WEBVTT NOTE Sovereignty, International Law, and the Triumph of Anglo-American Cunning 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.000 Yeah, I just want to say I'm in good company as is in this issue of the JLS. 2 00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:08.000 I'm in here with Tom DeLorenzo and H. A. Scott Trask. 3 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:14.000 Somehow I got most of the space because this article grew and grew. 4 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:18.000 It actually developed out of two lectures I gave here at this seminar. 5 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:24.000 There was one on collective security in the UN and another on sovereignty 6 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:28.000 and they kind of combined to make this very long article. 7 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:45.000 I don't claim to have answered everything. I raised a lot of questions. This article is sort of a provocation and an interrogation of some of the doctrines that are going around. 8 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:52.000 And since it's 60 pages and I've got about 30 minutes, that would be two pages a minute. 9 00:00:52.000 --> 00:01:00.000 So I figured I'd better just outline it and go from the outline. 10 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:04.000 I want to say one more thing. It's all sort of, I know people like to say, well, 9-11, everything changed. 11 00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:10.000 Well, it didn't, but it kind of had to make us focus in on what was going on in a different way. 12 00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:12.000 And I hope a more disciplined way. 13 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:17.000 Because all sorts of claims, that's the great thing about wartime or something they can even claim as a war. 14 00:01:17.000 --> 00:01:23.000 A lot of big claims suddenly turn up again, and it does focus your attention. 15 00:01:23.000 --> 00:01:32.000 So in a way this article is sort of a huge footnote to Rothbard's war piece in the state, in this new context. 16 00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:41.000 So I'll begin by just saying something about the Westphalian Order, which we roughly date from 1648, the piece of Westphalia. 17 00:01:41.000 --> 00:01:56.000 This is sort of the symbolic moment for saying that at some point there came into being a European state system in which the states theoretically were outwardly and inwardly sovereign and equal in status to one another. 18 00:01:56.000 --> 00:02:00.000 And anybody claiming to be a state had to be recognized as part of that system. 19 00:02:00.000 --> 00:02:05.000 And initially this is just, you know, Christian Europe and everybody else is sort of outside the system. 20 00:02:05.000 --> 00:02:35.000 and so with regard to the rest of the world it sort of forms a single state in a way and now we have all manner of writers telling us this is all broken down and sovereignty has to go, the states have to go and be incorporated into something bigger and better and the two models on offer are basically the UN and something we might call the American Empire and I expect some of us find 21 00:02:35.000 --> 00:02:43.000 Neither of these are very palatable, but the UN isn't looming on the horizon as much of a threat to anybody at the moment. 22 00:02:43.000 --> 00:02:50.000 Except in so far as some great power wants to put military force behind something the UN says. 23 00:02:50.000 --> 00:02:55.000 Guido Holzman likes to say that the state system is essentially a cartel. 24 00:02:55.000 --> 00:03:02.000 It's just the most successful and largest cartel, and it's a cartel of the producers of violence, in a way. 25 00:03:02.000 --> 00:03:12.000 And from the premise that states are equally sovereign, you can go in two directions, you can look at it internally and externally. 26 00:03:12.000 --> 00:03:18.000 I think from a libertarian perspective, internal sovereignty is a problem. 27 00:03:18.000 --> 00:03:25.000 We don't like big claims for unbounded, unlimited power held by anybody. 28 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:55.000 Now if we're only talking about external sovereignty, the proposition that here's some bounded territory and people have arbitrarily agreed it's a state, or agreed for various reasons it's a state, and nobody can impose rules from the outside on this area, this might be good, I mean we might want to make a kind of qualified defense of external sovereignty and spend the rest of our time criticizing internal sovereignty, 29 00:03:55.000 --> 00:04:05.000 and so on. So I've ended up, southerners tend to wander into the issue of sovereignty in the context of the debate on the nature of the American Union. 30 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:12.000 And in the later literature, the debate is kind of limited to saying where was sovereignty located? Was it in the States or in the Union? 31 00:04:12.000 --> 00:04:19.000 And at some point you begin to suspect that the notion of sovereignty itself has a lot of problems built into it. 32 00:04:19.000 --> 00:04:29.000 And so I've shifted my allegiance from John C. Calhoun to John Taylor of Carolina, who I think is clearer on the implications of all of that. 33 00:04:29.000 --> 00:04:36.000 Okay, so sovereignty in this sense is new. In the Middle Ages you have these overlapping jurisdictions and conflicts. 34 00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:40.000 You've got also the papacy offsetting these local rulers. 35 00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:48.000 But a given individual might have a layer of loyalties and hold land in a feudal way from different people. 36 00:04:48.000 --> 00:05:18.000 and so the one king will come to him and say well you've got to go help me fight this guy and he says well no I hold land from that guy too I can't fight him you'll have to find somebody else so there are some least interesting limitations on this notion of sovereignty now internally from the 13th century forward some of the rulers are more successful in claiming a right to tax for emergencies it starts out as an emergency power and they begin to gain the 37 00:05:18.000 --> 00:05:32.000 bit by bit, a kind of power to tax, and this is limited by the growth of assemblies and parliaments that try to say that, well, we have to be consulted first, and so on. 38 00:05:32.000 --> 00:05:41.000 And with regard to internal sovereignty, there are some new doctrines working their way into the system, Roman law, the revival of Roman law, 39 00:05:41.000 --> 00:05:46.840 Corporation law to explain these various bodies that existed in medieval society with the 40 00:05:46.840 --> 00:05:51.480 state or kingdom suddenly becoming the most important corporation and one that you maybe 41 00:05:51.480 --> 00:05:57.920 couldn't get out of, and various organic metaphors and so on, and an appropriation of the Christian 42 00:05:57.920 --> 00:06:03.520 doctrine of the mystical body and suddenly the state is another mystical body and again 43 00:06:03.520 --> 00:06:09.400 fraught with implications for what they can do with you. 44 00:06:09.400 --> 00:06:15.080 But even as we come through the late Middle Ages, no one is quite ready to claim that 45 00:06:15.080 --> 00:06:18.080 the king is the source of the law, the king makes the law. They all say, well, the king 46 00:06:18.080 --> 00:06:25.200 is under the law, and there is something called a law that's outside the king. As we come 47 00:06:25.200 --> 00:06:30.680 into early modern times, you have a series of theorists, Bartolus, Sassiferato, Machiavelli, 48 00:06:30.680 --> 00:06:36.400 Bodin, and Hobbes who begin theorizing a kind of boundless sovereignty and a kind of permanent 49 00:06:36.400 --> 00:06:41.400 and Emergency, to which this boundless sovereign is the answer. 50 00:06:41.400 --> 00:06:45.400 And I've come to grips with Hobbes. I've finally decided that everybody loves Hobbes, 51 00:06:45.400 --> 00:06:49.400 and as John Ludwigson would say, we're all recovering Hobbesians. 52 00:06:49.400 --> 00:06:54.400 Well, I think Hobbes has made an accurate description of what states do. 53 00:06:54.400 --> 00:06:59.400 I don't think he's justified anything. I just want to throw that out. 54 00:06:59.400 --> 00:07:04.400 Now, there's some people who claim there's a kind of North American exception 55 00:07:04.400 --> 00:07:09.920 to the notion of unbounded sovereignty, that in the colonies we're 70 or 80 years behind 56 00:07:09.920 --> 00:07:16.520 the intellectual trends in Europe and the ability of rulers to enforce anything, and 57 00:07:16.520 --> 00:07:21.340 Britain itself in some respects is behind the continental trends, so we're doubly behind 58 00:07:21.340 --> 00:07:26.360 and this is good, so the actual life on the ground in the American colonies is more feudal 59 00:07:26.360 --> 00:07:32.840 or federal and those two things are analogous and so on. 60 00:07:32.840 --> 00:07:51.840 Well, if that were true, and I think in a way up to a point it was true, this all ended in 1865 when we have shown, have seen, demonstrated by force that some people claiming sovereignty seem to have it in this rather physical sort of way. 61 00:07:51.840 --> 00:07:54.840 And then you begin to get theorists saying, well, this is a model for the world. 62 00:07:54.840 --> 00:07:59.840 You get Denton Snyder of the St. Louis Hegelians. 63 00:07:59.840 --> 00:08:04.840 There was actually a Hegelian sect by this time centered in St. Louis. 64 00:08:04.840 --> 00:08:06.840 Early influence on John Dewey. 65 00:08:06.840 --> 00:08:10.840 So all that bad stuff kind of has interesting genealogy. 66 00:08:10.840 --> 00:08:20.840 Denton Snyder said, well, we've just shown that you can have separate states organically bound into a union they can't leave. 67 00:08:20.840 --> 00:08:22.840 This is great. 68 00:08:22.840 --> 00:08:31.840 So the states have the status they can't leave, but they're protected by the Union, everybody's happy, and this could incorporate the entire planet. 69 00:08:31.840 --> 00:08:35.840 You have to think of this in terms of present foreign policy in a way. 70 00:08:35.840 --> 00:08:46.840 Everybody becomes incorporated, assimilated to the American system rather than other alternatives that used to be around, like the Soviet system and so on. 71 00:08:46.840 --> 00:09:16.840 Now, let's go back to the international dimension. As the Westphalian order is emerging, or has emerged, the writers are still saying that there's natural law, and there's customary law, and municipal law can involve exceptions from the euskentium, or the law of nations taken kind of literally as what you can extract if you look at what all the nations do and see what the common themes are. There'll be laws against theft. 72 00:09:16.840 --> 00:09:18.840 and Murder and so on. 73 00:09:18.840 --> 00:09:21.840 So there's some confusion whether natural law and the use of Gentium are the same thing, 74 00:09:21.840 --> 00:09:24.840 but there's a huge overlap in all these writers. 75 00:09:24.840 --> 00:09:27.840 Well, municipal law could institute slavery, 76 00:09:27.840 --> 00:09:31.840 but natural law, according to all these writers, would forbid it. 77 00:09:31.840 --> 00:09:33.840 So there are exceptions. 78 00:09:33.840 --> 00:09:36.840 And then, of course, there's treaty law, so it's getting fairly complex. 79 00:09:36.840 --> 00:09:41.840 But as one of the authorities on international law, Martin Shaw likes to say, 80 00:09:41.840 --> 00:09:45.840 international law has actually followed a lot more than we think. 81 00:09:45.840 --> 00:09:51.640 So there's a kind of workable dimension to this sort of state cartel. 82 00:09:51.640 --> 00:09:57.840 I mean, states like to get revenue out of their populace and do grandiose projects. 83 00:09:57.840 --> 00:10:02.640 They don't really always want to be at war, although that's an option. 84 00:10:02.640 --> 00:10:05.840 So the rules are quite often followed. 85 00:10:05.840 --> 00:10:18.840 Is it followed more than you think? Is it followed more than you think because of private interest reasons that just happened to dovetail with international law or because there's some enforceability being imposed on it? 86 00:10:35.840 --> 00:10:41.840 So, we don't want to get that far ahead yet because we don't want to deal with this democratic peace nonsense. 87 00:10:41.840 --> 00:10:45.840 So we want to save that and see if I can get to it. 88 00:10:45.840 --> 00:10:56.840 Okay, now, what's happening in the laws, the state system is consolidating itself and they're working out their relations to one another. 89 00:10:56.840 --> 00:11:03.840 And particularly when you get this sort of rising wave of state consolidation and state building from about 1494, 90 00:11:03.840 --> 00:11:33.840 Some people date the real wave of state-building from a French campaign in Italy and severe competition in which some of the smaller political entities are eliminated from the competition and the monarchs build or attempt to build bureaucracies to wage war, to get more land, to extract more revenue so they can wage more war and the process kind of is a bit circular until they reach a stopping point, reach national frontiers, they run out of resources, nobody will lend them money. 91 00:11:33.840 --> 00:11:37.840 Once that's invented, it's a huge boon to these guys in the short run. 92 00:11:37.840 --> 00:11:41.840 Well, you begin to get a development of, there's a lot of wars, 93 00:11:41.840 --> 00:11:44.840 so you begin to get the development of some laws of war. 94 00:11:44.840 --> 00:11:46.840 I think initially this was rather thin. 95 00:11:46.840 --> 00:11:50.840 There's hardly anything you can find that you could say has much to do with law. 96 00:11:50.840 --> 00:11:56.840 Essentially, you get rules like we can burn down the city if they don't surrender immediately. 97 00:11:56.840 --> 00:12:01.840 Well, this doesn't really seem all that consoling. 98 00:12:01.840 --> 00:12:31.840 But at least some rules are in a rough and ready way developed and we begin to get also in the 16th and 17th centuries a group of writers who appear to be restating natural law when in fact what they are also doing is accepting the nature of this new state system and the behavior of states and sort of rationalizing it and they say well we'll pretend that this kingdom is sort of like a natural 99 00:12:31.840 --> 00:12:35.840 and the individual who has natural rights and we'll talk about it in this framework. 100 00:12:35.840 --> 00:12:45.840 So with Suarez, Grotius, Pufendorf and Vattel, you get what appears to be a natural law approach to international law 101 00:12:45.840 --> 00:12:55.840 and with each writer there's less and less real natural law and more and more in effect acceptance of positive law and so on. 102 00:12:55.840 --> 00:13:25.840 And to make a long story short, well let's see if I can make it short, there is an upside and the upside is simply that there were so many wars and they were so devastating and costly that for purely practical reasons people thought well maybe there should be more rules and this coincided 103 00:13:25.840 --> 00:13:55.840 besides also with the development of early liberalism, early liberalism in a way begins in some respects as a revolt of traditional sectors of society who are being asked to pay more money for these wars and begin resisting through their parliaments and in many respects you can explain the so-called general crisis of the 17th century in terms of these resistance movements but of course doctrine is being hammered out too. At the same time theorists are saying there's all the sovereignty about and the king can do all these things 104 00:13:55.840 --> 00:14:01.740 You begin to get people arguing, well, maybe he can't, because we have chartered rights, or we have traditions, 105 00:14:01.740 --> 00:14:05.740 and when that doesn't work, they might move on to some abstract argument about rights and so on. 106 00:14:05.740 --> 00:14:10.140 So you get early liberalism contesting part of the process. 107 00:14:10.140 --> 00:14:16.740 But meanwhile, the bureaucracy is built up by the king in all these states, and they are more successful over time, 108 00:14:16.740 --> 00:14:22.440 despite all the hitches at extracting revenue and enforcing internal sovereignty. 109 00:14:22.440 --> 00:14:24.940 And then the kings aren't needed. 110 00:14:24.940 --> 00:14:54.940 At some point there we don't need the king. The bureaucracy can deplace the king that created it and you get a transition through republicanism, liberalism and democracy and we're all supposed to be living in some sort of eternal happiness now because we have democracy and liberalism and we're ruled by bureaucracy so the net effect of all this democracy is that we're ruled by bureaucrats and a few hundred legislators and so on which I'll refer you to the works of Paul Gottfried 111 00:14:54.940 --> 00:14:57.940 and John Lukash and some other people for that. 112 00:14:59.940 --> 00:15:01.940 And I'll say one thing about how this works. 113 00:15:01.940 --> 00:15:04.940 One of the interesting things when you read through the literature of the American, 114 00:15:04.940 --> 00:15:07.940 I'm not going to say founding, I'm tired of that word. 115 00:15:07.940 --> 00:15:10.940 Anyway, those guys are arguing about the Constitution. 116 00:15:10.940 --> 00:15:13.940 One of the interesting tricks was that the Federalist Party, 117 00:15:13.940 --> 00:15:18.940 the guys who wanted a stronger, central government, became the great Democrats. 118 00:15:18.940 --> 00:15:21.940 And they said, oh, well, we believe the people are sovereign, 119 00:15:21.940 --> 00:15:23.940 so this means you should ratify this new Constitution 120 00:15:23.940 --> 00:15:33.940 I'll put in a few protections, and don't listen to those anti-Federalists, you know, they have no vision, and various other considerations are reduced. 121 00:15:33.940 --> 00:15:39.940 But the Federalists, like Hamilton, start speaking in the name of popular sovereignty. 122 00:15:39.940 --> 00:15:50.940 And this was a good stroke of genius on their part, but as Gordon Wood would say, it also impoverished later American political thought pretty much forever. 123 00:15:50.940 --> 00:16:04.940 Because, in fact, you cannot run 13 states in any way that corresponds to any actual exercise of popular sovereignty. 124 00:16:04.940 --> 00:16:07.940 You might be able to do this at the level of a county or something. 125 00:16:07.940 --> 00:16:13.940 In the Constitutional ratification convention in New York, Governor Clinton, who was an anti-Federalist, famously said that, 126 00:16:13.940 --> 00:16:19.020 said that, well, New York is already too big to be a republic. I'm not sure we want to 127 00:16:19.020 --> 00:16:24.460 get in this union and give it a lot of power. You know, Governor Clinton was a bit prophetic, 128 00:16:24.460 --> 00:16:31.860 I think. But nonetheless, the language of popular sovereignty has been very persuasive, 129 00:16:31.860 --> 00:16:36.740 and so in the name of the people, all sorts of things are done. And I could fast forward 130 00:16:36.740 --> 00:16:40.740 I'm going to read a bit and come back. 131 00:16:40.740 --> 00:16:47.740 So there's a book I found by William Whiting, written in 1862 in Boston. 132 00:16:47.740 --> 00:16:52.740 So as you might imagine, he has a certain view of the Union and the war and Mr. Lincoln 133 00:16:52.740 --> 00:16:56.740 and the sort of powers Mr. Lincoln should be able to use to win the war. 134 00:16:56.740 --> 00:17:06.740 And it pretty much says everything that John Yoo or Mr. Gonzalez or Mr. Bybee might say, 135 00:17:06.740 --> 00:17:10.740 except he doesn't specifically, I don't think in this book, endorse torture. 136 00:17:10.740 --> 00:17:15.740 But apparently, Lincoln and his armies can do almost anything they have to do to win the war. 137 00:17:15.740 --> 00:17:19.740 Well, why is this? Because they represent the people, the people are sovereign, 138 00:17:19.740 --> 00:17:21.740 and it goes around in this big syllogism. 139 00:17:21.740 --> 00:17:24.740 And since the people are sovereign, there's only one people you can't get out of the Union 140 00:17:24.740 --> 00:17:29.740 and all these syllogisms go around in circles with, I think, unfortunate results. 141 00:17:29.740 --> 00:17:35.740 But nonetheless, there was a brief period for about a century and a half where laws of war were developed, 142 00:17:35.740 --> 00:17:40.740 that were an improvement, and they were actually followed in Europe. 143 00:17:40.740 --> 00:17:47.740 I'm not going to argue that anybody went out colonizing and followed laws of war in the colonies. 144 00:17:47.740 --> 00:17:54.740 I mean, Britain didn't even follow, I don't think very well, the laws of war next door in Ireland. 145 00:17:54.740 --> 00:17:58.740 So as soon as you get outside the club, the rules don't apply as well. 146 00:17:58.740 --> 00:18:04.740 Actually, there was an interesting guy, I think he was a cardinal in the 17th century, 147 00:18:04.740 --> 00:18:07.740 he wrote a book arguing there should be a sort of League of Christian Nations 148 00:18:07.740 --> 00:18:12.740 who would pledge to have eternal peace amongst themselves and make war on the Turks. 149 00:18:12.740 --> 00:18:17.740 So there's always outsiders to these agreements. 150 00:18:17.740 --> 00:18:27.740 So the positive law that's developing across these several centuries might not be ideal, 151 00:18:27.740 --> 00:18:37.740 but practically, while this is going on, at the same time there's a shift away from the questions of just war. 152 00:18:37.740 --> 00:18:41.740 Nobody wants to talk about news ad bellum, whether a war is just. 153 00:18:41.740 --> 00:18:47.540 They want to talk about just limiting the damage, so they want to talk about the use and bellow. 154 00:18:47.540 --> 00:18:50.740 What are the practices, you know, should you burn downtown just because they're there? 155 00:18:50.740 --> 00:18:55.740 They begin to develop some rules in Land War, which are sometimes followed, which is an improvement. 156 00:18:55.740 --> 00:18:59.740 And this is the point at which Rothbard would come in and say, 157 00:18:59.740 --> 00:19:08.740 well, this is better than doing it the way it's been done, say, starting in 1862 or World War I, whatever your starting point is. 158 00:19:08.740 --> 00:19:19.740 When ideology intrudes and big causes intrude, well, we don't necessarily think states are particularly justified in the end. 159 00:19:19.740 --> 00:19:26.740 They are there, and at this point we resort to a kind of casuistry and we say, what's the best thing they can do given they exist? 160 00:19:26.740 --> 00:19:28.740 Well, maybe they should follow these rules. 161 00:19:28.740 --> 00:19:35.740 Maybe we were better off in the 18th and 19th centuries as long as this period of following the rules lasted. 162 00:19:35.740 --> 00:19:58.740 The emphasis has become pragmatic and practical, but at least there is a kind of benefit in it, at least as long as you're fighting Europeans and not out in the colonies. 163 00:19:58.740 --> 00:20:17.740 Now, there were some suggestions made in the early period of the United States by people like James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and others trying to negotiate treaties involving trade with European powers during and after the revolution. 164 00:20:17.740 --> 00:20:31.740 And they're saying in effect, well really, trade is good. Why should trade be imposed upon during war? Why shouldn't we really restrict this whole notion of contraband and at least protect the rights of all the neutrals? 165 00:20:31.740 --> 00:20:36.740 And there was some progress intellectually at least on this front. 166 00:20:36.740 --> 00:20:51.740 Fast forward to Gustave de Molinari, our Belgian economist who, in a book of his published I guess around 1855 or 6, has a discussion of the usages of war. 167 00:20:51.740 --> 00:21:00.740 And he says, well a lot of practice has been made in the rules about land war, but why can't we extend this progress to naval warfare? 168 00:21:00.740 --> 00:21:08.740 I mean, why bombard cities that aren't military ports? And again, why attack neutral trade? 169 00:21:08.740 --> 00:21:16.740 One example he uses is that the Tsar of Russia, desiring to, just after Crimean War, desiring to punish Britain, 170 00:21:16.740 --> 00:21:23.740 restricts the export of grain and certain other commodities. And Britain, to punish the Tsar, 171 00:21:23.740 --> 00:21:29.740 restricts the importation of oats and these other commodities from Russia. So this is contradictory. 172 00:21:29.740 --> 00:21:37.740 I mean, economic warfare, again, doesn't make a great deal of sense, but each side thinks it's punishing the other by getting in the way of trade. 173 00:21:37.740 --> 00:21:44.740 And the other thing Mollinore notes is that you can alienate natural allies by your methods. 174 00:21:44.740 --> 00:21:51.740 So the British managed to, I guess, have some landing parties and confiscate property from the Finns. 175 00:21:51.740 --> 00:21:58.740 Made the Finns pro-Russian. How often are Finns pro-Russian? Happens once every thousand years. 176 00:21:58.740 --> 00:22:03.820 that kind of thing. So Molinari has a nice exposition of this and of course nobody 177 00:22:03.820 --> 00:22:07.980 followed his advice that the rules of naval warfare could be improved and I'll 178 00:22:07.980 --> 00:22:15.380 mention one connection with respect to that which is that during the 179 00:22:15.380 --> 00:22:23.620 American War of 1861 through 65 the US Navy is roaming around stopping neutral 180 00:22:23.620 --> 00:22:27.200 shipping looking for Confederate ambassadors and just generally causing 181 00:22:27.200 --> 00:22:35.120 and Trouble, and the British could either protest this or they could save up the precedents. 182 00:22:35.120 --> 00:22:40.760 They saved up the precedents. So during World War I, when they're vigorously blockading 183 00:22:40.760 --> 00:22:47.840 Germany and the Central Powers, William James Bryan, Wilson's first Secretary of State, 184 00:22:47.840 --> 00:22:54.160 would go to the British and say, see here, you're violating the known rules of naval 185 00:22:54.160 --> 00:22:58.960 Warfare or the Rights of Neutrals during a war and they're saying, oh no no, your Mr. 186 00:22:58.960 --> 00:23:05.960 Seward said this in 1862 and they would quote this back, another embarrassing moment in 187 00:23:05.960 --> 00:23:14.200 international law. So the hegemonic power, to make a brief point of it, tends to be the 188 00:23:14.200 --> 00:23:18.280 power that bends the rules, doesn't follow them or breaks them or makes new ones that 189 00:23:18.280 --> 00:23:24.140 it proclaims are now the rules. Another interesting intellectual feature of this period in which 190 00:23:24.140 --> 00:23:30.140 in which there was at least some following of the rules, was a notion of a balance of power. 191 00:23:30.140 --> 00:23:35.140 And how much this owes to Newtonian physics and other matters I don't know yet. 192 00:23:35.140 --> 00:23:39.140 But it's sort of a nice metaphor, except it doesn't seem to mean anything operationally. 193 00:23:39.140 --> 00:23:44.140 You can look at any constellation of power in the world at any given point and say, 194 00:23:44.140 --> 00:23:48.140 oh, there is a balance of power, or no, this power is trying to break the balance of power, 195 00:23:48.140 --> 00:23:51.140 or if we had more power there would be a balance of power. 196 00:23:51.140 --> 00:24:07.140 It really can't be applied very well, and so in the end I've concluded that probably the balance of power theory in general is just a rationalization for Britain's policy toward Europe, you know, get involved in this war, not get involved in that war, and so on. 197 00:24:07.140 --> 00:24:17.140 It seems to be a huge rationalization, which a number of German writers pointed out in 1915 in a book that we have in this library. 198 00:24:17.140 --> 00:24:33.140 Another interesting source, a number of the famous scholars of Imperial Germany put together, of course, a book of essays defending a German viewpoint, and this is regarded as scandalous. 199 00:24:33.140 --> 00:24:43.140 And then everybody fast-forwards over the role of American scholars once we got an oar. This is not scandalous, but it's just an interesting standard. 200 00:24:43.140 --> 00:24:55.140 Okay, well, now we have, I will say that for our purposes, in a way, the rules of war break down under Mr. Lincoln, but that doesn't affect the European state system. 201 00:24:55.140 --> 00:25:03.140 In the United States, in some ways, is outside the European state system, was always a rival to it, and wanted to make up the rules as it went. 202 00:25:03.140 --> 00:25:10.140 The United States has never really been comfortable with the European state system for reasons both good and bad, I suppose. 203 00:25:10.140 --> 00:25:31.620 So let's just take it provisionally that the real breakdown is World War I where the rules of war are more and more strained and you have the starvation blockade of Germany, you've got the unrestricted submarine warfare as a response to that, you've got all sorts of interesting bending and stretching and so on. 204 00:25:31.620 --> 00:25:40.620 Well, plus you've just got a colossal disaster, as Joseph Schempeter said, is this catastrophe of 1914 through 18. 205 00:25:40.620 --> 00:25:46.620 This calls into being, or gives heart to a new school of thought. 206 00:25:46.620 --> 00:25:53.620 Because one of the problems with liberalism is that the liberals haven't always worked anything out. 207 00:25:53.620 --> 00:25:56.620 We like the 19th century liberals up to a point, but they're very divided. 208 00:25:56.620 --> 00:26:09.620 And you can find almost any position. You can find John Stuart Mill writing an essay, a non-intervention, in which it turns out he's entirely in favor of intervention, provided Britain does it and it's done for the moral reason. 209 00:26:09.620 --> 00:26:16.620 And he has no problem with intervention in Utah. He's got various examples he uses which are interesting. 210 00:26:16.620 --> 00:26:22.620 So liberalism doesn't give us much. It depends on the liberals. 211 00:26:22.620 --> 00:26:40.620 And so you've got the line of attack proposed by Jefferson, these early American writers, Molinari and others, who said, well, you'd really want to practice strict free trade and improve the laws of war and naval warfare to defend the progress of commerce. 212 00:26:40.620 --> 00:26:44.620 This is the way to go, and everything else is kind of gradual, but this is what you do. 213 00:26:44.620 --> 00:26:57.620 Well, very early, I guess as far back as Gladstone, you begin to get the notion that with all the good powers sort of got together and faced off against the bad powers, the world would be a better place. 214 00:26:57.620 --> 00:27:00.620 You begin to get the germs of the idea of a League of Nations. 215 00:27:00.620 --> 00:27:05.620 and it goes, I say it goes back certainly in the direction of Gladstone 216 00:27:05.620 --> 00:27:11.620 and of course our experience that has left with Woodrow Wilson 217 00:27:11.620 --> 00:27:14.620 and our participation in World War I. 218 00:27:14.620 --> 00:27:19.620 There are also a number of highly placed writers, intellectuals and politicians in Britain 219 00:27:19.620 --> 00:27:22.620 which after all had the most successful empire in the world 220 00:27:22.620 --> 00:27:26.620 suddenly wanting a coalition of the good, 221 00:27:26.620 --> 00:27:29.620 wanting a League of Nations or a League to enforce peace and some such thing. 222 00:27:29.620 --> 00:27:32.620 You've got to be suspicious of the most successful empire. 223 00:27:32.620 --> 00:27:39.620 Somebody wants to be apparently adding some more material support to what it's gotten in order to keep it. 224 00:27:39.620 --> 00:27:45.620 It doesn't seem like it's entirely selfless, and so on. 225 00:27:45.620 --> 00:27:51.620 So now a notion of usad velem, or winner wars, just comes back into play. 226 00:27:51.620 --> 00:27:56.620 And we'll fast forward and say, well, the League of Nations is created. 227 00:27:56.620 --> 00:28:03.620 It doesn't do a great deal of good or harm because the original plan isn't followed, the Americans stay out. 228 00:28:03.620 --> 00:28:10.620 But the League of Nations, in any event, was really an extension of the Entente Cardiale. 229 00:28:10.620 --> 00:28:16.620 It's basically the British alliance system with more powers thrown in and probation for those who were defeated in the late war 230 00:28:16.620 --> 00:28:19.620 in the hope the Americans would come in and help pay the bills. 231 00:28:19.620 --> 00:28:26.820 I mean, in terms of the oil in the Middle East, once Britain decides it has to have Iraq, 232 00:28:26.820 --> 00:28:33.260 well, it invents Iraq first, it invents Iraq and has to have it, and they cut the French 233 00:28:33.260 --> 00:28:36.900 in for maybe 20% of the oil, let them muck around in Syria. 234 00:28:36.900 --> 00:28:42.860 They tried to give us Syria first, imagine that we could have had Syria, if only we joined 235 00:28:42.860 --> 00:28:44.180 the League and had it as a mandate. 236 00:28:44.180 --> 00:28:47.740 We could have been involved in this Middle Eastern business much sooner, helping the 237 00:28:47.740 --> 00:29:09.940 Under the League Theory, there is a new notion of just war, or use odd vellum, but now you 238 00:29:09.940 --> 00:29:12.140 define it in terms of aggression. 239 00:29:12.140 --> 00:29:15.540 When you define aggression as somebody crosses an existing frontier that was established 240 00:29:15.540 --> 00:29:22.540 The first few decades or hundreds of years ago by some successful empire, and so it's an attempt to freeze the status quo. 241 00:29:22.540 --> 00:29:25.540 Now, this may be good, it may be bad, but nonetheless, this is what it is. 242 00:29:25.540 --> 00:29:33.540 So essentially, the successful imperial powers saying, okay, no more change, no more threats to what we've got. 243 00:29:33.540 --> 00:29:42.540 And then the Kellogg-Briand Pact of, I think, what, 19... I've got it in here. 28, I think. 244 00:29:42.540 --> 00:29:51.540 Anyway, just a bunch of powers to sign up and say, yes, we agree that we'll never use war again in pursuit of any policies, any of our goals, we would just renounce war. 245 00:29:51.540 --> 00:30:02.540 Well, again, not very operationally enforceable. It's only good later if somebody loses a war and then you can say, well, you violated the Kellogg-Briand Pact. 246 00:30:02.540 --> 00:30:09.540 So now we fast forward to World War II, which wasn't prevented by the League or the Kellogg-Briand Pact. 247 00:30:09.540 --> 00:30:24.540 But it did lead to the formation of the United Nations, which again is simply the one alliance system writ large with more people included and are defeated to be rehabilitated in time and admitted into this big collective security system. 248 00:30:24.540 --> 00:30:32.540 And as Murray Rothbard used to say, the problem with the whole collective security notion is that it's hard to ever have a small war. 249 00:30:32.540 --> 00:30:37.660 All are. Everybody has to get involved, because then it's aggression and it has to be punished 250 00:30:37.660 --> 00:30:49.300 and there's this new, different notion, I guess, of what's just and unjust. And conceivably 251 00:30:49.300 --> 00:30:53.460 less attention might be paid to the use in bellow in one of these just wars if you're 252 00:30:53.460 --> 00:30:59.700 throwing off your peacekeeping. Who can question your methods? You know, at least off, you 253 00:30:59.700 --> 00:31:29.700 and so on. So you get a lot of ideology about collective security and this was attacked all through the 20s and 30s and even down into the early 50s by the old-fashioned group of international lawyers, so people like Borchardt, Bassett, Lage, and they influenced Charles Baird who in turn influenced Rothbard. So this explained to me why Rothbard never paid much attention to a good part of the international relationship. 254 00:31:29.700 --> 00:31:36.700 He had already developed a position before these guys started writing all this scientific 255 00:31:36.700 --> 00:31:39.700 equilibrium model business of international affairs. 256 00:31:39.700 --> 00:31:44.700 He thought there was already a working approach to these problems. 257 00:31:44.700 --> 00:31:53.700 Now in the article, and I won't go into this now, I follow the career of one writer in the American Journal of International Law 258 00:31:53.700 --> 00:31:55.700 who is now the editor, Michael Riesman. 259 00:31:55.700 --> 00:32:08.700 And what I show is that at any given time, he'll manage to find that international law supports whatever the Americans just did, or whatever fits the collective security model of what should be done generally. 260 00:32:08.700 --> 00:32:22.700 So he's got an article denouncing Rhodesia in, I guess, the late 60s, and then he's got an article that amounts to a recruiting poster for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. 261 00:32:22.700 --> 00:32:52.700 and they're all heroes and so on down the line and after 9-11 he's saying the United States has to enforce international civility so fairly predictable so my conclusion is as far as some of the writers go in this field that they're basically there to rationalize American foreign policy now there is another group who actually believe in the UN and in the short run if they can borrow power from the United States they'll do that but their end model is actually 262 00:32:52.700 --> 00:33:02.700 I appreciate a world government not run by anybody, I guess, sort of a machine that goes of itself, which was set up in the American Constitution. 263 00:33:02.700 --> 00:33:08.700 That might be bad, too. I don't know. Let's see. How am I doing? Okay. 264 00:33:08.700 --> 00:33:18.700 So we'll skip Mr. Riesman and the American Journal of International Law, where I think I've managed to say something about this in the article that will be interesting. 265 00:33:18.700 --> 00:33:23.700 And now we get another interesting doctrine, which is interesting the timing. 266 00:33:23.700 --> 00:33:28.700 We suddenly find out that democracies are inherently peaceful and lovable. 267 00:33:28.700 --> 00:33:32.700 And democracies just never go to war. 268 00:33:32.700 --> 00:33:36.700 I guess unless they're attacked first. 269 00:33:36.700 --> 00:33:39.700 And then they have to admit you bring cases up and they say, 270 00:33:39.700 --> 00:33:44.700 okay, well, it's true, this democracy did attack that power and this one attacked that power. 271 00:33:44.700 --> 00:33:47.700 All right, democracies never attack other democracies. 272 00:33:47.700 --> 00:33:56.700 Okay, so they have to retreat from the inherently peaceful thing, but then they say, but this is all too good because it means, it's sort of a theorem, 273 00:33:56.700 --> 00:34:03.700 because since democracies never go to war with democracies, if everybody were a democracy, why would there be no more war? There'd be eternal peace. 274 00:34:03.700 --> 00:34:09.700 So all you have to do is fight this series of wars to bring about everyone being a democracy and happiness will reign. 275 00:34:09.700 --> 00:34:19.700 Great. Another interesting utopian fantasy, I think, but sustained in the political science journals for the last, certainly 20 years, 276 00:34:19.700 --> 00:34:27.700 with a lot of mathematical mumbo jumbo and statistical analysis, correlations, regressions, who knows. 277 00:34:27.700 --> 00:34:37.700 Which might be interesting, the sort of method, I suppose, could be of some use in history on a limited kind of problem, 278 00:34:37.700 --> 00:35:07.700 There's a problem, but I'm not sure you get a predictive proposition of this kind, using these methods is already that problem, also doesn't fit the facts, and I've gotten into a couple of brief online debates with some of these people, brief because you get sick of it, but Rudy Rummel for instance, and they just really, there's a catalog somewhere, and they order movable goalposts, they can just change the terms of the argument, 279 00:35:07.700 --> 00:35:13.000 Well, okay, democracies never fight democracies, what about the Confederates and the Union? 280 00:35:13.000 --> 00:35:19.600 Oh, but the South is disqualified, you know, they've got slavery, it can't really be a democracy. 281 00:35:19.600 --> 00:35:22.000 Well, what about World War I? 282 00:35:22.000 --> 00:35:29.200 When you had a wider suffrage in the German Empire than you had in Britain, at least slightly wider, 283 00:35:29.200 --> 00:35:34.000 and, oh no, no, that doesn't count because in the German Empire, 284 00:35:34.000 --> 00:35:39.200 The executive and the military had too much independent control over foreign policy. 285 00:35:39.200 --> 00:35:42.360 And we're talking about a war in which basically 286 00:35:42.360 --> 00:35:45.680 four men in the British cabinet committed the cabinet 287 00:35:45.680 --> 00:35:48.740 to a war on the side of France 288 00:35:48.740 --> 00:35:53.180 and that minority of the cabinet somehow committed parliament, which then committed the people 289 00:35:53.180 --> 00:35:55.760 to all go get killed. 290 00:35:55.760 --> 00:35:59.520 But yet the German case is disqualified for being 291 00:35:59.520 --> 00:36:02.840 less democratic, and not so on down the line. Any case you bring up, they will 292 00:36:02.840 --> 00:36:07.240 will suddenly redefine one of the parties as not being democratic and thereby sustaining 293 00:36:07.240 --> 00:36:12.780 the theorem that democracies never go to war with one another. So the whole thing has become 294 00:36:12.780 --> 00:36:18.840 in a way a huge waste of time, but I hope people will devote some time to answering 295 00:36:18.840 --> 00:36:25.520 this claim. And they're confounding a number of things. Sure, there's some way probably 296 00:36:25.520 --> 00:36:33.820 in which with the growth of trade and communication, these societies are less likely to go to war, 297 00:36:33.820 --> 00:36:36.520 but I'm not sure that democracy is causing it. 298 00:36:36.520 --> 00:36:39.520 You could almost invert the proposition and say that certain things have happened 299 00:36:39.520 --> 00:36:43.520 that make it possible to have a democracy. 300 00:36:43.520 --> 00:36:46.320 I almost had put up with it. 301 00:36:46.320 --> 00:36:50.220 But, you know, the whole causation thing is wide open. 302 00:36:50.220 --> 00:36:54.120 What they've got is a set of correlations and then they claim the causation can only be this direction 303 00:36:54.120 --> 00:37:24.120 or something. Okay. Now I have also this overly long article, some discussion of where things seem to be going and I've already mentioned that the hegemonic power, whether it's Britain in the 19th century or the United States, particularly in the second, I mean the second half of the late century, tends to be the power that alters the rules. So Britain will rewrite, abuse, ignore the rules of naval warfare and neutral rights in its favor and get away with it. 304 00:37:24.120 --> 00:37:38.120 The United States is particularly fond of having no rules restricting air power, never signed in 1977 protocols to the Geneva Convention that try to limit the use of this wonderful military device. 305 00:37:38.120 --> 00:37:50.120 And so what's interesting is you have an almost seamless transition from British to American hegemony, obviously interrupted by the bipolar period of the Cold War. 306 00:37:50.120 --> 00:37:53.120 And there's a lot more that could be said along these lines. 307 00:37:53.120 --> 00:37:58.120 One writer I quote to some extent makes the interesting point that 308 00:37:58.120 --> 00:38:02.120 the United States first invented the United Nations Organization 309 00:38:02.120 --> 00:38:06.120 as what it hoped it would be an instrument of policy. 310 00:38:06.120 --> 00:38:10.120 When it didn't work, it abandoned it, rehabilitated it briefly during the first Gulf War, 311 00:38:10.120 --> 00:38:13.120 and then sidelined the UN again. 312 00:38:13.120 --> 00:38:17.120 And I've had to conclude over the years that the UN, 313 00:38:17.120 --> 00:38:23.120 really not my favorite thing, but I'm glad it provides a forum where some of these things can be argued 314 00:38:23.120 --> 00:38:28.120 at least, I'll say that much in favor of it. 315 00:38:28.120 --> 00:38:36.120 Another thing that's being confounded presently is the boundaries of sovereignty in the state system. 316 00:38:36.120 --> 00:38:42.120 So you've got a huge literature now. You've got Mr. Thomas Frank saying, well, everyone has a right to democracy. 317 00:38:42.120 --> 00:38:55.120 It's a right to live under democracy, and he goes through, well, he claims to the precedents for this, going back to maybe 1919, fast forwarding. 318 00:38:55.120 --> 00:39:01.120 And what this seems to mean is that if there's a right, someone has to enforce it. 319 00:39:01.120 --> 00:39:09.120 So we're back to inflicting democracy on those who haven't felt a need for it or don't have it somehow, and so on. 320 00:39:09.120 --> 00:39:29.120 And all of these doctrines obviously can be used as rationalizations of the policies desired for a range of reasons by a hegemonic power. 321 00:39:29.120 --> 00:39:34.120 And so now we also have a huge literature saying, well, sovereignty is just old-fashioned, it's outmoded. 322 00:39:34.120 --> 00:39:40.320 Well, I don't think we have to like it, particularly internal sovereignty, but on the purely negative 323 00:39:40.320 --> 00:39:45.200 side, external sovereignty, the idea that if we're just here in Alabama and nobody else 324 00:39:45.200 --> 00:39:52.300 can come in and tell us we're doing wrong and change that, well, this might be useful 325 00:39:52.300 --> 00:39:59.800 at times in self-defense and so forth, but no, this is all supposed to go by the board 326 00:39:59.800 --> 00:40:03.800 because now we have international human rights standards. 327 00:40:03.800 --> 00:40:06.800 There's a chilling article by a team of sociologists, 328 00:40:06.800 --> 00:40:09.800 I can't remember the names of four sociologists at once, 329 00:40:09.800 --> 00:40:12.800 but they're saying, in effect, 330 00:40:12.800 --> 00:40:14.800 well, suppose an island were discovered somewhere 331 00:40:14.800 --> 00:40:17.800 and they had not known about us and we hadn't known about them, 332 00:40:17.800 --> 00:40:20.800 so we go in there and talk to them, establish communication, 333 00:40:20.800 --> 00:40:22.800 learn how to translate things. 334 00:40:22.800 --> 00:40:25.800 In ten years, they'd have a human rights commission, 335 00:40:25.800 --> 00:40:32.340 Feminist Movement, minimum wage laws, they would adopt by imitation, some elite would 336 00:40:32.340 --> 00:40:36.940 spring up there and by imitation would adopt all the institutions that we have, good or 337 00:40:36.940 --> 00:40:49.320 bad, and join the UN. So that was rather chilling in a way. And I guess a further point to that 338 00:40:49.320 --> 00:40:53.960 would be that I've seen some of the writers of the Internationalist Persuasion, which 339 00:40:53.960 --> 00:41:11.960 Which again overlaps somewhat with those of the imperial persuasion, say that, well, of course you really couldn't allow a state to not supply a minimal standard of X, Y, Z, and you get the whole list of social welfare and not the 18th century short list of rights. 340 00:41:11.960 --> 00:41:24.960 So definitely, if some state, in some state of mental derangement, adopted a laissez-faire market economy, it would have to be invaded to restore the welfare state. 341 00:41:24.960 --> 00:41:32.960 So the doctrine is interesting. It's out there. Some of it will be used by the partisans of the empire. Some of it won't be. 342 00:41:32.960 --> 00:41:39.960 The final example is Alexander Wendt, who's an interesting political scientist who writes in this field. 343 00:41:39.960 --> 00:41:44.960 And his contribution is the inevitability of a world state, and he doesn't care who leads it, 344 00:41:44.960 --> 00:41:48.960 whether it's the Americans gradually bring it about accidentally or the UN somehow does it. 345 00:41:48.960 --> 00:41:55.960 He doesn't care, but he provides a kind of rather weak, hegelian argument, in my view, 346 00:41:55.960 --> 00:41:59.960 why this would come about and why it would be good. 347 00:41:59.960 --> 00:42:05.960 So I've left things out, but I hope the article at least has raised a few questions. 348 00:42:07.960 --> 00:42:25.720 Let me ask you about, unless you're going to New York, about the question of jurisdiction, 349 00:42:25.720 --> 00:42:34.260 the adaptability of one nation laws to citizens traveling abroad versus foreign citizens traveling into the US. 350 00:42:34.260 --> 00:42:38.720 What are the traditional rules concerning that versus the modern perspective? 351 00:42:38.720 --> 00:42:46.260 I'm thinking in particular that the U.S. seems to presume a kind of ownership over all of this. 352 00:42:46.260 --> 00:42:49.080 Where are they in the world, what are they doing? 353 00:42:49.080 --> 00:43:06.080 And no matter who is doing business with the U.S., this seems to be a growing attempt to impose U.S. laws on all institutions that are operating, any kind of corporation with the U.S. 354 00:43:19.080 --> 00:43:30.080 I mean, I think traditionally you went abroad, you took your chances and you were under the local laws unless there was a specific treaty with your state, kind of thing. 355 00:43:30.080 --> 00:43:40.080 Or sometimes the states would impose the unequal treaties with China where the Chinese had to let the Europeans be tried in some special court or their own courts. 356 00:43:40.080 --> 00:43:46.080 But normally you're kind of taking your chances and this claim that American jurisdiction in that sense extends everywhere, I think it's relatively new. 357 00:43:46.080 --> 00:43:52.080 I mean, how else could you arrest, quote unquote, arrest Noriega for drug dealing? 358 00:43:52.080 --> 00:43:54.080 There's a number of interesting things. 359 00:43:54.080 --> 00:43:59.080 There's actually a guy named William Robinson, who's a Marxist, 360 00:43:59.080 --> 00:44:04.080 who's done quite an interesting article on this, on the export of democracy. 361 00:44:04.080 --> 00:44:09.080 And first he sort of says, well, okay, they're not talking about radical democracy. 362 00:44:09.080 --> 00:44:13.080 They're talking about Samuel Huntington's idea of guided democracy anyway. 363 00:44:13.080 --> 00:44:23.080 Anyway, a lot of representative institutions and nothing gets out of hand, and we're exporting that model, sometimes called polyarchy, I guess, by some people. 364 00:44:23.080 --> 00:44:31.080 But he says that once they decided, at some point there was a debate in the 70s amongst the political scientists close to policy makers, 365 00:44:31.080 --> 00:44:41.080 and they decided that exporting some form of what they could call democracy was actually more effective in terms of protecting whatever interests they thought they were protecting 366 00:44:41.080 --> 00:44:50.080 And then supporting various despots and horrible dictators, in the long run, such a system would be more stable. 367 00:44:50.080 --> 00:45:01.080 So they began this process of colonizing everything, and at this point, this is where the certain neoconservatives in the Reagan administration come into play with this, 368 00:45:01.080 --> 00:45:09.080 oh, what's that, Endowment for Democracy, this whole gang getting involved, and they say, oh, good, let's show them how it's done. 369 00:45:09.080 --> 00:45:14.080 Let's get their trade union guys and put them together with our trade union guys. 370 00:45:14.080 --> 00:45:20.080 We're basically going to interest them in modeling their entire civil society on what we do, 371 00:45:20.080 --> 00:45:24.080 because that's best and then things are easier. 372 00:45:24.080 --> 00:45:29.080 So there's an attempt to not just colonize in some traditional sense, 373 00:45:29.080 --> 00:45:34.080 but to try to colonize other places ideologically and institutionally across the board, 374 00:45:34.080 --> 00:45:38.080 which is very big, and I suppose the legal model goes with that. 375 00:45:38.080 --> 00:45:47.080 Another example is, if you look at, probably no book was published in the American colonies where a penny was paid towards copyright. 376 00:45:47.080 --> 00:45:50.080 Anything printed in North America was probably pirated. 377 00:45:50.080 --> 00:45:58.080 And yet now we send all these people around the world demanding that every videotape made in China, you know, pay something to Hollywood. 378 00:45:58.080 --> 00:46:02.080 Well this, I think it's problematic to say the least. 379 00:46:02.080 --> 00:46:07.480 so this is a yeah the jurisdiction issue is getting interesting I mean there were 380 00:46:07.480 --> 00:46:11.040 some complaints when I think was it Belgium passed the law and wanted to 381 00:46:11.040 --> 00:46:15.920 arrest Rumsfeld or they were making some threats about this but apparently only 382 00:46:15.920 --> 00:46:21.040 the really big powers get to attempt this sort of thing 383 00:47:02.080 --> 00:47:15.080 I guess not, and then I guess any kind of analogies to individuals are already kind of perilous, but if you do them right, I think they work to at least illustrate something. 384 00:47:15.080 --> 00:47:24.080 One thing I've noticed with Rothbard is that he would make those kinds of comparisons to establish the basis of right. 385 00:47:24.080 --> 00:47:30.080 He would say, well, somebody steals my wallet, do I have a right to fire a machine gun into the crowd that he flees into? 386 00:47:30.080 --> 00:47:36.080 Well, no. He's trying to do this to establish right, right and wrong of it. 387 00:47:36.080 --> 00:47:45.080 Then he goes on to discuss states and says, well, it seems like states, for various reasons, are pretty unjust at the outset. 388 00:47:45.080 --> 00:47:52.080 So we have to just look, evaluate what they do kind of pragmatically and casuistically. 389 00:47:52.080 --> 00:47:59.080 And so you can't, and this is not in the spirit of saying, well, let's pretend that England is just like a guy and then this other guy. 390 00:47:59.080 --> 00:48:12.080 Those analogies get a little bit rougher, although in some libertarian circles this kind of analogous business turns into endless lifeboat situations and Walter Block will worry you to death with this kind of thing. 391 00:48:12.080 --> 00:48:17.080 So I don't think Murray started in this spirit, to be honest. 392 00:48:17.080 --> 00:48:44.080 I want to find John's. It is hard to make those kind of points to Americans because we are the world power. We have troops in 150 countries and we can obliterate everybody, so that would suggest that the strategy is to try to make those explanations to people outside the U.S. 393 00:48:44.080 --> 00:48:49.080 Well, I remember opening one lecture at maybe the Mises University or some event 394 00:48:49.080 --> 00:48:54.080 by noticing how many places the United States has troops, 395 00:48:54.080 --> 00:48:59.080 how many countries outside these frontiers, and how much is spent, 396 00:48:59.080 --> 00:49:02.080 and you compare that to the next ten or twelve countries, 397 00:49:02.080 --> 00:49:05.080 and you say, really, can this all be defense? 398 00:49:05.080 --> 00:49:11.080 The word defense has certainly undergone some elaboration if this is all defense. 399 00:49:11.080 --> 00:49:17.080 There's also an ideological factor, and let me quote this book title that I have in a footnote, one of the ideological factors. 400 00:49:17.080 --> 00:49:27.080 This is a book by Samuel D. Baldwin of Tennessee, published by a Methodist press, 1854. 401 00:49:27.080 --> 00:49:29.080 But the title of the book tells you all you need to know. 402 00:49:29.080 --> 00:49:38.080 Armageddon, or the overthrow of Romanism and monarchy, the existence of the United States foretold in the Bible, its future greatness, 403 00:49:38.080 --> 00:49:46.080 Invasion by Allied Europe, Annihilation of Monarchy, Expansion into the Millennial Republic and its Dominion over the whole world. 404 00:49:46.080 --> 00:49:52.080 So you've already got a Millennialist Protestant program of empire. 405 00:49:52.080 --> 00:50:00.080 And then this guy is a Northern counterpart whose name doesn't come right to mind, but another fellow wrote a prophetic vision up about 1856. 406 00:50:00.080 --> 00:50:11.080 And in his version, the same thing happens. The Americans become the new Israel, inflict Republican governments on the rest of the world, and abolish slavery. 407 00:50:11.080 --> 00:50:17.080 Baldwin didn't actually care about slavery. He thought that was consistent with republicanism in certain cases. And the other guy's anti-slavery. 408 00:50:17.080 --> 00:50:25.080 But they both agree there should be a millennial American republic that forces the entire planet to become republican by great bloodshed and struggle. 409 00:50:25.080 --> 00:50:29.080 And this brings about the millennium. So the theological point, too. 410 00:50:29.080 --> 00:50:40.080 So, there's all sorts of themes. I mean, you can find the Republican, sort of secular millennialists with people like John O'Sullivan of the Young America group writing in this same vein. 411 00:50:40.080 --> 00:50:49.080 So, a lot of this is this almost, you know, deep sort of cultural memory and it comes to the fore in a situation like this. 412 00:50:49.080 --> 00:50:57.080 It has something to do with Bush's rhetoric. One of the things I noticed going through Murray Rothbard's writings on the right wing, 413 00:50:57.080 --> 00:51:06.080 And what he didn't like about the right wing was he had this fear that high church theocrats were taking over the right wing and this would be a problem. 414 00:51:06.080 --> 00:51:22.080 I bet he wouldn't have, he would have figured it out, but I bet he didn't anticipate that it would sort of end up being low church theocrats, you know, with an inroad into an administration with a huge vision of global reform. 415 00:51:22.080 --> 00:51:35.080 So that's an interesting switch, but that may actually be more consistent with American history, and the European monarchism was a fluke in the right-wing movement. 416 00:51:35.080 --> 00:51:38.080 Anyone else? 417 00:51:38.080 --> 00:51:40.080 Okay. 418 00:51:40.080 --> 00:51:42.080 Excuse me. 419 00:52:08.080 --> 00:52:22.000 Yeah, there's kind of a blank check for American motives when they're kind of 420 00:52:22.000 --> 00:52:25.880 collectivized and done in our name, but that's back to popular sovereignty. I mean, 421 00:52:25.880 --> 00:52:31.440 we don't rule anything, but the fact that we have this notion of popular 422 00:52:31.440 --> 00:52:36.700 sovereignty around means that all sorts of things can be done in our name. Yeah, 423 00:52:36.700 --> 00:52:47.700 As the resident Greek in the crowd, I guess, I just find it stunning that folks think so timely of democracy, given the history of it. 424 00:52:47.700 --> 00:52:57.700 Most folks cite Athens as one of the first flourishing democracies, which probably in the posteristicities, Athenianly, go plucking off. 425 00:52:57.700 --> 00:53:13.700 Well, another little democracy. Do you know of any empirical work done? My intuition before you started talking was that democracies are more welfare warfare than, you know, your generic best bits of it. 426 00:53:27.700 --> 00:53:30.500 to Republican virtue and criticize this stuff as it comes along. 427 00:53:30.500 --> 00:53:34.500 So in a way, he's sort of a proto-Hoppian on this point, 428 00:53:34.500 --> 00:53:36.540 but he doesn't develop because he's still hoping 429 00:53:36.540 --> 00:53:40.140 that Republican ideas will win the day. 430 00:53:40.140 --> 00:53:42.020 And as far as the Athenians go, that's perfect 431 00:53:42.020 --> 00:53:44.820 because it's one of the articles of faith 432 00:53:44.820 --> 00:53:47.020 of the neoconservatives that you must believe 433 00:53:47.020 --> 00:53:48.860 in the Athenian Empire. 434 00:53:48.860 --> 00:53:50.820 And you must hate the Spartans 435 00:53:50.820 --> 00:53:52.300 because the Athenians were doing good 436 00:53:52.300 --> 00:53:54.780 and spreading their version of democracy. 437 00:53:54.780 --> 00:53:56.500 And they somehow can get around the fact 438 00:53:56.500 --> 00:54:03.500 The Athenians, you know, are huge slaveholders that is about as democratic as South Carolina in 1850. 439 00:54:03.500 --> 00:54:10.500 They get around that. But then I guess as soon as the Romans arrive, the neocons have to switch their allegiance to the Romans because they're bigger. 440 00:54:10.500 --> 00:54:14.500 I'm not sure how that works. But part of this is owing to Karl Popper. 441 00:54:14.500 --> 00:54:18.500 I don't miss a chance to say something bad about Karl Popper. 442 00:54:18.500 --> 00:54:24.500 because Popper in the open society and his enemies is sort of a champion of the 443 00:54:24.500 --> 00:54:30.060 Athenian model against other models and he has to gloss over stuff too but it 444 00:54:30.060 --> 00:54:34.380 becomes a kind of theme of Cold War liberalism and this is already present 445 00:54:34.380 --> 00:54:38.740 in the British Empire before World War one you've got writers saying well really 446 00:54:38.740 --> 00:54:45.260 we're commercial you know and yet we have an empire so we're the Athenians 447 00:54:45.260 --> 00:54:55.260 The Germans must be the Spartans, so this Athenian Empire has a popular run as an analogy, and yet it did have some drawbacks, as you said. 448 00:54:57.260 --> 00:55:08.260 You know, Joe, there's kind of, I'm not sure if this is optimistic or the hay fever that's bothering me, but you know, when you go through the paper and you listen to the lecture, 449 00:55:08.260 --> 00:55:17.260 One of the things you find is that the opponents of liberty, their arguments are rationalizations. 450 00:55:17.260 --> 00:55:23.260 They're not very consistent or logical. 451 00:55:23.260 --> 00:55:28.260 But the proponents of liberty have also got some problems. 452 00:55:28.260 --> 00:55:31.260 They always seem to compromise or are confused. 453 00:55:31.260 --> 00:55:46.260 You raised that John Stuart Mill is a case of confusion and the ratification of the Constitution is a problem of compromise. 454 00:55:46.260 --> 00:55:59.260 If we get to the point where the proponents of liberty don't make stupid compromises or aren't as confused about the nature of the issues and what their position should be, 455 00:55:59.260 --> 00:56:15.260 You know, I think about the Constitution, and the Southern, the Anti-Federalists were willing to accept it because they moved the capital, you know, it's silly things like that, and they didn't include any separation clause, which could have prevented the Civil War. 456 00:56:15.260 --> 00:56:32.260 If our side gets its act together, so to speak, this never-ending tide towards bigger government could at least be stopped. Is that too optimistic? 457 00:56:32.260 --> 00:56:39.260 I don't know. I guess we shouldn't be in this business if we don't have occasional optimistic moments. 458 00:56:39.260 --> 00:56:53.260 I mean Murray of course, you know, famously would, every election Murray is following the election returns and he's hoping for some kind of upsurge and victory of the good guys, seldom happened, but he really followed it anyway. 459 00:56:53.260 --> 00:57:05.260 But yeah, I think we have to have a kind of disciplined optimism. Oh, what was it? Oh, I know what it was. It was that quote from Gramsci of all people. I guess we get the quote Gramsci now. 460 00:57:05.260 --> 00:57:13.260 But it's the pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, which Genovese used to quote. 461 00:57:13.260 --> 00:57:20.260 I guess we don't have to use will on any of the senses connected to sovereignty. 462 00:57:20.260 --> 00:57:33.260 Well, I guess it's hard enough that that means that the main front is against our own sort of allies who are wavering. 463 00:57:33.260 --> 00:57:39.260 But it would be nice to... Well, I guess this whole war business is kind of an interesting shakeout. 464 00:57:39.260 --> 00:57:50.260 You've got to find out who the libertarians are and who the neocons are with the light, you know, sort of libertarian painted over. 465 00:57:50.260 --> 00:57:53.260 That's been helpful. 466 00:57:53.260 --> 00:58:03.260 So, and I guess in terms of the long run movement, building, or even just clarity, this is good. 467 00:58:03.260 --> 00:58:07.260 So yeah, I'll be guardedly optimistic. 468 00:58:07.260 --> 00:58:13.260 I mean really, if we wanted, you know, for pessimism you go to Paul Gottfried, for optimism you go to Murray. 469 00:58:13.260 --> 00:58:15.260 We can be in between some of the time.