Governance for Happiness

The previous essay argued that the factors that appear to be driving global discontent are not temporary distortions that well-functioning systems will eventually absorb and resolve. It referenced the insight of W Edwards Deming that every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. Deming’s insight was developed in the context of manufacturing defects and supply chain management, but it generalises meaningfully to the domain of political and economic governance.

Contemporary democracies are not failing because their politicians are uniquely venal, or their citizens uniquely apathetic. They are failing because they are operating within institutional frameworks that are not adequate for the world as it exists, and that contain no reliable mechanism for forcing their own adaptation. Political systems, unlike markets, are largely insulated from the creative destruction that displaces firms unable to adapt to changed conditions. A manufacturing firm that consistently produces defective outputs loses market share and eventually fails. A governance system that consistently produces defective outputs — elite capture, institutional paralysis, inadequate responses to external challenges — persists, held together by inertia, elite self-interest, and the absence of a sanctioned alternative. The structural condition of democratic governance is to resist adaptation.

Yet if the performance of government in supporting happiness in the democratic world is bad, it is substantially worse in much of the world under the control of autocracies and hybrid regimes. And the problem here is that those countries are both institutionally and culturally even less able to create the conditions for reform.

The essays that follow in this cluster are an attempt to design an evolution of the system. The aim isn’t to propose reforms within the existing framework — marginal improvements to campaign finance rules, or modest extensions of international treaty mechanisms — but to describe institutions of a genuinely different kind, built on different architectural principles, that complement and improve the efficacy of government.

Before introducing those institutions though, it is worth being precise about what they are designed to protect.

The Sovereignty Fallacy

What is sovereignty actually for?

Essays in the previous cluster explored this question through the lens of the sovereignty fallacy — the way in which “sovereignty” is routinely invoked to protect the interests of governments rather than citizens. It is worth returning to the point here, because it is the normative foundation on which everything that follows rests.

The standard account of sovereignty — the one embedded in the international order since the Peace of Westphalia — is territorial and governmental. A sovereign state has supreme authority within its own borders. Other states may not interfere in its internal affairs. This principle was a genuine achievement when it was codified: an attempt to end the catastrophic religious wars of the seventeenth century by establishing a framework in which coexistence, however imperfect, was possible.

But consider what sovereignty does not say. It does not say that citizens are sovereign over their governments. It does not say that the people who live within a territory have the right to determine the conditions of their own lives free from arbitrary power — whether that power is external or domestic. In practice, sovereignty as a legal principle is primarily a protection for governing elites. It shields them from external accountability. It insulates the mechanisms they use to maintain power from outside scrutiny. And when it is invoked by democrats and authoritarians alike as a defence against international obligations, it performs exactly this function.

The argument of this cluster is that citizens need protection from two directions: from outside interference and coercion by foreign powers, and from domestic capture by the elites who govern them. These are not the same problem, but they share a common root: the gap between formal sovereignty — the legal status of a state — and effective sovereignty — the practical ability of citizens to determine the conditions of their own lives.

Closing that gap is fundamentally the challenge that a reformed governance architecture needs to be designed to meet.

Realpolitik Redux

The term “Realpolitik” has come to be associated with the politics of pragmatism, of the engagement between states on the basis of a realistic assessment of how their interests do and don’t align. It is usually seen in contrast to engagement based on values.

The term as coined and originally defined by Ludwig von Rochau in 1853 was subtly different though, and more interesting in the context of this project. He explained the term as follows:

“The study of the forces that shape, maintain and alter the state is the basis of all political insight and leads to the understanding that the law of power governs the world of states just as the law of gravity governs the physical world. The older political science was fully aware of this truth but drew a wrong and detrimental conclusion—the right of the more powerful. The modern era has corrected this unethical fallacy, but while breaking with the alleged right of the more powerful one, the modern era was too much inclined to overlook the real might of the more powerful and the inevitability of its political influence.”

Historian John Bew has argued that it was “an early attempt at answering the conundrum of how to achieve liberal enlightened goals in a world that does not follow liberal enlightened rules.” This is precisely the problem that I am saying the world has still failed to adequately grapple with.

Steven Landsburg, in his 1993 book The Armchair Economist, made the memorable assertion:

“Most of economics can be summarized in four words: ‘People respond to incentives.’ The rest is commentary.”

I believe that the same assertion can be made about geopolitics, and it is this observation that I believe needs to be the nucleus of any meaningful and sustainable solution to creating a new architecture for the world order.

In essence, an entity is required that has both the power to behave coercively, and the structural incentives to exercise that power responsibly and benignly. To that end, I have developed the concept of sovereigncy, a system structured around a new trans-national entity designed to close the gap described above between formal and effective sovereignty. I have also proposed a complimentary concept of tribunacy, a system to ensure that the governance of domestic politics is structured to the benefit of its citizens and not the political class.

Introducing Sovereigncy and Tribunacy

Citizens face outside coercion when their government lacks the scale, leverage, or institutional backing to resist pressure from larger powers. The Unravelling World Order essay traces this dynamic through multiple domains: trade weaponisation, supply chain vulnerability, military deterrence, the structural incapacity of smaller states to shape global environmental outcomes. In each case, formal sovereignty — the legal right of a state to determine its own affairs — provides no practical protection. The right exists, but the capacity to exercise it does not.

Citizens face domestic capture when the institutions designed to check governmental power are themselves captured by the executive they are meant to constrain. This is not limited to authoritarian states. In functioning democracies, the temptation to exploit control over the mechanics of democracy like electoral administration, judicial appointments, anti-corruption mechanisms, and media regulation is structural and permanent. The people who benefit most from the current distribution of institutional power are exactly the people least likely to voluntarily reform it. This is not a moral judgement; it is a predictable consequence of the incentive structures within which political actors operate.

The response to these two forms of exposure needs to take a specific shape: institutions that are structurally insulated from the actors they are designed to constrain. The institutional framework proposed here has two components, with a common logic: to provide a structured system of governance over governance.

The first is a sovereigncy. The concept is built on a recognition that the sovereignty which matters — effective sovereignty, the practical capacity for self-determination — is not diminished by carefully circumscribed international cooperation, it is enhanced by it. A small or middle-sized democracy negotiating alone with a major authoritarian power has formal sovereignty and limited effective sovereignty. The same country, operating as part of a collective trans-national entity with shared military capacity, pooled economic leverage, and binding democratic commitments, has both. The paradox at the heart of the sovereigncy concept is that a small, precisely defined cession of formal sovereignty produces a substantial increase in the sovereignty that citizens can actually exercise.

What makes a sovereigncy categorically different from the multilateral institutions that already exist, and that have consistently failed to maintain order and equity among states, is not its scope or its ambition. It is a single architectural feature: compulsion. The institutions of the existing international order share a common failing: they require cooperation but cannot compel it. A sovereigncy operates on the opposite principle. Member states agree, as a condition of joining, that the collective has enforcement authority against them over the obligations they have undertaken. This changes everything. It is the difference between a contract with no remedy for breach and one with an enforceable consequence. Sovereignty without enforcement is a declaration. Sovereigncy with enforcement is a system.

The second institution is a tribunacy. Where a sovereigncy addresses the compulsion dimension — protecting citizens from outside coercion and from their own governments’ ability to subvert democratic standards without consequence — tribunacy addresses the question of citizen sovereignty over how they are governed. Its mandate is not to govern: it is to govern the rules of governing, to maintain the constitutional architecture that makes democratic self-determination possible, and to provide the formal pathway by which that architecture can be reformed.

These two institutions are complementary in their design and mutually reinforcing in their effects. A sovereigncy provides the external enforcement backstop, and a narrow set of executive functions that need to be held separate from internal democratic systems to ensure a member country retains its democratic character. A tribunacy, mandated in a country’s constitution, is the mechanism through which a country’s constitution can change to best meet the democratic needs of the country, free from the self-interested interference of the ruling elite. Neither institution can fully perform its function without the other. Together they provide a strong, interlocking, protective system that maximises the chances that Government will act in the best interests of its citizens.

More detail on these ideas is provided in the companion introductory essays. There is both a lot to absorb to fully appreciate the strength of the system, and a lot that would still need to be developed before it could be considered ready to implement. I ask only that you approach with an open mind.

Before leaving this topic, it’s worth making a brief comment on naming. The introductory essays talk in detail about the origin of the names and their significance. What is worth emphasising here is that the “cy” suffix has a common usage in English when defining a system, or a class of entity, and it is in that sense that I am talking about them here. The specific instances of the entities I have described would, following a standard English naming protocol, be logically called a sovereignate and a tribunate. What I want to again emphasise is that in form, function, and name, these concepts are about the system, and I venture, a better system.

A World that is Unsafe for Autocracy

I previously grappled with the problem of how to approach first world and third world unhappiness without implying moral equivalence. The question I want to address here is an extension of that dilemma: what should the stance of the democratic world be toward the systematic improvement of the lives of those in low and middle income autocracies, and specifically, what does this mean for a sovereignate.

One of the foundations of the post-cold-war international economic order was that trade is beneficial regardless of the political system of one’s trading partner — that engagement is better than isolation. This principle produced real development gains. It provided the economic framework through which hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty. It also financed the build-up of authoritarian capacity in ways that now threaten the system that underpinned that success. China has never fully respected the terms under which it was admitted to the World Trade Organisation, allowing it to exploit countries that do; it has since gone on to weaponise its trade strength and dominance of critical supply chains. Russia attempted to leverage Europe’s energy dependency to further its strategic aims — and while it ultimately failed, it inflicted severe economic pain in the process. Beyond these prominent examples, there is a respectable argument that across many autocratic countries, unfettered globalisation has worked primarily to the benefit of extractive elites, with trade generating sufficient national wealth for rulers to keep their populations pliant while they corruptly enrich themselves.

The alternative logic is one of systematic economic and technological isolation. This was the approach the west, led by the United States, applied to the Soviet Union — foundational to the partitioning of the world into two competing blocs during the cold war. Explicitly codified as the doctrine of containment, it contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, whose economic system buckled under the accumulated pressure of a model that could not indefinitely defy the logic of economics. Containment may have imposed genuine costs on the citizens of the Soviet bloc in the short term, but it ultimately supported their liberation from a toxic political and economic order.

Applying that logic to the modern world confronts four interrelated problems. The first is that the deficiency of the Soviet bloc was its economic system, not its political system alone. It was the faulty premise of central planning that failed. Modern autocracies have largely embraced market economics and found ways to make markets and authoritarian governance coexist with sufficient stability to deprive external pressure of the lever that ultimately undid the Soviet system. The second problem is that the countries outside the core of the rich democratic world lie on a spectrum — from flawed democracy through hybrid regimes to deeply repressive autocracy. The clean binary of the cold war no longer exists. The third is that countries outside the rich world now represent a large and growing share of global trade. Even if the entire democratic world collaborated on a principle of exclusion, the scale of trade flows among the excluded group would likely be sufficient to cushion most of the economic pressure. Fourth, to the extent that such exclusion did inflict economic pain, most of it would fall on the innocent citizens of those countries rather than on the ruling elites it was designed to constrain.

These realities explain why western leaders, confronting an increasingly predatory trade environment, have reached for the language of de-risking rather than de-coupling.

One of the recurring themes in modern geopolitics is the tension between values and interests as the guiding principle for rich countries in setting their foreign policies, and this tension is nowhere more acute than in trade relationships. Whether the post-cold-war doctrine of engagement — spreading prosperity and freedom through commerce — was driven primarily by values or interests is difficult to say. Likely it was genuinely seen as serving both, while also affording the west a comfortable sense of its own benevolence. With the rupture of the world order now beyond serious dispute, it is a good time to ask whether that doctrine should remain the guiding principle going forward.

Rather than choosing between values and interests, a more productive lens is the distinction between the short and the long term. In the long term, logic and evidence suggest that the interests of the democratic world are best served by the spread of genuine democracy and by concentrating relationships — in trade, security, and political alignment — among those who share its values. Members of stable democracies are, as a consistent body of research shows, more reliable trading partners, more peaceful neighbours, and less likely to use economic relationships as instruments of coercion. On a long horizon, values and interests are not in tension — they are congruent.

In the short term, however, applying a values-based approach rigorously would cause massive disruption and economic loss, for democracies and autocracies alike. The same tension applies in the security domain: the west has shown considerable willingness to set aside its values and sustain deep military relationships with manifestly repressive regimes when strategic interest demanded it. In both cases, the problem is the same: the democratic world has persistently allowed short-term expediency to crowd out long-term principle, repeatedly sacrificing conviction to pragmatism and opportunism.

What I would propose therefore is that the relationship between democracies and autocracies should be structured around a progressive de-coupling: not a sudden rupture, but a ratcheting exclusion of autocracies from the benefits that accrue to democratic partners — market access, financial systems, supply chain integration, technology partnerships, security alliances, arms sales, and political support. The aim would be to create a more benign environment for democracies through two mechanisms. First, by gradually reducing dependence on autocracies, democracies would increasingly insulate themselves from the economic and political risks that such entanglement entails. Second, it would make authoritarian governance increasingly costly for the elites who sustain it, and democratisation increasingly attractive for governments willing to embrace its obligations.

That second mechanism warrants closer scrutiny. Today’s world is not the neat binary of the cold war, in which the democratic bloc carried sufficient economic and political weight to impose genuine costs through containment. Nor is there a clean threshold between what constitutes an acceptable level of democracy and what does not. There remains, too, the unavoidable moral dilemma that imposing sufficient economic pressure on a repressive ruling elite necessarily means inflicting hardship first and most on the innocent citizens the policy is intended to liberate.

This proposition must nonetheless be weighed against the corrosive effect of the alternative. As discussed at length in the earlier essay on global unhappiness, the political hypocrisy of the rich world has steadily eroded its legitimacy and its capacity to bring any order to international affairs. A democratic world that lacks conviction in its own principles, and is unwilling to submit to the rules it asks others to follow, forfeits its claim to any moral authority. That deficit of conviction is not a minor inconvenience — it is a structural barrier to the predictable and cooperative global environment that democracies need.

The underlying logic of what I am proposing is not novel: it is the same logic that underpins sanctions regimes applied to authoritarian states today. The innovation is to make it systematic, transparent, and governed by consistent rules — rather than leaving it to the selective judgements of powerful states pursuing their own interests under a humanitarian veneer.

What this means for a sovereigncy depends heavily on how the concept is implemented — whether there is a single institution or several, the breadth of participation, and the relationship with the United States, which as the preeminent power may lack the strategic imperatives that would draw it into membership. Whatever the configuration, the broad direction is clear: countries are either in or out of the democratic club. If you are in, you are expected to commit to a pathway of continuous democratic renewal and improvement, with real enforcement. If you are out, you are progressively excluded from the benefits that membership confers — cooperation in trade, security, and political relationships. The logic is compelling: if democracies want a world that is safe for them, they need to act collectively, purposefully, and systematically to build it.

One characteristic of this proposal is worth highlighting explicitly to head off rhetorical objections: This is not imposing democracy, nor political colonialism, nor the imposition of western values. It is creating escalating incentives for democratic reform, while leaving the ultimate choice to each government. It is democratic states exercising their sovereignty legitimately and in their own interests. The corollary is that governments that choose to retain autocratic systems, and thereby face increasing exclusion, are not merely making a foreign policy choice — they are overtly denying their own citizens their legitimate sovereignty, that is, their right to choose how they are governed. To the extent that this stance causes harm, moral responsibility for that harm sits squarely with ruling elites that resist democratisation.

That said, it is worth returning to the moral question that I posed at the start of this section. I previously made the case that focusing on first-world wellbeing was defensible provided it caused no harm to those in the developing world whose circumstances were definitively worse. What I am proposing here almost certainly breaches that principle, even if the fault lies unambiguously with the ruling elites of autocracies. The question is whether that breach is justifiable. The answer rests on an unknowable outcome. To the extent that progressive exclusion causes some countries to democratise, the wellbeing of their citizens will improve — whether in the near term or over a longer horizon. That gain will be offset, to some degree, by declining circumstances in those autocracies that resist. The net effect cannot be known in advance, and is to some extent a matter of value judgement about how to weigh different kinds of harm against each other, and the extent to which future benefit is discounted relative to current harm.

The point worth emphasising is this: the world has largely exhausted its existing repertoire of ideas for improving the wellbeing of people in underdeveloped countries. Aid is increasingly constrained and of contested effectiveness. Many developing countries have proved resistant to the economic prescriptions of the IMF. Conditional investment has had limited impact. The functional reality is that extractive ruling elites continue to deprive their citizens of the opportunity to fully flourish across large swathes of the globe. The approach advocated here may not succeed either — but it is at least grounded in coherent logic, morally defensible, and capable of being sustained and applied with consistency.

Moving Forward, not Back

I want to close this essay with a word about the ideological alternatives that are gaining ground as existing institutions lose legitimacy.

There is a human tendency, when familiar systems fail, to reach for frameworks that have the character of certainty. The attraction of nationalism is not difficult to understand: it offers identity, clarity, and the comfort of a defined enemy. The attraction of authoritarianism is similar: it offers decisive action, uncomplicated by the messy negotiation of pluralist democracy. Both are being rehabilitated in the current moment — not because they have acquired new intellectual validity, but because the existing system has lost so much of its own.

The historical record of both is not ambiguous. Nationalist movements have rarely produced durable prosperity or security for the citizens they claimed to represent; more often, they have concentrated power in the hands of elites while displacing the costs onto exactly those they claimed to protect. Authoritarian models have produced growth and social order under specific conditions and at specific moments, but have shown no capacity to sustain it against the inevitable tendency of unaccountable power to serve itself.

What is on offer in this cluster is different in kind. Not a return to past ideologies that have caused injustice and failure, but an attempt to apply Deming’s logic: to ask what institutions, designed to be systemically functional, would be adequate to the challenges of the world as it actually is. The claim is not that the specific proposals for sovereigncy and tribunacy are necessarily correct in every detail. It is that the direction of thinking is right: toward institutions designed for citizens rather than governments, with enforcement mechanisms rather than voluntary compliance, and with structural insulation from the elite capture that defeats reform within conventional political channels.

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