Against the Empire of Intermediaries
Why direct relations, settled rules, inherited culture, and national accountability are not nostalgic luxuries but the architecture of civilisation
Keywords: nation-state, democratic accountability, supranational governance, culture, decentralisation, Bitcoin, intermediaries, institutional economics, sovereignty, political legitimacy, transaction costs, peer-to-peer exchange, accountability, civilisation, subsidiarity
Thesis
The common error in modern political, cultural, and monetary thought is the belief that mediation is the same as civilisation. It is not. A civilisation is not made more legitimate because more committees sit between a person and his government, more platforms sit between buyer and seller, more validators sit between payer and payee, or more bureaucracies sit between inherited culture and public life. The opposite is generally true. When accountable relations are replaced by managerial layers, when rules become revisable by distant specialists, when culture is flattened into mass preference, and when nations are dissolved into supranational administration, liberty is not enlarged. It is laundered away.
The predicate of legitimate order is not “everyone participates in everything.” That is democracy for the kindergarten wall. The predicate is that rules must be knowable, stable, answerable, and grounded in a people capable of removing those who govern them. In money, this means direct exchange with evidence and settlement. In culture, it means standards, inheritance, judgment, and transmission. In politics, it means a nation: not an idol of blood, not a marching band with tax authority, but a historical community with enough shared memory to say “we” and enough institutional agency to say “no.”
The alternative is the polite despotism of the intermediary. It comes smiling. It always does. It announces safety, inclusion, efficiency, harmonisation, and progress. It tells the people that control has not been removed but merely improved. It tells them that their rulers are not rulers, only administrators. It tells them that their speech is still free, though no longer consequential; that their vote still counts, though it can no longer dismiss the real machinery; that their culture is still respected, provided it agrees to become content; and that their money is still theirs, provided it travels through the authorised toll road.
This essay argues that the central political question of our age is not whether systems call themselves decentralised, democratic, inclusive, peer-to-peer, European, or modern. The question is whether power can be answered. Where it cannot, the system is already despotic in tendency, however well it has dressed for dinner.
Predicate I: Civilisation depends on direct accountability
The first predicate is simple: a legitimate order must contain a visible chain between action, consequence, and responsibility. A man may tolerate bad government if he can remove it. He may tolerate flawed institutions if they are corrigible. He may tolerate authority if it is answerable. But when power is exercised from a place he cannot reach, in a language he did not authorise, through procedures that survive every election, he is no longer a citizen in the full sense. He is a managed object with occasional voting privileges.
The nation-state became the most durable container of democracy because it joined law to belonging. Its importance is not mystical. It is institutional. A national electorate can dismiss a national government. It can punish a party, reject a programme, amend a constitution, alter a fiscal course, or refuse a war. Even when the process is messy, vulgar, ill-tempered, and occasionally conducted by people whose principal political qualification is owning a loud opinion, it has one saving grace: it can bite. Accountability without teeth is etiquette.
The supranational state, by contrast, is often constructed precisely to avoid that bite. The European Union declares itself founded on representative democracy, and EU citizens are directly represented in the European Parliament, while Member States are represented in the European Council and Council by national governments accountable at national level. That is the formal theory, and it is important to state it accurately. The EU is not an absolute monarchy with better catering. But the theory also reveals the problem: accountability is divided, diffused, and mediated through institutional compartments. Citizens elect MEPs; national governments sit in councils; the Commission has executive, managerial, coordinating, enforcement, and initiative functions; and the whole structure is treaty-based rather than directly dismissible as one government by one people. (EUR-Lex)
A French voter may dismiss a French government. A German voter may dismiss a German government. Neither can, by ordinary national electoral action, dismiss the supranational structure as such. A Member State can withdraw under Article 50 TEU, as the United Kingdom did, but that is not the same thing as an ordinary democratic mechanism for removing the ruling apparatus. It is an exit procedure, not a routine instrument of control. The fact that a hotel has a fire escape does not mean the guests govern the hotel. (Legislation.gov.uk)
This distinction matters because democracy is not merely representation. It is representation tied to the ability to remove, reverse, and discipline power. A vote that cannot alter the structure under which decisive authority is exercised begins to resemble a polite suggestion. The citizen is asked to perform the ritual of consent while being denied the ordinary consequence of consent: the power to withdraw it.
Predicate II: Nationality is not tribalism; it is the grammar of political obligation
The second predicate is that nationality is the precondition for accountable democracy because democracy requires a “we.” This is not a claim that every nation is morally superior, that every flag is sacred, or that every patriotic speech should be allowed to escape the building alive. It is a claim about political form.
A nation is not merely ethnicity, nor language, nor a sentimental postcard of old churches and suspiciously clean villages. A nation is a historical association organised around shared law, memory, sacrifice, territory, and obligation. Ernest Renan’s famous account of the nation emphasised inherited memory and present consent: a common past and a continuing will to live together. That formulation remains useful precisely because it avoids both blood-and-soil vulgarity and bureaucratic abstraction. (sourcebooks.fordham.edu)
The nation gives government a moral address. It tells power where it must answer. It places rulers among the ruled, not above them in a mist of transnational benevolence. The local minister may be foolish, venal, vain, or in possession of that uniquely parliamentary talent for saying nothing at great length. But he belongs to a jurisdiction, faces an electorate, answers within a public culture, and may be expelled by those he has bored, taxed, regulated, betrayed, or disappointed.
Supranational authority often lacks this intimacy of blame. Its defenders praise it for being above the passions of the nation. That is precisely the difficulty. A government that is above the passions of the people is also above their affections, loyalties, habits, inherited compromises, and moral vocabulary. It may be efficient in the way a machine is efficient when it no longer needs the consent of the hand that feeds it.
This is why the condemnation of patriotism as inherently dangerous is intellectually lazy. To condemn love of country because men have gone to war is like condemning love because men have murdered from jealousy. The corruption of affection is not an argument against affection. It is an argument for discipline. Love of country can become idolatry; so can love of humanity, which is often merely self-love with a passport.
The problem is not patriotism. The problem is political affection untethered from law and moral restraint. But a world without political affection is not peaceful. It is available. Available to empire, markets without manners, bureaucracies without memory, and ideologies that always promise to emancipate people from inherited loyalties so that they may be governed by newly invented ones.
Predicate III: Culture is inherited order, not a popularity contest
The third predicate is that political accountability cannot survive cultural flattening. A people must possess more than voting procedures. It must possess a culture capable of judgment. If every opinion is treated as equal, public reason collapses into arithmetic. If every taste is equal, culture becomes consumption. If every inherited standard is dismissed as exclusionary, then nothing remains but fashion supervised by bureaucracy.
Culture is not the sum of what people happen to like this afternoon. It is the transmission of forms, disciplines, manners, works, expectations, restraints, and hierarchies of excellence. It is the slow education of desire. The reduction of culture to democratic preference is therefore not liberation; it is liquidation. A Bach fugue is not equal to a ringtone. A serious argument is not equal to a slogan. A cathedral is not equal to a shopping centre with better lighting. One may permit bad taste. A free society must permit quite a lot of it. But permission is not canonisation.
The connection with politics is direct. A culture that cannot judge cannot govern itself. Self-government requires citizens capable of distinguishing liberty from appetite, authority from domination, dissent from tantrum, and standards from oppression. Once the very act of judgment is treated as moral aggression, a society becomes unfit for freedom. It must then be managed, and managerial power always arrives with a face of exhausted compassion.
The older account of culture as organic, inherited, and transmitted through family, religion, class, locality, and education is unfashionable because it offends the modern fantasy that civilisation can be redesigned by clever people with funding. Yet culture cannot be centrally manufactured. It may be damaged by policy, patronised by institutions, subsidised into mediocrity, or displayed as heritage, but it cannot be summoned into life by administrative decree. T. S. Eliot’s account of culture as an organic shared order remains important here because it insists that culture rests on conditions of transmission, not merely production. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
If politics is severed from culture, law becomes technique. If culture is severed from hierarchy, judgment becomes prejudice. If judgment is abolished, excellence must apologise to mediocrity. The result is not equality. It is the rule of those bureaucratic and commercial powers that can manipulate mass taste most efficiently. One does not abolish aristocracy by abolishing standards. One merely replaces the aristocracy of cultivation with the aristocracy of noise.
Predicate IV: Tolerance requires judgment, not surrender
The fourth predicate is that tolerance has been deliberately confused with approval. This confusion matters because political order requires the ability to judge without immediately reaching for coercion.
To tolerate a thing is not to celebrate it. It is to judge it wrong, foolish, ugly, false, immoral, or dangerous, and yet to refrain from using force to suppress it where it does not violate rights. Tolerance therefore presupposes negative judgment. One does not tolerate what one admires. One tolerates what one would rather not have, because liberty requires room for error.
A civilisation that forgets this distinction becomes ridiculous very quickly. It begins by saying everyone has the right to speak and ends by saying every speech must be equally esteemed. It begins by protecting dissent and ends by forbidding criticism of dissenters. It begins with tolerance and ends with compulsory applause.
This also applies to extremism and intolerance. Driving ugly movements into the shadows may feel satisfying, like sweeping dust under a carpet and calling oneself an interior designer. But concealed error becomes romantic. It acquires the glamour of persecution and the operational privacy of conspiracy. A free society should prefer open error to hidden error because open error can be answered, mocked, analysed, refuted, and socially judged.
Here again, the issue is architecture. A public order requires visible responsibility. If people say foolish or wicked things, let them be known for saying them. If they organise around dangerous ideas, let citizens see the thing in daylight. The alternative is not moral cleanliness; it is subterranean politics. And subterranean politics has poor manners and excellent survival instincts.
Tolerance, then, is not softness. It is disciplined strength. It is the civilised refusal to confuse moral judgment with legal prohibition. It says: you may be wrong, and I may say so; you may speak, and I may answer; you may exist, and I need not flatter you. This is one of the few arrangements under which liberty can survive contact with human beings, those charming creatures who so often make despotism seem administratively tempting.
Predicate V: Intermediaries turn function into rent
The fifth predicate is economic: intermediaries are justified only when they reduce costs, risk, or uncertainty more than they create them. When they cease to do so, they become toll booths erected across ordinary human action.
Institutional economics gives us a precise language for this. Ronald Coase’s theory of the firm began from the question of why market activity is often organised inside firms rather than through spot market exchange; the answer lay in the costs of using markets, negotiating contracts, coordinating action, and managing transactions. Douglass North later placed transaction costs and institutions at the centre of economic performance, arguing that institutions structure human interaction and that different institutional arrangements produce different economic outcomes. (JSTOR)
This matters because the value of a system is not exhausted by the intrinsic properties of its units. The economic illiterate looks at a token and asks whether it can be worn as jewellery or redeemed for wheat at a predetermined ratio. The institutional economist asks what the system enables: settlement, coordination, auditability, reduction of counterparty risk, reduction of reconciliation costs, enforceable evidence, asset representation, and direct exchange.
Cash has value not because paper is intrinsically noble. Paper is usually most valuable when someone has not written a policy memo on it. Cash has value because it enables immediate exchange, finality in practice, privacy, and independence from a chain of institutions. Digital cash, if designed properly, extends those properties into electronic commerce.
The Bitcoin white paper described “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system” and proposed proof-of-work as the means of recording transaction history without relying on a trusted third party. Its logic was not that every spectator with software becomes a sovereign legislature. Its logic was that proof-of-work supplies a costly mechanism for ordering transactions and resisting double-spending; the paper explicitly treats proof-of-work as a solution to majority representation and warns that one-IP-address-one-vote would be vulnerable to Sybil-style multiplication. (Bitcoin)
The point is broader than Bitcoin. A good system removes unnecessary middlemen. A bad system preserves them and renames them “infrastructure.” If Alice can pay Bob directly, with evidence, verification, and settlement, then every layer inserted between them must justify itself. If it cannot, it is not civilisation. It is a parasite with documentation.
This is why the value of direct digital cash is not obscure. It lies in tokenised assets, receipts, instant verification, rapid settlement, stable instruments built atop the system, audit trails, and the compression of settlement time from weeks or months into minutes. Those are economic functions. They are not magic beans. They are not gold teeth. They are precisely the kind of transaction-cost reductions that serious economists should recognise before breakfast.
Predicate VI: “Decentralisation” is often centralisation with a prettier alibi
The sixth predicate is definitional: decentralisation does not mean many decorative endpoints. It means the absence of discretionary control over the rules by a privileged managerial class.
This distinction is routinely buried under slogans. In technical, political, and financial systems alike, the word “decentralised” is often used to mean that many people are allowed to observe, comment, run software, complain, or choose among options prepared by others. But the decisive question is not who may observe the system. The decisive question is who may change the rules.
If rules are fixed, participants compete within them. If rules are plastic, politics enters. If a small group can define which changes are legitimate, which proposals are acceptable, which clients matter, which forks are heresy, and which market participants receive institutional recognition, then the system has governance. It may not have a parliament. It may have something less honest: governance by maintainers, exchanges, foundations, social pressure, and technical gatekeeping.
This problem is not confined to digital systems. It is the same in supranational politics. A structure may claim to be decentralised because many national governments participate, many citizens vote in some way, many agencies consult, and many stakeholders are invited to produce documents of ceremonial uselessness. Yet if the decisive rule-making authority remains insulated from removal, the system is not decentralised in the relevant sense. It is distributed administration without direct accountability.
The EU’s own institutional design illustrates the complexity. The ordinary legislative procedure makes the European Parliament and Council co-legislators across most EU policy areas; the Commission plays a central role in proposing, implementing, and enforcing law; and the Treaties state that EU powers are governed by conferral, subsidiarity, and proportionality. These are real legal constraints, not imaginary ones. But they do not remove the deeper question: can the governed directly and effectively dismiss the rule-making order itself, or only adjust personnel within it? (Consilium)
A system can therefore be formally representative and still suffer from attenuation of accountability. This is the more subtle danger. Nobody abolishes democracy. They merely stretch the chain between vote and consequence until accountability becomes theoretical. The citizen pulls the lever and somewhere, far away, a committee yawns.
Predicate VII: The democratic deficit is not a slogan; it is a structural problem
The seventh predicate is that the so-called democratic deficit is not merely populist grumbling from people insufficiently grateful for regulatory harmonisation. It is a serious debate within political science and constitutional theory.
The strongest defence of the EU argues that its legitimacy derives from multiple sources: direct election of the European Parliament, accountability of national governments in the Council, treaty constraints, judicial control, limited competences, and the advantages of insulating certain technical functions from direct day-to-day political contestation. Andrew Moravcsik famously argued that claims of EU democratic illegitimacy are overstated when judged against the standards of modern democratic governance rather than idealised plebiscitary democracy. (Princeton University)
That defence deserves to be taken seriously, because unserious opposition is merely flattery by other means. But the opposing argument is stronger. Andreas Føllesdal and Simon Hix argued that a democratic polity requires contestation for political leadership and over policy direction, and that this form of contestation is conspicuously weak at EU level. Dieter Grimm has also argued that the EU suffers from a democracy problem connected to over-constitutionalisation and the distance between European rule-making and ordinary democratic legitimation. (Wiley Online Library)
The essential question is not whether the EU contains elections. It does. Nor whether it contains accountability mechanisms. It does. The question is whether those mechanisms are sufficient to make power feel and function as the possession of the governed. Here the difficulty becomes acute. The EU is not a nation-state, yet it increasingly performs state-like functions. It is not a mere treaty organisation, yet it lacks the cultural intimacy and direct contestability of a national democracy. It is a hybrid machine, and hybrids are often praised for sophistication right until the repair bill arrives.
The motion of censure against the Commission is a useful example. The European Parliament can dismiss the Commission as a body, but official parliamentary analysis describes this as a “nuclear option,” and it has never succeeded; the threat contributed to the resignation of the Santer Commission in 1999, but the mechanism is exceptional, collective, and institutionally remote from the ordinary voter’s simple power to remove a national government. (European Parliament)
Thus the problem is not that there is no accountability whatsoever. The problem is that accountability is procedural rather than intimate, episodic rather than ordinary, and diffused rather than morally legible. Such a system can survive while it performs well. But systems that depend on performance for legitimacy are always only one crisis away from metaphysics.
Predicate VIII: A people cannot obey indefinitely what does not love them
The eighth predicate is moral: rulers must hold the values of the governed as sacred, or at least as politically binding. This does not mean rulers must flatter every prejudice. The people can be wrong. Indeed, the people often are wrong; this is one of the strongest arguments for civilisation and one of the weaker arguments for Twitter. But government cannot treat the inherited loyalties of the governed as obstacles to be corrected by experts.
When a governing class does not share, respect, or understand the values beneath it, it does not govern in the full sense. It administers. Administration may be necessary, but it cannot substitute for political membership. The tax office need not inspire poetry. It is enough if it counts correctly. But a constitutional order requires something more than counting. It requires a sense that law is ours, not merely applied to us.
The danger of supranational managerialism is that it systematically rewards people who think in abstractions. They speak of mobility, integration, harmonisation, values, markets, rights, transitions, targets, frameworks, strategies, and resilience. Some of these words have legitimate uses. Most have also been employed as anaesthetic. They make power sound like plumbing.
The nation, at its best, forces abstraction to answer to memory. It asks not only whether a policy is efficient but whether it is ours, whether it belongs to our inherited compromises, whether it respects the forms of life that make obedience tolerable. The supranational administrator finds such questions irritating because they are not easily modelled. But the unmodelled is often where the human being lives.
This is also where collapse begins. People do not revolt merely because they are governed. They revolt when they feel governed by those who neither know nor honour them. They revolt when lawful correction fails. They revolt when language, law, border, custom, and democratic agency are treated as provincial embarrassments. They revolt, finally, when every polite avenue of refusal has been converted into consultation.
A system that cannot be corrected from within invites correction from without. That is not a threat. It is a political law with an unfortunate amount of historical evidence.
Predicate IX: Collapse and anarchy are not opposites of managerial despotism; they are its children
The ninth predicate is that unaccountable order tends toward disorder. This sounds paradoxical only to those who mistake control for legitimacy. Despotism often produces anarchy because it weakens the habits that make voluntary obedience possible.
A law-abiding people obeys not only from fear of punishment but from recognition. They recognise the law as part of their world. They may grumble, cheat at the margins, and speak of ministers in tones that would startle the dead, but they still acknowledge the structure as legitimate enough. When that recognition disappears, enforcement must replace consent. Enforcement is expensive. It is also educational, in the worst sense: it teaches people that law is simply command.
A managerial supranational order risks precisely this decay. It shifts decisions away from recognisable publics. It dissolves responsibility into committees. It shelters power behind procedure. It tells local cultures to modernise, national electorates to behave, and dissenters to acquire better manners. It may succeed for a time because people are patient, distracted, indebted, and fond of peace. But patience is not legitimacy. It is only legitimacy’s understudy.
When people cannot remove power, they delegitimise it. When they cannot alter rules, they evade them. When they cannot speak inside institutions, they speak against institutions. When they cannot recover sovereignty by ballot, they look for harsher instruments. Thus the smiling despotism of centralised management does not prevent anarchy; it prepares the emotional and institutional ground for it.
The defenders of supranational systems often reply that nationalism causes war. It can. So can empire. So can ideology. So can universalism when it acquires an army. The relevant question is not whether national feeling can be corrupted, but whether political order can be sustained without a people capable of consent. The answer is no. A post-national democracy is like a cashless cash system: full of clever intermediaries and empty of the thing it names.
Predicate X: The same pattern appears in money, culture, and politics
The tenth predicate is the common thesis binding these questions together: legitimate systems reduce unnecessary mediation while preserving accountability and evidence.
In money, this means peer-to-peer exchange: Alice pays Bob; Bob verifies; evidence exists; settlement follows; intermediaries justify themselves or disappear. A system that inserts banks, payment processors, routing hubs, custodians, bridges, liquidity providers, and settlement delays between the parties may be technologically novel, but it is economically ancient. It is the old toll road with a better user interface.
In culture, the same principle appears as the defence of standards against mass flattening. A living culture transmits excellence through families, schools, institutions, masters, critics, and serious audiences. It does not ask the crowd to vote on the value of a cathedral. It does not confuse access with achievement. It does not make every opinion equal merely because every person has equal legal dignity.
In politics, the same principle appears as the nation. The nation is the peer-to-peer architecture of democratic accountability. It lets the governed face the governors without endless layers of institutional fog. It provides a common language of blame, memory, duty, shame, and correction. It gives politics a home.
The enemy in all three cases is the false intermediary: the layer that claims to serve the relationship while quietly becoming the master of it. The bank that delays payment while calling itself trust. The platform that controls speech while calling itself connection. The bureaucracy that overrides national electorates while calling itself Europe. The cultural commissar who abolishes standards while calling it inclusion. The technical priesthood that changes rules while calling itself decentralised.
The cure is not primitive simplicity. Civilisation is complex and must be. The cure is ordered directness: clear parties, clear rules, clear evidence, clear consequences, clear authority, and clear means of removal.
A system may be intricate without being opaque. It may be sophisticated without becoming priestly. It may contain institutions without allowing institutions to become idols.
Final Argument
The final argument can now be stated as a sequence.
First, civilisation requires order.
Second, order requires rules.
Third, rules require legitimacy.
Fourth, legitimacy requires accountability.
Fifth, accountability requires an identifiable people capable of correction.
Sixth, the nation is the most durable historical form in which such correction has been made politically real.
Seventh, culture supplies the inherited standards without which that people cannot judge.
Eighth, direct exchange supplies the economic form of the same principle: action tied to evidence and consequence.
Ninth, unnecessary intermediaries weaken accountability by inserting layers between actor and result.
Tenth, systems that cannot be corrected become despotic in tendency.
Eleventh, systems that become despotic in tendency eventually produce evasion, resentment, illegitimacy, and disorder.
Twelfth, therefore the defence of nation, culture, direct exchange, and fixed rules is not nostalgia. It is the defence of civilisation against the empire of intermediaries.
The modern world has become very good at manufacturing systems in which nobody is responsible. The transaction failed because of compliance. The speech disappeared because of policy. The law arrived from a directive. The rule changed through consensus. The culture declined because the market wanted it. The nation dissolved because history required it. Everywhere, agency wears a mask.
This is why the direct relation matters. Alice to Bob. Citizen to government. Teacher to student. Nation to law. Culture to inheritance. Buyer to seller. Voter to ruler. The point is not that intermediaries never have a role. The point is that they must remain servants of the relation, never its substitute.
The national democratic state is imperfect because mankind is imperfect. This fact is generally discovered by adolescents and then endlessly rediscovered by professors. But the imperfection of national democracy is not an argument for supranational managerialism any more than the imperfection of love is an argument for loneliness. The nation gives democracy a body. Culture gives it a soul. Law gives it discipline. Direct exchange gives it economic freedom. Accountability gives it legitimacy.
Remove these, and what remains is not enlightenment. It is administration.
Administration without belonging becomes domination.
Domination without accountability becomes despotism.
Despotism without legitimacy becomes collapse.
Collapse without inherited order becomes anarchy.
The choice, then, is not between nationalism and utopia, nor between culture and equality, nor between cash and modernity. The choice is between systems that answer to human beings and systems that ask human beings to answer to them.
The first may be flawed, provincial, argumentative, and occasionally embarrassing.
The second is usually very well designed.
That is precisely why one should fear it.
References
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