By Welf Herfurth

Introduction

After publishing my article on trust, social cohesion, and National-Anarchism, I received a number of thoughtful and challenging questions. Rather than treating them simply as criticism, I welcomed them because they touched on issues that deserved more explanation than I was able to provide in the original article.

Some of the questions go directly to the difficult parts of the argument. If I advocate smaller and more autonomous communities, what prevents those communities from becoming authoritarian themselves? What does a genuine right to leave mean in practice? What happens to children born into such communities? Who protects individual rights? How would disputes between communities be resolved? And if some form of shared legal structure remains necessary, have we simply reinvented the state under another name?

These are legitimate questions. More importantly, they cannot be answered simply by repeating that decentralization, autonomy, and voluntary association are desirable. Any political philosophy worth discussing must also consider what happens when its principles collide with the less convenient realities of human behavior.

The questions also made me realize that some ideas in my original article could easily be misunderstood without further clarification. Terms such as community, nation, tribe, cultural continuity, trust, and autonomy can mean very different things to different readers. National-Anarchism itself carries historical and political associations that make clarification particularly important.

That is why I decided to answer the questions individually and then publish those answers together as a follow-up to the original article.

I should make one point clear from the beginning: these answers represent my own understanding of National-Anarchism and my own political thinking.

I do not speak on behalf of an organization, movement, party, or other National-Anarchists. Nor am I presenting these answers as an official National-Anarchist programme. There is no central authority issuing an approved interpretation that I am attempting to reproduce here. Other people who identify with National-Anarchism may disagree with some of my conclusions, perhaps substantially.

That does not particularly trouble me. A philosophy centered on decentralization and autonomy would be rather strange if it demanded absolute ideological uniformity from everyone claiming an association with it.

What follows should therefore be read as my attempt to think through the implications of the ideas I presented in the original article.

I also do not pretend that I have designed a perfect political system or that every practical problem can be solved neatly. I am deeply suspicious of political philosophies that claim to possess a final blueprint for human society. Human beings are too complicated, circumstances differ too greatly, and power has an unfortunate ability to corrupt whatever institutions we create.

My argument is consequently not that autonomous communities would eliminate conflict, oppression, distrust, or abuses of power. They would not.

The question I am interested in is more modest but, I believe, more important: Can we organize society in ways that disperse power, allow greater cultural and political experimentation, strengthen voluntary communities, and give individuals more meaningful alternatives when the institutions around them no longer represent their values?

The questions that follow gave me an opportunity to explore that idea more deeply and, in several places, to qualify or clarify arguments from the original article.

I am publishing them for the same reason I published the original piece: not because I expect everyone to agree with me, but because political ideas improve when they are questioned.

And if an idea cannot survive serious questions, it probably did not deserve our trust in the first place.

1. The Problem of Power

If distrust leads people to seek protection from the state, who will protect individuals from abuses committed by autonomous communities themselves?

This is an important question because decentralization does not automatically produce freedom. A state can become authoritarian, but so can a family, church, village, political movement, or autonomous community. Replacing one large concentration of power with many smaller ones does not, by itself, solve the problem of power.

My argument is therefore not that autonomous communities should have unlimited authority over their members. Quite the opposite. If autonomy is to mean anything, it must apply not only to communities but also to the individuals who live within them.

The first safeguard must be the right of exit. A community should be free to organize much of its internal life according to its own values, customs, economic arrangements, or cultural traditions, but membership cannot amount to ownership of the individual. If someone no longer accepts those rules, that person must have the right to leave.

But the right to leave cannot exist merely on paper. A person who is physically prevented from leaving, stripped of documents or property, threatened with violence, or deliberately made incapable of leaving is not participating voluntarily. At that point, the community has crossed the line from autonomy into coercion.

There must therefore be some principles that exist between communities rather than being determined exclusively within them. Autonomous communities could establish treaties, federations, arbitration systems, mutual-defense agreements, or common legal principles dealing with matters such as violence, fraud, property, movement between communities, and the right of exit.

Critics may respond that this begins to resemble government. To some extent, it does. But there is an important distinction between accepting shared institutions for limited purposes and accepting a centralized state with an ever-expanding authority over virtually every aspect of social life.

National-Anarchism, as I understand it, should not mean abolishing every institution above the village and hoping human beings suddenly become saints. It means applying decentralization and subsidiarity: decisions should be made at the smallest practical level, while broader institutions deal only with problems that genuinely cannot be resolved locally.

There is also another safeguard that is often overlooked: competition between communities. Under a centralized system, if the state becomes oppressive, escaping its authority can require leaving the country entirely. In a decentralized society containing many autonomous communities, a person could potentially leave one community for another without abandoning an entire civilization, language, or geographical region. Communities that become excessively oppressive would risk losing members, skills, trade, reputation, and relationships with neighboring communities.

None of this guarantees that abuse will disappear. No political arrangement can make such a guarantee. States abuse people. Families abuse people. Religious institutions abuse people. Corporations abuse people. Communities can abuse people as well.

The real question is therefore not, “How do we create a society in which nobody can ever abuse power?” Such a society has never existed and probably never will.

The more realistic question is: How do we prevent power from becoming so concentrated that an abusive institution becomes almost impossible to escape?

My answer is to disperse power as widely as possible, protect the individual’s ability to leave, establish limited agreements between communities for basic protections, and prevent either the state or the community from claiming absolute authority over the individual.

Autonomy without the right of exit can become tyranny. But individual freedom without functioning communities can leave people isolated and increasingly dependent upon distant institutions. The challenge is therefore to preserve both: strong communities that are free to govern themselves, and individuals who remain free to walk away from them.

How can the “right to leave” a community be guaranteed when a person has no money, housing, documents, employment, or support network outside it?

This is perhaps one of the strongest criticisms of the idea of voluntary autonomous communities. It is easy to say that nobody is forced to remain because everyone has the “right to leave.” But a right that cannot realistically be exercised is of limited value.

If someone has no money, no independent housing, no employment, no documents, and no support network outside the community, then technically allowing that person to walk through the gate does not necessarily make their membership genuinely voluntary.

This means that the right of exit must be understood as more than simply the absence of a locked door.

First, an autonomous community should never have the right to confiscate or withhold a person’s identity documents, personal property, savings, or other resources in order to prevent them from leaving. Nor should leaving result in violence, imprisonment, threats, or retaliation against relatives who remain behind. These would be forms of coercion rather than legitimate expressions of community autonomy.

Second, communities would need arrangements with one another concerning movement and resettlement. A decentralized society does not necessarily mean thousands of completely isolated settlements refusing to interact. Communities could maintain agreements allowing people to travel, work, trade, temporarily reside elsewhere, and ultimately join another community.

There could also be independent associations specifically designed to assist people leaving communities. Charities, religious organizations, mutual-aid societies, cooperatives, family networks, federations of communities, and other voluntary institutions could provide temporary accommodation, transport, employment assistance, or legal representation. We sometimes make the mistake of assuming that if the state does not provide a service, nobody possibly could. Human societies developed systems of mutual assistance long before the modern welfare state appeared.

However, I would go further. If we seriously claim that membership of a community is voluntary, then communities themselves have responsibilities toward people who decide to leave.

For example, a person should retain legitimate personal property and an agreed share of assets that genuinely belong to them. There could also be an obligation to provide a reasonable transition period or basic assistance for someone leaving. The exact arrangements could differ between communities, but the principle should be clear: a community cannot deliberately create total dependency and then point to a theoretical right of exit as proof that membership is voluntary.

This becomes particularly important for people who were born into a community rather than choosing to join it. Someone who voluntarily entered a monastery, cooperative, religious settlement, or intentional community as an adult knowingly accepted certain conditions. A child born there made no such decision. When that child reaches adulthood, there must therefore be a meaningful opportunity either to remain and accept membership voluntarily or to leave and build a life elsewhere.

None of this means that leaving can be made effortless. Leaving any society, relationship, family, profession, or country can involve economic and emotional costs. Freedom cannot mean that every difficult personal decision must be made consequence-free.

But there is an important distinction between natural difficulties and deliberately manufactured dependency.

If I leave a community and discover that life elsewhere is difficult, that is not necessarily oppression. If the community deliberately ensures that I have no documents, no possessions, no access to my savings, no possibility of employment elsewhere, and no safe way to depart, then my membership is no longer meaningfully voluntary.

So when I speak about the right to leave, I do not mean merely a theoretical legal principle. I mean the practical ability to separate oneself from a community without being imprisoned, dispossessed, or deliberately reduced to destitution.

This also illustrates something important about my understanding of National-Anarchism. Autonomous communities cannot exist as completely sealed worlds. They would still require relationships with one another, common understandings about movement and basic protections, and institutions capable of mediating disputes between communities and individuals.

The objective is not to replace one enormous state with hundreds of miniature dictatorships.

It is to create a society in which authority is decentralized enough that people have genuine alternatives. A community can only reasonably call itself voluntary if its members are genuinely capable of leaving it.

2. Children and Individual Choice

Would children born into these communities genuinely be able to choose their own values, or would they be subjected to the group’s beliefs until adulthood?

No child is born into a neutral environment. Every child is raised within a particular culture and is influenced by the values of parents, family, school, religion, community, media, and the wider society. That is true in an autonomous community, but it is equally true in the societies we live in today.

A child raised in a Catholic family will probably be exposed to Catholic beliefs. A child raised by secular parents will probably encounter secular values. A child growing up in Germany, Brazil, Iran, or Japan will absorb different assumptions about society, morality, family, authority, and acceptable behavior. Even state education reflects particular political and cultural values.

So I do not believe it is realistic to demand that autonomous communities raise children without transmitting their beliefs. Culture could hardly survive if every generation were expected to begin from zero.

The more important question is what happens when the child begins to develop beliefs of his or her own.

There must be a distinction between passing on values and preventing independent thought. Parents and communities should be able to teach children their traditions, religion, history, language, and moral beliefs. But as children mature, they should increasingly be exposed to the existence of other ideas and other ways of living. They should be able to question what they have been taught without being subjected to violence, imprisonment, or other forms of coercion.

Education is therefore particularly important. Community autonomy should not mean intellectual isolation. Children should acquire basic literacy, numeracy, practical knowledge, and enough understanding of the wider world to function outside their community if they eventually decide to leave it. Otherwise, the supposed right of exit becomes meaningless. Someone who has deliberately been denied the knowledge and skills required to survive elsewhere may technically be free to leave while being practically incapable of doing so.

I would also distinguish between children and adults when discussing voluntary association. An adult may consciously choose to join a community with strict religious, cultural, political, or social rules. A child born there has made no such choice.

For that reason, reaching adulthood should represent an important threshold. The young adult should have the opportunity to decide whether to remain within the community and accept its obligations or leave and pursue a different life. That decision is only meaningful if the person knows alternatives exist and possesses the practical ability to choose between them.

Would every young person make a completely independent choice? Of course not. None of us does. Family loyalty, cultural identity, emotional attachment, economic circumstances, and social expectations influence people everywhere. A young person raised in modern liberal society is influenced by that society just as someone raised in a traditional religious community would be influenced by theirs.

The objective therefore cannot be to eliminate influence. It should be to prevent influence from becoming captivity.

This also places limits on community autonomy. I support the right of communities to preserve and transmit their culture, but I do not believe that gives them ownership over the minds or lives of the next generation. If a community must prevent its young people from encountering alternative ideas in order to survive, then its traditions are being maintained through coercion rather than genuine loyalty.

In fact, a healthy community should have enough confidence in its own values to allow them to be questioned.

Some children raised within these communities would undoubtedly leave. Others might leave for a time and later return. Some would reject the beliefs of their parents completely. Others would consciously embrace them. That diversity of outcomes would not represent the failure of autonomy. It would demonstrate that membership has become a genuine choice.

For me, the principle is therefore relatively simple: communities should have the freedom to pass on their values to the next generation, but the next generation must ultimately have the freedom to decide whether those values will remain their own.

If a community prohibits or persecutes conduct considered legitimate in other communities, who will determine the boundary between cultural autonomy and violations of human rights?

This is one of the most difficult questions because there is no perfectly neutral authority capable of drawing that boundary for everyone. Even the concept of “human rights” is interpreted differently across cultures, political systems, religions, and historical periods.

If we say that every community may organize itself however it wishes, we risk allowing autonomy to become a justification for abuse. But if we say that every community must conform to one detailed set of social, cultural, and moral values imposed from above, then meaningful autonomy disappears.

My starting point would therefore be to distinguish between rules governing voluntary membership in a community and actions that violate the basic rights of individuals.

Different communities should be able to establish very different standards of behavior. A religious community might prohibit alcohol. Another might permit it. One community might have conservative expectations concerning dress and relationships, while another might be socially liberal. One might organize property collectively, while another might strongly emphasize private property.

I see no reason why these communities could not coexist, provided adults understand the rules, voluntarily choose to live under them, and retain a meaningful right to leave.

The situation changes when a community moves from saying, “You cannot do this while voluntarily participating in our community” to saying, “You cannot leave, and we may imprison, assault, enslave, or kill you for refusing to obey us.”

That is where I believe cultural autonomy reaches its limit.

There would therefore need to be a narrow foundation of protections applying across communities. These should concentrate on protecting people from serious coercion rather than attempting to impose cultural uniformity. They could include protection against murder, physical violence, slavery, involuntary confinement, deliberate dispossession, and being physically prevented from leaving a community.

Who would enforce these protections?

I do not think the answer necessarily has to be a powerful central state. Communities could establish federations, treaties, independent arbitration bodies, courts agreed upon between communities, or other institutions responsible for disputes that cross community boundaries. Their authority should be limited to clearly defined areas rather than allowing them gradually to regulate every aspect of internal community life.

This distinction is important. There is a considerable difference between a common institution saying, “You may not imprison someone who wants to leave,” and saying, “Every community must have identical laws, education, family structures, economic systems, and social values.”

The first protects the possibility of autonomy. The second eventually destroys it.

There will inevitably be difficult cases in between. Human beings have been arguing about the boundary between freedom and harm for thousands of years, and decentralization will not suddenly produce a mathematical formula that settles every moral dispute.

That is why I would prefer overlapping safeguards rather than one institution possessing the final and unlimited authority to define acceptable behavior. Local customs, individual rights, agreements between communities, independent arbitration, and broader federations could all play a role.

This also means accepting genuine pluralism. If autonomous communities are to have any meaning, I may have to tolerate communities whose values I personally dislike. Other communities would have to tolerate mine. Mutual respect does not require mutual approval.

But tolerance cannot mean that individuals become the property of their community.

For me, therefore, the boundary lies principally at serious coercion and the destruction of meaningful individual choice. Communities should enjoy broad freedom to determine their culture and internal rules, but that freedom should stop where they use violence, captivity, or comparable coercion to prevent individuals from exercising basic personal autonomy.

The objective is not to create one universal culture. It is to establish enough common ground that radically different cultures can coexist without either a central authority forcing them to become identical or individual communities, becoming prisons for the people born or living within them.

Cultural autonomy should protect the right of communities to be different. Human rights should protect the right of individuals not to become their property.

If you acknowledge that families, churches, villages, and communities can also become authoritarian, why does he believe decentralization would necessarily produce greater freedom?

I do not believe decentralization necessarily produces greater freedom. That would be replacing one political certainty with another, and history gives us little reason to believe that any particular institutional arrangement automatically makes human beings benevolent.

Families can be authoritarian. Churches can be authoritarian. Villages, communes, cooperatives, corporations, political movements, and autonomous communities can all become oppressive. Power does not become harmless simply because it is exercised locally.

My argument for decentralization is therefore not that local power is inherently good. It is that concentrated power is inherently more difficult to escape and more dangerous when it is abused.

If one central authority controls the laws, police, education, taxation, welfare, economic regulation, and many other aspects of life across an entire country, an individual who fundamentally disagrees with that system has relatively few alternatives. Changing it requires influencing millions of other voters, capturing political institutions, accepting permanent minority status, or leaving the country altogether.

Decentralization creates the possibility of alternatives.

Imagine instead a society composed of numerous communities with substantially different political, cultural, economic, and social arrangements. One might be religious and conservative. Another might be secular and socially liberal. One might favor extensive communal ownership, another private property and markets. Others might experiment with arrangements that none of us has yet considered.

The important point is not that one of these models would be declared universally correct. It is that people would have more than one model available to them.

This is why decentralization must be connected to the principles I discussed earlier: the right to leave, freedom of movement, practical opportunities to join other communities, and limited protections against serious coercion. Without those safeguards, decentralization could simply replace one large authoritarian system with many small authoritarian systems.

But there is another important advantage. Smaller concentrations of power are generally easier to challenge, reform, abandon, or replace than enormous ones.

If a community of several thousand people adopts rules its members increasingly reject, changing those rules is potentially much easier than changing the political direction of a country containing tens or hundreds of millions of people. Local leaders are closer to the consequences of their decisions, and individuals have a greater possibility of organizing alternatives.

Decentralization can also limit the scale of political mistakes. When a central government makes a disastrous policy decision, millions of people may be forced to live with the consequences simultaneously. In a decentralized system, different communities can pursue different approaches. Successful arrangements can be copied voluntarily, while failed ones can be abandoned without requiring an entire society to fail with them.

In that sense, decentralization allows political and social experimentation.

It also changes the nature of political conflict. In a highly centralized system, groups with fundamentally different values are constantly competing to control the same institutions because whoever controls those institutions gains the power to impose rules on everyone else. Elections therefore become struggles over who gets to control the machinery of the state.

Greater autonomy offers another possibility: instead of constantly asking, “Who gets to rule everyone?”, we can sometimes ask, “Why must everyone be ruled in exactly the same way?”

That does not eliminate conflict. Nor does it guarantee liberty.

It simply disperses political power and increases the number of alternatives available when a particular authority becomes oppressive.

And this is where trust connects back to my original argument. In a smaller community, authority is potentially more visible and personal. Those making decisions are more likely to live among the people affected by them. That does not guarantee trustworthiness, but it reduces some of the distance between decision-makers and those who must live with their decisions.

Ultimately, my support for decentralization is based not on an idealistic view of communities but on a rather skeptical view of power itself.

I do not trust the state with unlimited power. But neither do I trust communities, churches, corporations, families, political parties, or any other institution with unlimited power.

That is precisely why I favor dispersing it.

Decentralization does not guarantee freedom. It creates more centers of power, more alternatives, and potentially more opportunities to escape, challenge, or replace authority when it becomes abusive. The objective is not to find rulers who can always be trusted. It is to build a society in which nobody needs to be trusted with too much power in the first place.

3. The Right to Leave

If an external authority is necessary to guarantee the right to leave, physical safety, and individual property rights, does this not mean that some form of shared state or legal structure would still be necessary?

Possibly a shared legal structure, yes. But that does not necessarily mean a state in the conventional sense.

This distinction is important. I do not understand anarchism as the absence of organization, rules, agreements, or institutions. Human beings living together will inevitably develop all of these. The real question is how much power those institutions possess, how centralized they become, and whether their authority can expand beyond the purposes for which they were created.

If autonomous communities recognize a right to leave, protection from physical violence, personal property rights, freedom of movement, and agreements governing relations between communities, then mechanisms would obviously be needed to resolve disputes concerning those principles.

There might therefore be arbitration bodies, common courts, councils representing different communities, federations, mutual-defense arrangements, or treaties establishing certain minimum protections.

A critic can reasonably say: “That sounds rather like government.”

In one sense, it is governance. I have no difficulty admitting that.

Where I would disagree is with the assumption that governance must inevitably take the form of the modern centralized nation-state.

Consider a federation of autonomous communities. They might agree that none may physically prevent an adult from leaving, seizing someone’s legitimate personal property because they wish to depart, or attack neighboring communities. They could jointly establish an arbitration body to deal with disputes concerning those agreements.

The crucial limitation would be that this institution could not then decide how every community educates its children, structures its economy, celebrates its traditions, regulates ordinary social behavior, organizes its internal leadership, or determines every other aspect of community life.

Its authority would be specific rather than universal.

This is where the principle of subsidiarity becomes important. Matters that can reasonably be handled by individuals should remain with individuals. Matters that require community organization should be handled by communities. Matters involving several communities can be addressed through federations or agreements between them. Only problems that genuinely require action at a broader level should move to that level.

Power should travel upward only, when necessary, rather than automatically flowing downward from a central authority.

Would such a federation sometimes resemble a very minimal state? Perhaps. I am less interested in winning a semantic argument over what we call the institution than in examining how power actually operates.

If someone wants to call a voluntary federation with narrowly defined common rules a “state,” then we have partly reached a disagreement about terminology. My objection is not to people cooperating, establishing rules, or creating institutions capable of resolving disputes. My objection is to the concentration of political power and to the assumption that one central authority should possess an expanding mandate to regulate increasingly large areas of human life.

There is also a danger here that National-Anarchists should acknowledge. A limited federation could gradually accumulate power. History provides plenty of examples of institutions created for narrow purposes, acquiring additional responsibilities and becoming increasingly centralized.

Any shared structure would therefore require mechanisms designed to resist that tendency: clearly defined powers, decentralized decision-making, transparency, the ability of communities to challenge decisions, competing or independent arbitration mechanisms where practical, and substantial barriers against expanding central authority.

None of those safeguards is perfect. Constitutional governments have demonstrated quite impressively that writing “limited government” on paper does not necessarily keep government limited.

But the same criticism applies to every political system. Institutions evolve, power accumulates, and people attempt to exploit whatever structures exist. A decentralized political philosophy should recognize this rather than promise that it has discovered an institutional arrangement immune to human ambition.

So my answer is that yes, some shared legal structures would probably be necessary.

But accepting common rules does not require accepting a centralized state with sovereignty over every aspect of society.

The alternative I envisage is not a world without governance. It is a world in which governance is distributed among individuals, communities, associations, federations, and common institutions, with each operating as close as possible to the people and problems concerned.

That distinction also helps clarify what I mean by National-Anarchism. The “anarchism” is not a demand for chaos or the abolition of every collective institution. It is a rejection of unnecessary concentrations of authority and the idea that the state must stand above society as its ultimate organizer.

The objective is therefore not to abolish every structure capable of exercising authority. It is to prevent any one structure from becoming the unquestionable center of authority for everyone.

Who would determine which community a person belongs to: the individual, their family, religion, ethnicity, or the community’s leadership?

This question is especially important because if community membership is assigned by birth, ethnicity, religion, or leaders rather than chosen by the individual, the whole argument for voluntary autonomous communities starts eating its own tail. The answer should therefore put individual choice at the center.

Ultimately, the individual should decide.

This is fundamental to my understanding of autonomous communities. If membership is determined permanently by ethnicity, religion, family background, birthplace, or community leadership, then we are no longer talking about voluntary association. We are simply replacing citizenship imposed by a state with membership imposed by another collective.

That would contradict the principle of autonomy I am arguing for.

Naturally, none of us chooses the circumstances into which we are born. A child may be born into a German, Brazilian, Muslim, Christian, secular, traditional, liberal, or any number of other cultural environments. Family and community will inevitably shape that child’s identity during childhood.

But inheritance is not the same thing as permanent membership.

As people mature, they should increasingly be able to determine which identities, beliefs, and communities they wish to retain. Someone born into a religious community might remain deeply religious, become less observant, convert to another religion, or reject religion altogether. Someone raised within a particular cultural community might embrace that culture enthusiastically, identify with several cultures, or decide that another community better reflects their values.

The same principle should apply to ethnicity.

Ethnic and cultural identity can certainly be important foundations for communities. People often feel stronger bonds with those who share their language, history, traditions, religion, or ancestry, and I see no reason to pretend those attachments do not exist.

But ancestry should not function as political ownership.

Being born to German parents, for example, might make someone culturally or ethnically German, but it should not mean that a German community has permanent authority over that person. Nor should someone necessarily be compelled to live in a community organized around ethnicity simply because others have classified them as belonging to that group.

There is another side to voluntary association, however, which is sometimes overlooked. Freedom of association belongs to communities as well as individuals.

An individual should be free to seek membership in another community, but that does not necessarily mean every community must accept every applicant. A religious monastery, for example, can reasonably expect prospective members to accept its religious commitments. A cooperative might require members to participate in its economic arrangements. A culturally specific community might expect members to respect and participate in its traditions.

Otherwise, the community eventually loses the ability to define what it actually is.

This creates a balance between two principles: the individual’s right to leave and the community’s right to determine the conditions of joining.

Neither side should possess the other.

A community cannot say, “You were born here; therefore you belong to us forever.” But an individual cannot necessarily say, “I have decided that I belong to your community, therefore you must accept me regardless of your rules.”

This also means that people should not necessarily be restricted to one exclusive identity. Human identity is more complicated than the categories governments like to put on forms. Someone might participate in a cultural community, work within an economic cooperative, worship within a religious community, and maintain relationships with people belonging to entirely different communities.

I therefore imagine community membership as potentially overlapping rather than exclusively territorial.

Some communities might be geographically based. Others might form around religion, culture, economic cooperation, lifestyle, philosophy, or shared interests. People could participate in different associations for different purposes rather than having one institution define their entire identity.

This is another important distinction between the society I envisage and the modern nation-state. The state generally assumes that everyone living within a particular territory falls under the same ultimate political authority. A decentralized society could allow authority and association to be considerably more diverse.

There will obviously be difficult questions involving children, property, residency, family responsibilities, and disputes between communities. No principle eliminates the need to resolve practical conflicts.

But the starting point should remain clear.

Community should be something people belong to, not something that owns them.

Family, religion, ethnicity, culture, and upbringing may profoundly influence which community a person feels connected to. Communities themselves should retain the freedom to define the conditions under which new members are accepted.

But ultimately, no adult should be told: “You belong to this group because you were born into it, and you can never choose otherwise.”

If National-Anarchism is based on voluntary communities, then voluntary membership cannot merely be an attractive phrase. It has to be one of its defining principles.

What would happen to people who do not wish to belong to any particular cultural or identity-based community?

They should be free not to belong to one.

If I argue that individuals should be free to choose their communities, then logically they must also have the freedom to reject membership in any cultural, religious, ethnic, or identity-based community. Otherwise, community membership would not actually be voluntary.

National-Anarchism, as I understand it, should not mean dividing humanity into neatly labelled ethnic, religious, or cultural territories and telling everyone to select the box into which they belong. Human beings are considerably more complicated than that.

Some people have very strong cultural, religious, ethnic, or local identities. Others do not. Some identify with several cultures simultaneously. Some are individualists who simply do not want their cultural background to determine how they live. All of those choices should be possible.

This is also why I think the word community should be understood much more broadly than ethnicity or culture.

A community could be based on religion, language, shared culture, economic cooperation, political philosophy, environmental principles, lifestyle, profession, or simply geography. There could also be highly individualistic communities whose defining characteristic is precisely that they place very few collective obligations upon their members.

And there should be space for people who prefer to live largely independently.

Naturally, complete independence from society is difficult. Even someone living alone still uses roads, trades with others, enters contracts, requires mechanisms for resolving disputes, and interacts with neighbors. Humans are social creatures whether we find that convenient or not.

But participating in practical social arrangements is not the same as being required to adopt a collective identity.

A person might live in a particular territory, pay for shared infrastructure, respect agreements concerning property and violence, and trade with surrounding communities without being required to identify culturally with any of them.

This is where territorial and cultural organization need to be distinguished.

If every piece of land were controlled by an ideological, religious, or ethnic community that could demand conformity from everyone living there, then people who rejected those identities would effectively have nowhere to go. That would reproduce precisely the problem decentralization is supposed to address.

A genuinely plural decentralized society would therefore need neutral or loosely organized spaces as well: towns, neighborhoods, commercial areas, independent homesteads, or associations where membership carries few cultural expectations.

There is also no reason why all communities must demand the same degree of commitment. Some might be close-knit and highly traditional. Others might function mainly as administrative or economic associations. People could move between them or participate in several different networks simultaneously.

This matters because my argument for community is not based on the belief that collective identity should dominate the individual. It is based on the belief that people should have greater freedom to organize their lives with others who share important values when they wish to do so.

The phrase “when they wish to do so” is essential.

Someone who wants to live within a strongly traditional cultural community should have that opportunity. Someone who wants to live in a multicultural, cosmopolitan community should have that opportunity as well. Someone who wants little involvement with organized community life should equally be entitled to pursue that path.

That may produce communities whose values I personally would not choose. But that is part of genuine pluralism. Freedom becomes rather meaningless if it only protects choices of which we approve.

So I would reject the idea that National-Anarchism requires every individual to possess a prescribed collective identity.

The freedom to associate must include the freedom not to associate.

The purpose of decentralization should be to increase the number of ways in which people can organize their lives, not to replace one compulsory identity imposed by the state with another imposed by the community.

If communities are allowed to select their members, what would prevent the creation of territories that exclude people based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or political beliefs?

Nothing about decentralization would guarantee that communities never form around characteristics that others find objectionable. If communities possess meaningful freedom of association, some will inevitably establish membership criteria based on values, religion, culture, lifestyle, political philosophy, or other characteristics.

That is one of the uncomfortable consequences of taking freedom of association seriously.

But I think an important distinction has to be made between choosing the membership of a voluntary association and claiming unlimited authority over a territory and everyone within it.

We already accept forms of selective association in ordinary life. A monastery can require its members to follow a particular religion. A political organization can require members to support its basic political objectives. A cooperative can expect members to accept its economic rules. An intentional community built around a particular lifestyle can reasonably expect its members to participate in that lifestyle.

If every association were required to accept everyone regardless of whether they shared its purpose, freedom of association would become largely meaningless.

But this does not mean that a community should be entitled to take control of a geographical area and simply expel existing residents because of their race, religion, sexuality, political opinions, or some other characteristic.

There is a fundamental difference between saying “we will not accept you as a member of our voluntary association” and saying “you may not live here, own your legitimate property here, travel through here, or exist peacefully here because of who you are.”

The first concerns association. The second concerns coercive power over another person.

This distinction is especially important when discussing ethnic or cultural communities. I believe people should be free to preserve particular cultures, languages, religions, traditions, and ways of life through voluntary association. But that does not give them the right to confiscate property, forcibly relocate people, or use violence against those who do not share their identity.

Nor should decentralization become a justification for racial or religious persecution.

A community formed voluntarily by people sharing a particular cultural or religious tradition is one thing. A political authority classifying people according to ancestry and ordering unwanted categories to leave is something entirely different.

The same principle applies to political beliefs and sexual orientation. A strongly religious community might establish conservative rules for those who voluntarily join it. A socialist cooperative might require members to accept collective economic arrangements. A libertarian community might organize itself around extensive individual freedom.

People who fundamentally reject those principles should be free to form or join different communities rather than forcing every community to adopt identical values.

However, there must remain basic protections for individuals who already live within a community, particularly those born there. A person should not suddenly lose their home, property, physical safety, or right to leave peacefully because their beliefs, religion, identity, or private life develop differently from the majority around them.

This returns us to the principle that runs through all of these questions: community autonomy cannot mean community ownership of the individual.

There will inevitably be difficult boundary cases. Freedom of association and protection against discrimination can conflict, and modern states struggle with precisely the same problem. No political philosophy makes that tension disappear.

My preference is therefore to maximize voluntary association while minimizing coercion.

Communities should have considerable freedom to define their character and the commitments expected of people who voluntarily seek membership. Individuals should have equally strong freedom to reject those communities, establish alternatives, retain legitimate property, travel between communities, and live without being subjected to violence or forced removal.

That means a decentralized society could contain communities organized around identities or beliefs that I personally dislike. Genuine pluralism requires accepting that other people may use their freedom in ways we would not choose for ourselves.

But there is a line between being free to associate with whom you choose and being free to persecute whom you dislike.

For me, that is the essential boundary.

Freedom of association should protect the ability of people to build communities around shared values. It should never become a license for dispossession, forced segregation, expulsion, or persecution.

If the proposal is not intended to organize communities according to race or ethnicity, why does it repeatedly use concepts such as people, tribe, cultural continuity, and national preservation?

This is a useful challenge because it forces a clarification of what words like nation, people, and tribe mean in your argument. If left undefined, readers can easily interpret them as racial categories, especially given National-Anarchism’s controversial history and associations. Better to confront that ambiguity than leave it sitting in the article wearing a suspicious hat.

Because rejecting race as the organizing principle of society does not require pretending that peoples, cultures, nations, traditions, and collective identities do not exist.

When I use terms such as people, tribe, cultural continuity, or national preservation, I am not using them as synonyms for biological race. I am referring to forms of collective identity that can arise from shared history, language, customs, religion, traditions, experiences, values, and a sense of belonging.

A nation, in my understanding, is therefore not simply a racial category.

Consider nations that exist today. Their populations are rarely biologically homogeneous, yet people can still possess a powerful sense of national identity. Culture is transmitted through families, institutions, stories, language, traditions, historical memory, and everyday social behavior. None of that requires a theory of racial purity.

The word tribe is particularly easy to misunderstand. I use it in a broader social sense: a group of people who feel a meaningful sense of belonging and mutual obligation. Human beings continually form such groups. They can be ethnic or religious, but they can also be political, cultural, local, professional, or based upon shared lifestyles and interests.

In fact, modern society is full of tribes. Political movements behave tribally. Football supporters behave tribally. Religious communities, subcultures, activist movements, expatriate communities, and even online groups can develop strong internal identities and loyalties.

The point is not that everyone must belong to an ethnic tribe. The point is that human beings frequently seek belonging among people with whom they share something meaningful.

The same applies to cultural continuity.

If a language disappears, a traditional way of life disappears, or a distinctive local culture becomes absorbed into a larger homogeneous culture, something has genuinely been lost. Recognizing that loss does not require believing that one culture is biologically superior to another.

We readily understand this when discussing indigenous peoples. We generally accept that indigenous communities may wish to preserve their languages, traditions, spiritual practices, historical memory, and connection to place. We do not automatically assume that cultural preservation means hatred of outsiders.

I apply the same principle more broadly.

People should be able to preserve cultures they value, whether those cultures are indigenous, regional, religious, national, linguistic, or something else. The important qualification is that preservation should occur primarily through participation, transmission, and voluntary association rather than coercion.

National preservation should therefore not mean freezing a population genetically or culturally at an arbitrary moment in history. Cultures have always changed, borrowed from one another, absorbed newcomers, divided, merged, and evolved.

Preservation means giving people the space to maintain a cultural inheritance when they consider it valuable rather than assuming that every distinctive identity must eventually dissolve into a universal monoculture.

This is also why I use the word national in National-Anarchism.

For me, the “national” does not mean that a central nation-state should impose a single identity upon everyone within its borders. That would contradict the anarchist and decentralist element of the philosophy. It refers instead to the legitimacy of collective identity and the right of peoples and communities to preserve and organize around identities they value.

At the same time, such identities cannot be compulsory.

Someone may feel deeply attached to their national culture. Another person of exactly the same ancestry may feel almost no attachment to it. Someone else may identify simultaneously with several cultures. Others may prefer cosmopolitan or individual identities.

A decentralized society should have room for all of them.

This is important because I do not want to solve the problem of forced multiculturalism by replacing it with forced cultural homogeneity. Both approaches make the same fundamental mistake: they allow a political authority to decide what identity individuals are supposed to possess.

My argument is instead for cultural self-determination.

People who value cultural continuity should have the freedom to build institutions and communities capable of maintaining it. People who prefer culturally mixed or cosmopolitan communities should have exactly the same freedom. And people who do not wish to organize their lives around cultural identity at all should not be compelled to do so.

So when I speak about peoples, tribes, cultural continuity, and national preservation, I am acknowledging that collective identity matters to many human beings.

I am not arguing that biology should determine political membership.

Culture may be inherited, adopted, shared, changed, or rejected. What matters is that neither the state nor the community should have the power to dictate permanently which identity an individual must possess.

4. Where Does Autonomy End?

If different communities claim the same territory, natural resource, or infrastructure, who will resolve the dispute?

Disputes between communities would be inevitable. Decentralization does not make competing interests disappear. Two communities might claim access to the same water source, disagree over a territorial boundary, depend upon the same road, or dispute ownership of land or infrastructure.

The question is therefore not whether conflicts would occur, but how they could be resolved without automatically giving a central state unlimited authority over everyone involved.

My preferred answer would be negotiation first, arbitration second, and broader federative institutions where genuinely necessary.

Communities would need agreements governing their relationships with one another. These could cover boundaries, water rights, transport networks, energy systems, trade routes, environmental responsibilities, and other resources that cannot realistically be divided into completely independent units.

Where two communities cannot resolve a dispute directly, they could submit it to an independent arbitration body or court whose authority they have previously recognized. That body need not govern the internal affairs of either community. Its purpose would be to interpret agreements and resolve disputes between them.

This is not particularly revolutionary. Arbitration already exists in many areas of life precisely because parties do not always need a single political authority controlling every aspect of their relationship in order to settle disagreements.

More complicated problems would require broader cooperation.

A river, for example, may flow through the territories of several communities. What an upstream community does with that water can directly affect everyone downstream. It would therefore be unrealistic to claim that the river belongs exclusively to whichever community happens to control its source.

The communities sharing that river would need some form of common agreement concerning access, pollution, extraction, conservation, and responsibility for damage.

The same would apply to major infrastructure.

A railway, electricity network, telecommunications system, reservoir, or highway may serve dozens of communities. Such infrastructure could be owned cooperatively, privately, municipally, or through a federation of the communities that use it. Different arrangements could develop for different circumstances.

This is where the principle of subsidiarity becomes important again.

A local footpath does not require a continental authority. A river crossing several territories probably requires cooperation between those territories. A railway network serving an entire region requires coordination on a larger scale.

The level at which something is governed should correspond as closely as possible to the actual scale of the problem.

Territorial disputes would perhaps be the most difficult. Communities could maintain recognized boundaries and property records, while disputed claims could be submitted to mutually recognized arbitration. Historical occupation, existing ownership, contracts, treaties, and practical use could all form part of such decisions.

What should not be acceptable is simply taking territory because one community is stronger than another.

If autonomy means anything, then the autonomy of neighboring communities must also be respected. A community cannot reasonably demand freedom from external domination while claiming the right to dominate its neighbors.

There would also need to be mechanisms for enforcing decisions. Arbitration is meaningless if every losing party can simply ignore the result. Communities could therefore make recognition of arbitration decisions a condition of participating in wider federations, trade agreements, infrastructure networks, or mutual-defense arrangements.

The response to violations would not necessarily have to begin with physical force. Suspension of agreements, withdrawal of shared services, compensation requirements, economic sanctions, or exclusion from cooperative institutions could provide graduated responses before coercive measures were considered.

In extreme cases involving aggression or the seizure of another community’s territory, other communities might collectively intervene under previously agreed mutual-defense arrangements.

Again, someone could reasonably object that this begins to resemble a political or legal system.

It does.

But, as I have argued elsewhere, anarchism does not have to mean the absence of institutions. The relevant question is whether those institutions exist to perform specific functions agreed upon by participating communities or whether they gradually become a sovereign authority entitled to govern everything.

My argument for decentralization is therefore not an argument for thousands of completely isolated communities pretending their neighbors do not exist.

Quite the opposite.

Greater internal autonomy would require considerable cooperation between communities precisely because many resources and problems cross community boundaries.

The difference is that cooperation should be built horizontally wherever possible rather than imposed vertically whenever convenient.

There is no perfect mechanism that will resolve every territorial or resource dispute peacefully. Centralized states themselves fight bitterly over borders, rivers, resources, infrastructure, and jurisdiction. Sometimes they even go to war over them. The existence of a state has hardly removed territorial conflict from human history.

The realistic objective is therefore not to eliminate disputes but to create institutions capable of resolving them while preventing those institutions from acquiring unnecessary authority over matters that do not concern them.

Autonomy does not mean isolation. Communities should govern what is genuinely theirs, cooperate over what is genuinely shared, and submit unavoidable disputes to institutions whose authority is limited to resolving those disputes.

5. Do We Still Need a State?

How would roads, energy systems, water supplies, hospitals, universities, and sanitation networks serving several communities be managed?

Decentralization does not mean that every community must be completely self-sufficient. That would be neither practical nor desirable.

Roads, electricity grids, water systems, hospitals, universities, telecommunications, public transport, and sanitation networks often operate on a scale much larger than a single community. Autonomous communities would therefore have to cooperate in creating, financing, maintaining, and using them.

The principle I would apply is simple: local where possible, shared where necessary.

A small community might manage its local streets, parks, primary school, waste collection, or local water system itself. But a major hospital serving an entire region would obviously require cooperation among many communities. The same would be true of a university, reservoir, electricity grid, railway, motorway, or large sewage-treatment facility.

These services could be organized in several different ways rather than according to one universal model.

Neighboring communities could establish cooperatives or federations specifically responsible for particular infrastructure. Several communities might jointly own a hospital, for example, contributing to its costs according to population, usage, or an agreed formula. The institution would serve participating communities without acquiring political authority over unrelated aspects of their internal affairs.

Other services might be provided by private companies, mutual associations, charities, foundations, professional organizations, or combinations of these.

A university provides a useful example. There is no reason why every community would need its own university or why a university must belong exclusively to one community. It could serve students from dozens of communities and be financed through tuition, foundations, participating communities, endowments, professional associations, or other arrangements.

Hospitals could operate similarly. Some might be community-owned, others charitable, cooperative, private, or jointly funded by several communities. Communities could establish mutual healthcare arrangements allowing their members to access specialized treatment elsewhere.

The important point is that shared service does not require shared government over everything else.

If twenty communities cooperate to maintain a regional hospital, the administrative body responsible for that hospital does not therefore need the authority to determine their education systems, cultural policies, family laws, or religious practices.

Its mandate is the hospital.

The same principle applies to infrastructure.

An electricity network serving a large region might be operated by a federation, cooperative, or specialist company. Communities using the network would agree on financing, access, maintenance, expansion, technical standards, and mechanisms for resolving disputes.

Water systems would require particular cooperation because water does not politely stop flowing at political boundaries. Communities sharing rivers, reservoirs, aquifers, or treatment facilities would need agreements governing extraction, pollution, conservation, infrastructure costs, and access.

Sanitation networks would operate according to similar principles. Where several communities depend upon the same sewage-treatment facility, they would jointly finance and regulate the service through an institution established for that purpose.

Major roads and transport networks could likewise be managed through regional associations, user charges, community contributions, private operators, cooperatives, or combinations of these arrangements.

Different regions could experiment with different systems.

That experimentation is actually one of the potential strengths of decentralization. We tend to assume that because the modern state currently provides or regulates a particular service, the state is the only conceivable institution capable of organizing it. But human beings cooperate through many different structures: municipalities, cooperatives, companies, charities, associations, foundations, professional bodies, and international agreements.

The important question is not simply “Who owns it?” but “At what level does this need to be organized?”

This is the principle of subsidiarity again.

If something can be managed effectively by an individual, family, or local community, there is little reason for a regional institution to control it. If several communities depend upon the same system, then those communities need a common institution for that system. If infrastructure spans a much larger region, cooperation must occur at that larger scale.

The scale of governance should follow the scale of the problem.

There would obviously be disagreements about costs, access, priorities, and standards. Those disputes could be dealt with through contracts, representative boards, arbitration mechanisms, and federative institutions established by participating communities.

None of this eliminates bureaucracy. A modern electricity grid will require engineers, administrators, regulations, accounting, technical standards, and long-term planning regardless of whether it is operated by a state, corporation, cooperative, or federation. Decentralization cannot abolish the practical complexity of modern civilization.

What it can do is prevent administrative necessity from automatically becoming an argument for unlimited political centralization.

The fact that several communities need the same sewage-treatment plant does not logically mean they need the same culture, education system, economic philosophy, or way of life.

They simply need to cooperate on sewage.

That distinction is central to what I am proposing.

Autonomy does not require communities to do everything alone. It requires distinguishing between what genuinely needs to be shared and what does not. Communities can cooperate extensively where their interests overlap while remaining autonomous where their differences matter.

Who would be responsible for problems that cross local boundaries, such as epidemics, pollution, environmental disasters, territorial defense, and organized crime?

Some problems simply cannot be solved at the level of a single community.

Epidemics, air and water pollution, environmental disasters, organized crime, large-scale infrastructure failures, and external military threats do not stop at local boundaries. Any serious decentralized political model therefore has to recognize that different problems require different scales of cooperation.

Again, the principle I would apply is subsidiarity: decisions should be taken at the lowest level capable of dealing effectively with the problem.

That does not mean everything must remain local. It means authority should move to a broader level when the nature of the problem genuinely requires it, rather than because centralization is automatically assumed to be preferable.

An epidemic is an obvious example.

Individual communities could manage local healthcare, prevention measures, clinics, and emergency responses. But if an infectious disease spreads across dozens of communities, coordination would clearly be required. Medical information would need to be shared, hospitals would need to cooperate, laboratories might operate regionally, and communities would need mechanisms for coordinating responses.

A regional health federation or emergency body could perform those functions.

The important question would be the scope of its authority. An institution created to coordinate an epidemic response should not automatically acquire permanent authority over unrelated areas of community life. Emergency powers have an unfortunate historical tendency to survive the emergencies that supposedly justified them.

The same principle applies to pollution.

If one community pollutes a river that supplies water to communities downstream, it cannot simply claim that what happens within its territory is nobody else’s concern. Its actions have crossed its own boundaries.

Autonomy therefore has to include responsibility.

Communities sharing rivers, forests, aquifers, air quality, coastlines, or ecosystems would need agreements establishing environmental standards and mechanisms for compensation when one community causes measurable harm to another.

Large environmental disasters would require even broader cooperation. Fire services, medical teams, engineering resources, evacuation systems, and emergency supplies could be pooled through regional mutual-aid organizations.

Organized crime presents another cross-boundary problem. A criminal organization would obviously exploit jurisdictional gaps if every community operated completely independently. Communities would therefore need agreements concerning investigations, evidence sharing, extradition, fraud, trafficking, violent crime, and fugitives.

That does not require one enormous central police organization with unlimited jurisdiction. Local policing could remain local while specialized regional bodies deal with crimes that genuinely cross community boundaries.

Territorial defense is perhaps the clearest example of why autonomous communities would need federative structures.

A small community cannot realistically defend itself against a powerful external military force. Communities would therefore have a strong incentive to create mutual-defense agreements.

An attack upon one participating community could be treated as an attack upon the federation, with communities contributing personnel, equipment, financing, logistics, intelligence, or other resources according to previously agreed arrangements.

But here again there must be limits.

A defensive federation should exist to protect participating communities from external aggression, not gradually transform itself into a central authority capable of dictating their internal political and cultural arrangements.

This is the recurring tension within any decentralized system: how do we create enough common authority to solve common problems without allowing common authority to absorb everything else?

There is no perfect constitutional formula that permanently solves that problem. Centralized states struggle with it as well. Government agencies expand, temporary programmes become permanent, emergency powers are normalized, and institutions continually discover new reasons why their responsibilities should increase.

A decentralized society would therefore need deliberate safeguards against the same process.

Broader institutions should have clearly defined responsibilities. Their authority should correspond to particular problems. Their decisions should be transparent and subject to review. Communities should participate directly in their governance, and powers granted during emergencies should expire when the emergency ends unless explicitly renewed.

Different problems would also require different geographical scales.

A contaminated local well may concern one community. Pollution of a river may involve twenty. An epidemic might require regional or continental coordination. Defense might require a much larger federation.

There is no reason why all of these functions must therefore be placed under one permanent central government.

This is an important distinction between coordination and centralization.

Coordination means recognizing that communities depend upon one another and creating institutions capable of dealing with shared problems.

Centralization means transferring increasingly diverse areas of authority to one institution simply because some matters require collective action.

I support the first while remaining deeply skeptical of the second.

National-Anarchism, as I understand it, therefore does not imply thousands of isolated communities incapable of acting together. Autonomous communities could form overlapping federations for healthcare, environmental protection, policing, infrastructure, trade, disaster response, and defense.

Those institutions would operate at different scales and for different purposes.

The underlying principle remains the same: what can be handled locally should remain local; what genuinely crosses boundaries should be handled cooperatively at the level necessary to deal with it.

The objective is not to eliminate large-scale cooperation. It is to prevent the necessity of cooperation in some areas from becoming the justification for centralized control over all areas of life.

If communities have different legal systems, which law will apply when a person from one community harms someone from another?

If autonomous communities have different legal systems, conflicts between their members would inevitably occur. A person from one community might damage the property of someone from another, break a contract, commit fraud, cause an accident, or commit a violent crime.

A decentralized society would therefore require rules governing inter-community disputes.

This is not an entirely new problem. Different states and countries already have different laws, and legal systems have developed principles of jurisdiction, conflict of laws, extradition, treaties, and arbitration to determine what happens when people from different jurisdictions come into conflict.

A decentralized society would need comparable mechanisms.

The simplest principle would be that local law generally governs conduct within a community’s jurisdiction, provided that those rules are known and do not violate whatever basic protections have been agreed between communities.

If I voluntarily enter another community, I cannot reasonably insist that all of my home community’s rules follow me. If one community prohibits alcohol, for example, I cannot enter it, ignore its rules, and then claim immunity because drinking is permitted where I normally live.

Entering another community carries a responsibility to respect its legitimate local rules.

However, this becomes more complicated when there is an identifiable victim from another community.

Suppose a member of Community A assaults a member of Community B. Or someone from Community A defrauds a business in Community B and then returns home. Neither community should simply be able to declare exclusive jurisdiction in its own favor.

This is why communities would need pre-existing agreements concerning jurisdiction.

Those agreements could establish principles such as where an offence occurred, where the harm occurred, where the parties reside, and what type of offence is involved. Different principles might apply to different kinds of disputes.

Minor civil disputes could be resolved through arbitration. Contracts between people from different communities could specify in advance which legal system or arbitration body would govern disagreements. Commercial relationships already frequently use this approach.

Serious crimes involving violence would require stronger arrangements.

Communities could agree upon certain offences that are recognized across the federation, such as murder, assault, kidnapping, slavery, major fraud, and deliberate destruction of another person’s property. These need not require identical criminal codes in every community, but there would need to be sufficient common ground to prevent offenders from escaping responsibility simply by crossing a boundary.

Otherwise, decentralization would create safe havens for criminals, which would quickly undermine trust between communities.

Extradition agreements could therefore allow a person accused of a serious offence in another community to be returned for trial, subject to agreed procedural protections.

There would also need to be safeguards against abuse.

Imagine that Community A criminalizes behavior that Community B considers entirely legitimate. A resident of Community B engages in that behavior within Community B, and Community A then demands extradition because it considers the act illegal.

I do not believe Community A should have that authority.

A community’s internal rules should generally bind people within its own jurisdiction and those who voluntarily enter it. It should not be able to export every aspect of its moral or cultural code into neighboring communities.

This distinction becomes particularly important if communities have radically different religious, cultural, or social values.

A conservative religious community may prohibit conduct that a secular community permits. That is part of meaningful autonomy. But the religious community should not be able to prosecute residents of the secular community for conduct occurring entirely outside its jurisdiction merely because it considers that conduct immoral.

Where jurisdiction is genuinely disputed, an independent inter-community court or arbitration body would be necessary.

Its role would not be to replace the legal systems of the communities. It would determine which jurisdiction applies, interpret agreements between communities, and resolve cases where the interests of more than one community are involved.

This again creates a layer of shared law, which I readily acknowledge.

But shared rules governing interactions between autonomous communities are not necessarily the same thing as imposing one comprehensive legal system upon all of them.

We can think of it as two levels.

Within communities, there could be considerable legal diversity reflecting different values and ways of life.

Between communities, there would need to be a more limited body of common rules dealing with jurisdiction, contracts, violence, property, movement, extradition, and dispute resolution.

The distinction is between internal law and inter-community law.

This arrangement would not eliminate every legal conflict. Neither does our present system. Countries disagree over extradition, jurisdiction, international law, property, contracts, and criminal prosecutions despite having governments, courts, treaties, and centuries of legal development.

The objective is therefore not to invent a system in which jurisdictional disputes become impossible.

It is to ensure that legal diversity does not produce legal chaos.

Communities should be free to maintain different internal laws, but interactions between communities require common rules. Local autonomy governs what happens within the community; agreed inter-community law governs what happens when the rights and responsibilities of different communities collide.

If each community establishes its own rules, what will prevent wealthier communities from controlling resources and imposing conditions on poorer ones?

Nothing about decentralization automatically prevents economic inequality or domination.

A wealthy community could control important resources, infrastructure, investment, employment, or access to markets and use that position to pressure poorer communities. If National-Anarchism is serious about decentralizing power, it therefore has to consider economic power as well as political power.

Otherwise, we could abolish a central political authority only to replace it with a hierarchy in which wealthy communities effectively dictate terms to everyone else.

The first principle should be that autonomy applies equally to rich and poor communities.

A wealthy community should be free to manage resources that legitimately belong to it, but wealth should not give it sovereignty over its neighbors. It should not be able to seize another community’s territory, dictate its internal political arrangements, or deny access to resources over which several communities have legitimate claims.

This becomes particularly important with shared or geographically interconnected resources.

A river flowing through several communities cannot realistically be treated as though the upstream community possesses an unlimited right to the water. The same applies to aquifers, forests, transport corridors, electricity networks, ports, reservoirs, and other resources or infrastructure upon which several communities depend.

These would require agreements defining access, responsibilities, environmental protections, costs, and dispute-resolution mechanisms.

The principle should be similar to the one I have applied throughout these answers: what belongs genuinely to one community can be managed locally; what is genuinely shared requires shared rules.

Economic relationships between communities should also be based as far as possible on voluntary exchange rather than political coercion.

Communities could trade with one another, establish cooperatives, create regional markets, form mutual-credit arrangements, jointly finance infrastructure, and enter long-term agreements concerning resources.

But voluntary exchange requires meaningful alternatives.

If Community A controls the only water supply available to Community B, telling Community B that it is “free” to accept whatever price Community A demands is rather questionable. Economic dependence can become a form of power even without formal political authority.

This is why decentralization should encourage multiple centers of economic power rather than merely multiple political jurisdictions.

Where practical, communities should avoid becoming completely dependent upon a single neighboring community for essential resources. Diverse trade relationships, alternative transport routes, distributed energy production, local food production, shared infrastructure, and mutual-aid agreements could all reduce that vulnerability.

Federations of smaller communities could also provide a counterweight to particularly powerful ones.

If one wealthy community attempted to use its economic position to dominate a poorer neighbor, other communities could collectively negotiate, provide alternative trade relationships, establish common infrastructure, or apply economic pressure of their own.

This is one of the reasons I envisage federations not as central governments but as mechanisms through which smaller communities can cooperate when their individual bargaining power is insufficient.

There is also an important distinction between inequality and domination.

I do not believe every community must possess exactly the same level of wealth. Different communities will have different resources, economic systems, skills, geographical advantages, priorities, and levels of productivity. Some will inevitably become wealthier than others.

Economic inequality alone does not necessarily destroy autonomy.

The problem begins when economic advantage becomes the ability to determine another community’s political or social choices.

A wealthy community offering favorable terms to attract workers or businesses is exercising economic competition. A wealthy community threatening to cut off an essential shared water supply unless its neighbor changes its internal laws is exercising coercive power.

The boundary will not always be perfectly clear, but the distinction matters.

There is also no reason to assume that poorer communities would necessarily remain permanently poor. Decentralization could allow communities to experiment with different economic arrangements, taxation systems, cooperatives, technologies, forms of ownership, and development strategies without waiting for permission from a distant central government.

Some experiments would fail. Others might succeed spectacularly.

People, investment, knowledge, and businesses could move between communities, creating pressure for poorly governed communities to change their policies.

But here again I would avoid pretending that competition magically solves every problem. Markets can disperse power, but they can also concentrate on it. Wealth can translate into political influence. Monopolies can develop. Dependency can be exploited.

My underlying principle therefore remains the same whether we are discussing governments, communities, corporations, or wealthy economic interests:

I am suspicious of concentrated power.

The purpose of decentralization should not simply be to transfer power from national governments to local elites, wealthy communities, corporations, or landowners. It should create multiple centers of decision-making capable of balancing one another.

This may require common rules concerning shared natural resources, monopolistic infrastructure, contracts between communities, environmental damage, and economic coercion. It may require federations through which smaller communities can negotiate collectively. And it would certainly require mechanisms for independent arbitration when communities disagree.

Once again, critics may argue that these arrangements begin to resemble government.

To some extent they do resemble governance, because any complex civilization requires rules for managing relationships between people and institutions.

But the objective is not to eliminate governance. It is to prevent governance, political or economic, from becoming unnecessarily concentrated.

National-Anarchism should therefore not promise economic equality between communities. Such a promise would be unrealistic.

What it should seek is a system in which wealth does not automatically translate into political sovereignty over others.

A wealthy community may be richer. It may possess greater economic influence. But it should not thereby acquire the right to rule its poorer neighbors.

Decentralization only has meaning if it disperses power in practice, not merely on a political map.

Could local autonomy not increase inequality between communities with different levels of wealth, infrastructure, and economic capacity?

Yes, it could.

Greater local autonomy would almost certainly produce differences between communities. Some would be wealthier than others. Some would have better infrastructure, stronger economies, better schools or healthcare, more valuable natural resources, or more successful institutions.

I do not think a serious argument for decentralization should pretend otherwise.

But this raises a broader question: Is inequality between communities necessarily evidence that autonomy has failed?

I would distinguish between inequality, poverty, and domination.

Two communities can have different levels of wealth without the poorer community being oppressed by the wealthier one. The important questions are whether people have access to basic necessities, whether communities can improve their circumstances, whether individuals have opportunities to move or trade, and whether economic differences allow one community to exercise coercive power over another.

Absolute equality between communities would be extremely difficult to achieve even under a centralized state.

Regions already differ enormously in geography, natural resources, infrastructure, population, education, economic activity, historical development, and access to markets. Central governments redistribute resources in an attempt to reduce those differences, sometimes successfully and sometimes rather less impressively.

Decentralization would not make those differences disappear.

It might even make some of them more visible.

A community with effective institutions, good infrastructure, skilled members, sensible economic policies, and successful businesses might develop rapidly. Another community might make poor decisions and stagnate. Others might consciously choose lower levels of material wealth in exchange for a different lifestyle.

That last possibility is important.

We should be careful about assuming that every community must define success in exactly the same economic terms. A rural community that prefers a simpler lifestyle, greater self-sufficiency, stronger family networks, and less consumption may have a lower monetary income than a highly commercial urban community without necessarily considering itself unsuccessful.

Autonomy means allowing communities to establish different priorities as well as different institutions.

However, there is a much more serious problem when inequality becomes entrenched disadvantage.

A child born into a poor community did not choose its economic policies, infrastructure, or historical circumstances. If that person has no meaningful access to education, healthcare, employment, mobility, or opportunities elsewhere, then the principle of voluntary community membership becomes considerably weaker.

This connects directly with my earlier argument about the right to leave.

Freedom of movement between communities would provide one mechanism for limiting entrenched inequality. People should be able to seek education, employment, trade, or membership elsewhere rather than being permanently trapped by the economic circumstances of their birthplace.

But migration alone is not an adequate answer. If every struggling community simply loses its most capable young people to wealthier neighbors, inequality could become even worse.

That is why autonomous communities would still have strong reasons to cooperate.

Regional federations could jointly finance infrastructure that benefits several communities. Wealthier and poorer communities could participate in shared hospitals, universities, transport systems, water networks, and energy infrastructure. Communities could establish development funds, mutual-aid arrangements, cooperative investment programmes, or insurance systems.

Some of these arrangements might involve redistribution.

I do not see that as inherently incompatible with decentralization, provided it is organized through agreed federative structures rather than automatically becoming justification for unlimited central control.

Communities have practical reasons to care about the prosperity of their neighbors.

Extreme poverty next door does not remain neatly contained. It can contribute to migration pressures, crime, instability, disease, environmental degradation, and political conflict. Helping neighboring communities develop may therefore be an act of solidarity, enlightened self-interest, or both.

There is also another side to decentralization that should be considered.

Centralization can hide inequality, but it can also create it.

When political and economic decisions are concentrated in capitals or major metropolitan centers, investment, government institutions, professional opportunities, cultural institutions, and infrastructure often concentrate there as well. Peripheral regions can become dependent upon decisions made far away.

Greater autonomy might allow communities to retain more control over their own resources, revenues, economic policies, and development priorities.

Some would use that autonomy wisely.

Others would not.

That is part of the price of genuine self-government. If communities are autonomous only when they make decisions approved by a higher authority, they are not particularly autonomous.

The potential advantage is that decentralization allows different approaches to be tested simultaneously. Communities can learn from successful neighbors, copy effective policies, abandon failed experiments, cooperate with others, or develop economic arrangements suited to their particular circumstances.

None of this guarantee’s equality.

Nor do I think equality of outcomes should be the primary objective.

The more important goal should be to prevent economic differences from becoming permanent systems of dependency and domination, while ensuring that individuals retain realistic opportunities to improve their circumstances.

This again reflects the distinction between equality and freedom.

A decentralized society may be unequal. A centralized society may also be unequal. The question is whether people and communities possess meaningful control over their circumstances and whether concentrations of wealth can be converted into unchecked political power.

So yes, local autonomy could increase inequality in some circumstances.

It could also allow poorer communities to pursue development strategies better suited to their needs, retain greater control over local resources, cooperate voluntarily with neighbors, and escape policies imposed by distant authorities that have failed them.

There is no guarantee in either direction.

Decentralization should therefore not promise that every community will become equally wealthy. It should aim to ensure that differences in wealth do not become permanent barriers to mobility, cooperation, basic opportunity, or political autonomy.

6. Does Decentralization Really Produce Freedom?

Are culturally homogeneous societies necessarily freer, or can they combine strong internal trust with authoritarianism, repression, and hostility toward outsiders?

No. Cultural homogeneity does not necessarily produce freedom.

A society can possess high levels of internal trust, strong social cohesion, a shared identity, and common cultural values while simultaneously being authoritarian, intolerant of dissent, or hostile toward outsiders.

This is an important distinction because my original argument about trust was not intended to suggest that trust and freedom are the same thing.

They are not.

Trust is a form of social capital. It can make cooperation easier. People who trust one another may require fewer formal controls, conduct business more easily, feel greater responsibility toward neighbors, and rely more heavily upon informal social institutions.

But trust tells us relatively little about what a community actually chooses to do with that social cohesion.

A highly cohesive community can use its solidarity to support individual freedom. It can also use that solidarity to enforce conformity.

Indeed, strong internal trust can sometimes make social control more effective. In a close-knit community where everybody knows everybody else, reputation matters enormously. Family expectations, religious authority, tradition, gossip, social exclusion, and community pressure can regulate behavior without the state needing to intervene at all.

That can be positive when it encourages responsibility and mutual assistance.

It can become oppressive when conformity is demanded at the expense of individual choice.

This is another reason why I do not believe simply reducing the size of political units solves the problem of authority. A village can become authoritarian just as a state can. A culturally homogeneous community can persecute dissenters. A religious community can suppress those who question its teachings. A politically homogeneous community can become intolerant of opposing views.

The difference I am interested in is therefore not simply between homogeneous and heterogeneous societies.

It is between systems in which individuals and communities have meaningful alternatives and systems in which one authority possesses sufficient power to impose its preferences upon everyone.

There is also the question of outsiders.

Strong internal solidarity can create a sharp distinction between “us” and “them.” The same bonds that encourage generosity toward members of the group can sometimes produce suspicion or hostility toward those outside it.

That possibility has to be acknowledged.

My argument for cultural autonomy therefore cannot be based on the idea that culturally distinct communities will naturally live together peacefully. They may not. That is precisely why autonomy has to be accompanied by rules governing relations between communities: respect for boundaries, freedom of movement, trade, arbitration, non-aggression, and protection against violence.

Mutual respect does not require communities to consider one another culturally identical or morally equivalent.

It requires them to accept that difference does not provide a license for domination.

A traditional community should be free to preserve its traditions. A cosmopolitan community should be free to embrace cultural diversity. A religious community should be able to organize itself around its faith. A secular community should be able to reject religious authority.

None should possess the right to impose its preferred model upon all the others.

This is where I would separate two claims that are sometimes confused.

The first is that shared culture can contribute to social trust.

The second is that shared culture automatically creates a free society.

I believe there is considerable reason to take the first proposition seriously. I reject the second.

Freedom depends upon how power is structured, what rights individuals possess, whether authority can be challenged, whether people can leave, whether alternative communities can exist, and whether institutions are prevented from accumulating excessive power.

Cultural cohesion may make some of those arrangements easier to sustain, but it cannot substitute for them.

Nor should cultural preservation become an excuse for hostility toward outsiders. A community does not need to hate another culture in order to value its own. Preserving German, Brazilian, Japanese, indigenous, religious, regional, or any other cultural traditions does not logically require believing that people outside those traditions are inferior.

Cultural confidence and cultural hostility are not the same thing.

So my argument is not that we should pursue homogeneity because homogeneous societies are inherently freer.

It is that people should have greater freedom to determine the social and cultural environments in which they wish to live, including the freedom to create culturally cohesive communities, culturally mixed communities, or communities in which cultural identity plays almost no role at all.

The test of freedom is therefore not how homogeneous a community is.

The test is whether people participate voluntarily, whether dissent remains possible, whether individuals can leave, and whether the community respects the equal right of other communities to organize their lives differently.

Trust can help sustain a free society. But trust alone cannot make a society free.

Is trust within a group always positive? Criminal organizations, cults, and authoritarian regimes may also have strong internal bonds.

No. Trust within a group is not always positive.

This is an important qualification to my original argument because it would be a mistake to treat trust itself as a moral virtue. Trust is better understood as a form of social capital. It enables people to cooperate, coordinate their behavior, accept obligations toward one another, and act with greater confidence that other members of the group will do the same.

What that social capital is used for is an entirely different question.

A family can use strong internal trust to care for children, support elderly relatives, help members through difficult periods, and build something together. A voluntary association can use it to organize charitable work. A community can use it to maintain public spaces, assist neighbors, or solve problems without constantly requiring outside intervention.

But a criminal organization can use precisely the same mechanisms of loyalty and trust to coordinate crime.

Members of an organized criminal group may have strong obligations toward one another. They may protect each other’s families, maintain codes of loyalty, punish betrayal, and cooperate extremely effectively. From the perspective of the organization, this internal trust is valuable. From the perspective of its victims, rather less so.

The same can be true of cults and authoritarian political movements.

Members may possess an extraordinary sense of solidarity and common purpose. They may trust their leaders and fellow members more than anyone outside the group. But that trust can be manipulated to isolate individuals, suppress criticism, justify violence, or demand unquestioning obedience.

This means we need to distinguish between trust and virtue.

Trust tells us something about the strength of relationships within a group. It does not tell us whether the objectives of that group are desirable or whether its treatment of outsiders and dissenters is acceptable.

There is another important distinction between internal trust and generalized social trust.

A society can contain groups whose members trust one another intensely while distrusting everyone outside the group. In such circumstances, strong internal bonds may actually contribute to wider social fragmentation.

If I trust members of my family, clan, religion, political movement, or ethnic group but assume that everyone outside it is dishonest or hostile, society may become divided into competing networks of loyalty.

This is particularly relevant to the argument I made in the original article.

When I speak positively about trust, I am not simply arguing that we need stronger loyalty within tribes. I am interested in the kind of trust that allows people to cooperate without requiring constant supervision or coercion.

That requires something beyond internal solidarity.

A healthy community should ideally contain both bonding trust and bridging trust.

Bonding trust connects the people within the community. It creates loyalty, mutual responsibility, and solidarity.

Bridging trust allows members of different communities to interact peacefully even when they do not share the same identity, religion, culture, or way of life. It allows them to trade, negotiate, cooperate, honor agreements, and recognize one another’s autonomy.

Both matter.

Without bonding trust, communities can become weak collections of isolated individuals.

Without bridging trust, strong communities can become hostile tribes permanently suspicious of one another.

This distinction is particularly important for the decentralized society I have been describing. Autonomous communities cannot survive peacefully if their members trust only one another and regard every neighboring community as an enemy.

They would need confidence that agreements will be respected, contracts honored, boundaries recognized, disputes arbitrated fairly, and differences tolerated.

In other words, autonomy requires trust between communities as well as within them.

There is also the question of dissent.

A group may appear highly trusting because nobody openly challenges its leadership. But if disagreement results in punishment, exclusion, intimidation, or violence, what looks like solidarity may partly be fear.

Genuine trust should make criticism possible.

If members cannot question leaders, challenge traditions, expose wrongdoing, or ultimately leave, then strong internal cohesion can become a mechanism of control.

This is why I would not measure the health of a community simply by asking how loyal its members are to one another.

I would also ask: Can members disagree? Can they criticize authority? Can they refuse demands? Can they leave? Does the community respect outsiders? Does it honor agreements with other communities?

Those questions tell us much more about whether trust is supporting freedom or reinforcing domination.

So the argument I made in the original article requires an important qualification.

Low social trust can certainly create problems. When people expect strangers to cheat them, institutions to fail them, and neighbors to exploit them, they often demand more regulation, surveillance, policing, bureaucracy, and state protection.

But the solution cannot simply be more trust within our own group.

The objective should be something more sophisticated: strong relationships within communities combined with sufficient trust and mutual respect between communities to allow different ways of life to coexist.

Trust is a tool of human cooperation, not proof of moral goodness. The question is not merely whether people trust one another, but what that trust enables them to do, how they treat those who dissent, and how they behave toward people outside their group.

Does the text confuse social trust with conformity to the group’s norms?

I do not believe social trust and conformity are the same thing, although I accept that the distinction needs to be made more clearly.

Social trust, as I use the term, means the reasonable expectation that other people will generally behave honestly, predictably, and cooperatively even when nobody is forcing them to do so. It allows people to interact without constantly assuming that they will be cheated, threatened, exploited, or deceived.

Conformity is something different.

Conformity means adapting one’s behavior, opinions, appearance, or lifestyle to the expectations of a group. It may be voluntary, but it can also result from social pressure, fear of exclusion, economic dependency, religious authority, political coercion, or simply the desire not to become the person everyone stops inviting to dinner.

A society can therefore have considerable conformity without much genuine trust.

An authoritarian society provides an obvious example. People may obey the same rules, repeat the same political slogans, dress according to accepted conventions, and avoid publicly challenging authority. From the outside, such a society can appear remarkably cohesive.

But if people behave that way because they fear punishment, surveillance, denunciation, or social exclusion, that is not necessarily trust.

It may simply be compliance.

The reverse is also possible. A society can tolerate considerable differences in lifestyle, religion, opinion, and personal behavior while maintaining relatively high levels of interpersonal trust. People do not need to agree about everything in order to trust one another.

What matters is a sufficient degree of shared expectation.

I do not need my neighbor to share my religion, politics, diet, taste in music, or family arrangements in order to trust him. I need reasonable confidence that he will respect agreements, refrain from stealing from me, recognize certain boundaries, and behave with a basic level of reciprocity.

That distinction is important to my argument.

When I speak about shared norms contributing to trust, I am not arguing that everybody must think alike.

Every functioning society requires some shared expectations of behavior. Even highly individualistic societies depend upon assumptions concerning honesty, contracts, property, violence, reciprocity, and responsibility. Without some common expectations, everyday cooperation becomes increasingly difficult and formal enforcement becomes more important.

But shared norms are not the same thing as identical values.

Two people can disagree profoundly about religion while sharing the norm that neither should use violence against the other. They can disagree about politics while accepting the legitimacy of peaceful disagreement. They can live very different lifestyles while respecting one another’s property and personal autonomy.

In fact, I would argue that one sign of a genuinely high-trust society is precisely that it can tolerate a degree of difference without requiring constant external enforcement.

This is also where conformity can become dangerous.

A community might achieve apparent stability by suppressing dissent. If everyone is afraid to challenge community leaders, question traditions, change religion, criticize accepted beliefs, or leave, then the resulting uniformity should not be mistaken for social trust.

Trust that exists only because dissent has been silenced is not particularly meaningful.

The same criticism can be directed at states. Governments can create outward conformity through laws, surveillance, censorship, education, bureaucracy, or political pressure. That may produce predictable behavior, but predictability imposed by authority is not the same thing as spontaneous social trust.

So I would refine my original argument in an important way.

Trust does not require everyone to be alike. It requires enough common expectations for people to cooperate despite the ways in which they are different.

Cultural similarity can sometimes contribute to those common expectations because people may share language, customs, social conventions, and assumptions about acceptable behavior. But cultural similarity is neither necessary nor sufficient for trust.

A homogeneous society can be distrustful and authoritarian.

A diverse society can develop strong trust if its members share sufficiently robust norms of reciprocity, responsibility, honesty, and mutual respect.

The question that interests me is therefore not simply how similar people are.

It is what enables people to trust one another without requiring an ever-growing external authority to regulate their relationships.

That is also why voluntary communities matter in my argument. Their purpose should not be to manufacture conformity. It should be to allow people to build social arrangements in which sufficient shared expectations exist for cooperation and trust to develop organically.

And those communities must still leave room for dissent, individuality, and exit.

Conformity says: “Behave like us because you belong to the group.” Trust says: “We do not have to be the same, because I can reasonably expect you to respect the rules that allow us to live together.”

That is the distinction I should have made more explicitly in the original article.

Does a person who challenges tradition undermine community trust, or are they legitimately exercising individual freedom?

A person who challenges tradition does not necessarily undermining community trust. They may simply be exercising individual freedom, and in some circumstances, they may actually be strengthening the community by forcing it to examine assumptions that have gone unquestioned for too long.

This is another area where I think we need to distinguish between trust, tradition, and conformity.

Traditions can play an important role in creating social trust. Shared customs, expectations, rituals, moral principles, and historical memories provide people with a common framework. They help answer basic questions about how members of a community are expected to behave toward one another.

But the fact that a tradition contributes to social cohesion does not make that tradition automatically correct, permanent, or immune from criticism.

Every living culture changes.

Many traditions we now regard as ancient were themselves innovations at some point. Cultures absorb outside influences, reinterpret customs, abandon practices, revive forgotten ones, and create new traditions. A culture that literally never changed would not be a living culture. It would be a museum exhibit.

The important question is therefore not whether someone challenges tradition, but how that challenge takes place and how the community responds to it.

An individual should be free to question religious beliefs, cultural practices, political assumptions, family expectations, or social conventions. If community trust depends upon nobody ever asking uncomfortable questions, then what exists may be conformity rather than trust.

Indeed, I would argue that genuine trust requires a certain tolerance for disagreement.

If I can disagree with my neighbors, criticize a community practice, live somewhat differently, and still expect to be treated fairly, that demonstrates a stronger form of trust than a society in which everyone appears to agree because dissent carries severe consequences.

This does not mean that individual freedom eliminates every responsibility toward the community.

There is a difference between challenging a tradition and deliberately destroying the ability of others to practice it.

If I reject a religious tradition, I should be free not to participate in it. But that does not give me the right to prevent others from practicing their religion peacefully. If I dislike a cultural custom, I can criticize or reject it, but I do not automatically acquire the right to demand that nobody else continue it.

Freedom has to operate in both directions.

The traditionalist should not be able to force the dissenter to conform, but neither should the dissenter automatically be able to force the traditionalist to abandon a voluntary way of life.

This principle is particularly important to my understanding of cultural autonomy.

The purpose of autonomy should not be to freeze communities at some chosen point in history. It should give people greater control over the evolution of their own social and cultural institutions.

Some communities may change rapidly. Others may deliberately preserve traditions for generations. Both should be possible, provided participation remains genuinely voluntary and basic individual freedoms are respected.

There will naturally be tensions.

Someone who rejects important community values may experience disagreement, criticism, or even social distance. Freedom does not guarantee universal approval. A community also has the right to debate what defines it and what obligations accompany voluntary membership.

But there is a significant difference between disapproval and coercion.

If someone questions a tradition and the response is debate, criticism, persuasion, or disagreement, then the community is exercising its freedom too.

If the response is violence, imprisonment, confiscation of property, or preventing the person from leaving, then the boundary has been crossed.

There is also a practical reason communities should tolerate internal criticism. Traditions sometimes become dysfunctional. Institutions become corrupt. Leaders abuse authority. Customs that once served a useful purpose may cease to do so.

A community incapable of questioning itself may preserve social cohesion for a time, but it can also preserve its mistakes.

Dissent can therefore function as a form of correction.

This connects directly with my broader argument about decentralization. I do not advocate smaller communities because I believe communities are always right. I advocate dispersing power precisely because nobody is always right, including communities.

The objective is not a society in which everyone conforms to the traditions of their group. It is a society in which people have greater freedom to preserve traditions they value, challenge traditions they reject, create new ways of living, and associate with others who make similar choices.

So no, I would not automatically regard the person challenging tradition as undermining trust.

A healthy community should be capable of surviving disagreement. If its traditions can only survive by silencing those who question them, then what holds that community together is probably not trust but coercion.

7. Is National-Anarchism Actually New?

Is National-Anarchism really a new political idea, or does it simply combine criticism of the state with conservative and nationalist ideas?

I would not claim that National-Anarchism is entirely new in the sense that nobody before the late twentieth century had ever combined ideas of decentralization, cultural autonomy, community self-government, nationalism, and opposition to the centralized state.

Political ideas rarely emerge from nowhere. Most are combinations, reinterpretations, and developments of earlier traditions. Liberalism, socialism, conservatism, and anarchism themselves developed through long arguments between thinkers who borrowed from, rejected, and modified ideas that came before them.

National-Anarchism should be understood in much the same way.

It certainly draws from anarchist criticism of centralized state power. From anarchism I take seriously the suspicion of hierarchy, concentrated political authority, imposed uniformity, and the assumption that society must always be organized from the top down.

At the same time, National-Anarchism differs from many contemporary anarchist currents because it does not assume that nationalism, cultural identity, tradition, religion, or attachment to a particular people must necessarily disappear with the state.

This is where the “national” element enters.

But I would also distinguish nationalism from statism.

The modern nation-state has encouraged us to treat the nation and the state as though they were the same thing. I do not believe they are. A state is a political institution claiming sovereign authority over a territory. A nation is a human community built around some combination of culture, history, language, memory, tradition, identity, and belonging.

States can contain several nations. Nations can exist without states. And political borders frequently fail to correspond neatly with cultural ones.

National-Anarchism therefore asks whether collective identity can be separated from the centralized state.

Can people preserve a national, cultural, religious, regional, or other collective identity without demanding political control over everyone else?

Can different communities organize themselves according to different values while cooperating where their interests overlap?

Can we defend both the individual’s freedom of association and a community’s freedom to maintain a distinctive identity?

Those questions place National-Anarchism in an unusual position because they challenge assumptions found on both the conventional Left and Right.

From parts of the Right, I reject the assumption that preserving national or cultural identity requires a powerful state, centralized authority, compulsory national unity, or political control over an entire territory.

From parts of the Left, I reject the assumption that liberation necessarily requires traditional identities, cultural particularism, religion, or nationalism eventually to dissolve into a universal political culture.

I see no contradiction in saying that a traditional religious community should be free to remain traditional while a secular progressive community should be equally free to organize itself according to entirely different principles.

Neither should rule the other.

This is also why describing National-Anarchism simply as “conservative anarchism” does not quite capture my position.

Some National-Anarchist communities might indeed be socially conservative. Others need not be. A decentralized order could contain ecological communes, traditional villages, religious settlements, libertarian communities, indigenous communities, cooperatives, culturally mixed cities, individualistic settlements, and arrangements that do not fit comfortably anywhere on the conventional political spectrum.

The common principle is not that all communities must become conservative.

It is that different communities should have greater freedom to determine their own social arrangements without capturing a central state and imposing those arrangements upon everybody else.

That, to me, is one of the more interesting implications of National-Anarchism.

Modern politics generally asks which values should govern society.

The conservative wants certain values reflected in law. The progressive wants others. Socialists, liberals, nationalists, religious movements, and libertarians all compete for political power because the winner gains the ability to shape rules applying to millions of people.

National-Anarchism asks a different question:

Why must there be one answer for everyone?

If people genuinely disagree about fundamental questions of culture, morality, economics, religion, education, and social organization, perhaps greater autonomy is preferable to an endless struggle over who controls the central state.

That does not make National-Anarchism an entirely unprecedented political philosophy. Elements of it can be found in anarchism, federalism, libertarianism, nationalism, communitarianism, indigenous self-government, subsidiarity, and various historical forms of local autonomy.

Its distinctiveness lies in how those elements are combined.

And I think it is important to acknowledge something else. National-Anarchism has historically attracted people from very different political backgrounds, including sections of the radical Right, and some interpretations have placed much greater emphasis on ethnicity or racial separation than I do.

Pretending that history does not exist would make clarification impossible.

My own understanding of National-Anarchism is not based upon racial determinism or the idea that every person should be assigned to an ethnic community. As I have argued throughout these answers, community membership must ultimately rest upon voluntary association, the right to leave, and the freedom to create alternatives.

So is National-Anarchism completely new?

No.

But I do think it combines existing ideas in a way that challenges the conventional political divide.

Its most interesting proposition, for me, is neither nationalism nor anarchism considered separately. It is the attempt to reconcile collective self-determination with individual autonomy.

The nationalist asks how a people can preserve its identity.

The anarchist asks how the individual can remain free from concentrated authority.

National-Anarchism, at least as I understand it, asks whether we can do both.

Its value therefore does not depend upon claiming that every ingredient is new. The question is whether combining decentralization, voluntary association, cultural self-determination, and skepticism toward concentrated power provides a useful alternative to the increasingly centralized political systems we have today.

From Criticism to Possibility

After answering all these questions, one thing should be obvious: I am not presenting National-Anarchism as a perfect political system.

I do not believe such a system exists.

Every form of social organization creates problems of its own. Centralization creates problems. Decentralization creates problems. Homogeneous societies can become oppressive. Diverse societies can become fragmented. Communities can abuse power, but so can states. Markets can create opportunities and concentrate wealth. Individualism can protect freedom while weakening social bonds.

There is no political arrangement that removes human nature from the equation.

That is why I think we sometimes approach political ideas in the wrong way.

When we encounter an unfamiliar idea, particularly one carrying a controversial label such as National-Anarchism, our first instinct is often to search for the point at which it fails.

What about this?

What happens if that goes wrong?

Who prevents someone from abusing this?

These are legitimate questions. I have tried to answer them seriously throughout this article, and they have forced me to clarify aspects of my own thinking.

But we should apply the same skepticism to the political arrangements we already accept.

Who prevents the state from abusing its authority? Who protects minorities when democratic majorities become intolerant? Who prevents wealthy interests from influencing central governments? Who guarantees that bureaucracy remains accountable? Who protects communities when national policies destroy their way of life? Who prevents temporary emergency powers from becoming permanent?

We rarely demand that the existing system provide perfect answers to all these questions before accepting its legitimacy.

Yet alternative ideas are often expected to solve every conceivable human problem before they are even considered.

Perhaps a more useful question is not simply:

“What could go wrong with National-Anarchism?”

We should also ask:

“What possibilities could it open?”

And perhaps even more importantly:

“What could these ideas mean for me as an individual?”

National-Anarchism does not have to begin with drawing new borders on maps or designing an entirely new political system.

It can begin much closer to home.

It can begin by asking how much responsibility we have surrendered to distant institutions.

It can mean rebuilding relationships with neighbors rather than expecting bureaucracies to solve every local problem.

It can mean creating voluntary associations, cooperatives, cultural organizations, mutual-aid networks, independent schools, local initiatives, or communities of people who share particular values.

It can mean taking greater responsibility for our families, our surroundings, and the people with whom we actually live.

It can mean rediscovering that community does not have to be something administered by government.

And it can mean accepting that other people may choose completely different ways of living.

That last point is particularly important to me.

National-Anarchism, as I understand it, is not about creating one National-Anarchist society in which everybody must follow National-Anarchist principles.

That would rather spectacularly defeat the purpose.

It is about creating greater space for different forms of human association.

Traditional communities should be able to exist.

Cosmopolitan communities should be able to exist.

Religious communities should be able to exist.

Secular communities should be able to exist.

Collectivist communities should be able to experiment with collective ownership, while more individualistic communities should be able to organize themselves differently.

And people who want very little to do with collective identity should have space as well.

The principle connecting them is not uniformity.

It is autonomy.

You organize your life according to your values, while recognizing the right of others to organize theirs differently.

That requires something that contemporary politics increasingly seems to have difficulty producing: tolerance of genuine difference.

Not the superficial tolerance that says, “You are free to be different as long as you ultimately think like me.”

Real tolerance.

The kind that says:

“I disagree with how you choose to live, but I do not need to control you.”

Perhaps that is also where trust returns to the discussion.

Trust does not require us all to become the same.

It requires enough confidence in one another that we do not constantly feel compelled to control one another.

The more we distrust our neighbors, communities, and fellow citizens, the easier it becomes to demand another law, another regulation, another authority, another institution to supervise human behavior.

Eventually we may discover that in trying to protect ourselves from everyone else, we have constructed institutions powerful enough to control all of us.

National-Anarchism asks whether another direction is possible.

Can we move some responsibility back downwards?

From the state to the community.

From the community to the family.

From institutions to voluntary associations.

And ultimately, back to the individual.

I do not expect everyone reading this article to become a National-Anarchist. Nor should they.

I would simply ask readers to approach these ideas with an open mind.

Criticize them. Challenge them. Point out contradictions. Ask difficult questions. That is how ideas develop.

But do not stop there.

Look for possibilities as well as problems.

Ask whether decentralization might give you greater control over some part of your own life. Ask whether stronger voluntary communities could reduce dependence upon distant institutions. Ask whether people with profoundly different values really need to spend their lives fighting for control of the same political machinery.

And ask whether freedom might sometimes mean allowing people to build societies that you personally would never choose to live in.

National-Anarchism does not need to provide the final answer to every political question to contribute something valuable.

Perhaps its most useful contribution is simply to make us question an assumption so deeply embedded in modern politics that we rarely notice it:

Why must one system, one political center, and one set of answers govern everybody?

I do not claim to have designed the perfect society.

I am suggesting that we should remain open to alternatives.

Because political progress has rarely begun with people insisting that the existing system is the only imaginable one.

It begins when someone is willing to ask:

Could we organize our lives differently?

Not the End – A New Beginning