Social LibertySocial Liberty
← Back home

Liberty Before Democracy

Russia's democracy soured, the Arab Spring turned to winter, and Latin America gains economic freedom as faith in elections falls. With nationhood strained on the Arabian Peninsula, can liberty come by another road?

Idan Rednaxus ·
confederalismrojavalibertysovereigntytaxationcurrent eventsdemocracymunicipalismrussiayemenrentier stategeopoliticsnovgorodarab springtunisiaegyptlatin americaargentinael salvadorhondurasvenezuelakuwaitomanarabian peninsulaconsentsyriazaydistribes

Click to enlarge

There is a habit of treating liberty and democracy as one thing with two names. Hold elections and freedom follows; where freedom is missing, elections are the cure. The last thirty-five years have been hard on that habit.

Russia held real elections in the 1990s, and they ended with a president shelling his own parliament in 1993 and a privatization that handed the country's oil and metals to a few men who financed his reelection. Twenty-five years of Vladimir Putin grew out of that soil.

In 2011 the Arab Spring brought crowds and then ballots to Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. Egypt's elected president lasted a year before the army removed him. Tunisia, the one success story, watched its own elected president suspend parliament in 2021 and rule by decree. Libya and Yemen are still at war.

Latin America is going the other way, and in a stranger direction. Economic freedom is spreading there faster than anywhere in the world: Argentina's chainsaw deregulation, Bolivia's break with twenty years of MAS rule, Chile's turn under Kast. At the same time, support for democracy as such keeps falling in the region's polls, and the most popular leader in the hemisphere is Nayib Bukele, who rules El Salvador under a state of exception that has run since 2022.

And now the war on the Arabian Peninsula, described in Shakeup On the Arabian Peninsula, is testing something deeper than any single government. Missiles are landing on Riyadh. The Emirates' project in southern Yemen collapsed in a week. Iran is bombed and blockaded, and the Houthis charge tolls on a strait. What's being questioned isn't who governs these states but whether they hold together as states at all, and on whose terms.

So the question is a real one. Can there be a path to liberty that doesn't run through democracy? And if liberty can come out of a moment like this one on the peninsula, what form would it take?

Three claims that pull apart

Try three claims together.

First, liberty needs consent. The only thing that makes power legitimate is the agreement of the people it governs. That was the argument of the American Revolution, and of every movement since that asked for a vote. A people that can't choose or remove its rulers isn't free, however comfortable it is.

Second, majorities choose against it. Russians kept electing Putin long before the elections stopped meaning much. Egypt's first free election produced a government that tried to put itself beyond the courts, and when the army removed it a year later, crowds in Tahrir Square cheered. Voters often choose order, strength, or their own side over the rules that protect everyone, and they choose it freely.

Third, power follows rent. Whoever collects income they didn't earn, from oil under the ground, tolls on a canal or a strait, or protection money from a market stall, doesn't need anyone's consent and can pay for the force to keep collecting it. Russia's wells, Egypt's canal, the Gulf's oil fields, the Houthis' tolls on the Bab al-Mandab: in each case whoever held the rent held the power, whatever the ballots said.

Taken together, these look like a dead end. Liberty needs consent, majorities don't reliably give their consent to liberty, and whoever holds the rent can ignore both.

The way through is the third claim, because it explains the second. Majorities choose strongmen most often where the state lives on rent. There, an election isn't a bargain between people who pay for their government and a government that needs them. It's a contest over who controls a flow of income that owes nothing to anyone, and the winner keeps the flow and buys the order the voters asked for. Where a ruler has to live off his people's work, their trade, their harvests, their taxes, consent is given constantly and not only at elections: in what people agree to pay, where they take their business, whether they stay. Most of the history of liberty looks like that. Democracy in the modern sense came later, as a way of writing down a bargain that already existed. So the path to liberty doesn't run through democracy, or around it. It runs through rent: who collects it, and whether those who rule can live without asking.

The bell of Novgorod

Russia is usually offered as proof that liberty doesn't take root in some soils. Its own history says otherwise.

For more than three centuries the city of Novgorod governed itself through the veche, an assembly of its free men summoned by a bell. The veche chose the city's mayor and its archbishop, made treaties, and hired and fired princes. A prince of Novgorod served under contract; if he overstepped, the city showed him the road. The city lived by trade with the Hanseatic League and grew rich on furs from the north. Its birchbark letters, dug up by the thousand since 1951, show ordinary townspeople, women among them, writing to each other about debts, deliveries, and lawsuits. Literacy, commerce, and self-government arrived together, centuries before anyone in Moscow held a vote.

In 1478 Ivan III of Moscow took the city, abolished the veche, and carried its bell away. The point was not lost on anyone: the bell was the institution.

What Novgorod had wasn't democracy in our sense, since much of the land around it was held by a few great families. But it was liberty of a recognizable kind, and it rested on a city that paid its own way and a prince who needed the city more than the city needed him. Moscow's autocracy came from the other direction, from a state that gathered land and service to itself and owed nothing back.

The 1990s ran the Novgorod lesson backwards. Russia got elections first, with no settled rights in land, no courts anyone trusted, and a state budget that lived on oil and gas. Whoever held the center held the rent. The elections became a fight over who would sit on the wells, and once that was settled the elections stopped mattering. Democracy was laid over a rentier state, and the rentier state won.

What Bouazizi wanted

The Arab Spring is remembered as a demand for votes. It began as something else.

Mohamed Bouazizi sold fruit and vegetables from a cart in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia. On December 17, 2010, a municipal inspector confiscated his scales and his goods, and when he went to complain, no office would hear him. He set himself on fire in front of the governor's building. The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto later sent a team to reconstruct his life. They found that registering a legal business would have cost him 142 days and more than $3,000, that his family's house couldn't be used as collateral because its title was not recognized, and that the confiscation wiped out the only capital he had. In the following weeks dozens of other small traders across the region did what he did. De Soto's institute counted 63 in the first two months.

They were asking for the right to buy, sell, own, and be left alone by inspectors. That's the oldest liberty there is, the one the revolutionary generation in America called property, and it doesn't need a parliament to be granted. A permit office could have granted it.

What the region got instead was elections laid on top of states that still lived on rent. Egypt's government ran on Suez Canal tolls, foreign aid, and Gulf money, not on taxing its own people's work. Whoever won the vote won control of that flow, and the army, which had its own share of the economy to protect, decided it would rather hold the flow itself. The vendor's grievance was never addressed by any of the governments that came after him. Tunisia still had more than 190 self-immolations in the years after the revolution, by its own fire service's count.

The spring turned to winter because it was asked to do the wrong job. A vote could change who held the state. It couldn't change what the state was: a collector of rent that owed its people nothing because it didn't need their money.

Latin America's split

Latin America shows the same split from the other side.

What's spreading there is real. Argentina has repealed or rewritten hundreds of regulations, opened its skies and its rental market, and loosened labor rules that dated from Perón. Bolivia elected Rodrigo Paz on a promise to dismantle the fuel subsidies and state controls of the last two decades. These are liberties of exchange, the vendor's liberties, and for a great many people they are the ones that touch daily life.

But they arrived through elections. Milei, Paz, and Kast won votes, and so did Bukele, twice, the second time by a landslide in a reelection the constitution had seemed to forbid. The decline of democracy in the region is real too, but it lives somewhere else: in polls that show majorities indifferent to whether their government is democratic, and in what a leader does with his votes once he has them. El Salvador shows both.

El Salvador is the hardest case in this essay, because many could consider El Salvador today to have much greater social liberty than it has ever known. For a generation the country was governed, in daily life, by the maras. MS-13 and the two factions of Barrio 18 drew borders through cities that residents couldn't cross without risking their lives, recruited children out of schoolyards, and collected a tax they called, with perfect accuracy, la renta: weekly payments from bus drivers, tortilla sellers, shopkeepers, anyone with a stall or a route. A woman selling pupusas paid her renta or closed. That was a rentier sovereign in its plainest form, living on other people's work by the threat of force and answering to no one. Since 2022 it has been broken. Salvadorans walk at night through neighborhoods they hadn't entered in years, open businesses without paying anyone for the privilege, and send their children to school across lines that used to be front lines. For the vendor in San Salvador, Bouazizi's liberty has arrived: the liberty to buy and sell and be left alone.

It arrived under a state of exception that suspends due process, through mass arrests that have swept up tens of thousands of people, many never charged with anything, and with the courts and the press brought to heel. The power the gangs held over daily life has passed to the state, which now holds it without the limits a constitution is supposed to set. Salvadorans voted for that exchange by a landslide, and from where they stand it isn't hard to see why. The question isn't whether their liberty grew. It did, and more than most outside commentary admits. The question is whether a liberty given by one man, who can suspend the rules that protect it, can be kept once the thing it was won from is gone. Freedom from the gangs that depends on the president's grace is held at someone else's pleasure.

Two other cases show how fragile liberty held that way can be.

Próspera, the charter city on the Honduran island of Roatán, was the most serious attempt in the hemisphere to build liberty without democracy: a private jurisdiction, with its own commercial law, granted by the national government under its ZEDE law. Then the government changed, Congress repealed the law in 2022, and the Supreme Court declared the whole framework unconstitutional in 2024. Próspera still operates and is suing Honduras through international arbitration. Whatever one thinks of it, it shows that liberty granted by a sovereign is held at that sovereign's pleasure, and that the people living next door, in villages like Crawfish Rock, were never asked. A freedom the neighbors never consented to is a fragile thing.

Venezuela is the opposite case. Maduro was seized by American forces in January and flown to New York. Delcy Rodríguez, his deputy, governs in his place with his interior and defense ministers still in office, and Washington speaks of a "transition" whose terms it is setting. Whatever else this is, it isn't liberty arriving. It's a change of hands on the oil, by force, from abroad. Venezuela's oil made its state rich and its people dependent long before Chávez, and nothing in this arrangement changes that.

The pearl merchants

That brings us back to the peninsula, where the rentier state was born in its purest form. It's worth remembering what came before.

Before oil, the towns of the Gulf lived on pearls and trade. Kuwait's rulers taxed the pearling fleets and the merchants who financed them, and the merchants had a weapon: they could leave. Bahrain, Qatar, and the Persian shore were a few days' sail away. When Sheikh Mubarak al-Sabah's wars and levies around 1910 drove pearl merchants to take their business elsewhere in the Gulf, he had to offer them terms to come back, and Kuwaiti histories still call the year that followed the Year of Great Prosperity. The ruler needed the merchants' money. The merchants could take it away. Between those two facts sat a real, unwritten constitution.

In 1938 the Kuwaiti merchants went further and forced the creation of an elected Legislative Council, the Majlis, which for a few months controlled the state's finances. It was dissolved within the year. The same year, oil was struck at Burgan. Once the ruler had oil, he no longer needed the merchants' taxes, and the bargain that had held his power in check for a century was over. He paid them instead. That is the rentier state in one sentence, as Shakeup On the Arabian Peninsula put it: no taxation, so no representation.

Oman offers a second memory. The Ibadi tradition of Islam, dominant there, held for over a thousand years that the imam is chosen by the community's scholars and notables, can be removed if he governs unjustly, and that in some times no imam is needed at all. It's a theory of conditional, revocable authority that grew up on the peninsula itself, owing nothing to Europe.

Neither of these is democracy as the West exports it. Both are liberty of a kind, and both rest on the same foundation as Novgorod: authority that depends on the people it governs and can be held to account by them, through money, exit, or law.

What form it would take

So, can liberty be what emerges from this war? Not if the war ends, as most wars on the peninsula have, with a new arrangement among rentiers: the same royal families, the same flows of oil money, perhaps a new outside guarantor, perhaps the Houthis brought into the circle of those who collect tolls. That would be a shift in who holds the rent, not a change in what the state is. Elections laid on top of such an arrangement would go the way of Egypt's.

But this moment is different in one respect. The rentier bargain has been shown to fail at the one thing it promised. The kingdoms bought security, and the missiles came anyway. Gulf confidence in American protection is broken. Oil revenues are disrupted, the money that bought quiet is being spent on war, and the young men who were paid not to ask questions are now being asked to fight. A state that has to ask its people for something is a state that has to bargain. That is how liberty began in Kuwait's merchant towns and in Novgorod, and it's how it could begin again.

Structure is what lasts

Whether liberty emerges matters less than what shape it takes when it does, because shapes harden. The years right after a collapse decide arrangements that then hold for generations, long after the crowds have gone home and the people who made the decisions are forgotten.

Russia shows this on the economic side. Its liberty in 1991 was real, and its elections were real. What decided the next thirty years wasn't either of those. It was the loans-for-shares auctions of 1995 and 1996, in which a handful of bankers acquired the country's oil, nickel, and metals companies for a fraction of their worth. The question of who would own the rent was settled in about eighteen months, and every later election was held inside that settlement.

Egypt shows it on the political side: the revolution changed the president and left untouched an army that owned a large share of the economy, from bottled water to cement. A structure that had survived Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak survived the revolution too, and then ended it.

Latin America's gains raise the same question. Much of Argentina's deregulation began with a single emergency decree in December 2023, and what one decree can do the next one can undo. El Salvador's peace rests on a state of exception renewed month after month. Both are real expansions of liberty, built so far on structures that make them easy to reverse. A liberty that hasn't been built into who owns what, who decides what, and who can stop whom is a mood, and moods change.

So the structure of what emerges is as important as anything else, and it has two sides that can't be separated. The economic side is who holds land and resources, how the rent from them is collected and where it goes, and whether markets are open to newcomers or reserved for licensed families, generals, and friends. The political side is how many centers of decision there are, whether they can check one another, and whether people can leave one for another. An open economy under a single unchecked center will be closed again when the center finds a reason. Many centers living on a single concentrated rent will fight over it, which is the peninsula's war in a sentence.

What sovereignty is for

That brings us to sovereignty, the claim to the final word. The war is breaking sovereigns on the peninsula, and it's tempting to see that as the opening or the danger in itself. It's neither. The question is where sovereignty settles, and what it's attached to.

For most of the peninsula's history, authority there was mobile and negotiable. Tribes ranged over grazing lands with no fixed borders and shifted their allegiance from one sheikh to another as it suited them. Merchants moved between ports. A ruler's reach went as far as people's willingness to stay with him. Then, through the nineteenth century, Britain signed a series of treaties with the coastal sheikhs, the General Treaty of 1820, the Perpetual Maritime Truce of 1853, the exclusive agreements of the 1890s, that recognized particular families as the rulers of particular coasts and froze them in place.

In the twentieth century the oil companies needed to know whom to pay, and lines were drawn across the desert to decide whose concession was whose. Sovereignty became fixed, territorial, and attached to a family, and then the rent was attached to the sovereignty. The rentier state wasn't only a product of oil. It was a product of oil arriving at the moment when authority had just been fixed in a few hands by outsiders.

That's the lesson for what comes next. Sovereignty's proper role is protective: to keep outside powers from deciding a people's affairs, and to keep any one group from capturing what belongs to everyone. It goes wrong when it becomes a title to rent, so that whoever holds the final word also holds the wells, the straits, or the protection money.

The gangs of San Salvador were a sovereign of that kind, on a small scale. So is a royal family that owns the oil, and so would be a Houthi state that owns the strait.

If the war unsettles the peninsula's sovereigns, the risk is that new ones fix themselves onto the same rents, and the structure stays the same with new names on it. The opening is that sovereignty settles in more places, in cities and communities with their own revenues and their own word, while the rent itself is held in common and paid out rather than owned by whoever holds power. Sovereignty divided that way protects liberty. Concentrated on top of rent, it consumes it.

A Rojava on the peninsula

The closest recent attempt to build that kind of structure on purpose was in northeastern Syria. In 2012, as Assad's forces pulled out of the Kurdish north, the communities there organized themselves under the ideas of Abdullah Öcalan, who called the nation-state the problem rather than the goal. This collection of essays set out his principles years ago in Principles of Democratic Confederalism: "a non-state social paradigm," in which "the basic power of decision rests with the local grass-roots institution" and higher levels only coordinate. Rojava, as it came to be known, was built from the bottom up as communes, neighborhood councils, cooperatives, and a confederation of those councils, with Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian, and Turkmen communities each running their own affairs. Every office had two co-chairs, one of them a woman. It was the most serious experiment in governing without a nation-state that the region has seen in a century.

It's being folded back into Syria now. After weeks of fighting in January, the Kurdish-led forces agreed to a phased integration into the Syrian state, and the talks in Damascus have continued through the year. Its weaknesses were structural, in exactly the sense above. The communes were real, but the spine of the system was a single party and its militia, so when the military balance shifted, the whole structure shifted with it. And the oil fields of the east were held by the administration, not the communes, which made them the prize that every outside power circled.

There's a deeper problem with Rojava that makes Arabia a better candidate. Rojava had to build its confederation out of doctrine. Decades of Baathist rule had flattened the older structures of Syrian society, and the communes were drawn up by a movement and laid on top of what was left. Much of Arabia never went through that. Away from the capitals and the oil towns, it is still fragmented into tribal nations that are real, not folkloric. In Yemen the great confederations, the Hashid and the Bakil, have governed their own territory for centuries, through customary law, councils of sheikhs, and arbitration between tribes, in places no state has ever fully reached. The tribes of Mahra have kept both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi at arm's length. The tribes of Hadramawt have spent the last two years pressing for their own autonomy against every government that claims them. The anthropologist Paul Dresch, who spent years among Yemen's northern tribes, described a world in which a sheikh is a first among equals, allegiance can be withdrawn, and the tribe is a kind of standing agreement among its members rather than a government over them.

The largest of these tribal nations is the Zaydis of the northern highlands. Zaydism is a branch of Shia Islam, but in Yemen it has long worked as something more like a nation: a community of the mountain tribes, the Hashid and the Bakil among them, bound by a shared faith, a shared law, and a thousand years of history under the Zaydi imamate. Its political theory is worth knowing. A Zaydi imam wasn't supposed to inherit his office. Any qualified descendant of the Prophet's family with the learning and the courage could claim it by "coming out," khuruj, against an unjust ruler, and the community owed nothing to an imam who governed badly. The imams depended on the tribes, which were called the two wings of the imamate, and the tribes kept their own law and their own sheikhs under him. It was conditional authority, held with the consent of armed communities that could withdraw it, close kin to the Ibadi imamate of Oman. Shakeup On the Arabian Peninsula traced how that community was pushed into a sectarian corner from the 1980s on, and how the Houthi movement grew out of a Zaydi revival against that pressure.

That is close to what Rojava tried to build from theory: a confederation of self-governing communities, bound by agreement, with no single sovereign over all of them. Öcalan himself noted that grass-roots democracy "goes together well with the traditional confederate structure of the society." In Syria that structure had to be reconstructed. On the peninsula it already exists, imperfectly, and it doesn't need a party to impose it.

The same conditions apply, though, and the peninsula's tribes have failed them before. For decades Saudi Arabia paid stipends to Yemeni sheikhs through its Special Committee, and a sheikh who is paid from abroad is a rentier like any other, answerable to his paymaster rather than his people. Customary law protects the standing of men within the tribe far better than it protects women, which is the one thing Rojava put at the center and tribal custom mostly leaves out. And a tribal confederation that captures a strait or an oil field becomes a state of the old kind, with the old appetites.

The Zaydis show both the promise and the danger. Their own tradition is one of contestable, conditional authority, sitting on top of tribes that govern themselves. But the movement that now speaks for them has made itself the collector of tolls on a strait and of customs and fuel levies across its territory, while its public employees go unpaid. That is the rentier state reborn inside a tribal nation. Whether Zaydi Yemen ends up as a confederation of its tribes or as a Houthi state depends on which of those two inheritances wins. A Rojava on the peninsula would need what Rojava lacked and what the tribes have never consistently had: rent held in common rather than by whoever controls the ground, no single armed party as its spine, and the freedom of every member, not only every tribe, to leave.

What would that structure look like on the peninsula? Less like a national parliament and more like these:

Cities and tribes before nations. Liberty on the peninsula has always lived in its ports and its tribal confederations: Kuwait, Muscat, Aden, Jeddah, Mukalla. Self-governing cities that keep their own revenues and answer to their own merchants and residents, confederated with tribes that already govern themselves, are a more natural form here than a national state that never fully existed outside the palace. Splitting the Atom of Sovereignty and The Municipality Against the State made the general case; the peninsula's own history makes the specific one.

Rent that goes to the people, not the palace. The oil under the peninsula is land rent, value nobody created. Thomas Paine argued in Agrarian Justice in 1797 that rent from the earth belongs to everyone and should be paid out to each person as a dividend. A peninsula where the rent was collected publicly and paid to residents, rather than held by the ruler and handed down as favor, would break the rentier bargain at its root. A ruler who had to tax his people's work, rather than spend his wells, would have to ask their consent.

The strait as a commons. The Houthis' toll on the Bab al-Mandab and Iran's on Hormuz are a war over who gets to collect rent on passage. A free peninsula would treat the straits the way Paine imagined America's ports: open to everyone, so that every nation has a stake in keeping them open.

Exit as a right. The pearl merchants' power came from being able to leave. Every arrangement that makes it easy for people and capital to move between the peninsula's cities keeps every ruler honest in the way the old fleets did.

Elections last. Votes would come, and they should. But they work when they record a bargain that already exists, between people who pay for their government and a government that needs them. Laid on top of rent, they choose who gets the rent.

What it isn't ours to do

None of this is something outsiders can build. Venezuela shows what happens when a foreign power decides a transition. Próspera shows what happens when liberty is granted over the heads of the people living nearby. And as Steering Clear of Foreign Entanglements argued, Americans are in no position to lecture: the United States is paying for this war, and its own government lives more on borrowing than on consent.

What we can do is notice where the bargain is being struck. It won't be in the speeches of foreign ministers. It will be in which cities keep their own revenue, which merchants and families decide to stay or go, and whether a ruler, for the first time in eighty years, has to ask his people for something. The bell of Novgorod was carried off in 1478. Bouazizi's scales were taken in 2010. In both cases the liberty lost was the small, daily kind, and it's the small, daily kind that has to come first.

Sources

A note on how this piece was written: every argument, source, and structural decision in this essay is mine. I chose the examples, worked out the logic connecting them, and directed what each paragraph needed to say. The sentences themselves were drafted with AI assistance from that outline and then edited by hand. I'd rather say that plainly than have a reader guess at it.