the decomposition and decentralization of the modern centralizing and coercive nation-state, deconstructing that state into constituent nationalities and neighborhoods, we shall at one and the same time reduce the scope of government power, the scope and importance of voting and the extent of social conflict. The scope of private contract, and of voluntary consent, will be enhanced, and the brutal and repressive state will be gradually dissolved into a harmonious and increasingly prosperous social order.

The argument would be exactly the same if events in the Soviet Union had taken a different course. The problem Rothbard is addressing is that of state tyranny, which he viewed as the greatest threat to individual liberty. He often depicted the doctrine of states’ rights and national self-determination as important bulwarks against the tyranny of centralized state power. National self-determination, and the principle of nations by consent, recognize people in a specific nation, living in a specific country, and within a specific geographical space. Therein lies the foundation of border control.

Debating Rothbard’s Examples

Many examples of state tyranny could be given, but the particulars of any specific tyrannical state are not essential to Rothbard’s opposition to state tyranny. This is because his opposition to state tyranny is based on the principles of self-ownership and individual liberty. It is not based on what a specific state did, but rather on the inherent tendency of states towards tyranny. The more centralized state power becomes, and the weaker the limits on the exercise of that power, the more likely that states become increasingly tyrannical.

Nevertheless, examples are important in the explanation and justification of any theory. Examples should, of course, be clear, comprehensive, and accurate. A theory without examples is impossible to defend, and if there are no good examples of a theory it is fair to conclude that the theory is worthless.

However, it is important not to lose sight of the purpose of an example. Examples may help to explain the meaning of a theory, but they do not necessarily serve the purpose of proving that a theory is true.

Critics of a theory can of course attempt to debunk specific examples by providing counterexamples, or even by arguing that the given examples have been wrongly understood. But if a counterexample does not address the main foundations of a theory, the counterexample does not prove that theory to be false.

In many cases, debunking an example only suggests that a more robust example is required to illustrate the theory. Anyone who has been a teacher understands this. If an example does not work, if it is not clear, if it is meaningless to the students, a better example is needed. The teacher does not say, “Well, if my example did not land, my entire lesson must be wrong.”

An analogy to illustrate the importance of this point may be taken from mathematics, where theorists may dispute the correctness of a “lemma”—“an auxiliary proposition used in the demonstration of another proposition.” But disproving the lemma does not disprove the larger proposition. The theorem is not disproved by a “local counterexample”:

I shall call a “local counterexample” an example which refutes a lemma (without necessarily refuting the main conjecture), and I shall call a ‘global counterexample’ an example which refutes the main conjecture itself. Thus your counterexample is local but not global. A local, but not global, counterexample is a criticism of the proof, but not of the conjecture.

Similarly, in philosophical debate, examples serve the function of helping to illustrate and substantiate the fundamental theory—but refuting an example does not disprove the theory if the example does not constitute the foundation of the theory.

Of course, if an attempt to provide better examples continues to prove fruitless, it may certainly be an indicator that the theory is probably wrong, and that the counterexamples are “global” rather than “local.”

This should be borne in mind when people attempt to “debunk” Rothbard’s arguments by quibbling about his examples concerning the various nations of Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and everywhere else that Rothbard drew examples from.

Examples from Historical Events

Understanding the purpose of examples is especially important because the best examples tend to be drawn from contemporary or recent events. They are chosen for their relevance to the listener, rather than because they are—in an abstract sense—the “best” example to prove the point.

Any teacher knows this—you can teach the same lesson for decades, but you probably need fresh examples each year. The old examples no longer resonate. The joke is told of a child who asked her mother, “Who was Paul Newman?” to which the mother replied, “He was the Brad Pitt of your grandma’s generation.” Came the next question: “Who is Brad Pitt?”

An example has no deeper significance for the theory that it illustrates, beyond serving an illustrative and explanatory purpose. As time passes, fewer people will remember the details of the events from which the examples were drawn. They will not immediately know if the example is “local” or “global.” They would have to study the relevant history in more detail.

Often people do not have time to study the history of all the examples being bandied about. It becomes easy for anyone to claim to “disprove” a theory by questioning the details of “local” examples that are ancient history to most listeners.

It is certainly easy to mislead people by using examples from centuries past. That is why so many political and ideological debates masquerade as debates about history. The more historical the example, the less likely that anyone knows whether it is true or not.

An example is when Republican politicians say things like, “Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is exactly like Jefferson Davis of Mississippi—Democrats are all the same!” They frequently remind everyone that, “Abraham Lincoln waged war to free the slaves!” Many people do not know enough about nineteenth century history to evaluate the truth or otherwise of these claims.

In fact, such examples are not intended as historical statements—they are political slogans that listeners will agree with because they support the speaker’s party politics:

History professor V.D. Hanson, who became a celebrity Republican spokesman by superficially trashing Southerners as traitors, has just informed us that Minnesota governor Walz is a “Confederate.” Some other “conservative” writers have broadcast similar opinions.

Not surprising, since blaming Southerners for everything bad has been stock-in-trade for the Republican Party since its creation in the 1850s. The worst thing these people can think of to say about the Minnesota leftist insurgents is that they are “Southern.” Even though Minnesota is in every way probably the single most un-Southern State in the Union.

Rothbard’s Political Philosophy

This makes it all the more important to distill the essence of any philosophical theory and avoid getting unnecessarily tied up in details concerning the examples. When Rothbard wrote about why he began to view mass immigration as a pressing issue, was this central to his thesis on nations by consent? He wrote,

I began to rethink my views on immigration when, as the Soviet Union collapsed, it became clear that ethnic Russians had been encouraged to flood into Estonia and Latvia…as cultural and welfare-state problems have intensified, it became impossible to dismiss [immigration] concerns any longer.

Should that be read as, “I’ve now decided to support border control because I just discovered that Russians have flooded Eastern Europe”? or, even worse, “Mass immigration is bad because I just heard the news about what is happening in Estonia”? Is Rothbard’s philosophy nothing more than a string of misunderstood examples that we can debunk by showing he did not correctly grasp the history of Latvia?

Of course not. Rothbard was merely explaining the context that made questions of national identity more pressing in political discourse at the time he was writing. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the problem of national identity broke into the public’s consciousness, and became much more dominant in political discourse.

It was not that the East European nations had never before had any problems with Russia until the Soviet Union collapsed, or that Rothbard was not aware of these problems until the fall of the USSR. The point is that the disintegration of the USSR lent this question such compelling urgency that it was no longer prudent for libertarians to ignore it—unless they wanted to live in a cave, oblivious to what was going on around them.

A similar example may be taken from the Brexit debates, which split British people on regional and national lines. Scottish nationalists largely wanted to remain in the European Union and England largely wanted to leave. This is an example—it does not mean no Scots wanted to leave or no English people wanted to remain. But the example illustrates a time when people who had never previously thought too much about their national identity began waving their national flags, the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew.

Nicola Sturgeon—leader of the Scottish National Party—was said to have “styled herself as a cross between Robert the Bruce and Margaret Thatcher, in her august fight to roll back the State of Westminster.” Did this upsurge in nationalist sentiment mean people were claiming never before to have realized there were British nations? No, the English and Scottish have always been aware of national identity. But Brexit catapulted national identity onto the center of the political stage with an urgency specifically tied to the Brexit debate, with nationalists temporarily beguiled by the prospect of an independent Scotland as an EU member state.

The flags came out in answer to the political questions of that moment, but it does not imply that these questions were “new” or that nobody had heard of these sentiments before. The same has happened in the context of mass immigration. National flags are waving as they rarely have done in the recent past. Immigration is not a new problem, but it is widely seen as an increasingly urgent problem.

Rothbard’s views on nations by consent are once again in the limelight. Libertarians who ignore the nationality question and continue merrily defending free trade, free movement of workers, and open borders, oblivious to the concerns of increasing numbers of people, are unwise. That is the point.