Yeah, I just want to say I'm in good company as is in this issue of the JLS.
I'm in here with Tom DeLorenzo and H. A. Scott Trask.
Somehow I got most of the space because this article grew and grew.
It actually developed out of two lectures I gave here at this seminar.
There was one on collective security in the UN and another on sovereignty
and they kind of combined to make this very long article.
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.
And since it's 60 pages and I've got about 30 minutes, that would be two pages a minute.
So I figured I'd better just outline it and go from the outline.
I want to say one more thing. It's all sort of, I know people like to say, well, 9-11, everything changed.
Well, it didn't, but it kind of had to make us focus in on what was going on in a different way.
And I hope a more disciplined way.
Because all sorts of claims, that's the great thing about wartime or something they can even claim as a war.
A lot of big claims suddenly turn up again, and it does focus your attention.
So in a way this article is sort of a huge footnote to Rothbard's war piece in the state, in this new context.
So I'll begin by just saying something about the Westphalian Order, which we roughly date from 1648, the piece of Westphalia.
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.
And anybody claiming to be a state had to be recognized as part of that system.
And initially this is just, you know, Christian Europe and everybody else is sort of outside the system.
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
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.
Except in so far as some great power wants to put military force behind something the UN says.
Guido Holzman likes to say that the state system is essentially a cartel.
It's just the most successful and largest cartel, and it's a cartel of the producers of violence, in a way.
And from the premise that states are equally sovereign, you can go in two directions, you can look at it internally and externally.
I think from a libertarian perspective, internal sovereignty is a problem.
We don't like big claims for unbounded, unlimited power held by anybody.
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,
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.
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?
And at some point you begin to suspect that the notion of sovereignty itself has a lot of problems built into it.
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.
Okay, so sovereignty in this sense is new. In the Middle Ages you have these overlapping jurisdictions and conflicts.
You've got also the papacy offsetting these local rulers.
But a given individual might have a layer of loyalties and hold land in a feudal way from different people.
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
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.
And with regard to internal sovereignty, there are some new doctrines working their way into the system, Roman law, the revival of Roman law,
Corporation law to explain these various bodies that existed in medieval society with the
state or kingdom suddenly becoming the most important corporation and one that you maybe
couldn't get out of, and various organic metaphors and so on, and an appropriation of the Christian
doctrine of the mystical body and suddenly the state is another mystical body and again
fraught with implications for what they can do with you.
But even as we come through the late Middle Ages, no one is quite ready to claim that
the king is the source of the law, the king makes the law. They all say, well, the king
is under the law, and there is something called a law that's outside the king. As we come
into early modern times, you have a series of theorists, Bartolus, Sassiferato, Machiavelli,
Bodin, and Hobbes who begin theorizing a kind of boundless sovereignty and a kind of permanent
and Emergency, to which this boundless sovereign is the answer.
And I've come to grips with Hobbes. I've finally decided that everybody loves Hobbes,
and as John Ludwigson would say, we're all recovering Hobbesians.
Well, I think Hobbes has made an accurate description of what states do.
I don't think he's justified anything. I just want to throw that out.
Now, there's some people who claim there's a kind of North American exception
to the notion of unbounded sovereignty, that in the colonies we're 70 or 80 years behind
the intellectual trends in Europe and the ability of rulers to enforce anything, and
Britain itself in some respects is behind the continental trends, so we're doubly behind
and this is good, so the actual life on the ground in the American colonies is more feudal
or federal and those two things are analogous and so on.
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.
And then you begin to get theorists saying, well, this is a model for the world.
You get Denton Snyder of the St. Louis Hegelians.
There was actually a Hegelian sect by this time centered in St. Louis.
Early influence on John Dewey.
So all that bad stuff kind of has interesting genealogy.
Denton Snyder said, well, we've just shown that you can have separate states organically bound into a union they can't leave.
This is great.
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.
You have to think of this in terms of present foreign policy in a way.
Everybody becomes incorporated, assimilated to the American system rather than other alternatives that used to be around, like the Soviet system and so on.
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.
and Murder and so on.
So there's some confusion whether natural law and the use of Gentium are the same thing,
but there's a huge overlap in all these writers.
Well, municipal law could institute slavery,
but natural law, according to all these writers, would forbid it.
So there are exceptions.
And then, of course, there's treaty law, so it's getting fairly complex.
But as one of the authorities on international law, Martin Shaw likes to say,
international law has actually followed a lot more than we think.
So there's a kind of workable dimension to this sort of state cartel.
I mean, states like to get revenue out of their populace and do grandiose projects.
They don't really always want to be at war, although that's an option.
So the rules are quite often followed.
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?
So, we don't want to get that far ahead yet because we don't want to deal with this democratic peace nonsense.
So we want to save that and see if I can get to it.
Okay, now, what's happening in the laws, the state system is consolidating itself and they're working out their relations to one another.
And particularly when you get this sort of rising wave of state consolidation and state building from about 1494,
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.
Once that's invented, it's a huge boon to these guys in the short run.
Well, you begin to get a development of, there's a lot of wars,
so you begin to get the development of some laws of war.
I think initially this was rather thin.
There's hardly anything you can find that you could say has much to do with law.
Essentially, you get rules like we can burn down the city if they don't surrender immediately.
Well, this doesn't really seem all that consoling.
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
and the individual who has natural rights and we'll talk about it in this framework.
So with Suarez, Grotius, Pufendorf and Vattel, you get what appears to be a natural law approach to international law
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.
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
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
You begin to get people arguing, well, maybe he can't, because we have chartered rights, or we have traditions,
and when that doesn't work, they might move on to some abstract argument about rights and so on.
So you get early liberalism contesting part of the process.
But meanwhile, the bureaucracy is built up by the king in all these states, and they are more successful over time,
despite all the hitches at extracting revenue and enforcing internal sovereignty.
And then the kings aren't needed.
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
and John Lukash and some other people for that.
And I'll say one thing about how this works.
One of the interesting things when you read through the literature of the American,
I'm not going to say founding, I'm tired of that word.
Anyway, those guys are arguing about the Constitution.
One of the interesting tricks was that the Federalist Party,
the guys who wanted a stronger, central government, became the great Democrats.
And they said, oh, well, we believe the people are sovereign,
so this means you should ratify this new Constitution
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.
But the Federalists, like Hamilton, start speaking in the name of popular sovereignty.
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.
Because, in fact, you cannot run 13 states in any way that corresponds to any actual exercise of popular sovereignty.
You might be able to do this at the level of a county or something.
In the Constitutional ratification convention in New York, Governor Clinton, who was an anti-Federalist, famously said that,
said that, well, New York is already too big to be a republic. I'm not sure we want to
get in this union and give it a lot of power. You know, Governor Clinton was a bit prophetic,
I think. But nonetheless, the language of popular sovereignty has been very persuasive,
and so in the name of the people, all sorts of things are done. And I could fast forward
I'm going to read a bit and come back.
So there's a book I found by William Whiting, written in 1862 in Boston.
So as you might imagine, he has a certain view of the Union and the war and Mr. Lincoln
and the sort of powers Mr. Lincoln should be able to use to win the war.
And it pretty much says everything that John Yoo or Mr. Gonzalez or Mr. Bybee might say,
except he doesn't specifically, I don't think in this book, endorse torture.
But apparently, Lincoln and his armies can do almost anything they have to do to win the war.
Well, why is this? Because they represent the people, the people are sovereign,
and it goes around in this big syllogism.
And since the people are sovereign, there's only one people you can't get out of the Union
and all these syllogisms go around in circles with, I think, unfortunate results.
But nonetheless, there was a brief period for about a century and a half where laws of war were developed,
that were an improvement, and they were actually followed in Europe.
I'm not going to argue that anybody went out colonizing and followed laws of war in the colonies.
I mean, Britain didn't even follow, I don't think very well, the laws of war next door in Ireland.
So as soon as you get outside the club, the rules don't apply as well.
Actually, there was an interesting guy, I think he was a cardinal in the 17th century,
he wrote a book arguing there should be a sort of League of Christian Nations
who would pledge to have eternal peace amongst themselves and make war on the Turks.
So there's always outsiders to these agreements.
So the positive law that's developing across these several centuries might not be ideal,
but practically, while this is going on, at the same time there's a shift away from the questions of just war.
Nobody wants to talk about news ad bellum, whether a war is just.
They want to talk about just limiting the damage, so they want to talk about the use and bellow.
What are the practices, you know, should you burn downtown just because they're there?
They begin to develop some rules in Land War, which are sometimes followed, which is an improvement.
And this is the point at which Rothbard would come in and say,
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.
When ideology intrudes and big causes intrude, well, we don't necessarily think states are particularly justified in the end.
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?
Well, maybe they should follow these rules.
Maybe we were better off in the 18th and 19th centuries as long as this period of following the rules lasted.
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.
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.
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?
And there was some progress intellectually at least on this front.
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.
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?
I mean, why bombard cities that aren't military ports? And again, why attack neutral trade?
One example he uses is that the Tsar of Russia, desiring to, just after Crimean War, desiring to punish Britain,
restricts the export of grain and certain other commodities. And Britain, to punish the Tsar,
restricts the importation of oats and these other commodities from Russia. So this is contradictory.
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.
And the other thing Mollinore notes is that you can alienate natural allies by your methods.
So the British managed to, I guess, have some landing parties and confiscate property from the Finns.
Made the Finns pro-Russian. How often are Finns pro-Russian? Happens once every thousand years.
that kind of thing. So Molinari has a nice exposition of this and of course nobody
followed his advice that the rules of naval warfare could be improved and I'll
mention one connection with respect to that which is that during the
American War of 1861 through 65 the US Navy is roaming around stopping neutral
shipping looking for Confederate ambassadors and just generally causing
and Trouble, and the British could either protest this or they could save up the precedents.
They saved up the precedents. So during World War I, when they're vigorously blockading
Germany and the Central Powers, William James Bryan, Wilson's first Secretary of State,
would go to the British and say, see here, you're violating the known rules of naval
Warfare or the Rights of Neutrals during a war and they're saying, oh no no, your Mr.
Seward said this in 1862 and they would quote this back, another embarrassing moment in
international law. So the hegemonic power, to make a brief point of it, tends to be the
power that bends the rules, doesn't follow them or breaks them or makes new ones that
it proclaims are now the rules. Another interesting intellectual feature of this period in which
in which there was at least some following of the rules, was a notion of a balance of power.
And how much this owes to Newtonian physics and other matters I don't know yet.
But it's sort of a nice metaphor, except it doesn't seem to mean anything operationally.
You can look at any constellation of power in the world at any given point and say,
oh, there is a balance of power, or no, this power is trying to break the balance of power,
or if we had more power there would be a balance of power.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The United States has never really been comfortable with the European state system for reasons both good and bad, I suppose.
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.
Well, plus you've just got a colossal disaster, as Joseph Schempeter said, is this catastrophe of 1914 through 18.
This calls into being, or gives heart to a new school of thought.
Because one of the problems with liberalism is that the liberals haven't always worked anything out.
We like the 19th century liberals up to a point, but they're very divided.
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.
And he has no problem with intervention in Utah. He's got various examples he uses which are interesting.
So liberalism doesn't give us much. It depends on the liberals.
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.
This is the way to go, and everything else is kind of gradual, but this is what you do.
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.
You begin to get the germs of the idea of a League of Nations.
and it goes, I say it goes back certainly in the direction of Gladstone
and of course our experience that has left with Woodrow Wilson
and our participation in World War I.
There are also a number of highly placed writers, intellectuals and politicians in Britain
which after all had the most successful empire in the world
suddenly wanting a coalition of the good,
wanting a League of Nations or a League to enforce peace and some such thing.
You've got to be suspicious of the most successful empire.
Somebody wants to be apparently adding some more material support to what it's gotten in order to keep it.
It doesn't seem like it's entirely selfless, and so on.
So now a notion of usad velem, or winner wars, just comes back into play.
And we'll fast forward and say, well, the League of Nations is created.
It doesn't do a great deal of good or harm because the original plan isn't followed, the Americans stay out.
But the League of Nations, in any event, was really an extension of the Entente Cardiale.
It's basically the British alliance system with more powers thrown in and probation for those who were defeated in the late war
in the hope the Americans would come in and help pay the bills.
I mean, in terms of the oil in the Middle East, once Britain decides it has to have Iraq,
well, it invents Iraq first, it invents Iraq and has to have it, and they cut the French
in for maybe 20% of the oil, let them muck around in Syria.
They tried to give us Syria first, imagine that we could have had Syria, if only we joined
the League and had it as a mandate.
We could have been involved in this Middle Eastern business much sooner, helping the
Under the League Theory, there is a new notion of just war, or use odd vellum, but now you
define it in terms of aggression.
When you define aggression as somebody crosses an existing frontier that was established
The first few decades or hundreds of years ago by some successful empire, and so it's an attempt to freeze the status quo.
Now, this may be good, it may be bad, but nonetheless, this is what it is.
So essentially, the successful imperial powers saying, okay, no more change, no more threats to what we've got.
And then the Kellogg-Briand Pact of, I think, what, 19... I've got it in here. 28, I think.
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.
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.
So now we fast forward to World War II, which wasn't prevented by the League or the Kellogg-Briand Pact.
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.
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.
All are. Everybody has to get involved, because then it's aggression and it has to be punished
and there's this new, different notion, I guess, of what's just and unjust. And conceivably
less attention might be paid to the use in bellow in one of these just wars if you're
throwing off your peacekeeping. Who can question your methods? You know, at least off, you
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.
He had already developed a position before these guys started writing all this scientific
equilibrium model business of international affairs.
He thought there was already a working approach to these problems.
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
who is now the editor, Michael Riesman.
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.
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.
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
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.
That might be bad, too. I don't know. Let's see. How am I doing? Okay.
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.
And now we get another interesting doctrine, which is interesting the timing.
We suddenly find out that democracies are inherently peaceful and lovable.
And democracies just never go to war.
I guess unless they're attacked first.
And then they have to admit you bring cases up and they say,
okay, well, it's true, this democracy did attack that power and this one attacked that power.
All right, democracies never attack other democracies.
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,
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.
So all you have to do is fight this series of wars to bring about everyone being a democracy and happiness will reign.
Great. Another interesting utopian fantasy, I think, but sustained in the political science journals for the last, certainly 20 years,
with a lot of mathematical mumbo jumbo and statistical analysis, correlations, regressions, who knows.
Which might be interesting, the sort of method, I suppose, could be of some use in history on a limited kind of problem,
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,
Well, okay, democracies never fight democracies, what about the Confederates and the Union?
Oh, but the South is disqualified, you know, they've got slavery, it can't really be a democracy.
Well, what about World War I?
When you had a wider suffrage in the German Empire than you had in Britain, at least slightly wider,
and, oh no, no, that doesn't count because in the German Empire,
The executive and the military had too much independent control over foreign policy.
And we're talking about a war in which basically
four men in the British cabinet committed the cabinet
to a war on the side of France
and that minority of the cabinet somehow committed parliament, which then committed the people
to all go get killed.
But yet the German case is disqualified for being
less democratic, and not so on down the line. Any case you bring up, they will
will suddenly redefine one of the parties as not being democratic and thereby sustaining
the theorem that democracies never go to war with one another. So the whole thing has become
in a way a huge waste of time, but I hope people will devote some time to answering
this claim. And they're confounding a number of things. Sure, there's some way probably
in which with the growth of trade and communication, these societies are less likely to go to war,
but I'm not sure that democracy is causing it.
You could almost invert the proposition and say that certain things have happened
that make it possible to have a democracy.
I almost had put up with it.
But, you know, the whole causation thing is wide open.
What they've got is a set of correlations and then they claim the causation can only be this direction
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.
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.
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.
And there's a lot more that could be said along these lines.
One writer I quote to some extent makes the interesting point that
the United States first invented the United Nations Organization
as what it hoped it would be an instrument of policy.
When it didn't work, it abandoned it, rehabilitated it briefly during the first Gulf War,
and then sidelined the UN again.
And I've had to conclude over the years that the UN,
really not my favorite thing, but I'm glad it provides a forum where some of these things can be argued
at least, I'll say that much in favor of it.
Another thing that's being confounded presently is the boundaries of sovereignty in the state system.
So you've got a huge literature now. You've got Mr. Thomas Frank saying, well, everyone has a right to democracy.
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.
And what this seems to mean is that if there's a right, someone has to enforce it.
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.
And all of these doctrines obviously can be used as rationalizations of the policies desired for a range of reasons by a hegemonic power.
And so now we also have a huge literature saying, well, sovereignty is just old-fashioned, it's outmoded.
Well, I don't think we have to like it, particularly internal sovereignty, but on the purely negative
side, external sovereignty, the idea that if we're just here in Alabama and nobody else
can come in and tell us we're doing wrong and change that, well, this might be useful
at times in self-defense and so forth, but no, this is all supposed to go by the board
because now we have international human rights standards.
There's a chilling article by a team of sociologists,
I can't remember the names of four sociologists at once,
but they're saying, in effect,
well, suppose an island were discovered somewhere
and they had not known about us and we hadn't known about them,
so we go in there and talk to them, establish communication,
learn how to translate things.
In ten years, they'd have a human rights commission,
Feminist Movement, minimum wage laws, they would adopt by imitation, some elite would
spring up there and by imitation would adopt all the institutions that we have, good or
bad, and join the UN. So that was rather chilling in a way. And I guess a further point to that
would be that I've seen some of the writers of the Internationalist Persuasion, which
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.
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.
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.
The final example is Alexander Wendt, who's an interesting political scientist who writes in this field.
And his contribution is the inevitability of a world state, and he doesn't care who leads it,
whether it's the Americans gradually bring it about accidentally or the UN somehow does it.
He doesn't care, but he provides a kind of rather weak, hegelian argument, in my view,
why this would come about and why it would be good.
So I've left things out, but I hope the article at least has raised a few questions.
Let me ask you about, unless you're going to New York, about the question of jurisdiction,
the adaptability of one nation laws to citizens traveling abroad versus foreign citizens traveling into the US.
What are the traditional rules concerning that versus the modern perspective?
I'm thinking in particular that the U.S. seems to presume a kind of ownership over all of this.
Where are they in the world, what are they doing?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, how else could you arrest, quote unquote, arrest Noriega for drug dealing?
There's a number of interesting things.
There's actually a guy named William Robinson, who's a Marxist,
who's done quite an interesting article on this, on the export of democracy.
And first he sort of says, well, okay, they're not talking about radical democracy.
They're talking about Samuel Huntington's idea of guided democracy anyway.
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.
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,
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
And then supporting various despots and horrible dictators, in the long run, such a system would be more stable.
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,
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.
Let's get their trade union guys and put them together with our trade union guys.
We're basically going to interest them in modeling their entire civil society on what we do,
because that's best and then things are easier.
So there's an attempt to not just colonize in some traditional sense,
but to try to colonize other places ideologically and institutionally across the board,
which is very big, and I suppose the legal model goes with that.
Another example is, if you look at, probably no book was published in the American colonies where a penny was paid towards copyright.
Anything printed in North America was probably pirated.
And yet now we send all these people around the world demanding that every videotape made in China, you know, pay something to Hollywood.
Well this, I think it's problematic to say the least.
so this is a yeah the jurisdiction issue is getting interesting I mean there were
some complaints when I think was it Belgium passed the law and wanted to
arrest Rumsfeld or they were making some threats about this but apparently only
the really big powers get to attempt this sort of thing
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.
One thing I've noticed with Rothbard is that he would make those kinds of comparisons to establish the basis of right.
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?
Well, no. He's trying to do this to establish right, right and wrong of it.
Then he goes on to discuss states and says, well, it seems like states, for various reasons, are pretty unjust at the outset.
So we have to just look, evaluate what they do kind of pragmatically and casuistically.
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.
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.
So I don't think Murray started in this spirit, to be honest.
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.
Well, I remember opening one lecture at maybe the Mises University or some event
by noticing how many places the United States has troops,
how many countries outside these frontiers, and how much is spent,
and you compare that to the next ten or twelve countries,
and you say, really, can this all be defense?
The word defense has certainly undergone some elaboration if this is all defense.
There's also an ideological factor, and let me quote this book title that I have in a footnote, one of the ideological factors.
This is a book by Samuel D. Baldwin of Tennessee, published by a Methodist press, 1854.
But the title of the book tells you all you need to know.
Armageddon, or the overthrow of Romanism and monarchy, the existence of the United States foretold in the Bible, its future greatness,
Invasion by Allied Europe, Annihilation of Monarchy, Expansion into the Millennial Republic and its Dominion over the whole world.
So you've already got a Millennialist Protestant program of empire.
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.
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.
Baldwin didn't actually care about slavery. He thought that was consistent with republicanism in certain cases. And the other guy's anti-slavery.
But they both agree there should be a millennial American republic that forces the entire planet to become republican by great bloodshed and struggle.
And this brings about the millennium. So the theological point, too.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
Anyone else?
Okay.
Excuse me.
Yeah, there's kind of a blank check for American motives when they're kind of
collectivized and done in our name, but that's back to popular sovereignty. I mean,
we don't rule anything, but the fact that we have this notion of popular
sovereignty around means that all sorts of things can be done in our name. Yeah,
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.
Most folks cite Athens as one of the first flourishing democracies, which probably in the posteristicities, Athenianly, go plucking off.
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.
to Republican virtue and criticize this stuff as it comes along.
So in a way, he's sort of a proto-Hoppian on this point,
but he doesn't develop because he's still hoping
that Republican ideas will win the day.
And as far as the Athenians go, that's perfect
because it's one of the articles of faith
of the neoconservatives that you must believe
in the Athenian Empire.
And you must hate the Spartans
because the Athenians were doing good
and spreading their version of democracy.
And they somehow can get around the fact
The Athenians, you know, are huge slaveholders that is about as democratic as South Carolina in 1850.
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.
I'm not sure how that works. But part of this is owing to Karl Popper.
I don't miss a chance to say something bad about Karl Popper.
because Popper in the open society and his enemies is sort of a champion of the
Athenian model against other models and he has to gloss over stuff too but it
becomes a kind of theme of Cold War liberalism and this is already present
in the British Empire before World War one you've got writers saying well really
we're commercial you know and yet we have an empire so we're the Athenians
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.
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,
One of the things you find is that the opponents of liberty, their arguments are rationalizations.
They're not very consistent or logical.
But the proponents of liberty have also got some problems.
They always seem to compromise or are confused.
You raised that John Stuart Mill is a case of confusion and the ratification of the Constitution is a problem of compromise.
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,
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.
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?
I don't know. I guess we shouldn't be in this business if we don't have occasional optimistic moments.
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.
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.
But it's the pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, which Genovese used to quote.
I guess we don't have to use will on any of the senses connected to sovereignty.
Well, I guess it's hard enough that that means that the main front is against our own sort of allies who are wavering.
But it would be nice to... Well, I guess this whole war business is kind of an interesting shakeout.
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.
That's been helpful.
So, and I guess in terms of the long run movement, building, or even just clarity, this is good.
So yeah, I'll be guardedly optimistic.
I mean really, if we wanted, you know, for pessimism you go to Paul Gottfried, for optimism you go to Murray.
We can be in between some of the time.