In light of actually existing history, social contract theory appears bloodless. For Locke and Rousseau, everyone joins the band, not of the conquerors, but of the autonomous self-interested protectors of property. There are no conquered. All meet as equals in this state of supposed nature.
No social contract in the real world has ever unfolded thus. Nor should it. We remember Charlemagne for reasons of nationalism; we forget the many peasant revolts of the middle ages, which don’t fit the favored story so well. A parliament of all of our ancestors would of course include Charlemagne, but it might also be one of the shortest and nastiest affairs this side of Thomas Hobbes. Behind a veil of ignorance, who set up a Charlemagne? Who’d ask to be ruled by a small band of pillaging warlords? What about their spoiled children’s spoiled children? No one would want this, maybe not even Charlemagne himself.
Many of your non-Charlemagne ancestors probably hated an all too similar warlord in their own time. They feared him and suffered under him, and they tolerated him on two grounds—their culturally fostered attachment to the known, which makes acquiescing easier, and their fear that a different ruler would be even worse. If they’d known a bit more about the system they were embroiled in, it might have dissolved their rationalizations. Those peasants too were our ancestors. If we could tell them that we were doing just fine without any warlords or kings, they’d probably ask how they could do that. They’d want to do that, too.
As a foil to nationalism, a bloodless social contract might be an improvement, and it has been, but we can do even better. And we’ll do so by building a better idea of our actual ancestry, as difficult as it may be to look at.
The lesson here, in the simplest words, is as follows: They were all our ancestors. Oppressor and oppressed. They lived with one another, the conquerors and the conquered. Side by side. The reality of conquest is a moment of triumph, then weeks of rape and pillage, then generations of extractive toil and misery in a deeply unequal society. Sometimes, the dominant ethnicity gets anxious about it hasn’t fully purified itself. In times like that, the actions and the propaganda may look very different.
Liberalism often begins by noticing the shit parts of history. And then perhaps there comes a gradual loosening of the rules enacted after the conquest. Perhaps there will be ethnic mixing, cultural exchange, and better treatment for the oppressed, whose ways grow gradually indistinguishable from those of their former conquerors. If you’re really lucky, eventually all are seen as a part of the same nation. The children of the oppressed start telling themselves the myths of the oppressors, and no one necessarily knows the difference, and everyone has a family tree that’s mixed with everyone else’s.