“The idea that expertise ought to guide our political life is at odds with the principle of national self-determination”

If we all turn our minds to governance, we can find solutions to the problems. The idea that human government is a permanent thing that reached its perfection in Athens and Jerusalem was not part of the participants’ ideology. What was most striking is that sitting within sight of the Gulf – Arab or Persian depending on the viewpoint – in a place of ancient civilisations, the theme was how to engineer the political future.

Less alien, but not less striking, is the manner in which this concept has taken hold in Euro-American civilization. That civilization grew out of the Enlightenment, and its political foundation was the idea of republicanism, an idea that rests on the right of national self-determination. The idea that the nation is the foundation of a moral political life was self-evident to the American and French revolutions and their heirs. The individual and his nation were intimately bound. And the right of a nation’s people to govern themselves was central to the nation.

There was, of course, another part of the Enlightenment, the idea that reason ought to be used to improve all things, including government, and the idea that those who had mastered the subject at hand were to be respected and listened to. So, an aeronautical engineer (always on my mind when I am at 36,000 feet) should design planes. Experts in governance should design governments.

The idea that expertise ought to guide our political life is at odds with the principle of national self-determination. Expertise means experts, and experts are defined as knowing more than the rest of us. If government ought to rest on expertise, then experts should govern. If government should rest on the consent of the governed, then the premise is that all of us, by virtue of being citizens of a nation, are qualified to determine how the nation ought to be governed.

There is a blended version of this. The people should govern by selecting representatives, then those representatives ought to select experts to work on the details. It seems to me that this is one of those solutions that appears readily soluble but isn’t.

In selecting a president or prime minister, the people are both imbuing him with power and holding him accountable. The idea of expertise is that governance is so complicated it requires experts to manage it. Very quickly the ability of the elected representative to determine the direction of the nation, or of the possibility of national self-determination, dissolves.

This is not the result of a conspiracy of the experts. The people’s expectation of what the state can do for them has surged, and with it the complexity of the process. Citizens cannot manage the complexity, and elected officials cannot oversee the complexity. By default, the republican system has moved from a relationship between the people and their representatives to one between the people, their representatives and the managers. This process has been underway for a long time, since European states created a permanent civil service to do the bidding of their political masters. And since that time, the civil servants have increasingly managed the system – and managed their political masters.

Over time, the technocrats, who are the experts, developed ambitions and ideology. The ambition was to be free of the meddling hand of politicians and the ignorant whims of the people, and to be free, in the words of the United States Constitution, to build “a more perfect union” without being constrained by the inexpert help of the citizens or government. There was political ambition in this of course, but there was also logic. If history is the unfolding of reason, then those most trained in the application of reason must be allowed to rule. But the truth also was that the creation of a defense plan or a health care system requires expertise that citizens and representatives lack.

At the same time, there was an ideology at work as well, and it was most visible in the European Union. If the goal is to constantly improve governance, then a broader vision than the nation-state is needed. The problems that have to be solved can’t be solved within the narrow confines of a single nation-state. The nation stands in the way of improvement.