The Laws of Power and the Power of Law
1. The Laws of Power
Experience shows that those given power will act according to the following laws:
- Try to keep your power by all means.
- Use your power to get more power.
Why? Power is nice. It allows you to arrange the world the way you like it. It starts from little personal preferences, over what kind of jobs you do at work and how much you get payed for it, to modeling society according to your view of the world.
Power flatters your ego, makes you feel important, admired – and maybe even loved? Altogether, if you are someone who likes power, it is certainly better to have it than others having power over you.
Not surprisingly, given these laws of power, power gets concentrated in the hand of a few if it goes unchecked. Well aware of this, the designers of constitutions of countries all over the world have always sought an approach of “checks and balances”. Typical is a distribution of political power over a legislative branch (e.g. Parliament, that creates new laws), an executive branch (typically the government, president etc.), and the judicial branch that supervises that everybody obeys the laws – including the governments.
This separation of powers ensures that each branch of the political system has distinct functions and the ability to monitor and restrain the others. It promotes accountability and safeguards democracy by balancing authority between the actors of the political system.
So far so good.
But who keeps the power of the whole political system in check? In a democracy, all the power is supposed to emanate from “the people”. In an indirect democracy it goes to the three branches of the political system mentioned – but remains almost completely unchecked!
Yes, if the government and parliament pass a law, you may go to court and try to prove that it is unconstitutional. In some cases, this does happen, and the government is then invited to “fix” the law. But it is clear that the hurdle for doing so is very high. Who, as a private person, has the time and resources to sue the government? In most cases only larger lobby groups, the political opposition, or other larger organizations have the power already needed to do so.
Wouldn´t it be a more efficient approach to give people the power to veto a law passed by their government?
Interestingly, just that idea was implemented in 2015 in the Netherlands with the “Advisory Referendum Act” (“Wet raadgevend referendum”). While not legally binding, it allowed citizens to call for a referendum on legislation that had already been passed by Parliament, excluding issues like taxes or constitutional amendments. A referendum could be triggered if 300,000 valid signatures were collected within a specified time frame. If a law was rejected by more than half of the votes cast, with a mandatory turnout of at least 30%, its entry into force was to be suspended indefinitely and a follow-up law had to be enacted that either repealed the law or provided for its entry into force.
E.g., in 2016, in the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement Referendum, citizens voted against the agreement, which led the Dutch government to renegotiate aspects of the agreement to address public concerns.
The limits of this non-legally binding type of referendum became apparent in 2018, when the Dutch government abolished it. Attempts were made by groups like the NGO “Meer Democratie” to initiate a referendum to stop that. They intended to use the existing provisions of the law to request a referendum on its repeal. However, the government preemptively blocked this possibility by retroactively enforcing the repeal law! This legal maneuver eliminated the time frame during which citizens could collect signatures to trigger a referendum.
The approach faced significant criticism from legal scholars, the media, and the public, who accused the government of undermining democratic principles. Despite efforts, including lawsuits filed by advocacy groups to contest this move, no referendum ultimately took place.
And that was the end of it, in 2018. Which brings us back to the 1. Law of Power. How surprising.
Presumably, this lack of check of the entire political system is a major reason why so many people feel frustrated with democracy, are angry against politicians and established parties, feel unheard, helpless, and without any possibility to influence the world in which they live. And then vote extremist, populist parties who promise to make everything better, just to get in power and then curtail the rights of about everybody.
The political system essentially asks the people to provide some fraction of a bit of information per year by casting their vote every 4 years or so (if at all), with which they are supposed to decide a large conglomerate of questions neatly packed in political programs of their parties.
Compare that to the Gigabits of data in form of images, videos, articles etc. that flows the other way round from the show-business that politics has largely become, to the people – trying to nudge them in the desired direction for the next election. For that is the only official feedback from the people, with just the same little information transfer as in the last election.
In between, once in power, the politicians can essentially do what they want and cannot be held accountable by the people by any official check-mechanism.
To summarize: People give their power to the political system. The different branches of the political system have mechanisms of checks and balances between them to avoid concentration of too much power in one of them. But a mechanism to keep in check the power of the entire political system relative to that of the people is largely missing even in typical bona-fide democracies.
Not to talk about dictatorships, of course.
While this is already bad enough, it is really disastrous when it comes to decisions of War.
To make the point clear, think of the extreme case: Nuclear war. To cite from the Sipri Yearbook 2024: “At the start of 2024, nine states—the United States, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) and Israel—together possessed approximately 12 121 nuclear weapons, of which 9585 were considered to be potentially operationally available…, including about 2100 that were kept in a state of high operational alert—about 100 more than the previous year. “
Even though this is down from a staggering 60,000 or so nuclear bombs towards the end of the Cold War, it is probably more than enough to extinguish human civilization several times over – extrapolating from the Nuclear Famine report 2022, which concluded that even in a “regional war” with “just” a 100 nuclear bombs, the live of about 2 billion people would be at stake…
And who has the power over these weapons? A handful of mostly elderly, power-hungry men, often of doubtful character!
It is totally mind-blowing that humanity has given away the power to eradicate itself to those few men, without any possibility to keep them in check!
This is total insanity and needs to be changed if humanity wants to survive!
2. The Power of Law
While we, the people, have little to no power over the decisions of our politicians, laws certainly do give us some power. More importantly, the power of law cannot be underestimated in the process of getting power for entire parts of the population that so far had no power.
Examples include the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and elsewhere, or the struggle of the “suffragettes” fighting to obtain the right to vote in the UK.
These were epic struggles for power, and corresponding changes of law institutionalized and hencefore protected the rights obtained.
At the time these struggles started, their goals must have appeared totally utopian. The South of the US was deeply and officially racist, and before 1964, lynch justice was a grave issue that primarily targeted African Americans and was used to reinforce white supremacy.
Between 1882 and 1968, there were over 4,700 documented lynchings in the U.S., with approximately 3,500 of the victims being African Americans. The peak of lynching occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, declining gradually by the 1930s but persisting into the 1960s. Lynching was often justified by false allegations, such as accusations of crimes against white women or defiance of racial norms. These acts were public spectacles, sometimes attended by large crowds, with perpetrators facing little to no legal consequences. Seeing some of the pictures from them (try here, if you have strong nerves…), one cannot help but be deeply shocked not only about the brutality but also the relaxed, cheerful attitude of the white crowd, men and women, enjoying the show. It was so common place, you could buy postcards with photos of lynchings.
Before 1964, the justice system largely failed to protect victims or prosecute perpetrators. Local law enforcement often colluded with or ignored mob actions. Attempts to pass federal anti-lynching legislation, such as bills introduced by the NAACP starting in the 1910s, were repeatedly blocked by Southern senators. Federal efforts to address lynching, such as the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill (1922), failed due to Senate filibusters, reflecting entrenched resistance to racial equality.
The impact on the African-American communities was terrible. Lynching fostered a climate of terror, restricting African Americans’ economic, social, and political freedom. Families were displaced, and entire communities were subjected to violence and intimidation.
By the 1950s and 1960s, activism by organizations like the NAACP, the Civil Rights Movement, and media coverage brought lynching to national attention. High-profile cases, such as the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, galvanized public outrage and advocacy for civil rights.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent legal changes improved protections, and made racism illegal.
And while not everything is good today, definitely, by virtue of those laws, the situation has improved. Not only has racism become illegal, but it has also become unacceptable in the vast majority of the public consciousness.
What do we learn from it? The power of law must not be underestimated in the process of grabbing power, of cementing the power obtained, and in changing the public consciousness of what people´s rights are.
This is the reason why VetoWar is aiming at a legal framework that allows people to veto war decisions of the their governments. Once in place, it will for the first time give people a possible to keep the insane power of politicians to wage war or even eradicate humanity in check. It is important that this right will be implemented in the national legal systems of as many countries as possible, as only then people can effectively assert their rights in court. If that is not necessarily easy, it should be doable by the interest group that pushes for a referendum, and it is certainly easier than if they had to sue their governments in some international court.
The way to get to change the laws has never been easy. Those who have the power will not want to relinquish it, see the Law of Power No. 1. But if something is just and fair, and even more so if those who are deprived of power are all of us outside a small elite of politicians and others who profit one way or another from war, there is no way of stopping us.
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