For a period of time in the 1870's and 1880's, both Manitoba and Ontario claimed a huge swath of land extending from the Lake of the Woods far to the north. Both governments attempted to assert their claims by imposing their laws on the same individuals and communities living in the disputed area. Even a cursory examination of the personal principle suggests the ways in which it might resolve conflict in areas with ethnically-mixed populations. This being the case, one wonders why the personal principle has never attracted the attention of large numbers of political theorists. Perhaps the paradigm inherent in governments with a territorial law-making monopoly is so strong that even theorists accept it uncritically. Today, most people are unaware of the possibility of organizing governments along non-territorial lines. At first glance, the absence of any governments organized along the personal principle might seem to indicate that the concept is not viable in real-life. It is my contention however, that it is very much a viable concept, one whose implementation would bring benefits in many different spheres of life. Today, there are relatively few non-territorial states and even the status as states of organizations like the Knights of Malta and the Iroquois Confederacy is in doubt. In this essay, I will introduce the concept of the personal principle and examine the modern history of the idea. I will then attempt to sketch what I believe to be the prerequisites for successful non-territorial governments as well as some of the benefits of this form of political organization. Lastly, I will provide some hypotheses as to why this idea has proved unpopular.

Territorial decentralization as a way of giving each ethnic group a degree of self-government has taken various forms in multi-cultural states.⁽¹⁾ In Switzerland, while there are four main ethnic groups, the number of cantons is much larger, decentralization to the cantonal level serving to deal with other tensions besides linguistic ones. For instance, there are French Catholic and French Protestant cantons in Switzerland. In Belgium, in contrast, two territorial governments ( one for each linguistic area ) have been superimposed upon an older federal system with many provinces. In some countries, territorial federalism has worked well to manage ethnic and other cultural conflicts. In others, it has been much less successful. One basic problem with it is that the boundaries between ethnic groups are rarely clean. There are broad zones of ethnic transition, islands of ethnic minorities, and culturally-mediating populations that share affinities with two or more groups. Examples of the latter situation include populations that speak a dialect in between two standard languages. One solution to this problem is allow for territorial adjustments down to quite minute levels, even if this means that some units of government will not be geographically contiguous and territorial "islands" are very small. Even in Switzerland, where very elaborate mechanisms for fine adjustments along these lines exist, there are cases where the problems brought on by making sub-national governments territorial in nature are intractable.

Another defect with sub-national governments taking a territorial form is that this privileges certain social and cultural cleavages over others, much in the same way the single-member constituency system privileges groups and issue-constituencies that are territorially concentrated. For instance, in Canada, the Inuit ( about 2 per cent of the population, living almost exclusively in the Arctic region ) will soon have unit of government they are numerically dominant. In contrast, Chinese-Canadians ( a slightly larger group ) are scattered in towns and cities across the country can form numerical majorities only in very small areas ( e.g., Chinatown ). Properly constructed, a form of federalism in keeping with the personal principle would be less discriminatory to groups that are not concentrated in areas large enought to be a state/province/canton/region.

Historically, the advocates of the personal principle have been few and far between. Ever since the emergence of the nation-state in the modern period, political actors have operated in accordance with the idea that in each territory, there can only be one law-making authority. This conception of government was approached in unitary states like the United Kingdom. A modification of this idea allowed for different levels of government each with its own legislative sphere, but in federalism the basic concept remained the same; at any given point in space, there would only be one set of laws applying to all individuals. On occasions when two or more sub-national units claimed the same territory (e.g., the Ontario-Manitoba boundary dispute), this was viewed as highly unfortunate for not only the politicians controlling the two sub-national units but also for the citizens living in the disputed zone. Differening laws for different individuals inhabiting the same territory were increasingly anathema. Absolutism was one force for legal uniformity, but so was the doctrine of Parliamentary supremacy. Liberalism, with its insistence on equality before the law was another. To be fair, the personal principle can be linked with many of the abuses of the early modern period. The remnants of the parallel legal systems of earlier time were now corrupted into privileges that allowed the rich and powerful to both participate in the system and be protected from the full rigor of the law. For instance, literate Englishmen could plead benefit of clergy and be spared execution ( the assumption that literacy indicated membership in holy orders was a carryover from the middle ages ). The reaction against the personal principle was, to a certain extent legitimate. In an era that was putting a greater premium on individual choice and freedom, the personal principle and the privileges it was linked with were seem as shackling individuals. In constructing federal systems in accordance with the personal principle, we must clearly avoid merely granting privileges to classes of individuals. Methods of insuring this will be discussed below.

One hundred years ago, the problems of nationality were coming to the boiling point in the Balkans, the "powder keg" of Europe. Ethnic conflict was especially fierce in the Hapsburg Empire. Since 1867, the Empire had been divided roughly in half, one half consisting of "Austria", the other of "Hungary," which was allowed a great deal of autonomy. However, tensions between Austria and Hungary remained. Furthermore, within each half of Austria-Hungary, various minority nationalities ( for instance, Croatians, Poles, Italians, and Czechs ) were also striving for autonomy, attempts which often conflicted with the goals of the dominant group. Some nationalities, like the Poles were demanding independence, while others merely wanted autonomy with the two dominant groups. Compounding the situation was the increasingly poly-ethnic nature of the large urban areas and the special problem of an ethnic group that was scattered throughout the country, namely the Jews. Territorial decentralization as a way of providing autonomy had serious limits in this situation. For one thing, rural migration to the cities often ignored traditional ethnic boundaries. Moreover, few localities in the Empire were exclusively populated any one ethnicity.

Two political thinkers of a socialistic bent proposed a solution, a new footing for group autonomy in the Empire. Karl Renner and Otto Bauer sought to introduce a form of federalism grounded in the personal rather than the territorial principle. Hannah Arendt describes their plan as to make nationality "a kind of personal status; this of course corresponded to the situation in which ethnic groups were dispersed all over the empire without losing any of their national characteristics." Otto Bauer wrote: "the personal principle wants to organize nations not as territorial bodies but as mere associations of persons."

The personal principle did not prove popular enough to seriously affect the destiny of Austria-Hungary. But the idea of parallel governments coexisting in the same territory resurfaced. Significantly, the reappearance of this idea was in the United States in the 1960's, when the break-down of social and political consensus was evident. Thinkers whose beliefs fall somewhere between libertarian and anarchist proposed a compromise solution between very minimalist government and no state. Murray Rothbard proposed a system of competing governments or "protection agencies" that individuals could choose to purchase police protection and other legal services from. Rothbard, however, believed that a common, individualist body of law respected by all the competing governments would be a prerequisite for the systems smooth operation. In Rothbard's utopia, everyone has the same basic individualist values, with competition between governments merely serving to deliver these values as efficiently as possible. Rothbard's system is thus predicated on a belief that an objective truth in social matters exists and would be determined by all reasonable men to be the same. In an increasingly multi0cultural society, this idea is very significant as well as very problematic. Shorn of this objectivist baggage, Rothbard's ideas were extended by a younger libertarian thinker, David Friedman, son of Nobel-laureate Milton Friedman. In a 1974 book entitled The Machinery of Freedom, Friedman expanded the idea of competing governments to include different legal systems reflecting the differing values of groups sharing the same area. The radical subjectivism of this idea, the recognition of increased cultural and value diversity and the impossibility of lasting consensus place this book in the mainstream of its time in terms of philosophical fundamentals. Likewise, the desire to expand the choices of the individual, the focus on consumer sovereignty and the use of economic analogies make this book characteristically American. And above all, the idea of competing governments as enunciated by Friedman and Rothbard corresponds to the personal principle. The "personal principle" and "competing governments" are not synonymous. For instance, in the Middle Ages the personal principle existed, but the amount of really effective competition between governments was minimal: after all, a married serf could not switch to being a member of the clergy subject to church laws. More recently, the personal principle was part of South Africa's apartheid laws, where people of one group ( say Zulus ) retained Zulu status or nationality wherever in the country they lived. How many of the injustices associated with apartheid ( such the reservation of jobs for members of certain legally-defined groups ) would have been impossible if individuals had the right to self-identify their ethnicity and switch their status to whatever group they wanted. To avoid the abuses and injustices associated with the old form of the personal principle, where membership in groups was not freely chosen by individuals, we must couple the personal principle to the equality of all groups and the right of individuals to self-identify and to chose which group the want to join. Friedman and Rothbards great accomplishment was to make this coupling.

There are several main problems with the Murray and Rothbard writings. For one thing, they assume that "competition in governments" would invariable produce a number of fairly minimalist governments asking little from their citizen-members and providing little in return. They overlook the quite real possibility that many of the competing, non-territorial governments might be quite activist, perhaps taking the form of welfare-states or Geneva-style theocracies. Another problem with Rothbard and Friedman's writings is that they are too utopian. They show how competing governments might work once they had been in existence for a long time, but the messy details of the transition to competing governments are left out.

Other published proponents of the personal principle are few and far between.

1. ¹Please note that the term "multi-cultural" and not "multi-ethnic" is used. This is because so often cultural conflict in states is along cleavages not strictly ethnic in character. For instance, in Switzerland, the tension between Catholic and Protestant was once more salient than that between French-speakers and German-speakers. Historically, federalism has been proposed as a solution to both cultural and ethnic conflict. I am proposing the personal principle as an extension of this idea, but one which could eventually address cultural cleavages that barely correlate with areas. The proliferation of subcultures in Western societies pointed out by Alvin Toffler has created new cultural-political tensions; it is my view that these too could be dealt with by the application of the personal principle to federalism.