WEBVTT NOTE The U.N. Charter and International Law 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.000 Well, by some time in the 17th century, the transition from old reviews on states, war and peace, 2 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:15.000 transition from this old review to a new paradigm which centered on sovereign states as sources of law 3 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:20.000 and final judges in their own cause was pretty much completed. 4 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:27.000 And so this was the end of most attempts to apply any kind of just war theory. 5 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:32.440 Now, some of the writers, of course, manage to sound as if they're in that tradition, 6 00:00:32.440 --> 00:00:40.560 so this trajectory, sort of Suarez, Grodius, Pufendorz, Vattel, sums up the development 7 00:00:40.560 --> 00:00:47.280 with each writer more and more adopting a positivist position. 8 00:00:47.280 --> 00:00:51.420 And we can add in Machiavelli, Bodane, Hobbes, and some other people entirely on the side 9 00:00:51.420 --> 00:00:57.900 and of this notion of unbounded sovereignty and the heroic unity of the sovereign will 10 00:00:57.900 --> 00:01:04.460 embodied in the ruler and increasingly the abstract modern state and in the more popular 11 00:01:04.460 --> 00:01:10.060 forms of government as they come into being inherent from the monarchies this notion of 12 00:01:10.060 --> 00:01:18.780 unbounded sovereignty and positive law and finally passing from republicanism to liberalism 13 00:01:18.780 --> 00:01:20.540 and then to mass democracy. 14 00:01:21.980 --> 00:01:24.220 Now possibly the less serious resistance 15 00:01:24.220 --> 00:01:26.940 to the ideological victory of sovereign states 16 00:01:26.940 --> 00:01:29.220 was in the work of Erasmus of Rotterdam 17 00:01:30.140 --> 00:01:32.300 in the 16th century. 18 00:01:32.300 --> 00:01:34.700 But unfortunately, he hampered his analysis 19 00:01:34.700 --> 00:01:38.260 by a belief in the necessity in the end of states. 20 00:01:38.260 --> 00:01:40.060 And this is what Erasmus says 21 00:01:40.060 --> 00:01:44.660 in one place in his many writings. 22 00:01:44.660 --> 00:01:47.080 He says, once you have granted imperial rule, 23 00:01:47.080 --> 00:02:17.080 You have granted at the same time the business of collecting money, the retinovatarant, armed force, spies, horses, mules, trumpets, war, carnage, triumph, insurrections, treaties, battles, in short, everything without which it is not possible to manage the affairs of Empire. And one writer comments, acceptance of the state then is the doom of pacifism. I think that's interesting. 24 00:02:17.080 --> 00:02:23.240 Short of adopting the posture of someone like Etienne de la Boétie, those who acknowledged 25 00:02:23.240 --> 00:02:27.320 the manifold evils of war were reduced to advocating practical adjustments within the 26 00:02:27.320 --> 00:02:35.640 prevailing system of nation-states. 27 00:02:35.640 --> 00:03:05.640 This actually of course, well at second best, had some positive results coming out of the usage of these states which had emerged and the treaties between them, you begin to have a body of rules which are not always observed but there are at least some penalties in terms of reputation and so forth inflicted on those who don't abide by the rules. 28 00:03:05.640 --> 00:03:10.640 Rules, and I suppose it's fair to say 29 00:03:10.800 --> 00:03:12.840 that if we wanna call this progress, 30 00:03:12.840 --> 00:03:14.080 then the high point is reached 31 00:03:14.080 --> 00:03:17.140 in the 18th and 19th centuries. 32 00:03:18.760 --> 00:03:23.040 As near as I can find out, even the campaigns of Napoleon 33 00:03:23.040 --> 00:03:27.280 tend to have been conducted within some 34 00:03:27.280 --> 00:03:29.960 or all of the prevailing rules. 35 00:03:29.960 --> 00:03:32.080 So the big exception in the 19th century 36 00:03:32.080 --> 00:03:37.000 that comes to mind at least in wars conducted between states, 37 00:03:37.000 --> 00:03:38.880 where the people were of European ancestry, 38 00:03:38.880 --> 00:03:42.420 the big exception is probably Lincoln and his war. 39 00:03:45.800 --> 00:03:49.960 Gustav de Molinari talks a lot about this 40 00:03:49.960 --> 00:03:53.240 in an essay published in 1854, 41 00:03:53.240 --> 00:03:55.400 and I've used some of this before in a paper on Mises, 42 00:03:55.400 --> 00:03:57.040 but I'll summarize it quickly. 43 00:03:58.140 --> 00:04:00.400 Molinari said that economic progress has resulted 44 00:04:00.400 --> 00:04:02.880 from the Separation of the Personnel and Materials of War 45 00:04:02.880 --> 00:04:04.640 from those of Peace. 46 00:04:04.640 --> 00:04:06.840 And a lot of progress had been realized 47 00:04:06.840 --> 00:04:11.840 along the lines of adopting and following rules 48 00:04:12.960 --> 00:04:14.880 that did not penalize the ordinary, 49 00:04:19.480 --> 00:04:20.320 what's the word I want? 50 00:04:20.320 --> 00:04:22.860 Well, the ordinary things that go on in society, 51 00:04:22.860 --> 00:04:24.800 production, all the peaceful arts 52 00:04:24.800 --> 00:04:29.560 that limited the destruction as much as possible 53 00:04:29.560 --> 00:04:30.900 to the Contending Armies. 54 00:04:31.860 --> 00:04:33.240 And he said the only problem was 55 00:04:33.240 --> 00:04:35.020 that this hadn't been extended. 56 00:04:35.020 --> 00:04:38.440 These rules still needed extending to naval warfare 57 00:04:39.380 --> 00:04:42.880 where a number of practices, 58 00:04:43.880 --> 00:04:46.920 seizure and destruction of property on the high seas 59 00:04:46.920 --> 00:04:48.660 were normal. 60 00:04:48.660 --> 00:04:51.880 And he mentioned the draft treaty in 1780 61 00:04:51.880 --> 00:04:54.760 between Sweden, Denmark, United States, Prussia, Austria, 62 00:04:54.760 --> 00:04:56.080 Portugal and the two Sicilies, 63 00:04:56.080 --> 00:05:26.080 which was meant to change the rules in a way that was more favorable to the rights of those who aren't in the war and this is interesting because rhetorically in our time neutrality is a crime and we'll come to that shortly but at this time it was thought that only the states actually involved in the war need to suffer unduly and they should be conducting the war within certain rules and that everyone 64 00:05:26.080 --> 00:05:37.080 and someone else's right to trade need not be that much affected, so rules were drawn up about contraband and so on, and Molinari is simply saying, well, these rules could be made more rigorous. 65 00:05:37.080 --> 00:05:42.080 It's interesting that the early American statesmen were quite sound on this. 66 00:05:42.080 --> 00:05:52.080 Of course, the United States, this confederation being a fairly weak emerging power, probably saw some advantage in having the rules changed, 67 00:05:52.080 --> 00:06:00.080 The rules change, but there's also an element of idealism that Rothbard talks about in the fragment to the fifth volume of Conceived in Liberty. 68 00:06:04.080 --> 00:06:17.080 Okay, so Molinari even suggested that if there was some necessity felt to maintain a blockade, 69 00:06:17.080 --> 00:06:24.080 That a distinction could be made between a military blockade and a commercial blockade, and the second would be illegitimate from his standpoint. 70 00:06:24.080 --> 00:06:30.080 So if the enemy has a port that's actually a naval facility for the armed forces, you could blockade that. 71 00:06:30.080 --> 00:06:42.080 But it wouldn't make sense under Molinari's view of liberalism to blockade all the ports just to starve the population or maximize the inconvenience. 72 00:06:42.080 --> 00:06:59.080 So this is a great modern notion that you make the war as terrible as possible, then it's shorter, and in that you save lives, and I don't see any demonstration that this is true. 73 00:06:59.080 --> 00:07:05.080 In any event, they don't tell us whose lives were saved specifically, so the whole argument I think breaks down. 74 00:07:05.080 --> 00:07:11.080 Okay, so let us stipulate then that some rules were adopted. 75 00:07:11.080 --> 00:07:15.080 There had been some progress along these lines for a couple of centuries, 76 00:07:15.080 --> 00:07:19.080 and of course with exceptions and slippage. 77 00:07:19.080 --> 00:07:24.080 World War I, I think more than anything else, is this great disaster 78 00:07:24.080 --> 00:07:29.080 that made all sorts of horrible things possible in the 20th century. 79 00:07:29.080 --> 00:07:34.080 In World War I we see the starvation blockade, we see submarine warfare, 80 00:07:34.080 --> 00:07:40.080 We see all sorts of things that are hard to reconcile with the older rules. 81 00:07:40.080 --> 00:07:47.080 It's interesting that so much of the initiative that leads to this breakdown of the older international law 82 00:07:47.080 --> 00:07:53.080 is undertaken by the then near hegemonic power, Britain, 83 00:07:53.080 --> 00:07:58.080 operating out of a kind of cynical view of what it could get away with. 84 00:07:58.080 --> 00:08:03.080 So one has to always watch the hegemonic power, it seems to me. 85 00:08:03.080 --> 00:08:14.080 So out of World War I comes this notion that, well, wars are pretty inconvenient, and they're terrible, and maybe we should just redefine wars as crime. 86 00:08:14.080 --> 00:08:23.080 Maybe we could outlaw war, or maybe we should be able to distinguish between the good nations and the bad nations, and pick out who the aggressor is in any given situation, 87 00:08:23.080 --> 00:08:30.080 and then require everyone to boycott or even attack this supposed aggressor. 88 00:08:30.080 --> 00:08:32.480 And this would be a way to enforce peace. 89 00:08:32.480 --> 00:08:34.000 Of course, dodging the usual paradox 90 00:08:34.000 --> 00:08:35.800 that they're basically going to war, 91 00:08:37.240 --> 00:08:39.160 the coalition of powers to enforce peace, 92 00:08:39.160 --> 00:08:40.640 it sounds like an old fashioned alliance, 93 00:08:40.640 --> 00:08:42.680 but now it's got a nice rhetorical glass. 94 00:08:43.640 --> 00:08:48.640 So by sometime in 1915, you begin to hear a lot of discussion 95 00:08:48.880 --> 00:08:52.280 in well-placed upper-class British circles 96 00:08:52.280 --> 00:08:56.120 about the need for some sort of league to enforce peace. 97 00:08:56.120 --> 00:08:57.760 And the idea, of course, is famously picked up 98 00:08:57.760 --> 00:09:04.480 by Woodrow Wilson, and upon U.S. entry into World War I, Wilson is determined to sell 99 00:09:04.480 --> 00:09:09.480 this notion of a League to enforce peace. 100 00:09:09.480 --> 00:09:16.480 Now, of course, this has some precedent. In 1735, Jules Cardinal Alberoni proposed a League 101 00:09:18.200 --> 00:09:23.200 of Christian Princes to eugenicate their differences, keep the peace, and make war on the Turks. 102 00:09:23.200 --> 00:09:36.200 And some modern writers are now claiming that Immanuel Kant's essay on perpetual peace is a sort of charter for present-day global democratic crusading. 103 00:09:36.200 --> 00:09:40.200 I don't know that that would actually be Kant's position. 104 00:09:40.200 --> 00:09:49.200 And what's interesting is that you can follow this struggle between the older notion of international law and the new international law, 105 00:09:49.200 --> 00:09:55.320 International Law, which we associate with the UN and these other institutions. 106 00:09:55.320 --> 00:09:57.480 You can trace a lot of this in one journal. 107 00:09:57.480 --> 00:10:05.200 You can look at the American Journal of International Law from the early 20th century down to the 108 00:10:05.200 --> 00:10:09.480 present and see the battle being fought out. 109 00:10:09.480 --> 00:10:17.140 Now the short story version is that the new international law thinkers won the battle probably 110 00:10:17.140 --> 00:10:18.140 by the mid-1950s. 111 00:10:18.140 --> 00:10:28.140 It's a bit like the passing of the old right, and it's not accidental that some of these older international theorists were widely cited by the old right. 112 00:10:28.140 --> 00:10:40.140 And here I'm thinking of people like John Bassett Moore, who's this great jurist, and let's see, Borchard, who was, I think, his student, Philip Jessup, 113 00:10:40.140 --> 00:10:45.140 There's a number of these writers who are still complaining about these trends. 114 00:10:45.140 --> 00:10:51.140 Some of them are still writing in the early 50s but then are swept away in the enthusiasm for the Cold War 115 00:10:51.140 --> 00:10:57.140 or because they're being overtaken by a younger generation who believe in these new notions of collective security. 116 00:10:57.140 --> 00:11:02.140 And this amounts, of course, to redefining the whole nature of war and peace 117 00:11:02.140 --> 00:11:08.140 and international relations and international law in a very fundamental way. 118 00:11:08.140 --> 00:11:21.140 Roland Stromburg, who I don't think is a relation of mine, has written an interesting piece on this about the sort of inner contradictions of the idea of a league to enforce peace, 119 00:11:21.140 --> 00:11:34.140 saying in effect that, well, the whole thing breaks down conceptually because you can't quite say it's a world government, 120 00:11:34.140 --> 00:11:39.840 Although some thinkers decided you had to go to a world government, that would be the only way to resolve the problem. 121 00:11:39.840 --> 00:11:50.140 And this problem is already sort of embedded in classic liberalism because reasoning from a social contract model of how internal peace was established in each separate state, 122 00:11:50.140 --> 00:11:56.840 the only way they can think of to prevent war is in effect to have some big enforcement power on a global scale. 123 00:11:56.840 --> 00:12:00.140 You see this clearly in the writings of someone like Lionel Robbins. 124 00:12:00.140 --> 00:12:06.940 All these latter day liberals have a tendency to think that this is the ideal solution, 125 00:12:06.940 --> 00:12:12.860 some sort of world government is unfeasible and dangerous as that might sound to the rest of us. 126 00:12:17.020 --> 00:12:23.980 As a quote from the the New Republic of all sources in 1915 saying the League of Peace, 127 00:12:23.980 --> 00:12:28.860 that's what they're calling this proposal, would either be the old imperialistic alliance under 128 00:12:28.860 --> 00:12:35.860 a dishonest name, or else it would be a highly conservative federation which would keep its members in a very straight pacifist jacket. 129 00:12:35.860 --> 00:12:39.860 There is no stopping point between at a league to prevent war. 130 00:12:39.860 --> 00:12:44.860 Such a league would either grow to a world federation or would break up in civil war. 131 00:12:44.860 --> 00:12:51.860 So the war problem is reintroduced in some other fashion. 132 00:12:51.860 --> 00:13:02.860 Okay, but this is highly fashionable. All sorts of people like Eli who wrote the former Secretary of War, Nicholas Murray Butler who was later to be President of Columbia University. 133 00:13:02.860 --> 00:13:18.860 Everyone thinks this is great stuff. People like Robert Taft have a soft spot for this notion because they've thought themselves into a corner in which some drastic solution appears to be needed to keep something like World War I from recurring. 134 00:13:18.860 --> 00:13:38.860 And then they're locked into certain assumptions about how you could do that, reasoning from an analogy of how protective services are organized domestically to how you could do this internationally, so you get all these sort of quasi-federal schemes. 135 00:13:38.860 --> 00:13:45.860 One of my favorites was this Clarence Stride, who wrote a couple of books during World War II. 136 00:13:45.860 --> 00:13:51.860 At Union, now with Britain, we had to have this big Anglo-sphere federation. 137 00:13:51.860 --> 00:13:56.860 And if you read his constitution carefully, there's some unfortunate omissions. 138 00:13:56.860 --> 00:14:00.860 There's no Second Amendment in this proposed Anglo-federation. 139 00:14:00.860 --> 00:14:02.860 There are some other problems. 140 00:14:02.860 --> 00:14:06.860 Okay, well, I suppose I need to fast-forward a little. 141 00:14:06.860 --> 00:14:25.860 The League of Nations is reputed to have been a failure solely because the United States did not enter this organization which otherwise would have flourished and kept the peace and prevented World War II and this seems to all be another sort of dubious propositions. 142 00:14:25.860 --> 00:14:34.620 Well, how was the League supposed to function? Well, the League was, had its sort of central 143 00:14:34.620 --> 00:14:42.060 committee in which the major powers would vote when the situation came up and define 144 00:14:42.060 --> 00:14:50.980 the aggressor. Okay. And then it would call upon the members to boycott, put sanctions 145 00:14:50.980 --> 00:14:55.020 on the aggressor, which is a new name for what used to be called a blockade, which was 146 00:14:55.020 --> 00:15:02.420 was at least traditionally considered to be a preliminary action or act of war, but now 147 00:15:02.420 --> 00:15:09.140 this is supposed to be the instrument of peace, so we can see this constant redefinition of 148 00:15:09.140 --> 00:15:10.140 the fundamentals. 149 00:15:10.140 --> 00:15:17.220 Well, Murray Rothbard liked to point out, and does this more than once, that the logic 150 00:15:17.220 --> 00:15:25.620 of Collective Security is something to widen any war that might break out to the greatest 151 00:15:25.620 --> 00:15:27.140 possible degree. 152 00:15:27.140 --> 00:15:35.100 Now everyone has a duty to be on the right side and support the correct side and you 153 00:15:35.100 --> 00:15:42.860 begin to have this notion that every little war that could occur between two minor states 154 00:15:42.860 --> 00:15:46.840 will necessarily mushroom into a much larger conflagration. 155 00:15:48.820 --> 00:15:50.660 Well, in a way, of course, there's an analogy 156 00:15:50.660 --> 00:15:54.140 to the big alliance systems that preceded World War I. 157 00:15:54.140 --> 00:15:55.420 These were an attempt to solve 158 00:15:55.420 --> 00:15:59.060 what the international political theorists 159 00:15:59.060 --> 00:16:01.500 called the self-help problem under the anarchy 160 00:16:01.500 --> 00:16:03.140 that exists between states. 161 00:16:03.140 --> 00:16:05.900 You have big alliances and this makes you safer 162 00:16:05.900 --> 00:16:10.420 because no one will dare to attack your big alliance. 163 00:16:10.420 --> 00:16:15.540 The problem is, of course, if this depends on the controls it did in August of 1914, 164 00:16:15.540 --> 00:16:19.380 then you've got the potential for a very large war. 165 00:16:19.380 --> 00:16:26.620 And it's no accident that this whole League of Nations and United Nations concept 166 00:16:26.620 --> 00:16:30.460 is in a line of descent from the Entente. 167 00:16:30.460 --> 00:16:37.500 It's basically the military alliance of certain Western powers writ large. 168 00:16:37.500 --> 00:16:41.780 and say, well, the Entente was good and defeated the Kaiser, 169 00:16:41.780 --> 00:16:44.580 so we just need to have the same organization 170 00:16:44.580 --> 00:16:47.900 with the same good powers running it on a global scale, 171 00:16:47.900 --> 00:16:50.380 get everyone talked into agreeing to this. 172 00:16:50.380 --> 00:16:51.780 And the UN, quite literally, I mean, 173 00:16:51.780 --> 00:16:54.260 Roosevelt starts talking about United Nations during the war, 174 00:16:54.260 --> 00:16:56.980 there's no organization, it's just his slogan 175 00:16:56.980 --> 00:17:00.640 for the powers that are fighting Germany, Japan and Italy. 176 00:17:01.580 --> 00:17:05.080 This is United Nations, it's clearly the military alliance 177 00:17:05.080 --> 00:17:10.080 that suddenly is said to have given birth to a world order 178 00:17:11.440 --> 00:17:14.000 and a new organization with a charter. 179 00:17:14.000 --> 00:17:15.200 But first I have to say something about 180 00:17:15.200 --> 00:17:18.240 the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. 181 00:17:19.600 --> 00:17:21.280 It's a rather innocent looking document. 182 00:17:21.280 --> 00:17:22.680 It's rather brief. 183 00:17:22.680 --> 00:17:25.160 It's on the web if anybody wants the text. 184 00:17:25.160 --> 00:17:26.680 It's just a couple of articles. 185 00:17:27.560 --> 00:17:31.600 And Secretary Kellogg, in a fit of American idealism, 186 00:17:31.600 --> 00:17:34.840 supposedly went around and got many of the powers 187 00:17:34.840 --> 00:17:37.140 to agree that the war was a bad thing, 188 00:17:38.100 --> 00:17:41.480 and they all agree that they wouldn't resort to war 189 00:17:41.480 --> 00:17:43.600 as an instrument of policy. 190 00:17:43.600 --> 00:17:45.840 Now, of course, all the ratifying powers 191 00:17:45.840 --> 00:17:49.160 in ratifying this innocent sounding document 192 00:17:49.160 --> 00:17:52.200 said that, of course, they all reserved the right to judge 193 00:17:52.200 --> 00:17:57.200 when they had to defend the particular state. 194 00:17:58.080 --> 00:18:00.280 But no, they did agree that war was a bad thing 195 00:18:00.280 --> 00:18:02.920 and they wouldn't do it except in self-defense. 196 00:18:02.920 --> 00:18:04.320 Well, this is incoherent 197 00:18:04.320 --> 00:18:08.400 because you will always say that you're doing this in self-defense. 198 00:18:08.400 --> 00:18:12.240 And so the pact, in a sense, is said to have been a failure. 199 00:18:12.240 --> 00:18:16.320 Now it's coming to be appreciated as a major turn 200 00:18:16.320 --> 00:18:18.660 in the sort of rhetorical development 201 00:18:18.660 --> 00:18:21.040 of these new notions of international law 202 00:18:21.040 --> 00:18:22.760 and collective security. 203 00:18:22.760 --> 00:18:24.760 In fact, part of the legal rationale 204 00:18:24.760 --> 00:18:27.920 for the Nuremberg trials was that all the powers had agreed 205 00:18:27.920 --> 00:18:30.400 that war was outlawed. 206 00:18:30.400 --> 00:18:32.400 So you couldn't launch a war. 207 00:18:32.400 --> 00:18:34.640 Then it followed that anyone who launched a war 208 00:18:34.640 --> 00:18:36.720 was guilty of aggression, 209 00:18:36.720 --> 00:18:38.640 and then they kind of plea bargained everything down 210 00:18:38.640 --> 00:18:41.680 and are up, and they said, well, then this would mean 211 00:18:41.680 --> 00:18:44.600 of course planning an aggressive war would be bad, 212 00:18:44.600 --> 00:18:45.880 and then buying paper clips 213 00:18:45.880 --> 00:18:48.680 to make the aggressive war possible would be bad, 214 00:18:48.680 --> 00:18:50.140 and having the intention would be bad, 215 00:18:50.140 --> 00:18:52.320 and you get a whole kind of English law proliferation 216 00:18:52.320 --> 00:18:55.400 of separate charges once you decide that somebody 217 00:18:56.840 --> 00:19:00.520 was preparing all those years for an aggressive war. 218 00:19:00.520 --> 00:19:05.720 So it's like saying that, well, Saddam Hussein has this regime and he has some weapons. 219 00:19:05.720 --> 00:19:13.320 We say that he intends, by powers of mind reading, we say that he intends to use these for aggressive war, which would be illegal. 220 00:19:13.320 --> 00:19:18.520 Therefore, everything he's done to have a military at all is part of this great crime. 221 00:19:18.520 --> 00:19:29.920 So the distinction between defense and offense, or weapons of offense and defense, is somewhat nebulous anyway, at least it's not completely obvious. 222 00:19:29.920 --> 00:19:31.980 Well, now it just becomes completely arbitrary, 223 00:19:31.980 --> 00:19:35.200 subject to the definition of whoever is deciding 224 00:19:35.200 --> 00:19:36.440 who the aggressors are. 225 00:19:37.560 --> 00:19:41.500 So hence the significance of the Kellogg-Briand fact. 226 00:19:42.440 --> 00:19:47.440 And a number of writers began promoting this new notion. 227 00:19:49.440 --> 00:19:51.680 One of them is Dennis Frank Fleming, 228 00:19:51.680 --> 00:19:53.480 later Cold War revisionism fame, 229 00:19:53.480 --> 00:19:55.560 but he's basically a Wilsonian. 230 00:19:55.560 --> 00:19:58.620 Quincy Wright, he's a real titan in this field. 231 00:19:58.620 --> 00:20:04.220 For years, I thought of him as just a sort of a peace guy, a general kind of guy advocating peace. 232 00:20:04.220 --> 00:20:11.220 Well, it turns out on further examination, all the peace guys are simply advocates of collective security. 233 00:20:11.220 --> 00:20:19.220 There are very few real peace guys in the literature, except for some extreme leftists and Mennonites and libertarians. 234 00:20:19.220 --> 00:20:26.220 They're all collective security guys who believe that the only way to have peace is to impose it by force, 235 00:20:26.220 --> 00:20:31.500 bringing back that paradox where you're making war and calling it peacemaking. 236 00:20:31.500 --> 00:20:36.060 And you begin to see with these writers and then also of course in the practice at Nuremberg and 237 00:20:36.060 --> 00:20:43.020 another later war crimes files and so forth the claim that this new international order 238 00:20:43.020 --> 00:20:48.060 should be able to reach individuals. So you get this whole Madisonian dimension where Madison says 239 00:20:48.060 --> 00:20:53.660 that well the problem with the confederation is that the central government can't reach down to 240 00:20:53.660 --> 00:20:57.260 to individuals and take their money and slap them in jail, 241 00:20:57.260 --> 00:21:00.260 and any proper system, this should be possible. 242 00:21:00.260 --> 00:21:02.700 So you have this constant sort of, 243 00:21:02.700 --> 00:21:03.940 particularly with the American writers, 244 00:21:03.940 --> 00:21:05.740 this constant set of analogies 245 00:21:07.260 --> 00:21:10.240 between American federalism as it turned out 246 00:21:10.240 --> 00:21:13.340 and how the world order should turn out, okay. 247 00:21:13.340 --> 00:21:15.540 Of course, if you think that the way 248 00:21:15.540 --> 00:21:18.020 the American Federation turned out wasn't good, 249 00:21:18.020 --> 00:21:20.620 you might judge these things differently. 250 00:21:20.620 --> 00:21:25.180 But anyway, Secretary of State Henry Stemson and Cordell Hull 251 00:21:25.180 --> 00:21:30.180 went around in the 30s acting as though everyone had agreed 252 00:21:30.840 --> 00:21:33.220 that war was outlawed and war was now a crime, 253 00:21:33.220 --> 00:21:37.340 developing this rhetoric and so forth. 254 00:21:37.340 --> 00:21:39.180 And we see this increasingly employed. 255 00:21:39.180 --> 00:21:42.800 and employed. 256 00:21:47.280 --> 00:21:50.700 And so in short order, we do have the Second World War 257 00:21:50.700 --> 00:21:52.260 with all those complications 258 00:21:53.420 --> 00:21:55.340 and coming together this, the UN Charter, 259 00:21:55.340 --> 00:21:58.320 which is supposed to embody this new thought, 260 00:21:58.320 --> 00:21:59.900 this new international law. 261 00:22:00.780 --> 00:22:04.140 By the way, I should go back and say that, of course, 262 00:22:04.140 --> 00:22:05.900 one of the central points of this new idea 263 00:22:05.900 --> 00:22:09.140 of international law was that, well, neutrality was obsolete 264 00:22:09.140 --> 00:22:10.780 because that's the bad old international law 265 00:22:10.780 --> 00:22:13.580 which assumed that states would just independently go to war 266 00:22:15.740 --> 00:22:17.860 and people could be neutral. 267 00:22:17.860 --> 00:22:19.860 This is bad, you can't be neutral. 268 00:22:19.860 --> 00:22:23.700 And so nobody wants to work on rethinking 269 00:22:23.700 --> 00:22:28.700 or deploying any of these older rules of neutrality, 270 00:22:29.860 --> 00:22:31.900 which I suppose we would think were about the best thing 271 00:22:31.900 --> 00:22:35.200 you could get under the circumstances. 272 00:22:35.200 --> 00:22:45.120 So the U.N. Charter reads like a weird combination of the U.S. Constitution, utopian aspirations, 273 00:22:45.120 --> 00:22:49.760 an ordinary treaty of alliance, and a set of rules for a private club. 274 00:22:49.760 --> 00:22:54.280 And Hans Kelsen has a very biting essay on the preamble to the U.N. Charter in which 275 00:22:54.280 --> 00:23:00.000 he points out this sort of American aspect of it, among other things. 276 00:23:00.000 --> 00:23:06.320 And somehow this is going to make collective security into a going concern, but of course 277 00:23:06.320 --> 00:23:14.640 there's some practical aspects, it has to be something that might actually be practicable. 278 00:23:14.640 --> 00:23:21.120 So you have to have in effect a central committee of the big powers to actually have the weaponry 279 00:23:21.120 --> 00:23:26.060 and then we'll vote, so a majority of these big powers actually will make these determinations 280 00:23:26.060 --> 00:23:29.160 about who's the aggressor, who should be boycotted, who should be sanctioned, who should 281 00:23:29.160 --> 00:23:42.840 and of course this broke down because some of the powers at this level of the organization 282 00:23:42.840 --> 00:23:49.240 weren't speaking to the others so the Cold War cut across the whole happy prospect of 283 00:23:49.240 --> 00:23:56.120 collective security so the certain dodges were resorted to again part of the living 284 00:23:56.120 --> 00:24:26.120 I think, if I'm not mistaken, there got to be this kind of habit of bypassing the Security Council and going to the General Assembly to get a vote on something which, on the textual evidence of the Charter, isn't proper procedure, but it's no different than ratifying NAFTA by a majority vote of the whole Congress, when if it's a treaty it should be ratified by two-thirds of the Senate. So there are certain dodges, typically invented by the Americans, to get around the fact that the 285 00:24:26.120 --> 00:24:28.800 and the Soviet Veto or the threat of a Soviet Veto and so forth. 286 00:24:28.800 --> 00:24:31.720 So there's been some development along these lines. 287 00:24:33.160 --> 00:24:35.480 Now I want to mention, okay, I've already mentioned 288 00:24:35.480 --> 00:24:39.360 the Nuremberg Trials as sort of being a sort of test case 289 00:24:39.360 --> 00:24:41.160 of this new notion. 290 00:24:41.160 --> 00:24:44.280 And there's an interesting critique by a fellow named Schick 291 00:24:44.280 --> 00:24:46.120 in the same journal that I related to, 292 00:24:46.120 --> 00:24:48.840 the American Journal of International Law. 293 00:24:48.840 --> 00:24:52.760 And he points out there were other ways to accomplish this. 294 00:24:52.760 --> 00:24:57.080 I mean, if someone who's just felt need to punish 295 00:24:57.080 --> 00:25:00.340 certain German politicians at the end of World War II, 296 00:25:00.340 --> 00:25:03.760 wouldn't exactly have been impossible to set up 297 00:25:03.760 --> 00:25:07.600 a German court under a German state 298 00:25:07.600 --> 00:25:12.600 and have the enemies of these people handle the case. 299 00:25:13.560 --> 00:25:15.080 You don't need to go through all this rigmarole 300 00:25:15.080 --> 00:25:18.140 of setting these precedents. 301 00:25:19.420 --> 00:25:21.320 Now, there was, as I say, some persistence 302 00:25:21.320 --> 00:25:27.160 To the older school and to the 50s, so that for instance, Borchard writes a kind of blistering 303 00:25:27.160 --> 00:25:33.640 critique of the Truman Doctrine as part of this emerging American globalism under this 304 00:25:33.640 --> 00:25:34.640 kind of rhetoric. 305 00:25:34.640 --> 00:25:39.080 But I want to quote a couple of things from John Bassett Moore because he's just very 306 00:25:39.080 --> 00:25:47.040 lucid and he's one of the older international lawyers and he writes in 1933, the President 307 00:25:47.040 --> 00:25:49.240 So the United States has no power, 308 00:25:49.240 --> 00:25:52.880 either under the Constitution or under international law, 309 00:25:52.880 --> 00:25:54.400 legally to decide the question 310 00:25:54.400 --> 00:25:57.120 of whether a foreign government is de jure, 311 00:25:57.120 --> 00:25:58.800 or in other words, established in conformity 312 00:25:58.800 --> 00:26:00.380 with the Constitution and laws of the country 313 00:26:00.380 --> 00:26:02.400 over which it actually rules. 314 00:26:02.400 --> 00:26:04.660 Nor did Congress have this power. 315 00:26:04.660 --> 00:26:06.400 Congress has the power under the Constitution 316 00:26:06.400 --> 00:26:10.720 to make some policy decisions about retaliations 317 00:26:10.720 --> 00:26:13.080 and things that actually occur during O.R. 318 00:26:13.080 --> 00:26:15.800 But nowhere does it say we are in the business 319 00:26:15.800 --> 00:26:45.800 and the Deciding Who's a Good Government and a Bad Government and this had come up famously when Woodrow Wilson couldn't get a government that he liked in Mexico which was undergoing a horrific revolution and Wilson was just never satisfied with the people who would turn up in power in Mexico City and so he kept saying we can't recognize these bad governments and he issued a general proclamation that this applied to all of Latin America. He was only going to recognize the good governments and he would determine 320 00:26:45.800 --> 00:26:54.800 And of course this tends to interrupt diplomacy and ordinary practice of the courts and so forth when you put the status of the government in doubt. 321 00:26:54.800 --> 00:27:03.800 Traditionally you just ignore all these things that are going on and if the government is there in effective control then you accept that its acts have been legal and so forth. 322 00:27:03.800 --> 00:27:07.800 So here's Wilson opening up this characteristic can of worms. 323 00:27:07.800 --> 00:27:11.800 And this is important of course because this has all come back in a big way to haunt us. 324 00:27:11.800 --> 00:27:22.800 Now, there are all sorts of articles in journals, including the American Journal of International Law, saying, well, there's an emerging right to democratic governance. 325 00:27:22.800 --> 00:27:25.800 Everyone, everywhere in the world has a right to a democratic government. 326 00:27:25.800 --> 00:27:28.800 Well, of course, we see how this plays in the crisis with Iraq. 327 00:27:28.800 --> 00:27:37.800 This is one of the constant themes that the poor Iraqis are suffering, and we owe it to them to bomb them so they can have elections and so on. 328 00:27:37.800 --> 00:27:40.800 So there's a number of these themes that go straight back to Wilson. 329 00:27:44.800 --> 00:27:55.800 But let me read the, I think it's a particularly good quote from John Bassett Moore in this same article in 1933 as this new law is, 330 00:27:55.800 --> 00:27:58.800 or this new conception of international law is emerging. He says, 331 00:27:58.800 --> 00:28:08.800 The tendency to confuse war and peace and to magnify the part which force may play in international affairs not unnaturally followed the so-called world war. 332 00:28:08.800 --> 00:28:22.800 During that great conflict there developed in the ordinary course of things a war madness manifested in the exaltation of force and the belittling of the enduring legal and moral obligations that lie at the foundation of civilized life. 333 00:28:22.800 --> 00:28:27.800 Peaceful processes fell into disrepute. We began to hear of the war to end war. 334 00:28:27.800 --> 00:28:38.300 And the pacifists, enamored of this shibboleth, espoused the shallow creed that international peace could be best assured by the use of force or threats of force. 335 00:28:38.300 --> 00:28:49.800 We were told that pre-existing international law had suddenly become obsolete, and that the world had entered upon a new era in which the general tranquility was to be maintained by sanctions, boycotts, and by war. 336 00:28:49.800 --> 00:29:00.800 The final stage was reached in the notion now rampant that people's may with force and arms exterminate one another without breach of peace so long as they do not call it war. 337 00:29:00.800 --> 00:29:09.800 In this final stage belongs the supposition that the law of neutrality no longer exists and in future wars there will be no more neutrals. 338 00:29:09.800 --> 00:29:19.800 And we're beginning to see this now, there's all this retrospective litigation, all the neutrals who dared to stay out of World War II are in trouble. 339 00:29:19.800 --> 00:29:30.800 I'm sure Portugal will be sued any minute now. Switzerland, of course. The Swedes have it coming. They're all going to be punished for having the neutral during this great war. 340 00:29:30.800 --> 00:29:33.340 Okay, so that's part of the rhetoric. 341 00:29:36.420 --> 00:29:38.760 Now, I can say a lot more about the critical school 342 00:29:38.760 --> 00:29:41.880 because these people like Jessup and Borchardt 343 00:29:41.880 --> 00:29:44.720 and more had quite a lot to say and it's still very good. 344 00:29:44.720 --> 00:29:48.660 And this is why these were the favorite international lawyers 345 00:29:48.660 --> 00:29:52.040 of the old right isolationists. 346 00:29:52.040 --> 00:29:55.220 But I wanna forge ahead to the trajectory 347 00:29:55.220 --> 00:29:58.160 that's then followed from the 50s to the present 348 00:29:58.160 --> 00:29:59.920 by this new school. 349 00:29:59.920 --> 00:30:02.600 and particularly I'm thinking here of the American writers, 350 00:30:02.600 --> 00:30:04.400 although there's analogs elsewhere. 351 00:30:05.320 --> 00:30:06.800 After all, one of the great friends 352 00:30:06.800 --> 00:30:10.520 of the notion of collective security was Maxim Litvinov, 353 00:30:10.520 --> 00:30:13.560 the Soviet foreign minister. 354 00:30:13.560 --> 00:30:14.840 He was always trying to conjure up threats 355 00:30:14.840 --> 00:30:17.120 to collective security in the interest 356 00:30:17.120 --> 00:30:19.760 of getting some shelter for Stalin. 357 00:30:21.420 --> 00:30:24.260 Now, it's interesting that I think you can see the process 358 00:30:24.260 --> 00:30:26.520 worked out in this one journal. 359 00:30:26.520 --> 00:30:31.020 Okay, the American Journal of International Law, 360 00:30:31.020 --> 00:30:34.120 which we'll call agile because they are agile. 361 00:30:34.120 --> 00:30:36.660 Their positions always seem to coincide with an apology 362 00:30:36.660 --> 00:30:40.180 for US foreign policy at any given time. 363 00:30:40.180 --> 00:30:42.560 But you can also follow it very closely 364 00:30:42.560 --> 00:30:44.040 in the career of one writer, 365 00:30:44.040 --> 00:30:48.520 and this is this W. Michael Raisman. 366 00:30:49.500 --> 00:30:51.960 I don't know if he's related to an economist 367 00:30:51.960 --> 00:30:53.140 of this same name. 368 00:30:53.140 --> 00:31:01.140 He's quite fascinating because he begins writing in this journal in 1968. He's now the editor. 369 00:31:01.140 --> 00:31:09.140 And the first article co-authors with the editor then, Meyers and MacDougall, 370 00:31:09.140 --> 00:31:17.140 and it's an explanation of how it's perfectly reasonable to boycott and starve the Rhodasians 371 00:31:17.140 --> 00:31:21.700 for their various crimes, such as claiming independence 372 00:31:21.700 --> 00:31:24.780 from Britain, which oddly enough, we had done that ourselves, 373 00:31:24.780 --> 00:31:27.780 but somehow it's wrong to do it in the 1960s, 374 00:31:27.780 --> 00:31:30.540 particularly if you have a racist regime. 375 00:31:30.540 --> 00:31:33.880 So that's his first contribution, of which I'm aware. 376 00:31:33.880 --> 00:31:38.180 Then, fast forward to 1988, he's writing this long piece 377 00:31:38.180 --> 00:31:41.520 with the co-author, James Silk, about what law applies 378 00:31:41.520 --> 00:31:43.060 to the Afghan conflict. 379 00:31:43.060 --> 00:31:44.540 Well, wouldn't you know it? 380 00:31:44.540 --> 00:31:50.700 The law that applies in the Afghan conflict favors the United States and doesn't favor 381 00:31:50.700 --> 00:31:56.060 the Soviet position. That's surprising. Plus that same year he has a kind of manifesto 382 00:31:56.060 --> 00:32:02.460 in which he says in this journal that the war of the Afghan people is a people's liberation 383 00:32:02.460 --> 00:32:08.380 struggle with an exclamation point. And that's true because at that time they were good Muslim 384 00:32:08.380 --> 00:32:14.260 fanatics whereas later they weren't recently. And he has a piece on war powers under the 385 00:32:14.260 --> 00:32:24.260 The U.S. Constitution in 1989, suggesting that, well, of course, there should be a lot of war powers and the president should really predominate, but there's still some stickiness in the system, needs to be worked out. 386 00:32:24.260 --> 00:32:31.260 By 1990, he's talking about how sovereignty must everywhere give way to the emerging conception of human rights. 387 00:32:31.260 --> 00:32:40.260 Okay, so human rights trump all these old sovereignties, and then so forth, with, I suppose, there'd be an obvious exception to this. 388 00:32:40.260 --> 00:32:54.260 Now here's one of my favorites. Here's a piece in 1994, and it's titled Preparing to Wage Peace for the Creation of an International Peacemaking Command in a Staff College. 389 00:32:54.260 --> 00:33:09.260 He wants West Point for the armed pacifists. I find this quite remarkable in the case of Doublethink and Schizophrenia to propose a war college that's going to maintain peace. 390 00:33:09.260 --> 00:33:14.900 Peace. Well, again, you could fall back on what Tacitus says, that they create a desert 391 00:33:14.900 --> 00:33:21.020 and call it peace. Okay. Great quote. So perhaps it is consistent after all, a longstanding 392 00:33:21.020 --> 00:33:26.740 tradition of Roman imperialism. And then the last article of his I've seen is called In 393 00:33:26.740 --> 00:33:33.380 Defense of World Public Order. Now you have World Public Order. Okay. And this is in October 394 00:33:33.380 --> 00:33:55.380 2001. So this brings me to the present situation, what seem to be the present trends. Actually I'd like to drop back, I guess I've got enough time, and just torture a few things out of this piece he did on Rhodesia with the other writer, MacDougall. 395 00:33:55.380 --> 00:34:07.380 See if I can, well he's saying Britain as an enlightened power refused to grant independence until the Rhodagians had got everything in a row and granted majority rule and that sort of thing. 396 00:34:07.380 --> 00:34:13.380 Okay, Britain's an enlightened power, it's just been certified here. And so what the Rhodagians did is illegal. 397 00:34:13.380 --> 00:34:23.380 And so in the interests of humanity you have to put this down, this terrible rebellion which is then characterized as a unilateral declaration of independence, 398 00:34:23.380 --> 00:34:30.380 and Independence, although one would think that declarations of independence are always a bit unilateral, but this is one of the rhetorical devices. 399 00:34:30.380 --> 00:34:44.380 So he's kind of torn between saying that the UN, since this is a colony that's going, is scheduled to be liberated once the details are worked out and the majority rules, 400 00:34:44.380 --> 00:34:50.380 that it's really under the sovereignty of the UN. He actually uses this term sovereignty of the UN, or they do. 401 00:34:50.380 --> 00:34:58.380 But on other points in the argument, he appeals to the sovereignty of Britain, which is somehow the overseeing power. 402 00:34:58.380 --> 00:35:05.380 So he has a choice of which sovereignty he can bring in if he needs to use the concept of sovereignty. 403 00:35:05.380 --> 00:35:11.380 But now, what justifies this? I mean, how can you say, here's the Rhodesians, they've declared independence, 404 00:35:11.380 --> 00:35:15.380 you don't like their government, you think it's a bad government internally. 405 00:35:15.380 --> 00:35:22.380 But what's the reason for placing them under blockade, even though that's just called sanctions? 406 00:35:22.380 --> 00:35:25.380 How can you blockade them? They aren't doing anything to anybody, 407 00:35:25.380 --> 00:35:28.380 except they have a form of government internally that some people don't like. 408 00:35:28.380 --> 00:35:31.380 Well, it's because they're a threat to peace. 409 00:35:31.380 --> 00:35:36.380 What's a threat to peace? Well, it's a bit subjective, it turns out. 410 00:35:36.380 --> 00:35:42.380 It's a threat to peace, and the Charter turns out to be rather flexible on this. 411 00:35:42.380 --> 00:35:57.380 And he says, the potential effect of power which global elites perceive in the symbols of international authority and can strengthen, and seeing this potential effect of power, the global elites will strengthen and extend the authority of this conception of international law. 412 00:35:57.380 --> 00:35:59.380 So suddenly we do have a living charter. 413 00:35:59.380 --> 00:36:01.980 And he says it's actually good that they don't specify 414 00:36:01.980 --> 00:36:06.980 in the charter very strictly what some of these things mean, 415 00:36:08.300 --> 00:36:11.660 that they didn't define the key terms 416 00:36:11.660 --> 00:36:12.740 like threat to the peace. 417 00:36:12.740 --> 00:36:14.700 This is good, because this means you can decide them 418 00:36:14.700 --> 00:36:16.060 as you go. 419 00:36:16.060 --> 00:36:18.740 So what we have is the legislative model 420 00:36:18.740 --> 00:36:21.540 that Bruno Leone talks about supplanting 421 00:36:21.540 --> 00:36:23.100 the sort of judicial model. 422 00:36:23.100 --> 00:36:25.900 You don't have defined terms, you just make them up 423 00:36:25.900 --> 00:36:27.180 and you say, well, it's threat to the peace 424 00:36:27.180 --> 00:36:29.100 because we say it is. 425 00:36:29.100 --> 00:36:31.020 But then he has a little more, he's got a, 426 00:36:31.020 --> 00:36:33.580 he says that it makes the neighbors feel bad. 427 00:36:33.580 --> 00:36:36.720 So the Africans in neighboring countries will feel bad 428 00:36:36.720 --> 00:36:39.340 and this adds to their tension 429 00:36:39.340 --> 00:36:42.820 and this might ultimately cause a breakdown in peace. 430 00:36:44.000 --> 00:36:44.840 Actually, it never did. 431 00:36:44.840 --> 00:36:47.220 I mean, in South Africa, which is the real poster boy 432 00:36:47.220 --> 00:36:52.100 for evil in this part of the world, supposedly, 433 00:36:52.100 --> 00:36:53.780 was always trying to turn away immigrants 434 00:36:53.780 --> 00:36:54.620 who wanted to move there 435 00:36:54.620 --> 00:36:55.980 because the place was more productive 436 00:36:55.980 --> 00:37:00.980 and the black run regimes, but that's a minor point. 437 00:37:02.220 --> 00:37:04.420 So I find this fascinating, we've already got 438 00:37:04.420 --> 00:37:07.500 the kind of postmodern subjective notion of harm 439 00:37:07.500 --> 00:37:10.540 creeping in, but of course this is what you would want 440 00:37:10.540 --> 00:37:13.040 if you were running an arbitrary system 441 00:37:13.040 --> 00:37:14.940 and pretending it was law, you'd want to be able 442 00:37:14.940 --> 00:37:18.020 to change the meaning or define things as you go, 443 00:37:18.020 --> 00:37:20.620 you'd want a living constitution or a living UN charter 444 00:37:22.180 --> 00:37:25.300 and then so on, otherwise it's not very workable, 445 00:37:25.300 --> 00:37:29.300 People hide behind the guarantees, 446 00:37:29.300 --> 00:37:30.500 and you can have people hiding behind 447 00:37:30.500 --> 00:37:33.220 constitutional guarantees when they're doing bad. 448 00:37:33.220 --> 00:37:35.820 So that's the simple, there's more, 449 00:37:35.820 --> 00:37:37.020 but it's kind of a great article 450 00:37:37.020 --> 00:37:39.220 because it's so symptomatic of everything we hear now, 451 00:37:39.220 --> 00:37:40.780 but this is already in 1968, 452 00:37:40.780 --> 00:37:44.060 so he's 30-some years ahead of his time 453 00:37:44.060 --> 00:37:47.540 in working out this kind of discussion 454 00:37:47.540 --> 00:37:49.840 in relation to Rhodesia. 455 00:37:51.700 --> 00:37:54.900 Okay, now let me see, did I just misplace a page? 456 00:37:54.900 --> 00:37:56.100 Okay, I think I did. 457 00:37:57.840 --> 00:37:58.800 Well, I want to say a little more. 458 00:37:58.800 --> 00:38:01.340 What I think is interesting right now 459 00:38:01.340 --> 00:38:04.380 is the way in which we have this sort of 460 00:38:07.820 --> 00:38:09.560 emergent ideology. 461 00:38:11.040 --> 00:38:13.240 But in a way, there's a tension. 462 00:38:13.240 --> 00:38:14.720 There are people that really believe in this stuff. 463 00:38:14.720 --> 00:38:17.200 There are people who really accept this gospel 464 00:38:17.200 --> 00:38:18.420 of world government. 465 00:38:19.880 --> 00:38:23.820 And now that the Cold War's over 466 00:38:23.820 --> 00:38:41.820 or nobody vetoes anything and one power dominates this organization or has up to a point. I suppose the real ideological internationalists hope to use American power as approximate means of realizing their project. 467 00:38:41.820 --> 00:38:50.820 On the other hand, I suppose you'd have to say that some of these people in the American state apparatus just hope to use the UN as a rhetorical cover and fig leaf. 468 00:38:50.820 --> 00:39:03.820 In general, though, there's a huge amount of overlap between these two positions, and you see this all through the journal that I've been using as sort of my laboratory, American Journal of International Law. 469 00:39:03.820 --> 00:39:15.820 It's very hard to separate out whether these guys actually believe in this UN business, or whether they see it as a convenient ideological cover for the empire, or given the fact they can believe a lot of other kind of things. 470 00:39:15.820 --> 00:39:25.820 There's a tendency in some of the literature now to, again, drag poor manual content as a kind of long-term justification for these notions. 471 00:39:25.820 --> 00:39:30.820 And there's also a continual discussion of the relativity of sovereignty. 472 00:39:30.820 --> 00:39:35.820 After all, you can't just have people out there respected as equally sovereign powers. 473 00:39:35.820 --> 00:39:38.820 And in practice, of course, there was always a limit to that. 474 00:39:38.820 --> 00:39:42.820 But the older international law rested on the notion. 475 00:39:42.820 --> 00:39:47.820 Well, I was saying, well, the notion is bad. After all, if someone were sovereign and did bad things, you couldn't punish them. 476 00:39:47.820 --> 00:39:53.820 But I have a quote here. This is Colin Powell in January saying, 477 00:39:53.820 --> 00:40:00.820 We continue to reserve our sovereign right to take military action against Iraq alone or in a coalition of the willing. 478 00:40:00.820 --> 00:40:04.820 I'm getting tired of thinking about this willing business, but anyway. 479 00:40:04.820 --> 00:40:09.820 So there is one power that will still claim sovereignty when it's convenient 480 00:40:09.820 --> 00:40:13.460 and then adopt this UN rhetoric and derogation 481 00:40:13.460 --> 00:40:15.420 of anybody else's claims to do 482 00:40:17.240 --> 00:40:19.540 something the United States doesn't want done. 483 00:40:23.000 --> 00:40:24.840 Now, as I've said before, 484 00:40:24.840 --> 00:40:28.320 I think one of the worst aspects of this, 485 00:40:28.320 --> 00:40:30.780 and you can see it kind of putting 486 00:40:30.780 --> 00:40:34.340 the present peace movement in a rhetorical corner 487 00:40:34.340 --> 00:40:36.000 is the appeal to the UN, 488 00:40:36.000 --> 00:40:38.300 as though the UN were the source of the undercut 489 00:40:38.300 --> 00:40:40.060 I'm gonna have to find a new argument 490 00:40:40.060 --> 00:40:42.500 if the United States manages to conjure up votes 491 00:40:43.620 --> 00:40:47.320 in the Security Council for the much promoted war. 492 00:40:49.820 --> 00:40:52.300 But on the face of it, by appealing to the UN 493 00:40:52.300 --> 00:40:54.900 and treating this as a source of law, 494 00:40:54.900 --> 00:40:56.700 then anything the UN said was a just war 495 00:40:56.700 --> 00:40:58.460 would be a just war, and that would be the end of it 496 00:40:58.460 --> 00:41:00.900 because it's a legislative model 497 00:41:00.900 --> 00:41:02.740 of how these problems are resolved. 498 00:41:02.740 --> 00:41:04.900 So that's an interesting problem right there. 499 00:41:08.300 --> 00:41:38.300 Let's see, this is sort of an attempt at reconstructing some of this ideologically and historically and it's still a bit rough but there's a huge amount of material on this that I've gone through and so I hope this has been of some use in orienting 500 00:41:38.300 --> 00:42:05.510 I will recommend it once it's done and I've got the final version. I will recommend it over this piece done by two scholars at the Cato Institute who have decided that everything has turned out for the best and that international law has actually much improved and it's all because of transaction costs and spontaneous order. I think we can do a little different approach than that. Thank you.