Van Notten was a generic foot soldier in the neoliberal “war of ideas” until 1978, when he hatched the idea that would become his trademark: the tax-free T-zone, which would also be defined by deregulation.8 He introduced the notion at a Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Paris that was opened by then-mayor Jacques Chirac, who praised Hayek for diagnosing the ills performed under the banner of “social justice.” One economist in attendance praised van Notten’s idea for the way it could begin to punch holes in the existing system. By lifting taxation in discrete areas, van Notten’s T-zones would “give rise to a stimulating jealousy,” as towns and regions would compete to emulate the low-tax enclaves. They would offer a demonstration effect, “discrediting the surrounding system.”9

  Like other champions of zones before him, van Notten saw the anomalous jurisdictions less as straightforward economic entities than as experiments in new ways of living and battlefronts in an ongoing war. In a 1982 pamphlet, he referred to the zone as a “political crowbar.”10 Zones were to be “paradises on earth for entrepreneurs.” Arrayed against them were governments, trade unions, employers’ associations, and environmentalists, all of whom feared change and sought to protect their own special interests and block innovation.11 As he saw it, the ultimate goal of zones was to “make governments compete for people.”12 Because citizens of modern democracies were seduced by ideas of social justice, the quickest way to teach them “the virtues of a deregulated society” was “to create among them some mini-societies.”13 Once T-zones existed, he predicted, all European states would be forced to replicate them for fear of losing investors. The bottom-up compulsion of competing for scarce resources would be more effective than any design from above.14 The zone would act as pedagogue and disciplinarian.

  Like many others, van Notten’s prototype was Hong Kong. But he gave the model a twist. While everybody was talking about the need for new Hong Kong–style arrangements worldwide, he suggested that the T-zones be populated by Hong Kongers themselves.15 He wondered if Europe might help accelerate an “exodus,” suggesting that “one million Chinese could be divided over twenty European nations.” Hong Kong emigrants would act as agents of capitalist spread: “a hundred little enclaves” would push three hundred million Europeans to change their social democratic ways. The dream was stillborn, however: Brussels played the role of spoiler, shortening tax holidays, blocking T-zones in cities, and limiting them to distressed areas.16 The “Euro–Hong Kongs” that van Notten hoped would exert the discipline that democracies refused to, and undermine the political cartel at the heart of Europe, morphed into workaday technology parks.

  Having failed at home, van Notten searched farther afield. Just below Hong Kong on his list of ideal free zones was the less familiar territory of Aruba, a Caribbean island off the northern coast of Venezuela.17 In the early 1980s, he worked with political leaders to draft a libertarian constitution for the nation as it pondered a still-unrealized independence from the Netherlands.18 He envisioned privatizing police and judges, and replacing taxes with voluntary contributions.19 When this effort also failed, van Notten turned his attention to another remnant of the Dutch Empire: the nation of Suriname on the South American mainland, which had gained full independence in 1975. Van Notten connected with exiled opposition leaders and freelance guerrillas to plan a coup.20 His daughter describes him advising would-be insurrectionaries by shortwave radio from their home in Holland. He kept his constitution for a libertarian Suriname under lock and key in the attic of his sister’s home. After his death, the document, marked TOP SECRET, was opened to find a proposal to build a dream zone with all state functions privatized and taxes eliminated altogether.21

  By the early 1980s, van Notten had gone from a gadfly in Brussels to a border-crossing would-be libertarian guerrilla. As the Berlin Wall fell, his attention again shifted continents, from South America to Africa. There, he would devise a novel form of legal thinking by retrofitting what he saw as an archaic social form perfectly suited for anarcho-capitalism: the Somali clan.

  2.

  Van Notten had spent time in Africa before.22 Between his job at the European Economic Community and his trek through the world of free-market think tanks, he made various forays into southern Africa. According to his daughter, one of van Notten’s first ventures was building fiberglass coffins; he secured a contract with Zambia’s vice president, who reportedly wanted bodies from deaths in guerrilla training camps interred before the president’s return. Van Notten’s daughter recounts a mad scramble to produce fifty coffins, with the paint drying on the way to the Brussels airport for shipment. Ultimately, the enterprise went no further than another business scheme, a hovercraft service across the Kalahari Desert.23

  After his plans for a libertarian revolution in Suriname ran aground, van Notten turned from insurrection to the more conventional field of consulting, taking an assignment for the UN International Development Organization to investigate the possibility of setting up free trade zones in the Horn of Africa.24 Shaped like the number 7, the Horn of Africa had been divided in the nineteenth century among colonial powers. France had established French Somaliland at the top left of the 7, at the bottleneck between the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea; after decolonization in 1977, it became the country of Djibouti. The rest of the top bar had been the protectorate of British Somaliland, and the diagonal slash had been Italian Somaliland. Because the whole stretch of coast spoke the same language and identified as the same ethnicity, it followed the standard principle of self-determination that the former British and Italian territories should be one nation. This was what happened in 1960, as the two colonies merged to become the single state of Somalia.

  After less than a decade of relative democracy, Somalia descended into dictatorship under Siad Barre. But in the 1980s, forces built against him, starting in the north. By 1991, the country had fallen entirely into civil war, becoming the most notorious “failed state” of the decade. The UN launched a humanitarian and military peacekeeping mission that lasted until 1995, bringing in some thirty thousand troops and civilian support staff.

  Van Notten was in the middle of events. No longer an innocuous NGO consultant, he had found a patron in an insurgent military leader who was willing to take his advice on the design of a constitution for a future Somali state. Ensconced in a hotel in Mogadishu, the country’s capital, he ruminated underneath a mango tree as the rumblings of conflict began in the streets.25 He believed he had the chance here to create a utopia. He called his ideal form of alternative ordering kritarchy, “the rule of judges.” This would be an anarchist society—without a central state—but not a lawless one. Although there would be no legislature or parliament (and thus no way of creating new laws), there would be a codified set of prohibitions, sanctions, and punishments, which would be overseen and administered by judges. Somalia was an ideal locale for a test run of this form of government because he believed it already hosted a rare, existing form of kritarchy: traditional Somali law, also known as xeer.26

  The Horn of Africa had long been of special interest for anarchists and libertarians. In the 1940s and 1950s, British colonial anthropologists had documented what they saw as a remarkable form of social order in the region, organized along the hereditary unit of the “clan.”27 They described a nomadic people without a centralized government but with strong patrilineal ties, tracing each person back to a male ancestor from which the clan’s name derived. Each clan had its own unwritten set of sanctions, punishments, and rules governing marriage, murder, theft, and other matters. Clan law allowed for what one scholar called “ordered anarchy,” a term that libertarians later honored by adopting it to describe their own ideal social arrangement.28

  Relying on ethnographies of the Horn of Africa, van Notten wrote something extraordinary: a constitution for a polity without a state.29 In his view, it was only by abandoning both democracy and the idea of the central state itself that Somalia could overcome its colonial legacy. “Somalia will become the first country in the world not to be ruled by the democratic dictatorship of 51 percent of the vote,” he wrote in a letter to his daughter.30 It was not alien rule that constituted the essence of colonialism but government itself.31 True decolonization required the deconstruction of the state. This principle, he believed, had been missed by the international community and by Somalia’s initial leaders, who had reached for multiparty elections but created chaos.32 “The United Nations invaded Somalia with a multi-national army of 30,000 to re-establish a democracy,” he wrote, but it only deepened the civil war.33

  The traditional Somali system of law and order in van Notten’s writings resembled the anarcho-capitalist constructions of the medieval system described in an earlier chapter: crimes were dealt with through restitution and compensation, rather than imprisonment.34 Families functioned as insurance pools: relatives shared their incomes, and the perpetrator’s whole family would pay the victim in the event of a transgression. He included lists of the number of camels due for the loss of an eye, a nose, or a toe and a sliding scale of compensation for rape, with the highest amount paid when the victim was a virgin and the lowest when she was a widow.35

  Somali customary law seemed to offer a coherent form of social order without a state. Van Notten wondered if foreign businesspeople could adopt it and use it for themselves. The obvious obstacle was that Somali law was based on kinship rooted in clan—but was there a way around this? Discussing the idea with a group of Somali elders, he heard a radical suggestion. “Gather with your business friends and form a new clan,” they told him. “If the new clan prospers, the existing clans will not lose a moment in adopting its superior business environment as their own custom.” The elders even suggested a name—Soomaali ‘Ad, or the “White Somalis.”36

  The wild innovation of a White Somali business clan was grafted by van Notten onto the more conventional proposal of a free port on the Somali coast, a delimited area where tariffs are suspended and incentives are given to businesses to invest and operate.37 The “manager” of the free port, presumably van Notten himself, would act as “the head of an extended Somali family,” settling disputes but not being a ruler per se, more like the manager of a shopping mall or the captain of a cruise ship.38 Members of the “freeport-clan” would be related not by kinship but by a network of contracts.

  Van Notten saw stateless Somalia as a “huge network of hundreds if not thousands of mini-governments, each wholly independent of the others.”39 He found this compelling, in part, because he saw it as a dry run for the near future. He believed the monetary system in the industrialized world was doomed to collapse, with multiparty elections and central governments soon to follow. People would turn to mercenaries, private companies, and freelancers for infrastructure and services in the new state of anarchy. “It is at that moment,” he wrote, “that the Somali experience can offer us some guidance.”40 If libertarians had once praised a Portable Hong Kong for its flat rate income tax, a Portable Somalia would be even more portable. As van Notten put it, “With their nomadic lifestyle, the Somalis can’t afford to have a big government. Theirs must be small, so small that it can be transported on the back of a camel.”41 Here was a path back to Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s vision of Europe in the year 1000, comprising many hundreds or thousands of independent territories.42 Somalia had led the way as “the first nation to have rid themselves of their foreign political system” of democracy.43 The Horn of Africa was the germ of a global anarcho-capitalist future.

  3.

  In the late 1990s, van Notten found an ally in a man with a biography almost as unusual as his own. Writing for the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education, the anthropologist Spencer Heath MacCallum described having met “a Somali tribeswoman traveling in the United States with her European husband.” This was van Notten and his new wife, Flory Barnabas Warsame, who hailed from the Awdal region in the northwest corner of Somalia.44 She explained to MacCallum that her people had come to realize that “Somalia’s statelessness might prove to be a uniquely valuable asset in the modern world.” The idea was for clans to capitalize on their “statelessness by opening areas within their tribal lands for development, inviting businessmen and professionals the world over to come to take advantage of the absence of a central government or other coercive authority.” Clans would lease territory, and van Notten would have a chance to realize his plans. MacCallum declared himself inspired by the “social experiment with far-reaching implications for human freedom” underway in Somalia.45

  MacCallum had been working on designs for his own “mini-societies” for decades. His investigations began with the idiosyncratic insights of his namesake and grandfather Spencer Heath, an amateur theorist and professional inventor made wealthy by his design of airplane propellers.46 In Heath’s telling, after the fall of Rome central European “barbarians” had established small-scale forms of ownership and self-government, which they brought with them to the British Isles. It was there, far from the authoritarian undertow of the Roman tradition, that ideal-typical forms of “free feudal” communities developed, reaching their peak in the ninth century before the unpleasant intrusion of the Continental mindset via Norman conquest in the eleventh.47 Incubated in island isolation, the patrimony of “the Teutonic tribes” remained the key payload of cultural evolution, a treasure brought by the colonists to what became the United States.48

  Heath found some of the last islands of Saxon self-ownership in an unlikely place in mid-twentieth-century America: its hotels and resorts. With their shared utilities, security, and amenities, hotels modeled what he called proprietary communities—voluntary agglomerations of humans in a space overseen and owned by a private agent.49 MacCallum took up the investigation from his grandfather. He moved from hotels to shopping malls, office buildings, mobile home parks, and marinas, all examples of the “multi-tenant income property.”50 Heath had overwhelmingly focused on the Germanic antecedents for a future of capitalist anarchy, only briefly touching on the “voluntary feudalism” of ancient Mexico and Japan.51 MacCallum was more earnest in his explorations beyond the Western world. While he pored over the management model of the shopping center, he also completed a doctorate in anthropology to better study what he called the “traditionally stateless society” of Indigenous communities.52 In an inversion common among Western romantics, he argued that “the concepts of property, freedom of contract, and justice were discovered and first developed not by the technologically advanced societies but by tribal societies.”53

  In 1971, MacCallum began his first effort at writing a lease outlining rules of conduct, rights, and responsibilities for a future mini-society. He was employed for the purpose by Werner Stiefel, a refugee from Nazi Germany and the head of a family-owned dermatological company whose most well-known product was the skin cream Lubriderm. Stiefel wanted to create his own country—“a community on the high seas outside the political jurisdiction of any nation,” modeled on Galt’s Gulch in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.54 He owned a motel in upstate New York. MacCallum suggested, consistent with his father’s theories, that it could act as a laboratory.55

  The motel became what they called Atlantis I, a prototype for an alternative society. New residents were called “immigrants” and they created their own “Atlantean” currency. The second “immigrant” recounts helping sell the silver coins of the currency along with bars of soap and bumper stickers. Satisfied by the prototype, Stiefel sought out locations in the Caribbean and set to work building a geodesic dome and a concrete ship, christened Atlantis II. Launched into the Hudson River, the ship tipped onto its side and got stuck in the mud. Eventually it managed to reach the Bahamas, where it remained until sinking in a hurricane.56

  MacCallum tinkered with the lease he drafted to govern Atlantis, including innovations taken from Ciskei in South Africa.57 His hope was to replace constitutional arrangements with something more like a business contract. A polity should be like a shopping mall, he thought. Nobody who rented retail space in a mall would expect to exercise popular sovereignty over the building. That would be absurd. Likewise, MacCallum hoped for a political environment that set politics aside. Collective life would be reduced to a problem of administration. You entered if the terms of the contract were to your liking and left if they were not. Vague ideas of the demos and “the people” would have no place. He and van Notten saw stateless Somalia as a chance to roll out their anarcho-capitalist system in miniature. They leased a patch of territory from the local clan, dubbed it Newland, and planned for the business clan to govern inside of it.58

  Free-port clans would pave the path to the future by looking backward. “If the ‘new Somalia’ comes about,” MacCallum wrote, “it will simply be an evolved version of traditional, pre-colonial Somalia. It will provide a navigational light in a world ravaged by political democracy, a beacon for a humanity that has lost its bearings.”59 MacCallum’s grandfather and mentor Spencer Heath had emphasized the foundational importance of kinship for unifying the “blood-bonded group.”60 The notion of free-port clans made the audacious proposition that voluntary agreements between commercial partners would prove as robust as familial ties. Murray Rothbard had spoken of “nations by consent.” This went one further, imagining contracts transmuted into kinship in “clans by consent.”