Are Free Zones Really Free?
The Hidden Globe takes a skeptical but nuanced look at quasi-autonomous territories in the cracks of the map.
The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Riverhead Books, 336 pages, $30
The idea of carving out territorial exceptions to, or escape zones from, the hand of the nation-state has long captured the imagination of free market enthusiasts. In the 1990s, I was involved in several organizations devoted to the idea, and I witnessed the movement's gradual shift from a pipe dream of libertarian theorists to something attracting serious interest, and investment capital, from entrepreneurs, as libertarian-oriented free ports, special economic zones, charter cities, and even floating maritime cities (sea-steads), began to look more politically possible. In 1993, my "free nation" group was meeting in a local North Carolina hotel; by 2011, I was sipping cocktails at a rather swankier "free cities" conference on the resort island of Roatán, Honduras—which, not coincidentally, today boasts its own charter city, Próspera.
What looks exciting to libertarians may unsurprisingly seem less congenial to those not already sold on libertarian ideas. In The Hidden Globe, the journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian turns a more skeptical eye on these developments, and on the broader trend for the conventional picture of "one land, one law, one people, and one government" to undergo "a kind of transfiguration" into "an accretion of cracks and concessions, suspensions and abstractions, carve-outs and free zones, and other places without nationality in the conventional sense."
Abrahamian takes us on an engaging tour of a variety of communities that exist in, offer access to, or are entangled with this interstitial, postnational network, including Singapore, Mauritius, Shenzhen, Dubai, Svalbard, Boten, Luxembourg (an aggressive pioneer in laws pertaining to outer-space resources), Geneva (her childhood home), and the aforementioned Próspera.
Although Abrahamian's understanding of libertarian ideas is somewhat superficial, her discussion is more nuanced and less hostile than the jacket copy for the book might lead one to expect; she sees potential for unjust exploitation in economic free zones, but liberatory potential as well. She also recognizes that the decoupling of jurisdiction from territory is not a new phenomenon and has not been a uniformly negative one. Where she is critical, much that she says deserves libertarian attention.
The free zones that Abrahamian explores are, generally by design, places where legally questionable assets can be hidden from the eyes and hands of government. Libertarians are unlikely to lose much sleep over her dismay that tax evaders are thereby enabled to shield their wealth from legal scrutiny; but her further examples of dictators, war profiteers, and dealers in stolen art might raise more concern. Nor are interstitial zones always liberating for their inhabitants. The infamous prison at the U.S. naval base in Cuba's Guantánamo Bay is an attractive place for the American government to house refugees without asylum hearings and suspected terrorists without trials, because—or so the government maintains—neither U.S. nor Cuban law applies there.
Australia has its own Guantánamo Archipelago, and Abrahamian devotes a chapter to it. This comprises, on the one hand, a string of islands under Australian jurisdiction but legally excised from Australian territory, so that asylum seekers' legal rights do not apply there, and on the other hand prisons in foreign countries to which Australia has sent unwanted migrants (a precedent that President Donald Trump is imitating today). Even refugees allowed into Australia proper for medical care have sometimes been treated via a legal fiction as though they were still back in their offshore prisons, and thus without ordinary rights.
Abrahamian worries that even the more rhetorically libertarian free zones can be oppressive in practice. Many feature legal regimes stronger in "economic" rights (narrowly construed) than in civil rights, particularly for workers. Capital is regularly attracted to free zones via offers of corporate welfare and land seized through eminent domain. Countries with free zones are often economically authoritarian outside the free zone, thus pushing their desperate population into the free zone in search of jobs. Thus the profits that employers make from low wages and dangerous work conditions inside the free zone are not purely market-driven; they are subsidized by the host country's illiberalism.
Investors drawn to free zones are not always freewheeling libertarians; often they support severe immigration controls. Thus the hidden globe "circumscribes the lives of the world's most disenfranchised people"; Abrahamian instances "detainees languishing in offshore prisons in the Caribbean and the Pacific, impoverished workers processing goods for export in duty-free industrial zones across the Global South, sailors and asylum seekers stuck on vessels they cannot leave for lack of papers." Those who are "unwanted abroad" but "can't stay home" often end up "in a third space: neither here nor there." In short, the interstitial network that Abrahamian describes may be liberating for those with the wealth and connections to navigate it, but for those who don't it can be a grim trap.
A strong supporter of open borders, Abrahamian favors giving immigrant-friendly cities "a power traditionally reserved for federal governments," namely "the leeway to grant foreigners legal residency"—sanctuary cities with legal teeth. But she also warns that such a process, if mishandled, might result in nominal free zones that are actually "glorified prisons" where impoverished refugees can live and work but have no option to leave. It matters little to a prisoner whether the key to one's prison is held by officials within the prison or by officials in the surrounding neighborhood.
The charter city movement draws inspiration from the free mercantile cities of the late Middle Ages that served as a refuge for serfs escaping the feudal system. These medieval cities inspired thinkers as diverse as the classical liberal Augustin Thierry and the anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin with visions of islands of cooperative social order emerging in a hostile sea of royal, baronial, and ecclesiastical privilege. But Abrahamian worries that a libertarian-minded charter city might turn all too easily into "a company town, governed by corporate charter, full of workers who have no say in their plight." (Naomi Kritzer's recent sci-fi novel Liberty's Daughter, set on a purportedly libertarian seastead, dramatizes this possibility.) I think this is a worry that libertarians should take seriously; something calling itself a free-enterprise zone is not thereby magically prevented from morphing into just another nation-state, perhaps even an especially repressive one.
Yet Abrahamian also acknowledges that such a city could instead "represent a new kind of place, with new rules for all people: a temporary, or even a permanent city of refuge." While she has serious reservations about the benefits of actually existing free zones, she agrees with their proponents that "to solve global problems in ways that help ordinary people, we need to be less hidebound to rigid notions of sovereignty, territoriality, and jurisdiction."
For Abrahamian, securing this more salutary result requires a refusal to "cede this territory to rigidly ideological capitalists." As often happens when people talk about "capitalism," it is difficult to track when by "capitalism" she means a free market and when she means a regime of corporate privilege. To her credit, she recognizes the distinction, at least in principle, but the distinction often gets lost in application. Hence her tendency not to take very seriously the possibility that a consistent free market might hold the solutions to many of the problems she considers.
Libertarians have, it must be admitted, an uneven record of tracking the distinction themselves. When the libertarian-minded investors that Abrahamian interviews talk blithely of importing efficient first-world economic rules into inefficient third-world economies, they seem not to have asked themselves whether those first-world economic rules already diverge from free market principles by building in systematic exploitation that might be exacerbated in a more impoverished environment.
Yet the idea of zones of escape from the hand of the state is not just one that appeals to wealthy investors. We may also think of squatter settlements, "maroon" communities of escaped slaves, left-wing anarchist zones like the (formerly) semiautonomous Christiana in Copenhagen, or the late James C. Scott's example (in The Art of Not Being Governed) of upland Southeast Asia's "shatter zones" of refuge from the predatory states that dominate the valleys. Abrahamian does briefly discuss Scott, though she does not seem to see much of a parallel between her venture capitalists and Scott's fugitive serfs. And indeed, as she shows, the capitalists seeking out free zones are not always so innocent. (Neither are the fugitive serfs, for that matter.) But many participants in libertarian free-zone projects are very much not at the upper end of the economic spectrum, and taking them into account blurs the contrast somewhat.
Libertarians can be too quick to see only the liberatory side of free zones, and Abrahamian's book should serve as a useful corrective. The problems she points to, however, stem from interstitial freedom being extended unequally to different groups. People need zones of escape, not only from the state but from purported free zones that have turned abusive, in line with the anarchist Paul Goodman's vision of "the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life." The cure for bad interstitiality, perhaps, is more interstitiality.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline "Cracks in the Map."
