State legitimacy

It is the ability to execute all these three processing operations (creation, storage and dissemination of information) that makes any particular state legitimate to its citizens. A state is legitimate when it is able to create, store and disseminate information on its citizens. As long as a state is able to provide its citizens with a name and a citizenship at birth, and to subsequently store safely and transmit authoritatively this and any other enhanced co-created personal information whenever and to whomever required by its citizens, then legitimacy is warranted for the state concerned. By contrast, if this ceases to be the case for any one of these processing operations then legitimacy is lost (or was never achieved in the first place, in the case of new states). State legitimacy is a fact, a concrete material finding that exists or does not exist in the analogue (and the digital) world (see also §14.00.10). A state is either legitimate for its citizens, because it carries out these three types of information processing, or it is not legitimate because it does not do so. State legitimacy is not a principle within any political theory connected to decision-making by a government, nor is it the purpose of a state or a justification for any subsequent action by a government or any other actor.

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