9.2.3 Negotiability to Ensure that Governance Protects Freedom

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Governance can play a role in protecting both positive and negative freedom, which is to say that it can preserve individual liberty, provide people with the opportunity to flourish and protect them from harm in all four dimensions:

· It can contribute to economic freedom (3.5.9).

· It can help people to live in peaceful pluralism with ethnically diverse neighbours – as summarised later (9.3).

· It can use the law to protect people (5.2.5) in a manner that most find acceptable (5.4.3); it can avoid unnecessary restraint on their moral freedom (5.4.4).

· The law can protect freedom of speech (5.4.5), enabling political criticism to be expressed (6.8.3.2), whilst people can urge self-restraint to avoid creating strife (4.4.6.5).

· Governments might use military force to protect the population (7.2.7).

Conversely, governance can be a threat to freedom if it takes the form of domination, as described earlier (9.2.1). Meaningful negotiation is a safeguard which prevents such domination:

· Political systems offer varying degrees of control over how politicians are appointed (6.8.2). They then need to offer people opportunities to raise issues (6.8.3.1) and to agree changes to their governance (6.8.4).

· The Legal Dimension has some negotiability if the legislature is a representative body (5.2.1).

· Subsidiarity in local government (6.6.2) can counter the undue concentration of government power, so that power is distributed and services can be locally negotiated.

· Political problems are somewhat mitigated if, unlike in the East German example (6.3.1.6), one has the freedom to leave, to live somewhere else with a preferable system. Ideally, though, it should not be necessary to leave one’s country to escape oppression.

These freedoms would ideally be provided within each country but an international guarantee might also be needed to protect populations from governments who infringe agreed rights. The ‘responsibility to protect’ (5.3.7) could be formalised, as suggested later (9.5.3).