Individual Neutrality and Credible Commitment: A Generative Relational Theory of Self-Legislation

A state that undertakes to remain neutral is believed for reasons that have little to do with its sincerity. It will outlive the government that made the undertaking, its conduct is recorded and observed by many parties at once, and it holds sunk institutional investments that defection would destroy. An individual who undertakes the same thing has none of these. This paper asks how a private person, holding no office and backed by no sovereign, renders a commitment to non-capture credible to strangers. Three deficits are identified in the position of the isolated individual, concerning duration, observability, and the cost of exit, and the paper argues that the devices by which individuals address them all work in one way: they recruit other parties into the enforcement of a rule the individual states. Self-legislation, so understood, is legislation for a self and enforcement by a field. A trilemma follows. Among credibility, revisability, and retained authority over the determination of breach, a commitment device secures at most two: removing the capacity to defect is credible and unrevisable, declaring a rule one judges oneself is revisable and unbelieved, and delegating the judgment of breach is credible and revisable at the cost of the authority. The paper further distinguishes the registers through which trust is produced, treating symbolic guarantee, shared ordeal, and identification as distinct mechanisms with different failure conditions rather than as one process. Four instruments are compared: the international civil service, judicial recusal together with blind trusts and auditor independence, and a personal instrument that the author discloses and evaluates against the other three. The account is then tested against evidence that its own prescriptions fail, including the finding that disclosure of a conflict can increase rather than reduce the bias it reports. Two structural exposures are recorded: a short record makes an individual reputation both harder to establish and easier to destroy, and the community recruited to enforce a commitment is itself capturable.