A broken social contract

Power is amoral. It has no religion, either. It listens only to those it feels threatened by. So, how can a country deliver social, economic, and political empowerment to its citizens if its power structure is not dependent upon people’s consent and accountable to them?

Since the birth of civilisation, humans have found it necessary to form a government to escape from the lawless jungle of the state of nature, where life was “nasty, brutish and short”. But whose benefit the country’s power and resources should be used for has remained a contentious question for centuries.

We have moved from the divine right to the hereditary right, to the conqueror’s right, to the coloniser’s right to rule over other people and use their resources. After big battles – reforms, revolutions and wars – we rejected these claims by all pretenders to the throne and finally arrived at rule by none other than the consent of the people governed.

Rooted in the principle of equality of all human beings, the rule by the consent of the governed has acquired such universal acceptability that it has become the litmus test of the legitimacy of every government. Those who do not submit to this test of legitimacy are considered usurpers and find themselves embroiled in conflicts, rebellions and even wars and their countries listed among the failing states of the world.

This litmus test of legitimacy is enshrined in the powerful concept of the ‘social contract’ – a product of the Enlightenment – which brought a sea-change in relations between the state and individual about 250 years ago. And it is this powerful concept which gave birth to several values that have shaped the world we live in today – including the ideas of democracy, legitimate and accountable governance, rule of law and people’s ‘right’ to development and the ‘obligation’ of the state to create conditions to make these possible.

It is unfortunate that the importance of the social contract is not much talked about in our public discourse because no social contract was drawn between the people and the new state of Pakistan, and people have not experienced its environment nor enjoyed its benefits for most years of our chequered history.

For centuries before, neither under the divine right nor hereditary right did anyone recognise people’s right to anything, nor did they feel the obligation of the state to deliver their empowerment. Emperors Akbar, Louis XIV, or Empress Catherine of Russia, all great names in history, ruled their countries in pursuit of their own power, glory and prosperity, not for the well-being of their subjects. Simply because their power structure did not depend upon the will and consent of the people. Nor were they accountable to the people of their empires.

It was even worse under the conquerors’ and colonisers’ models because resource plunder was a common feature of both. They practised the extraction economy model, disregarding people's rights to their own resources.

That was a disconnect between the state and society. The social contract provided this missing link, establishing that governance is not a one-way street like in previous models but a reciprocal obligation where both state and society have rights and obligations to each other. It spells out what the state would do for society in return for society's obedience to the state's laws.

It is a two-way street of the rights and obligations of the state and society to each other. The state was no longer the all-powerful, unaccountable Leviathan, where people were serfs and subjects who had no rights to anything, not even to their lives.

The social contract changed this equation and was the dividing line between the medieval and the modern world. The people were now citizens with unalienable rights and owners of the state, holding the state accountable to them. Not counting on the vague and verbal promises of the rulers, the social contract is now written down and known as the constitution of the country.

The ‘development’ under this model is not merely an obscure economic activity like in medieval times when it took 1000 years for the world GDP to double, but an inalienable right of citizens and a legal and political obligation of the state under the social contract between the state and society.

That is why a country without a social contract is a dangerous place where people’s rights are not recognised, including their inalienable human right to enjoy the benefits of social, economic, and political empowerment of their country's resources. Modern development ideas, such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Welfare State, SDG, etc, owe their origin to this game-changing concept of the social contract between the state and society.

Looking at the nature of power and rich historical evidence, how do we assume that the state of Pakistan owes any legal, political or practical obligation for the social, economic and political development of people, and would work for them, if the acquisition of the instruments of power is not made dependent upon people’s consent?

Rhetoric and emotions aside, logically, in the absence of a social contract between the state and society, why should the state of Pakistan work for the ‘development’ of the people of Pakistan, when it does not depend upon them to acquire the instruments of power? It would have other priorities.

We in Pakistan have been talking and writing about the social and economic development of our people for years, even when our Ivy League suggestions have made no improvement in people's lives as these indicators have been going down in world rankings. And now, in evidence of further deterioration, even non-economic factors like the rule of law and access to justice have also hit bottom positions in world rankings.

Is there any evidence that the state has undertaken meaningful reforms for course correction and redirected policy and resources to reverse this decline in economic and non-economic factors piling miseries upon people?

The reason is obvious. The system does not depend upon the people's will and consent. But we continue talking about achieving secondary and tertiary objectives when the primary causal factor connecting people and power – the social contract, which obliges the state to work for the well-being of people – has been broken for a long time.

It is like trying to construct upper stories of a building whose foundation has been missing.

A broken social contract negates cherished values and opposes people's social, economic and political empowerment. People's development would follow, not precede, the reciprocal model of mutual obligations – the social contract between state and society.

The writer designed the Board of Investment and the First Women Bank. He is the author of ‘Struggle between State &Society’, and can be reached at: smshah@alum.mit.edu