2. The second (and even larger) problem is, WHO decides who's blameless? Each nation itself?
Or does the US get to make the call for the rest of the sovereign nations in the world?
OR, do we rely upon an outside source such as a World Court or UN?
Do you see the problem?
If each nation itself is deciding what rules to create and obey and which ones not to, it'd be like each person in a city deciding unilaterally which laws they'll obey. You're talking anarchy, chaos. You're talking terrorism and hell on earth. Might makes Right is cool only for the fleeting time that you're the mightiest.
On the other hand, should the US decide for everyone else? It'd be ridiculous to think thusly. One of the core tenets of conservatism (and democracy) is self-determination. I don't WANT to make your decisions for you. I sure as hell don't want you to make my decisions for me. One nation making the calls is the ultimate in Big Gov't and could only lead to despotism.
And that leaves us with only one possible solution: an international source for justice (in conjunction with local laws). That leaves us with the terrible task of coming together and agreeing that some things are just wrong and struggling to find just ways to oppose the worst of human behavior and yet allow for local sovereignty at the same time.
Yes, this is problematic, too. What if despots or terrorists have the majority at the UN? What if a world court finds some group guilty of crimes they didn't commit? I think this approach is a horrible, horrible solution.
Its only redeeming factor is that it is better than the despotism of One Nation/Big Brother rule or the lawless hell on earth of Every nation for itself/Might makes right. Of the three alternatives, it is the one with the best hope for finding a semblance of justice and peace and working out real solutions to the oppression and genocide which plague our nature. It is the only one that can be logically justified.
Working together internationally will without a doubt fail, but you must remember that so will the other solutions.
Again, I offer the local example. I can't unilaterally decide that murder is okay for me if I think someone is offensive. The local gov't ought to intervene and stop me if I tried. A local gov't can't decide they want to hang all Left-handed people. A state gov't ought to step in and intervene if it tried. A state can't take the homes of all brown-eyed people, sell them and split the proceeds amongst the blue-eyes. A federal gov't ought to intervene if it tried.
The rule ought to always be local sovereignty and personal liberty. But when that nasty old human nature gets a-hold of us and the individual or locality begins making oppressive decisions, we need to come together to create larger rules. It's how we operate as a nation (in theory) and it's the only way that makes rational sense as a world.
6 comments:
Dan, the reason you have created an unravelable Gordian Knot in addressing this problem is that you are looking toward who it is who should be deciding international matters. Who decides who's blameles, who is right, who is committing crimes.
Your antagonist is correct, the US should never be under the authority of international law, he (or she) is right but not for the reasons they stated.
Thoreau restated the saw that the political body "governs best which governs least" and added his own observation that it should be "govern best which doesn't govern at all." This last should be the rule of thumb for the UN and World Court.
Only those things we can't by any wise do for ourselves should we depend on our family to do for us (for example, we should brush our own teeth). Only those things a family can't do itself should we depend on the community to do. Only the things impossible for a community to do should we depend on the county or city, and then the state. And only those things that the states just can't do should the US government even be involved in. The last bit in this series is that any world body should only do what individual sovreign countries can't do, that is, nothing.
Poland, Holland, and a score of other countries could not resist Nazi Germany on their own so it was right to form an international body to oppose them. Germany boasted that Dresden was the epitome of Teultonic culture, Jew-free (because they had been murdered), and the example for the rest of the world to follow, by choice or by force. The allies fire bombed it to cinders to break that evil mindset.
Today we are bombing in Iraq becasue of our pathological dependence on oil. The way to address that, the ONLY way to effectively address it, is to address the problems of the Oil Culture and NOT through the UN or World Court.
As long as you eat, have clothes, have housing, and keep warm by means of imported oil, there will be military aggression to obtain it for you.
I agree with at least two of your points, if I might disagree with your ultimate conclusion, E.
You restate what I've suggested, that personal autonomy ought to come first, with help or interference coming from a larger source only when problems arise - in my case, the larger entities should be involved only when oppression or human rights violations occur (while you put it in terms of larger entities getting involved only when the smaller entity can't accomplish something).
On that point, I'd ask, why is it okay for the federal to intervene but not global? That seems a random break.
I think we agree on local autonomy as primary, with larger intervention only as necessary and we agree on that from the personal to the local to the state to the federal, but then you stop and don't agree with it at the hemispheric or global scale. Why there?
Why AREN'T there some actions (in your mind) that we may need to come together on a larger scale than federal? For an easy example, if two countries share a river, it would seem not only reasonable but highly desirable that there be larger-than-federal cooperation.
In fact, you go on to cite a reference to the Poland/Holland, etc coalition as a necessary, so I'm not clear on your position. ARE there times when we might need a larger than national consensus or not?
The other point on which we clearly agree is that our current problems are largely due to our oil dependence.
Dan:"On that point, I'd ask, why is it okay for the federal to intervene but not global? That seems a random break."
For this simple reason, all the states of the US form a federation and by common culture and language we all subscribe to the same general set of principles and mores. We, for example, respect personal possession of property, the ability to own our own means of livelihood. As basic and essential as this concept is, many cultures around the world do not embrace it. This is only an example, the list could go on for some length. All states of the US have thrown in their lot in this mutual pot and agreed to abide by the general principles of the Constitution.
The reason this paradigm does not extend outside our own country is that the rest of the world does not share our culture, nor we theirs.
Oh, sure, we say everyone wants the same thing: peace, freedom, security, etc. The Devil's in the details. What do we mean by 'peace'? Often we mean people are free to pursue their own personal economic interests. The Wahabi fundamentalists, however, say it's cessation of all resistance to Islam. So it doesn't do to just say we all want 'peace'.
A clarification of this for me was the story of an American journalists of Cantonese ancestory who went to China and because he spoke the Yue (Cantonese) language he conversed witht he taxi driver who asked him why the Americans were all upset over conditions in China. The journalist began to explain it was because of human rights violations but was suddenly aware there was no phrase in Yue for 'human rights'. He translated it as best as possible with a phrase meaning roughly 'man-authority'. "Ha" said the taxi driver, "we have that. Xang is the man in authority around here and you don't dare cross him." Try as he might, he could not convey the western concept of 'human rights' to the man.
Any time, and I defy anyone to come up with a concept to the contray, a sovreign nation has been invaded to prevent that government from abusing its own people, there is ALWAYS (worlds without end, amen) an underlying economic motivation. The allies did not try to stop Germany from murdering its own Jewish citizens until Germany's aggressions caused economic harm (or presented economic opportunities) to them. But we were quick to use it as an justification and excuse.
Because of deep cultural differences, the world cannot have a single body that can effectively sit in judgement over individual nations.
I tend to agree with some of your economic analyses, but not your conclusions. However, when you say, "Because of deep cultural differences, the world cannot have a single body that can effectively sit in judgement over individual nations," I'm not sure of your point.
If you only mean that, at the current state of the world, the UN could not be a world government, I agree. It's not designed to be one. The UN and other international legal institutions are designed simply to give some order to the anarchy of international affairs--so that something called international society actually exists. It's an anarchic society, but it is not a pure anarchy, a Hobbesian war of all against all.
Out of such a framework of international laws, plus global forces which create more and more ties between nations, could one day emerge a global government. I am a global federalist. I would like to see something like our federal government on a global scale, but it cannot be imposed top-down without being tyrannical. It takes slow growth.
We have just seen in the European Union's failure to adopt a Constitution what happens if that growth is pushed too fast. I believe that eventually the EU will become something like a "United States of Europe," but it is farther away from such an era than many, including myself, believed. Nationalism is still a powerful force despite a common market, common currency, free movement across borders, increasing cultural ties, and the fact that, unlike in the U.S., most Europeans now speak a minimum of two languages and frequently three or more.
But fear that individual histories and traditions would be lost in the EU scuttled the constitution--something that almost happened with the U.S. at our beginning when most here thought of themselves as Virginians or Rhode Islanders or whatever first, and "Americans" (a new term) only secondarily if at all. And that was despite a common language and much common history.
So, we are on the same page in saying that (at this time) something like a world government (other than a tyrannical empire) is impossible. But that shouldn't mean a call for ending the UN or failing to use and strengthen the international institutions we have as much as possible. Every time we strengthen such cooperation and the international rule of law, the globe benefits, including the U.S. Undermining those institutions and acting like a rogue nation threatens to increase the anarchy in international affairs and return things to a sheer competition of wills backed by military and economic might--a recipe for much pain and suffering all around. I see no wisdom in following that path.
Michael:"I am a global federalist. I would like to see something like our federal government on a global scale"
I would sumbit then that the notion has a very bad track record. A generation ago, beginning with, says I, Reagan and continuing unabated through Bush, Clinton, and Bush, has been the notion of economic globalism.
I submit that globalism has been an unmittigated disaster. If you like on this forum or another, I could go into details, but I can identify economic globalism as the source of almost every ill in the world we are currently experiencing. Our immigration problem is a direct outgrowth of NAFTA, our excellerated use of petrol fuels is a direct result of the WTO, the collapse of the farms in Zimbabwe leading to the starvation of millions is the result of relying on foreign trade, my list could go on for some time.
Economic globalism is a ticking time bomb and the effects of Peak Oil only make the impact all the more devastating.
Economic globalism seemed like such a good idea on paper, we're all cooperating like one big happy family. It hasn't worked out that way.
Global government, says I, woudl be the same thing. It sounds like such a good idea, but it isn't. We should rather work to eliminate the need to govern anything globally.
"Economic globalism" is a mixed bag. I favor more of a bottom-up global economy than the current top-down one that is far more tyrannical. Access to markets is vital for bringing impoverished nations out of poverty, but the current model gives far too many advantages to already existing transnational corporations and too few ecological, labor, and local culture protections.
The top-down model of economic globalism is an example of what Dan has been calling hegemony--what I call empire. It is neo-colonial. But if you attend the meetings (or read the blogs and reports) of the global justice movement (wrongly called by the mainstream media the "anti-globalization movement") or papers at the World Social Forum (a justice-oriented alternative to the G-8 summits), you'd find that
that no one is arguing for a return to purely national economies.
International trade of one form or another has existed for centuries--the question is how to set the rules for fair trade. The same kind of questions beset any form of global federalism.
As I said, it has to be developed slowly and bottom-up. The current economic globalism has been imposed by force and top-down. It is hegemonic. I am not arguing for that. But, take the Fair-Trade movement that gets people to bypass transnationals and "middle men" and pay fair wages for Third World Crafts or coffee or chocolate by independent farmers, etc. They still require access to a market.
Transitions will be messy and painful, too. History--LIFE--is like that. And, TO RETURN TO THE POINT OF DAN'S POSTS, developing, adhering to, and enforcing fair international laws will lessen that pain.
I share with you libertarians a distrust of concentrated power without checks and balances. The erosion of those checks and balances in our own government is frightening. But I do not share the libertarian belief that government is inherently evil and should do the bare minimum. To the value of individual liberty (keeping intrusive powers out of places they have no business), one must add the values of equality, solidarity, sustainability, and peace. That's why I am a global federalist and a social democrat.
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