“The first grave. Now we’re getting someplace. Houses and children and graves, that’s home, Tom. Those are the things that hold a man down.”

John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown.

Introduction:

As human beings, not completely rational as we sometimes think we are, yet barely able at times to control our emotions and impulses, we find it hard to deal with the world in the cold manner the physical world behaves. At any instance, we exhibit both spiritual and scientific patterns of thinking toward the elements of the world we process. We’re not machines that only need to be oiled and fueled regularly, but the mechanical parts and the engine-like processes influence much of our behavior. Still, as human beings, we desire things not for immediate sustenance — like love and meaning and appraisal. One particularly spiritual thing, that can also be processed in a semi-scientific manner is our need to belong to a group. And not any group will do, since we are very picky creatures who, individually, may choose which groups we attempt to belong to. One such large social group is the nation. As Murray Rothbard reminds us in his Nations by Consent, the concept of a nation ‘cannot be precisely defined; it is a complex and varying constellation of different forms of communities, languages, ethnic groups, or religions.’

              And yet, in most states of the world, this concept of nationhood and nationality has been diverted from being such a group to which we belong in sharing a heritage, a language, a history, and so on. It has become a set of paperwork that needs to be processed in central facilities, with documents proving that the process has been followed thoroughly and successfully. Gone are the days of dynamic, instinctual, social belonging; to belong now requires a specific bureau and a set of policies put in place by bureaucrats and politicians.

              To belong to such a group as the nation of Kuwait (now, read as the state of Kuwait), to concentrate on a specific contemporary example, means that you have the right to be employed, given government-mandated social security, medical care, and education if you successfully go through the process of obtaining a national ID. And though these ‘free’ privileges may seem to many to be a social good — even in the decrepit state by which the government offers them — they come with huge social costs. Ignoring for the moment that they hinder competition, and naturally bring with them a bureaucratic structure that slows (and almost always combats) social and cultural evolution which Mises painstakingly explains in his short work, Bureaucracy, there is one social ill that they tend to create. And that is the problem of statelessness: People who would naturally be assimilated into the community, who would also be integrated into the labor, consumer, producer, and infrastructure economies are denied access because of a failure to successfully go through the bureaucratic process. A process that was initially skewed and hostile toward any newcomer. And the process may be offered due to some justifications, such as the difficulty of assimilating new citizens, most of these justifications are invalid. Some justifications, ad hoc as they are, only feign concern for costs and assimilation but were consciously designed so that the processing bureaus retain their powers.

Statelessness:

In John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown, Joseph Wayne’s homesteading experiment, and his subsequent attachment to the land as he grows fond of it and spiritually attaches himself to it, is all too human and is shared by everyone who successfully assimilates to a community. But unlike the characters of Steinbeck’s novels, many Kuwaitis are unable to own the land they homestead, nor be able to obtain any job they want — given that both employer and employee are more than eager to work together — because they are not able to successfully go through the process of obtaining a national identity. A national identity that often requires stateless individuals to associate with other states and live here as immigrants. They’re colloquially called the Bidoon (the withouts), for they are without nationalities, or more precisely, national identification.

              Here, dignity comes from having such identifications, and not from their own hard work and achievements. No matter how much some of them prove themselves, their work will be less considered and their lives remain hard and they remain poor in a nation of abundant wealth. A professor of mine who has chosen to stay in Kuwait decided to obtain the American nationality and his children are American and Canadian citizens, for getting some of the freedoms which he is denied here. Those God-given freedoms which Bastiat details in The Law exist in a tattered form for Kuwaitis and those who have successfully gone through the process, but not to many of those who were denied because of having an Iraqi/Irani/Syrian uncle, or whose great grandparents served in the Kuwaiti army before Kuwait’s independence and statehood, but did not register for an ID. The reasons are often arbitrary, and it is natural for those excluded to start harboring extreme resentment toward others and themselves. (And really, who wouldn’t be angry if the least of his freedoms are denied of him.)

Nationality:

And yet, the problem must be stated very clearly: Why would anyone want to have an official national identity instead of belonging to this traditional group we consider to be our national identity? The reasons seem to me to be thrice-fold. One, many freedoms are only granted to those who have official identities. And two, those with the identity are given privileges and rights that are in excess of what they would get if they had to work for them (i.e., in a free market). And three, only the (exclusionary) state is allowed to offer (to those officially registered citizens) many of the public utilities needed for modern life in such a scorchingly harsh climate as that of Kuwait.

              All humans have their individual desires which can only be granted in a state of liberty, so the first point need not be expanded on. But the second point is very important: The state, in its inefficiency, cannot produce enough to harbor a growing populace. And when the capital structure is dissipated by the state, these privileges and free goods will no longer be available in their degree of abundance to Kuwaitis. That may explain why many Kuwaitis falsely adopt the cultural-preservation narrative in excluding others, since any culture cannot be preserved indefinitely without people voluntarily taking on the roles dictated by it, anyway. The third point, which is really the crux of the matter, is often a question of inception and survival for the family. Families, in their healthy states, rely on an infrastructure that provides running water, electricity, shelter, and a constant influx of nutrition — which is becoming progressively hard for many of those stateless families, since it is virtually impossible for any service provider to supply these given our regulatory, and self-preserving, political structure.

              The libertarian solution, as I see it, is to render this official national identification meaningless, and to let the traditional structure of social bonds we call our nation to take its place, resuming its course. Many social woes can be solved by a free-exchange market economy, without any central authority dictating which parties are allowed to be involved in satisfying the goods and services of the community. People can accommodate, even in their poverty, if the chances permit, if the rules are consistent and stable over time — and many rise in these circumstances. If only allowed.

[This article was first published on the Mises Wire, under the title: ‘Nationality and Statelessness: The Kuwaiti Bidoon,’ which can be accessed here: https://mises.org/mises-wire/nationality-and-statelessness-kuwaiti-bidoon.]

Surra,
October, 2022.