WEBVTT NOTE States, Sovereignty, and History 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:12.000 In the program, the topic, this topic is listed as state sovereignty and history, which is what I'm talking about. 2 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:18.000 My title is Sovereignty International Law and the Triumph of Anglo-American Cunning. 3 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:21.000 But anyway, that's just me. 4 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:24.000 This all started out because they kept offering us more wars. 5 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:28.000 I mean, I would have been happy to work on some other areas. 6 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:43.000 And instead, of course, the current situation is sort of forcing us to work out in detail the implications of, oh, for instance, Rothbard's essay on war peace in the state to pursue his method further. 7 00:00:43.000 --> 00:01:06.000 And it almost recapitulates this debate that occurred in the early 60s where William F. Buckley and these other people, having been annoyed once too often by the fact that Rothbard didn't really agree with their choice of foreign policy, which was to threaten war as much as possible. 8 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:25.000 And if you got one to, you know, wage it, wrote dismissively that the libertarians ought to just attend their busy little seminars on de-municipalizing the garbage supply and leave the serious stuff to Buckley and Burnham and so forth. 9 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:33.000 So almost in response to that, Rothbard wrote the War Peace and the State Essay, which wasn't what they had in mind that libertarians should be doing. 10 00:01:33.000 --> 00:01:38.000 But I think a very pointed response. 11 00:01:38.000 --> 00:01:42.000 So we've kind of forced into this same activity. 12 00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:47.000 The only good thing about having more of this interesting foreign policy 13 00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:49.000 is that it tends to polarize. 14 00:01:49.000 --> 00:01:51.000 Polarization, as Murray would have said, is good. 15 00:01:51.000 --> 00:01:52.000 It makes us more radical. 16 00:01:52.000 --> 00:01:55.000 It makes us try to get closer to the fundamental question. 17 00:01:55.000 --> 00:01:57.000 So if that's what they want to do, fine. 18 00:01:57.000 --> 00:01:59.000 We accept the challenge. 19 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:03.000 Okay, well, let's talk about states and the state system. 20 00:02:03.000 --> 00:02:10.000 The state system, as we know it, at least symbolically arises with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, 21 00:02:10.000 --> 00:02:17.000 which ended the era of the so-called Wars of Religion, 22 00:02:17.000 --> 00:02:21.000 and established a rule-bound cartel of sovereign territorial states. 23 00:02:21.000 --> 00:02:26.000 I take this cartel term from Guido Hulsman. 24 00:02:26.000 --> 00:02:33.000 And in this cartel, the states are externally considered equal to one another in standing. 25 00:02:33.000 --> 00:02:40.000 They're internally hierarchical, so the state's sovereign internally, and you have to obey the rules of your rebel. 26 00:02:40.000 --> 00:02:45.000 And then outwardly, the states at least make some attempt to treat each other by the same rules, 27 00:02:45.000 --> 00:02:52.000 and they have developed a whole complex set of diplomatic rules and procedures. 28 00:02:52.000 --> 00:03:22.000 But of course they are free to just launch a war, that's part of the rules, you just launch a war because you covet this piece of territory or there's some family insult or something, and then of course just whoever wins decides that, but nonetheless there's a kind of larger logic to the system and externally in a way the state system functions as a unit, except of course they had to come up with ways of dealing with 29 00:03:22.000 --> 00:03:29.400 The competition is European states begin sending out explorers and annexing territory and making wild claims. 30 00:03:29.400 --> 00:03:35.200 You know, I claim, you know, this continent in the name of so-and-so, and then they'd fight about that. 31 00:03:35.200 --> 00:03:45.000 And so there'd be negotiations and also some actual battles in these territories for control. 32 00:03:45.000 --> 00:03:52.000 Now, of course, the people are fighting in, say, the Americas or Africa and elsewhere 33 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:54.000 aren't considered part of the state system. 34 00:03:54.000 --> 00:04:00.000 One reason being that they're generally infidels, but they also often don't have a state, 35 00:04:00.000 --> 00:04:06.000 so they don't come within whatever few benefits might arise from this system. 36 00:04:06.000 --> 00:04:11.000 Now, as the state system comes into play then in the 17th century, 37 00:04:11.000 --> 00:04:22.000 The writers who deal with this can bring to bear on this the whole Stoic and Roman tradition of natural law and the idea of euskentium, which is the law of nations. 38 00:04:22.000 --> 00:04:38.000 And the ancient writers had held, and here we're talking about, I suppose, Cicero and various Stoics and so on, that this sort of approximated, overlapped with natural law. 39 00:04:38.000 --> 00:04:42.400 But you had to kind of deduce it from seeing what actually was done in different places, 40 00:04:42.400 --> 00:04:44.800 compare the customs and the laws. 41 00:04:44.800 --> 00:04:48.600 And they admitted there could be some deviations from strict natural law, 42 00:04:48.600 --> 00:04:55.100 so some place over here might, by municipal law, allow slavery, 43 00:04:55.100 --> 00:04:58.500 which seemed to be a bit of a contradiction to this kind. 44 00:04:58.500 --> 00:05:06.500 So it left it kind of under a moral cloud, but nonetheless this is a practical sort of science 45 00:05:06.500 --> 00:05:19.500 The State System is horizontal with relations between the units considered at least theoretically equal, 46 00:05:19.500 --> 00:05:25.500 whereas internally we have a vertical relationship between the state and the population. 47 00:05:25.500 --> 00:05:33.500 And they're being no agreed upon superior, because in 1648, among other things, 48 00:05:33.500 --> 00:05:52.500 and other things, the claims of the papacy are somewhat sidelined and the German Emperor, the Holy Roman, actually German Emperor, was never able to, after this, in this period, to make a claim to universal rule either. 49 00:05:52.500 --> 00:06:00.500 It's unfortunate, they're kind of a nice fiction that might have kept some of these states in line, that there was something superior to them. 50 00:06:00.500 --> 00:06:09.500 But nonetheless, states are now kind of on their own in what the political scientists like to call a kind of institutionalized state of anarchy. 51 00:06:09.500 --> 00:06:12.500 Okay. 52 00:06:12.500 --> 00:06:17.500 Surviving by self-help and agreement and other measures. 53 00:06:17.500 --> 00:06:26.500 Now, Ian Shaw, a noted international lawyer, says that actually states tend to obey the prevailing rules much more than you'd expect. 54 00:06:26.500 --> 00:06:33.300 There is a way in which there is cooperation. 55 00:06:33.300 --> 00:06:36.000 In fact, there's now a whole new school of social constructivism, 56 00:06:36.000 --> 00:06:38.100 and they're talking about how, gosh, ideas are important, 57 00:06:38.100 --> 00:06:40.100 and we have to think about ideas and history, 58 00:06:40.100 --> 00:06:44.500 as opposed to some other schools of international relations. 59 00:06:44.500 --> 00:06:46.600 I'm afraid they're probably going to take a postmodern turn 60 00:06:46.600 --> 00:06:51.700 and go off in some weird corner, but nonetheless. 61 00:06:51.700 --> 00:06:56.400 So I want to take a little time to say a little bit more about sovereignty as such, 62 00:06:56.400 --> 00:07:02.400 since now we're hearing from so many quarters that it's withering away 63 00:07:02.400 --> 00:07:07.900 and it's being relativized and it's going to give way to a new secular millennium 64 00:07:07.900 --> 00:07:14.400 to be led by the UN or the United States, whichever gets there first. 65 00:07:14.400 --> 00:07:18.400 It's a rather restrictive choice. 66 00:07:18.400 --> 00:07:25.400 Well, the celebrated C.H. McIlwain said that in Rome we have the first actual sovereign 67 00:07:25.400 --> 00:07:29.400 But then he chides the Romans for not theorizing sovereignty. 68 00:07:29.400 --> 00:07:31.400 The Romans had dominion in the... 69 00:07:31.400 --> 00:07:34.400 Romans never admitted to having an actual frontier. 70 00:07:34.400 --> 00:07:38.400 There was a line, it was just they hadn't conquered the next thing. 71 00:07:38.400 --> 00:07:40.400 The Romans are a bit like the Americans. 72 00:07:40.400 --> 00:07:46.400 They think their institutions are so great that everybody should enjoy them. 73 00:07:46.400 --> 00:07:52.400 But in the Middle Ages, of course, there is no overarching state-like entity of this sort. 74 00:07:52.400 --> 00:07:58.400 And what you find in the Middle Ages is a jurisdictional multiplicity and relative sovereignty 75 00:07:58.400 --> 00:08:05.400 with competing claims of the papacy and the German emperor to supervise the whole system. 76 00:08:05.400 --> 00:08:11.400 And this rested on a non-event, and a non-event is the failure of anyone to reproduce an empire in Western Europe 77 00:08:11.400 --> 00:08:17.400 after the Roman project collapsed. 78 00:08:17.400 --> 00:08:28.400 And another important difference between what we're used to and the Middle Ages is that in the Middle Ages, no one assumed that the ruler made the law. 79 00:08:28.400 --> 00:08:39.400 The ruler is under the law. The law just kind of goes on. And there might be some debates about what it is, but no one claimed that the king could get up one morning and change the law. 80 00:08:39.400 --> 00:08:49.400 Okay. Whereas the modern notion of sovereignty is that the ruler makes the law, is in some sense the source of the law. 81 00:08:49.400 --> 00:09:05.400 Of course, as we get into the waning of the Middle Ages, there's this large-scale outbreak of competition between these relatively sovereign rulers 82 00:09:05.400 --> 00:09:08.400 and a whole process of state-building competition. 83 00:09:08.400 --> 00:09:12.400 This might be the downside of European decentralization in a way. 84 00:09:12.400 --> 00:09:18.400 But nonetheless, out of the struggle, we begin to see, 85 00:09:18.400 --> 00:09:22.400 certainly in the 16th century, the rise of larger territorial states 86 00:09:22.400 --> 00:09:26.400 who eliminate some of the competitors and then develop the state system 87 00:09:26.400 --> 00:09:29.400 to handle competition amongst these larger units. 88 00:09:29.400 --> 00:09:33.400 And they also get rid of some competing political forums. 89 00:09:33.400 --> 00:09:41.700 These are the city-states in Italy, and in the north, the city leagues, the Hanseatic League and so forth, 90 00:09:41.700 --> 00:09:50.400 which is an interesting attempt at solving these protection problems, okay, these, the leagues. 91 00:09:50.400 --> 00:10:00.700 And the territorial monarchies do this by tending to exclude units that aren't like their own from any participation in the system, 92 00:10:00.700 --> 00:10:14.700 So it's sort of deliberate, as one writer has pointed out, Hendrick Spruit, in an interesting book that's only slightly marred by neoclassical assumptions. 93 00:10:14.700 --> 00:10:22.700 Now, we have these states competing, or these monarchies, and larger ones surviving the struggle. 94 00:10:22.700 --> 00:10:28.700 Well, they begin to feel a need for a theory. They have to have a better theory. They have to explain what this all means. 95 00:10:28.700 --> 00:10:35.700 and the modern notion of sovereignty in France, England and Spain. 96 00:10:35.700 --> 00:10:38.700 There are a couple of steps in this. I'll try to be brief. 97 00:10:38.700 --> 00:10:46.700 One thing the kings do is seize on the church notion of the corpus mysticum, the mystical body. 98 00:10:46.700 --> 00:10:49.700 And then they say, well, actually, the realm is something like that. 99 00:10:49.700 --> 00:10:53.700 There's a sort of mystical body there and the implication there is, of course, 100 00:10:53.700 --> 00:11:00.700 Of course, on really rare occasions, you might be morally obligated to sacrifice yourself for the faith. 101 00:11:00.700 --> 00:11:07.700 Well, certainly this ought to be true. You ought to sacrifice yourself for the king once in a while in an emergency. 102 00:11:07.700 --> 00:11:19.700 So this provides the classical notion of a duty to die for the state, which is the main theme of Victor Davis Hanson's many writings. 103 00:11:19.700 --> 00:11:24.700 This is a great classical Republican notion. 104 00:11:24.700 --> 00:11:29.700 And also, as this theory of sovereignty is being created, 105 00:11:29.700 --> 00:11:36.700 there's a lot of people using organic analogies in which the realm, the state is a body, 106 00:11:36.700 --> 00:11:39.700 the people are parts of the body, the king is the head. 107 00:11:39.700 --> 00:11:42.700 And now we derive these organic analogies, 108 00:11:42.700 --> 00:11:47.700 except when someone like Hobbes, Hegel or Lincoln says the same thing in different languages, 109 00:11:47.700 --> 00:11:52.780 somehow it's more persuasive and then finally the law of corporations is 110 00:11:52.780 --> 00:11:57.740 appropriated by writers on sovereignty because you hadn't had the development 111 00:11:57.740 --> 00:12:02.260 of legal theory of corporations to explain the guilds and other bodies 112 00:12:02.260 --> 00:12:06.580 municipalities that are risen in the later Middle Ages and they're saying well 113 00:12:06.580 --> 00:12:11.620 actually the the king he's just the most inclusive corporation except the you 114 00:12:11.620 --> 00:12:14.460 can't get out of that one the membership isn't really optional but there's just 115 00:12:14.460 --> 00:12:44.460 the most inclusive universitas or corporatio and of course there's some people that resist both this process of state building and the ideas and of course their ideas as Ralph Reiko points out in many places these ideas are the seedbed of early liberalism and this is a great deal of what's going on in the so-called general crisis of the 17th century it's a question of the large sections of the public resisting 116 00:12:44.460 --> 00:12:47.460 These New Taxes and State Building and so on. 117 00:12:47.460 --> 00:12:52.460 Okay, well, let me probably pick up speed here. 118 00:12:52.460 --> 00:12:59.460 Well, some of the theorists of this new kind of bottomless sovereignty are Bartolus of Sassaforato, 119 00:12:59.460 --> 00:13:02.460 Machiavelli, Jean Baudin and Thomas Hobbes. 120 00:13:02.460 --> 00:13:03.460 It wouldn't be up for sovereign. 121 00:13:03.460 --> 00:13:07.460 It wouldn't be right to just think of the poor king as just an agent providing a, 122 00:13:07.460 --> 00:13:11.460 actually providing protection to people and ask for it. 123 00:13:11.460 --> 00:13:14.460 Now, that would just be wrong. 124 00:13:14.460 --> 00:13:21.460 So, as Jacques Maritain points out, under their conception, the king becomes a separate and transcendental whole, 125 00:13:21.460 --> 00:13:28.460 and sovereignty is thus a property held by someone, instead of just a means to its security provision, 126 00:13:28.460 --> 00:13:35.460 to which self-owners have agreed. So the whole idea of agency disappears from the picture, pretty much. 127 00:13:35.460 --> 00:13:44.460 There's a little trickery, though, because Hobbes will still use the language of contract, compact, or covenant to show that people consented originally. 128 00:13:44.460 --> 00:13:51.460 Oh yeah, you know, 500 years ago, sure, your ancestors agreed to this contract, but that's it. You don't get to vote again. 129 00:13:51.460 --> 00:13:57.460 It's very much like Harry Jaffa's view of the American Constitution, of course. 130 00:13:57.460 --> 00:14:09.460 And anticipating the Chicago School view of private property, Hobbes denied that every man has a property in his goods such as excludeth the sovereign. 131 00:14:09.460 --> 00:14:22.460 So property right is also on sufferance. It's just something conceded to you by the Chicagoites or Hobbes from the King. 132 00:14:22.460 --> 00:14:34.460 Now, again, with some later writers like Hegel, you get an even less, I would say, hard to think of Hobbes as a liberal. 133 00:14:34.460 --> 00:14:40.460 Some writers insist on using this because of certain notions he uses. 134 00:14:40.460 --> 00:14:45.460 He actually talks about individuals, but only to get rid of them in his analysis. 135 00:14:45.460 --> 00:14:49.460 But these writers like Hegel don't even really think about individuals that much. 136 00:14:49.460 --> 00:14:58.460 are all part of various complicated holistic bodies and internal relations take over and so on. 137 00:14:58.460 --> 00:15:03.460 But for Hegel, the state really comes into its own in a war. 138 00:15:03.460 --> 00:15:09.460 And then it's the rallying point for the common good, and this is uncontestable. 139 00:15:09.460 --> 00:15:12.460 And this is when the state is most state-like. 140 00:15:12.460 --> 00:15:16.460 So it's the same thing Randolph Burns says during World War I, 141 00:15:16.460 --> 00:15:25.460 Robert Hegel thinks this is good, and Morton didn't think it was so good, but yes, war is the health of the state. 142 00:15:25.460 --> 00:15:30.460 Okay, now some people have written that there's a sort of North American exception, 143 00:15:30.460 --> 00:15:41.460 that the American Revolution proceeded along lines such that we didn't really sign on knowingly for this notion of sovereignty, 144 00:15:41.460 --> 00:15:45.460 the notion that would have pleased the international lawyers. 145 00:15:45.460 --> 00:15:56.460 And this is interesting, and it's a respectable argument, but of course somewhat denied in practice. 146 00:15:56.460 --> 00:16:01.460 John Taylor of Caroline, in my opinion, is the most interesting writer on this. 147 00:16:01.460 --> 00:16:11.460 He tried to sideline the whole notion of sovereignty. He said, well, we just happened to have historically had these 13 colonial governments that had come into existence. 148 00:16:11.460 --> 00:16:22.460 And then we, in the course of the American Revolution, some portion of the people set up new institutions to provide for their security. 149 00:16:22.460 --> 00:16:32.460 At a later stage, delegates from these 13 political societies organized another agent to protect their interests. 150 00:16:32.460 --> 00:16:36.460 But nowhere does he see the necessity for using the notion of sovereignty. 151 00:16:36.460 --> 00:16:51.460 In his mind, it's all delegated upward, which frankly I think is somewhat superior to the later writers like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, who adopt this ironclad notion of sovereignty, but then say it's only in the States. 152 00:16:51.460 --> 00:16:59.460 I think it's a mistake to adopt it at all. In relative terms, I'd defend the States, but anyway. 153 00:16:59.460 --> 00:17:08.460 So it was a nice try from John Taylor, but the opposing view had always been present, I mean Americans read Blackstone. 154 00:17:08.460 --> 00:17:14.460 Blackstone says there on like page two that there has to be a single power that is final and absolute in any state. 155 00:17:14.460 --> 00:17:16.460 Blackstone already gives you this. 156 00:17:16.460 --> 00:17:22.460 And in my opinion most of the prominent founding fathers were essentially Hobbesians 157 00:17:22.460 --> 00:17:29.460 who managed to use a certain amount of Republican and Liberal language while pursuing their Hobbesian assumptions. 158 00:17:29.460 --> 00:17:34.460 And I'll grant that Hobbes is good on describing states in a way. 159 00:17:34.460 --> 00:17:39.460 I can't see these ever really giving you any reason to want one. It's another matter. 160 00:17:39.460 --> 00:17:46.460 In any case, so then we have this big struggle over the implications of some of these ideas. 161 00:17:46.460 --> 00:18:05.300 So 1861 to 65, we get some film to go with the dialogue, and during this struggle, the advocates of integral nationalism, which is the Senator Charles Sumner, Francis Lieber, 162 00:18:05.300 --> 00:18:13.300 Arrestus Brownson and the St. Louis Higalians go around proclaiming the absolute sovereignty of the Union. 163 00:18:13.300 --> 00:18:18.300 It's a question of which unit is sovereign. They say it's the Union, and then the sovereignty is pretty much absolute, 164 00:18:18.300 --> 00:18:25.300 except sometimes they attribute it to the people, which is just a dishonest dodge that doesn't really need to detain us very much, 165 00:18:25.300 --> 00:18:30.300 except that it's very powerful. I mean, it has ideological import that you go around telling the people are sovereign. 166 00:18:30.300 --> 00:18:34.300 Okay, fine, but what does it really mean? It means the government is sovereign. 167 00:18:34.300 --> 00:18:41.300 And every four years you get to pretend that you're part of the sovereignty by wasting your time voting. 168 00:18:41.300 --> 00:18:48.300 Now one of the St. Louis Galions, Denton Snyder, these guys are actually quite influential. 169 00:18:48.300 --> 00:18:55.300 One of the St. Louis Galions became one of the first U.S. Commissioners of Education in the 1880s. 170 00:18:55.300 --> 00:19:00.300 Reverend Rush Dooney has a very interesting book that traces some of these thinkers through, 171 00:19:00.300 --> 00:19:04.300 down towards John Dewey and other perpetrators. 172 00:19:04.300 --> 00:19:10.300 So Denton Snyder saw the American Union after the war as the affirmation, quote, 173 00:19:10.300 --> 00:19:15.300 of all particular states in a larger whole which recreates them in such a process, 174 00:19:15.300 --> 00:19:20.300 as Merle, Merle, Merle, Merle-Curdy is now paraphrasing here, Snyder's view, 175 00:19:20.300 --> 00:19:24.300 such a process might well end in the development of a world state 176 00:19:24.300 --> 00:19:31.300 Corresponding to the world spirit, and the American federal system was the model. 177 00:19:31.300 --> 00:19:37.300 So now it's suddenly, well, we solved our problem with the Union, and now we just give this to the world. 178 00:19:37.300 --> 00:19:41.300 Just bring them in. You know, okay. 179 00:19:41.300 --> 00:19:44.300 And this is a constant theme, by the way, that I've been running into, 180 00:19:44.300 --> 00:19:47.300 and more I go through the political science literature. 181 00:19:47.300 --> 00:19:53.300 You start in 1880 and move forward, and it's always there. 182 00:19:53.300 --> 00:20:04.300 Now, one of the other aspects of this war, which I won't go into, is total war. 183 00:20:04.300 --> 00:20:12.300 Well, the poor state is fighting for its existence and is entitled to do whatever has to be done, so you unleash Sherman, people like that. 184 00:20:12.300 --> 00:20:19.300 But it also corresponds to the legal concept that's in place by now, which is positive law. 185 00:20:19.300 --> 00:20:22.300 And as Mr. Brankowski, who writes on these things, says, 186 00:20:22.300 --> 00:20:27.300 in the positivist scheme of things, people have no national standing. 187 00:20:27.300 --> 00:20:29.300 The state determines their rights. 188 00:20:29.300 --> 00:20:33.300 So if the state is threatened by a rebellion, 189 00:20:33.300 --> 00:20:35.300 we can just do anything it needs to do. 190 00:20:35.300 --> 00:20:37.300 Yes, there's no national standing. 191 00:20:37.300 --> 00:20:38.300 Okay. 192 00:20:38.300 --> 00:20:41.300 So you wouldn't be surprised to have total war undertaken 193 00:20:41.300 --> 00:20:45.300 by people that have a positive law of view. 194 00:20:45.300 --> 00:20:50.300 I mean, others might too, but it seems less problematic this way. 195 00:20:50.300 --> 00:20:53.300 Okay, well, how has the state system been operating since its inception? 196 00:20:53.300 --> 00:21:02.300 I mean, what has it meant that states claim sovereignty and they clash once in a while? 197 00:21:02.300 --> 00:21:08.300 Well, one thing it means is that it has direct implications for the process of state building. 198 00:21:08.300 --> 00:21:13.300 So by the late 13th century, the kings in Sicily and France were collecting taxes. 199 00:21:13.300 --> 00:21:18.300 This is when you begin to see something like regular tax collection, and it was for the defense of the realm. 200 00:21:18.300 --> 00:21:23.300 They say, well, we just have to have this, you've got to pay it, that's it, for the defense of the realm. 201 00:21:23.300 --> 00:21:25.300 So taxation, in a way, is the original war power. 202 00:21:25.300 --> 00:21:31.300 I'm going to talk about what the war powers might be, this vague notion that comes up from time to time. 203 00:21:31.300 --> 00:21:35.300 And then they invent the formal declaration of war. 204 00:21:35.300 --> 00:21:43.300 I mean, we have a lot of people now, every time the president maneuvers some devious fashion into a war, 205 00:21:43.300 --> 00:21:48.300 and in Congress votes their support, but doesn't actually say they're declaring it, they don't say they're declaring it, 206 00:21:48.300 --> 00:21:53.300 then we get people that say, oh, they should be held to declaring war. 207 00:21:53.300 --> 00:21:57.300 The problem with that is, if they actually declared war, they've got a blank check. 208 00:21:57.300 --> 00:22:01.300 It's even worse, in a way. I mean, it's constitutionally more honest, 209 00:22:01.300 --> 00:22:09.300 The declaration of war opens up a whole set of theoretical consequences. 210 00:22:09.300 --> 00:22:12.300 This is why they invented declarations of war, so that they could say, 211 00:22:12.300 --> 00:22:15.300 well, we're having a public war, everybody's involved, you all have to contribute, 212 00:22:15.300 --> 00:22:18.300 some of you have to go get killed, and so on. 213 00:22:18.300 --> 00:22:22.300 So it's actually part of the same process. 214 00:22:22.300 --> 00:22:24.300 Nobody ever declares defense. 215 00:22:24.300 --> 00:22:28.300 Why is that? 216 00:22:28.300 --> 00:22:36.100 Okay. Okay, so then, as these kings are competing, and maybe in the, of course, they're stuck for revenue. 217 00:22:36.100 --> 00:22:43.300 So the successful state, you know, will conquer some territory, get more revenue, build bigger forces to conquer something else. 218 00:22:43.300 --> 00:22:49.500 And there's a kind of cycle for the successful ones. So it's extraction, conquest, taxing, extraction, or something. 219 00:22:49.500 --> 00:22:57.100 Charles Tilly talks about this. But there's a limit. And this is why they provoke all these revolts in the 17th century. 220 00:22:57.100 --> 00:23:11.100 Essentially what you've got is a series of tax revolts in the 17th century with some other issues at the same time as in the English Civil War, but the tax issue is very important. 221 00:23:11.100 --> 00:23:22.100 So the English solved this problem. They perfect public debt and now it's a little easier to have these wars and stay in the competition. 222 00:23:22.100 --> 00:23:39.100 So you begin to get to perfection of public debt with the invention of the institutionalization of dishonest banking in London. 223 00:23:39.100 --> 00:23:43.100 Now, what's going on with the legal theorists? 224 00:23:43.100 --> 00:23:52.100 I've alluded to this before, but running parallel to the state-building process, the legal theorists continue to talk the language of natural law. 225 00:23:52.100 --> 00:23:57.100 So you've got a sort of trajectory, Suarez, Crotias, Pufendorf, Vattel. 226 00:23:57.100 --> 00:24:05.100 What's actually going on, what's going on is that they're diluting the actual natural law content of the theory as they go. 227 00:24:05.100 --> 00:24:11.100 They're simply adapting natural law language. Each writer is a little bit worse than the other. 228 00:24:11.100 --> 00:24:20.100 You're actually beginning to espouse a positive law doctrine within a kind of natural law language. 229 00:24:20.100 --> 00:24:28.100 So some of them will say, well, suppose you just have natural individuals and they'd have certain rights and duties to each other. 230 00:24:28.100 --> 00:24:34.100 Well, each of the kings is sort of like a natural individual, and so they'd have certain rights of the same kind. 231 00:24:34.100 --> 00:24:39.100 And you begin to have all sorts of rather dubious analogies of this kind. 232 00:24:39.100 --> 00:24:49.100 and so you get really, I think objectively, further and further into a positive law notion, whatever the language is that they're using. 233 00:24:49.100 --> 00:25:01.100 Now at a later stage, of course, now you've got the idea of absolute sovereignty, the state or king is the source of the law, there's no appeal really. 234 00:25:01.100 --> 00:25:08.100 Well, you don't have to have a king to keep this operation going. You can get rid of the king. 235 00:25:08.100 --> 00:25:13.100 You just say the people are sovereign now, so it's a republic, but you have the same sovereignty. 236 00:25:13.100 --> 00:25:19.100 Then it becomes a mass democracy, and now it's liberal, whatever it is. 237 00:25:19.100 --> 00:25:25.100 All these reforms get rid of the king. No one gave up the idea of sovereignty. 238 00:25:25.100 --> 00:25:33.100 If anything, they made it more absolute and made everyone feel personally uplifted by participating in it. 239 00:25:33.100 --> 00:25:38.100 I have my 280 millionth portion of the sovereignty, whatever it is. 240 00:25:38.100 --> 00:25:40.100 I don't remember what the population is anymore of this country. 241 00:25:40.100 --> 00:25:41.100 It keeps growing. 242 00:25:41.100 --> 00:25:48.100 Anyway, that little fraction of the sovereignty, for all the good it does me, well, I can feel proud about that. 243 00:25:48.100 --> 00:25:54.100 So the bureaucrats and the mass democratic electorate replaces the king. 244 00:25:54.100 --> 00:25:58.100 But nobody re-thinks sovereignty. 245 00:25:58.100 --> 00:26:00.100 Now you might think that everything's kind of doomed. 246 00:26:00.100 --> 00:26:04.100 You've got the total claim to sovereignty and you've got constant competition between these states 247 00:26:04.100 --> 00:26:07.100 because they are still allowed to go to war. 248 00:26:07.100 --> 00:26:13.100 There's no one to stop them and they don't have any ideas that might mitigate that. 249 00:26:13.100 --> 00:26:19.100 Well, what happens for about a century and a half? 250 00:26:19.100 --> 00:26:25.660 This is starting in some part of the 18th century and through much of the 19th. 251 00:26:25.660 --> 00:26:35.980 You have the adoption of a code of civilized warfare and V.J.P. Veale has a book that's very useful on this. 252 00:26:35.980 --> 00:26:39.260 So practically the international lawyers and the practical statesmen say, 253 00:26:39.260 --> 00:26:43.100 well, we've got to quit worrying about just war theory. 254 00:26:43.100 --> 00:26:47.500 We just won't get anywhere if we try to figure out who's right in a conflict. 255 00:26:47.500 --> 00:26:57.500 Let's just try to mitigate, mitigate the consequences. Let's say there's a war, we don't, it's too opaque to say who's right, but why don't we get them to not kill each other quite so much? 256 00:26:57.500 --> 00:27:04.500 Why don't we get them to not burn down the cities and burn the peasants and rape the women and pillage and all the stuff that sometimes happens? 257 00:27:04.500 --> 00:27:14.500 Why don't we at least make the wars a little more bearable? And also, these wars hurt commerce. Why don't we quit attacking commerce and property quite so much and limit the damage? 258 00:27:14.500 --> 00:27:25.500 And so for a period, you have, by practice and custom and treaty, the development of relatively civilized warfare. 259 00:27:25.500 --> 00:27:30.500 Again, pretty much only applies in Europe. 260 00:27:30.500 --> 00:27:38.500 I mean, I don't think there was, I can't think of any wars in North America that were really conducted too much under these rules, 261 00:27:38.500 --> 00:27:41.500 at least not too strictly. 262 00:27:41.500 --> 00:27:47.180 Robert E. Lee, but again, there's always an exception, and Indian wars weren't conducted 263 00:27:47.180 --> 00:27:52.820 under rules of this kind. Nobody conducted colonial wars in Africa this way. Okay, but 264 00:27:52.820 --> 00:27:58.860 between European, Christian monarchies and so on, the rules were followed for a while, 265 00:27:58.860 --> 00:28:03.820 which was probably important because that's where a lot of the wars could potentially 266 00:28:03.820 --> 00:28:10.060 take place. And Gustav de Molinari wrote an interesting essay on this in 1854, that there 267 00:28:10.060 --> 00:28:15.060 The Peaceful Pursuits from the Ravages of War 268 00:28:40.060 --> 00:28:58.060 This is very close to Rothbard's argument that in the end, there's nothing wrong with trading with the so-called enemy during a war. 269 00:28:58.060 --> 00:29:01.060 Why wouldn't you trade with the so-called enemy during a war? 270 00:29:01.060 --> 00:29:08.060 That one stops people at first, but if we believe that commerce is good, then the war is about other questions. 271 00:29:08.060 --> 00:29:11.060 Anyway, why mess with commerce? 272 00:29:11.060 --> 00:29:20.060 Okay, Rothbard has a summer discussion in an unpublished piece on the Confederation period. 273 00:29:20.060 --> 00:29:25.060 And he talks about how the American statesmen under the Confederation were always pushing the envelope, 274 00:29:25.060 --> 00:29:33.060 trying to get Sweden or Prussia or the Netherlands to agree to wider definition by treaty of the rights of neutrals. 275 00:29:33.060 --> 00:29:43.060 And they're basically moving towards trying to get people to see that you should protect all forms of commerce, 276 00:29:43.060 --> 00:29:48.060 protecting neutral commerce during a war. 277 00:29:48.060 --> 00:29:56.060 Now, as we know, both these ideas and the ones Molinari talks about didn't really take hold to our cost later. 278 00:29:56.060 --> 00:30:04.140 Just later, Molinari, here's an interesting remark, he says, he remarks that of the Crimean 279 00:30:04.140 --> 00:30:09.920 War that there's some mistake being made when the Tsar, hoping to punish his enemies, prohibited 280 00:30:09.920 --> 00:30:15.340 the export of cereals and metals while England sought to punish Russia by preventing the 281 00:30:15.340 --> 00:30:21.740 movement of the same products. I mean, this is the mercantilist way of looking at economic 282 00:30:21.740 --> 00:30:26.740 of Warfare seems rather internally contradictory. 283 00:30:28.140 --> 00:30:32.360 But Moenorrie was certainly right to stress the ill will 284 00:30:32.360 --> 00:30:35.360 that blockades and destruction of private property bred 285 00:30:38.780 --> 00:30:40.660 in the longstanding national animosities 286 00:30:40.660 --> 00:30:42.560 has something to do with how the other side's troops 287 00:30:42.560 --> 00:30:46.020 behaved the last time they were on your land. 288 00:30:46.020 --> 00:30:47.380 If you protected property, 289 00:30:47.380 --> 00:30:49.940 the animosities wouldn't be as great. 290 00:30:49.940 --> 00:30:57.940 So instead, no one reforms naval warfare and blockading and so forth, and we see this during this war. 291 00:30:57.940 --> 00:31:05.940 The northern government is always interrupting shipping and trade and annoying the British government. 292 00:31:05.940 --> 00:31:09.940 The British government doesn't say much because it saves the precedents. 293 00:31:09.940 --> 00:31:21.940 And in 1915, they're stopping our neutral shipping out of fear that some food or something might get to Germany or Austria. 294 00:31:21.940 --> 00:31:28.940 And then we protest, however feebly. Brian protested more than his successor, the Secretary of State. 295 00:31:28.940 --> 00:31:34.940 And then everybody said, oh yes, yes, but your Mr. Seward said this in 1862. 296 00:31:34.940 --> 00:31:41.940 So you see the logic of your own argument, why this sort of interference with neutral trade was reasonable. 297 00:31:41.940 --> 00:31:45.940 So they were very good at saving up precedents, at least, given that. 298 00:31:45.940 --> 00:31:56.940 Now, one idea that is of some mild interest, small interest in the whole period, this whole long period, is the idea of balance of power. 299 00:31:56.940 --> 00:32:02.940 Of course, it's like another concept. Rothbard has a little pamphlet on the myths of the Cold War. 300 00:32:02.940 --> 00:32:11.940 And he said, we're always being asked to intervene somewhere, and then if you say, well, but the Soviets aren't there, even on your own theory, the Soviets aren't messing with it. 301 00:32:11.940 --> 00:32:17.940 But they say, well, but there's no state to speak of, and if we don't intervene, there'll be a power vacuum. 302 00:32:17.940 --> 00:32:22.940 And the Soviets will just be drawn in to this power vacuum. It's just an inevitable thing. 303 00:32:22.940 --> 00:32:28.940 And Rothbard said, well, this is just another importation of a misleading analogy from the natural sciences. 304 00:32:28.940 --> 00:32:38.940 There's no power vacuum. It all depends on what people do. What someone decides to do. There's no legitimate power vacuum. 305 00:32:38.940 --> 00:32:46.940 This is why I think in the end Rothbard never bothered to critique most of the international relations literature that attempts to be signed around. 306 00:32:46.940 --> 00:32:50.940 I mean you can't say, you can't do this sort of thing. 307 00:32:50.940 --> 00:33:14.940 Okay, here's discontent, here's discontent, .05, and you divide ideology by that, and you put some funny number here, I don't know what it is, and then this equals something, and at the end you've got Samuel Huntington telling you there won't be a revolution in South Africa, and then five years later there is. 308 00:33:14.940 --> 00:33:29.940 So this is not very good stuff. The record of the political scientists predicting political events is somewhat less impressive than the record of econometricians predicting economic future. 309 00:33:29.940 --> 00:33:40.940 Yeah, even worse. So Rothbard, of course, I think understandably didn't pay much attention to this literature, but I'm turning back to a new form of that literature shortly. 310 00:33:40.940 --> 00:33:49.940 So the balance of power anyway, but again, and I just mentioned that because it reminded me of balance, equilibrium, power vacuum. 311 00:33:49.940 --> 00:33:53.940 Well, it's hard to say there's any such thing as a balance of power. 312 00:33:53.940 --> 00:34:01.940 Now, the older realists like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan would use this in a kind of historic literary kind of way and say, 313 00:34:01.940 --> 00:34:05.940 The Theory of Money and Credit 314 00:34:05.940 --> 00:34:09.940 The Theory of Money and Credit 315 00:34:31.940 --> 00:34:43.940 to work this out. It's more like what Mises calls thymology, if anything. It's certainly not some pseudoscience. 316 00:34:43.940 --> 00:34:56.940 But the more I read, the more I'm convinced that the whole balance of power notion is simply a rationalization for English foreign policy from the 16th century forward. 317 00:34:56.940 --> 00:35:02.940 The English monarchy has had certain reasons, once in a while it wants to do something, intervene somewhere, 318 00:35:02.940 --> 00:35:06.940 or maybe they are worried about some power being too big. 319 00:35:06.940 --> 00:35:09.940 But let's get a German point of view on this just for fun. 320 00:35:09.940 --> 00:35:14.940 And this is the political historian Otto Hintze writing about 1915. 321 00:35:14.940 --> 00:35:22.940 Otto Hintze says that England's conception meant that the continental powers should destroy each other by constant warfare, 322 00:35:22.940 --> 00:35:25.940 which England would pay for and subsidize one side or the other 323 00:35:25.940 --> 00:35:31.440 in order that England might have a free hand at sea and in the colonies. 324 00:35:31.440 --> 00:35:37.440 Well, that's a little less benevolent reading than when we're used to where the British are just sitting benevolently offshore balancing, 325 00:35:37.440 --> 00:35:44.440 just kind of being the benevolent offshore balancer, doing a good deed, kind of keeping the fractious Europeans from killing each other. 326 00:35:44.440 --> 00:35:48.440 Well, it doesn't seem to be quite that way. 327 00:35:48.440 --> 00:35:54.440 Okay, so what happens to the state system and this temporary code of civilized warfare? 328 00:35:54.440 --> 00:35:57.440 Well, what happens is World War I. 329 00:35:57.440 --> 00:36:01.440 Okay, not only does that destroy a number of the states, those that were empires, 330 00:36:01.440 --> 00:36:09.440 it also pretty much is the end of any attempt at self-restraint and the use of weaponry. 331 00:36:09.440 --> 00:36:15.440 Also, it's the death of common sense and having any idea of whether it was worth it. 332 00:36:15.440 --> 00:36:20.440 I mean, you know, some of you know that there was this Jewish-Polish businessman 333 00:36:20.440 --> 00:36:27.880 Yvonne Jean-Bloche, who made a lot of money, so he had some time to sit down and think. 334 00:36:27.880 --> 00:36:34.320 So he wrote a multi-volume work, I think published around 1910 and 1911, multi-volume work, and 335 00:36:34.320 --> 00:36:40.080 he said, well, there's a lot of explosives around now, and there's these Gatling guns, 336 00:36:40.080 --> 00:36:47.160 and machine guns, and there's barbed wire. The next bar will be very short, because the 337 00:36:47.160 --> 00:36:57.160 The cost will immediately, the advantage will shift to the defense at some point and the cost will add up so rapidly they'll have to quit in a few months. 338 00:36:57.160 --> 00:37:06.160 Nobody would stand for it. So of course the damn fools do it for four years on that static western front in northern France and Belgium. 339 00:37:06.160 --> 00:37:15.160 The only thing you can say for the war in the east, at least there was some movement in the eastern front, mostly in that direction too. 340 00:37:15.160 --> 00:37:22.160 But, I mean, of course, he was right about the sort of thing that would logically happen, 341 00:37:22.160 --> 00:37:30.160 but he underestimated the idiocy of the politicians, the public, everybody involved in making decisions. 342 00:37:30.160 --> 00:37:34.160 Couldn't have foreseen Marshall Haig, people like that. 343 00:37:34.160 --> 00:37:40.160 You know, well, all right lads, over the top, this time we'll break through. 344 00:37:40.160 --> 00:37:42.060 Soften them up as shelling. 345 00:37:42.060 --> 00:37:44.960 As far as I know, the shelling never softened anybody up. 346 00:37:44.960 --> 00:37:47.060 One reason was the Germans were being, 347 00:37:47.060 --> 00:37:50.860 were very organized and they built concrete bunkers. 348 00:37:50.860 --> 00:37:55.060 They didn't dig a hole in the dirt and sit in it like the British did. 349 00:37:55.060 --> 00:37:57.760 But nonetheless, for various reasons, the shelling didn't have the effects. 350 00:37:57.760 --> 00:38:01.160 I mean, but have we ever seen any predictions 351 00:38:01.160 --> 00:38:03.560 of how a war is going to work 352 00:38:03.560 --> 00:38:09.060 really unfold the way that the optimists say it will? 353 00:38:09.060 --> 00:38:15.240 Probably not. Okay. Well, let me get back on the trend of the talk. 354 00:38:15.240 --> 00:38:20.340 Well, all we want is so horribly, there's a horrible catastrophe for civilization. 355 00:38:20.340 --> 00:38:25.980 In fact, Schumpeter uses the word catastrophe with regard to this war. 356 00:38:25.980 --> 00:38:29.100 But some people say, well, we can't let this happen again. 357 00:38:29.100 --> 00:38:31.900 We'll have to have a league to enforce peace. 358 00:38:31.900 --> 00:38:35.420 This is the beginning of the collective security delusion or legism. 359 00:38:35.420 --> 00:38:37.300 They call it legism. 360 00:38:37.300 --> 00:38:46.300 It's actually originated semi-idealistic for formers who just accidentally happen to be near the top leadership of the British Empire. 361 00:38:46.300 --> 00:38:52.300 And their thinking seems to be that, well, if we had a League of Nations that would stop trouble when it started, 362 00:38:52.300 --> 00:39:00.300 we could shift some of the costs of having the empire onto others and also pose as guardians of peace and prosperity. 363 00:39:00.300 --> 00:39:02.300 That's a bit cynical, isn't it? 364 00:39:02.300 --> 00:39:12.300 But is it any different than trying to bring in the U.N. as a fig leaf to cover the present operation? No, it's not going well. I don't know. 365 00:39:12.300 --> 00:39:23.300 And then, of course, this was sold to the Americans. There's always a surplus. I know we can't objectively measure it, but there always seems to be a surplus of people that fall for notions like this in this country. 366 00:39:23.300 --> 00:39:26.300 And Woodrow Wilson was one of the biggest ones. 367 00:39:26.300 --> 00:39:38.300 Now back in 1735, Jules Cardinal Alberoni had proposed the League of Christian Princes to adjudicate their differences, keep the peace, and make war into Turks. 368 00:39:38.300 --> 00:39:45.300 Well, that's one way of organizing world peace, I mean, you know. 369 00:39:45.300 --> 00:39:53.300 So this is kind of in that tradition, because it's going to, particularly once the war is over, and they had some debate. 370 00:39:53.300 --> 00:39:57.300 Well, should we set up this league during the war? 371 00:39:57.300 --> 00:40:00.300 Should we set up a league during the war and we'll get all the good powers 372 00:40:00.300 --> 00:40:03.300 who happen to be on the allied side and let them be in the league 373 00:40:03.300 --> 00:40:07.300 and then we can organize the league while we're defeating the terrible central powers? 374 00:40:07.300 --> 00:40:09.300 Or should we wait? 375 00:40:09.300 --> 00:40:12.300 Well, of course, they wait until the Treaty of Versailles 376 00:40:12.300 --> 00:40:16.300 and then Wilson is embarrassed having helped craft the league and the covenant 377 00:40:16.300 --> 00:40:22.300 because the Senate doesn't buy it and the U.S. doesn't join the league and so on. 378 00:40:22.300 --> 00:40:27.540 I thought it probably limited the damage the League could have done. 379 00:40:27.540 --> 00:40:31.940 The usual progressive interpretation is that we didn't join the League and this led to 380 00:40:31.940 --> 00:40:32.940 World War II. 381 00:40:32.940 --> 00:40:36.340 But if there had been the League, probably if we had been in the League and had actually 382 00:40:36.340 --> 00:40:38.540 ever made a decision, we would have had a war somewhere sooner. 383 00:40:38.540 --> 00:40:43.860 What's the point of a League to enforce peace if it doesn't go to war? 384 00:40:43.860 --> 00:40:44.860 What's the threat? 385 00:40:44.860 --> 00:40:49.300 I mean, the whole problem is supposed to be there's no judge, there's no common superior 386 00:40:49.300 --> 00:40:51.380 over the states. 387 00:40:51.380 --> 00:40:58.380 So if you want a league to do it, the United Nations, you're basically saying you have to have a military force or somebody that will borrow military force. 388 00:40:58.380 --> 00:41:02.380 You're basically creating a glorified military alliance. 389 00:41:02.380 --> 00:41:06.380 So the genealogy of the League of Nations runs like this. 390 00:41:06.380 --> 00:41:10.380 First you have the Triple Entente, made up of good powers. 391 00:41:10.380 --> 00:41:13.380 Then they invent the League of Nations. 392 00:41:13.380 --> 00:41:17.380 And then later on you have somewhat the same powers, sort of Entente II. 393 00:41:17.380 --> 00:41:19.380 They invent the United Nations. 394 00:41:19.380 --> 00:41:25.380 is basically a glorified military alliance that proceeds under the cover of this collective security rhetoric, 395 00:41:25.380 --> 00:41:28.380 which at least does sound plausible, I suppose. 396 00:41:28.380 --> 00:41:32.380 Okay, so that's my cynical take on this. 397 00:41:32.380 --> 00:41:41.380 As Rothbard said, the whole problem with the collective security idea is that it guarantees that no war can ever remain limited. 398 00:41:41.380 --> 00:41:45.380 I mean, there's some minor clash in who knows where, 399 00:41:45.380 --> 00:41:50.980 And then the collective security types have to take an interest in it 400 00:41:50.980 --> 00:41:58.680 and they almost inevitably would tend to make it a larger conflict than it needed to be. 401 00:41:58.680 --> 00:42:06.080 I mean, I suppose if you're really cynical, you could say that it's unfortunate that someone shoots the Austrian Archduke, 402 00:42:06.080 --> 00:42:10.680 but absent the alliance systems that existed in 1914, 403 00:42:10.680 --> 00:42:14.980 which are approximations to some kind of solution to the collective security problem, 404 00:42:14.980 --> 00:42:22.980 Absent those big alliances, Austria would have trounced Serbia, and millions of people would have been happier. 405 00:42:22.980 --> 00:42:25.980 Not the Serbs, but nonetheless, it limits the damage. 406 00:42:25.980 --> 00:42:29.980 It seems to me that to not think in these terms, possibly, potentially, 407 00:42:29.980 --> 00:42:32.980 I mean, it's not a predictive science. We have to go by other methods. 408 00:42:32.980 --> 00:42:36.980 Okay, so what happens next? Well, the U.S. doesn't join the League, 409 00:42:36.980 --> 00:42:40.980 but the Kellogg-Briand Pact is signed by a number of the powers. 410 00:42:40.980 --> 00:42:47.980 Wars, everyone's in a good mood that week, 1928. Everybody agrees that war is bad, that war is outlawed. 411 00:42:47.980 --> 00:42:53.980 All the powers have agreed that they won't use war as a method in their foreign policy. 412 00:42:53.980 --> 00:43:01.980 Well, clearly this is organized hypocrisy. And they all say, well, yes, but of course we'll have to go to war if we're attacked. 413 00:43:01.980 --> 00:43:08.980 And so they're back saying, well, we'll just use war for defense. Well, of course, again, this is open-ended, it's like the first part of just war theory. 414 00:43:08.980 --> 00:43:10.980 How do you know which side was just? 415 00:43:10.980 --> 00:43:12.980 Well, how do you know who's acting in defense? 416 00:43:12.980 --> 00:43:14.980 Well, sometimes it's not clear. 417 00:43:14.980 --> 00:43:18.980 Everyone will say that he's acting in self-defense. 418 00:43:18.980 --> 00:43:20.980 So this suddenly resolved the problem, 419 00:43:20.980 --> 00:43:24.980 but it created a rhetorical proposition that war was now a crime. 420 00:43:24.980 --> 00:43:28.980 The problem with that is then they're going to want somebody to prosecute it, 421 00:43:28.980 --> 00:43:32.980 and then they're going to take this all a step further. 422 00:43:32.980 --> 00:43:36.980 And, again, not self-enforcing, 423 00:43:36.980 --> 00:44:00.980 The main task was to sort out the good and the bad nations, sort out the aggressors from the defenders, and decide how best to bring the aggressors to heel by boycott, blockade, or military attack. 424 00:44:00.980 --> 00:44:05.580 and the sect that believed in this kind of doctrine was particularly strong in the United States 425 00:44:05.580 --> 00:44:08.580 and included a number of secretaries of state. 426 00:44:08.580 --> 00:44:12.180 And then a whole school develops and you can trace the whole development 427 00:44:12.180 --> 00:44:15.580 in the pages of the American Journal of International Law. 428 00:44:15.580 --> 00:44:18.180 Let's go back to about 1920 and read forward 429 00:44:18.180 --> 00:44:21.780 and you'll see the triumph of the collective security guys. 430 00:44:21.780 --> 00:44:25.580 Until you get into about the 1980s and you'll see a split 431 00:44:25.580 --> 00:44:28.980 and you'll see that some of the collective security guys 432 00:44:28.980 --> 00:44:32.980 really argue in ideologists. They really believe in this stuff. 433 00:44:32.980 --> 00:44:35.980 And you'll see that about half of them simply use the argument 434 00:44:35.980 --> 00:44:39.980 whenever it's convenient for this week's American Foreign Policy. 435 00:44:39.980 --> 00:44:42.980 So there's actually a split in that journal. 436 00:44:42.980 --> 00:44:47.980 Okay, but let me have to fast forward a bit. 437 00:44:47.980 --> 00:44:50.980 Okay, so then we have the next four in the United Nations 438 00:44:50.980 --> 00:44:55.980 and the UN Charter, which reads like a mixture of the US Constitution, 439 00:44:55.980 --> 00:45:02.980 The Treaty, the Utopian Manifesto, and the Rules of a Private Club 440 00:45:02.980 --> 00:45:07.980 such that you can have a war in Korea, but you can call it police work, so it's a very strange thing. 441 00:45:07.980 --> 00:45:10.980 But the Cold War rendered it somewhat useless. 442 00:45:10.980 --> 00:45:14.980 The Cold War meant that, with the Russians having a veto and so forth, 443 00:45:14.980 --> 00:45:19.980 China out of the picture, unrecognized, mostly. 444 00:45:19.980 --> 00:45:22.980 The UN wouldn't work as planned. 445 00:45:22.980 --> 00:45:28.980 Well, actually, I don't find that very tragic, how it worked as planned, who would have had, well, some different problems. 446 00:45:28.980 --> 00:45:37.980 But, nonetheless, the United States went on through many years of the Cold War, ignoring the UN as much as possible. 447 00:45:37.980 --> 00:45:46.980 And when the Soviet Union collapsed, it looked like the UN could work as a sort of American front, as planned. 448 00:45:46.980 --> 00:45:57.980 Then Bush I made some use of the UN. Bush II didn't find it possible to make that use, so the UN was sort of pushed to one side again. 449 00:45:57.980 --> 00:46:06.980 I regard the UN as a useful place for launching criticisms of things that I wouldn't certainly regard it as a source of law. 450 00:46:06.980 --> 00:46:13.980 Okay, so follow through this journal, particularly the writings of a guy named Michael Reisman. 451 00:46:13.980 --> 00:46:25.980 You can follow whatever the current American foreign policy is, he will prove to you, starting in 1968 down to the present, that international law requires whatever was just done. 452 00:46:25.980 --> 00:46:32.980 And it's absolutely true. Everything that's done, he will show you that it's consistent with the deepest reading of international law. 453 00:46:32.980 --> 00:46:38.980 So he's rather interesting in that respect, but I don't want to take time. 454 00:46:38.980 --> 00:46:46.980 I mean, he once proved that the UN should suppress Rhodesia because Rhodesia was a threat to the peace. 455 00:46:46.980 --> 00:46:50.980 Well, why was Rhodesia a threat to the peace? Well, Rhodesia, which wasn't attacking anyone, 456 00:46:50.980 --> 00:46:58.980 had a white minority government that had a dispute with Britain, but this would cause bad feelings in the rest of Africa. 457 00:46:58.980 --> 00:47:02.980 And bad feelings could lead to conflict, and that could lead to war. 458 00:47:02.980 --> 00:47:07.980 So the very existence of this government was objectively doing harm. 459 00:47:07.980 --> 00:47:13.420 This is a postmodern argument, so now we have postmodern international law, subjective feelings 460 00:47:13.420 --> 00:47:20.540 for being consulted in 1968. It's rather interesting. It reads like a U.S. Supreme Court decision 461 00:47:20.540 --> 00:47:27.660 any time after World War II. You pile up subjectivities, unlikely chains of causation, and announce 462 00:47:27.660 --> 00:47:34.180 that the Constitution actually means that up is down. In fact, he actually writes that 463 00:47:34.180 --> 00:47:42.180 And it's a good thing that the UN Charter doesn't define the key terms, that way there's room for making policy. 464 00:47:42.180 --> 00:47:47.180 So in effect, it's just a legislature in his mind. 465 00:47:47.180 --> 00:47:52.180 And he's happy when, of course, provided it does whatever the United States wants done that week. 466 00:47:52.180 --> 00:48:01.180 Okay, well this brings me, well I still have a few minutes, to an important trend in the literature. 467 00:48:01.180 --> 00:48:21.180 The whole discussion of sovereignty, and it's funny, because the more I look into these things, the more I find that it really is true, history is what people think, you know, it isn't so many tons of wheat and so many, you know, grams of pig iron or something. 468 00:48:21.180 --> 00:48:40.180 In the end, history is what people think, not the whole story, but it's human action and you can't do all that math as if the people are just interchangeable. 469 00:48:40.180 --> 00:48:44.180 So what's interesting to me is the ideological trend. 470 00:48:44.180 --> 00:49:01.180 Now, the present trend, leading aside the fight between those who really believe in the UN as collective security and those who just want to use it as a front for some American policy, or those who don't even want to use it, which is more the National Review position these days. 471 00:49:01.180 --> 00:49:13.180 Well, what we're seeing is a new piece of rhetoric and invoking Immanuel Kant and the proposition that democracies are really lovable, 472 00:49:13.180 --> 00:49:18.180 why they're just inherently peaceful, they never attack each other. 473 00:49:18.180 --> 00:49:23.180 The original claim was that democracies were inherently peaceful, and when this debate broke out about 20 years ago, 474 00:49:23.180 --> 00:49:26.180 someone pointed out, well, this democracy attacked that state, and look at that, 475 00:49:26.180 --> 00:49:31.080 Look at that, we've got all these long lists of democracies attacking people, and they said, 476 00:49:31.080 --> 00:49:42.880 Oh, that's too bad. Well, democracies never attack other democracies, and the fact that they attack other people actually just proves their virtue, 477 00:49:42.880 --> 00:49:52.980 because they're attacking bad people. You know, they're attacking reactionary tribal, stateless places, or they're attacking bad states, they're attacking fascists, whatever. 478 00:49:52.980 --> 00:49:57.980 So, they're attacking no longer a problem, and then they set up what are called dyads. 479 00:49:57.980 --> 00:50:00.980 They make a long list of dyads, pairs of states. 480 00:50:00.980 --> 00:50:04.980 Okay, and they say, well, has Norway attacked Denmark lately? 481 00:50:04.980 --> 00:50:07.980 No, see, democracy causes peace. 482 00:50:07.980 --> 00:50:10.980 Well, has Sweden attacked Finland lately? 483 00:50:10.980 --> 00:50:14.980 No. Has the UK attacked the US lately? 484 00:50:14.980 --> 00:50:17.980 No, see, democracy causes peace. Well, wait a minute. 485 00:50:17.980 --> 00:50:21.980 It could be they've had two disastrous world wars and they're tired of it. 486 00:50:21.980 --> 00:50:32.980 Without bringing ideas and people, it could be that most of these states in Europe have been corralled by the Americans into a big alliance against the Soviets who no longer exist. 487 00:50:32.980 --> 00:50:38.980 That could be a factor. Treaty partners don't usually attack each other, leaving aside the Greeks and the Turks. 488 00:50:38.980 --> 00:50:47.980 Normally they don't. Or maybe there's been a lot of peace, and this allowed democracy to break out. Maybe the causation is reversed. 489 00:50:47.980 --> 00:51:01.980 But here's his claims. They stack up their di-ends and they extract percentages, they do equations, all this phony-blony math associated with Bruce Russert, Rudy Rummel, a guy named Weart. 490 00:51:01.980 --> 00:51:05.980 There's a whole school that's been cluttering up the political science journals for 20 years. 491 00:51:05.980 --> 00:51:18.980 My favorite is a guy named Zev Maus, who's an Israeli and he writes articles. He's so strong on this democratic peace theory that he says democracies shouldn't even negotiate with non-democracies at all. 492 00:51:18.980 --> 00:51:25.980 Well, I'd say following his implications really go. You have to give him credit. You shouldn't even talk to him. 493 00:51:25.980 --> 00:51:34.980 Well, that'll bring about world peace. So the further implication is that if you actually want world peace, then everyone has to be a democracy, 494 00:51:34.980 --> 00:51:49.980 This is a great move, strategically, why that would mean it's okay to attack everyone else until you make them democracies, and then there'll be eternal peace. 495 00:51:49.980 --> 00:51:59.980 Well, George Fitzhugh wrote in the 1850s that there was too much freedom in the world, and that's what was causing discontent and led to war. 496 00:51:59.980 --> 00:52:03.980 If all the nations held slaves, there'd be peace. 497 00:52:03.980 --> 00:52:08.980 So the slavery peace theory, I'm working on, just for fun, the fascist peace theory. 498 00:52:08.980 --> 00:52:12.980 I mean, how often did any fascist nations attack another fascist nation? 499 00:52:12.980 --> 00:52:15.980 Maybe fascism causes peace. 500 00:52:15.980 --> 00:52:19.980 I mean, fascists. So you can convert all the states to fascism, 501 00:52:19.980 --> 00:52:22.980 and they realize they're separate national destiny. 502 00:52:22.980 --> 00:52:25.980 How often do socialists attack one another? 503 00:52:25.980 --> 00:52:28.980 And you say, oh yeah, but China and Russia have border disputes. 504 00:52:28.980 --> 00:52:32.980 in Vietnam Invading Cambodia. 505 00:52:32.980 --> 00:52:36.980 But if you're good at this kind of theory, the way the democratic peace guys are, 506 00:52:36.980 --> 00:52:39.980 you'll say, oh, that's an exception. 507 00:52:39.980 --> 00:52:43.980 Or Cambodia wasn't really socialist. 508 00:52:43.980 --> 00:52:47.980 So if you argue with someone like Rudy Rummel, and you say, well, they had elections 509 00:52:47.980 --> 00:52:51.980 in the southern states and the northern states, 510 00:52:51.980 --> 00:52:55.980 so the Confederacy fighting the Union seems to be, at least, 511 00:52:55.980 --> 00:52:59.580 At least, republics fighting each other, maybe democracies. 512 00:52:59.580 --> 00:53:01.180 You'll say, oh no, no, you have to disqualify the South. 513 00:53:01.180 --> 00:53:05.080 They're not really democratic because they're holding slaves. 514 00:53:05.080 --> 00:53:09.780 Or you go back and say, well, what about Britain fighting its colonies? 515 00:53:09.780 --> 00:53:12.980 And we admit that's not democracy, but they're fairly liberal. 516 00:53:12.980 --> 00:53:15.480 Sometimes they confuse the word liberal, republic. 517 00:53:15.480 --> 00:53:19.380 And they say, well, no, no, no, no, there's fewer people voting in Britain. 518 00:53:19.380 --> 00:53:20.380 So you can't count that. 519 00:53:20.380 --> 00:53:23.180 So no example you can think of can be counted. 520 00:53:23.180 --> 00:53:28.780 So no example will disprove that democracies don't attack, because you always redefine the democracy. 521 00:53:28.780 --> 00:53:33.180 Now why am I bringing this up at all? Well, one, it's a snare and a delusion. 522 00:53:33.180 --> 00:53:35.780 It's remarkably self-serving and stupid. 523 00:53:35.780 --> 00:53:40.180 It's also been constantly quoted by Bush, foreign policy spokesman, 524 00:53:40.180 --> 00:53:43.980 democracies don't attack each other, and the more democracy we have, 525 00:53:43.980 --> 00:53:46.980 however we get it, the world will be a better place. 526 00:53:46.980 --> 00:53:51.080 And going back in the Clinton administration, the foreign policy spokesman 527 00:53:51.080 --> 00:53:53.480 are already using this new bit of armament. 528 00:53:53.480 --> 00:53:55.880 Okay. 529 00:53:55.880 --> 00:53:59.680 So to bring the topic back around, 530 00:53:59.680 --> 00:54:03.880 what we actually seem to have is 531 00:54:03.880 --> 00:54:08.980 mad social science reinforcing a dubious proposition 532 00:54:08.980 --> 00:54:12.080 which serves the ideological function 533 00:54:12.080 --> 00:54:16.080 of justifying at least one imperial project. 534 00:54:16.080 --> 00:54:18.280 It's not very satisfactory. 535 00:54:18.280 --> 00:54:45.280 And sovereignty, as little as we like it, to the extent it was actually conceived of as belonging to more than one state, was at least a barrier to some of these things, so I'm not going to rethink sovereignty and embrace it, but I'm going to say that pragmatically, apparently there are worse things than separate sovereign states, but I think I'll leave it at that. 536 00:54:45.280 --> 00:54:49.280 Any questions? Argument?