Well, by some time in the 17th century, the transition from old reviews on states, war and peace,
transition from this old review to a new paradigm which centered on sovereign states as sources of law
and final judges in their own cause was pretty much completed.
And so this was the end of most attempts to apply any kind of just war theory.
Now, some of the writers, of course, manage to sound as if they're in that tradition,
so this trajectory, sort of Suarez, Grodius, Pufendorz, Vattel, sums up the development
with each writer more and more adopting a positivist position.
And we can add in Machiavelli, Bodane, Hobbes, and some other people entirely on the side
and of this notion of unbounded sovereignty and the heroic unity of the sovereign will
embodied in the ruler and increasingly the abstract modern state and in the more popular
forms of government as they come into being inherent from the monarchies this notion of
unbounded sovereignty and positive law and finally passing from republicanism to liberalism
and then to mass democracy.
Now possibly the less serious resistance
to the ideological victory of sovereign states
was in the work of Erasmus of Rotterdam
in the 16th century.
But unfortunately, he hampered his analysis
by a belief in the necessity in the end of states.
And this is what Erasmus says
in one place in his many writings.
He says, once you have granted imperial rule,
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.
Short of adopting the posture of someone like Etienne de la Boétie, those who acknowledged
the manifold evils of war were reduced to advocating practical adjustments within the
prevailing system of nation-states.
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.
Rules, and I suppose it's fair to say
that if we wanna call this progress,
then the high point is reached
in the 18th and 19th centuries.
As near as I can find out, even the campaigns of Napoleon
tend to have been conducted within some
or all of the prevailing rules.
So the big exception in the 19th century
that comes to mind at least in wars conducted between states,
where the people were of European ancestry,
the big exception is probably Lincoln and his war.
Gustav de Molinari talks a lot about this
in an essay published in 1854,
and I've used some of this before in a paper on Mises,
but I'll summarize it quickly.
Molinari said that economic progress has resulted
from the Separation of the Personnel and Materials of War
from those of Peace.
And a lot of progress had been realized
along the lines of adopting and following rules
that did not penalize the ordinary,
what's the word I want?
Well, the ordinary things that go on in society,
production, all the peaceful arts
that limited the destruction as much as possible
to the Contending Armies.
And he said the only problem was
that this hadn't been extended.
These rules still needed extending to naval warfare
where a number of practices,
seizure and destruction of property on the high seas
were normal.
And he mentioned the draft treaty in 1780
between Sweden, Denmark, United States, Prussia, Austria,
Portugal and the two Sicilies,
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
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.
It's interesting that the early American statesmen were quite sound on this.
Of course, the United States, this confederation being a fairly weak emerging power, probably saw some advantage in having the rules changed,
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.
Okay, so Molinari even suggested that if there was some necessity felt to maintain a blockade,
That a distinction could be made between a military blockade and a commercial blockade, and the second would be illegitimate from his standpoint.
So if the enemy has a port that's actually a naval facility for the armed forces, you could blockade that.
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.
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.
In any event, they don't tell us whose lives were saved specifically, so the whole argument I think breaks down.
Okay, so let us stipulate then that some rules were adopted.
There had been some progress along these lines for a couple of centuries,
and of course with exceptions and slippage.
World War I, I think more than anything else, is this great disaster
that made all sorts of horrible things possible in the 20th century.
In World War I we see the starvation blockade, we see submarine warfare,
We see all sorts of things that are hard to reconcile with the older rules.
It's interesting that so much of the initiative that leads to this breakdown of the older international law
is undertaken by the then near hegemonic power, Britain,
operating out of a kind of cynical view of what it could get away with.
So one has to always watch the hegemonic power, it seems to me.
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.
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,
and then require everyone to boycott or even attack this supposed aggressor.
And this would be a way to enforce peace.
Of course, dodging the usual paradox
that they're basically going to war,
the coalition of powers to enforce peace,
it sounds like an old fashioned alliance,
but now it's got a nice rhetorical glass.
So by sometime in 1915, you begin to hear a lot of discussion
in well-placed upper-class British circles
about the need for some sort of league to enforce peace.
And the idea, of course, is famously picked up
by Woodrow Wilson, and upon U.S. entry into World War I, Wilson is determined to sell
this notion of a League to enforce peace.
Now, of course, this has some precedent. In 1735, Jules Cardinal Alberoni proposed a League
of Christian Princes to eugenicate their differences, keep the peace, and make war on the Turks.
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.
I don't know that that would actually be Kant's position.
And what's interesting is that you can follow this struggle between the older notion of international law and the new international law,
International Law, which we associate with the UN and these other institutions.
You can trace a lot of this in one journal.
You can look at the American Journal of International Law from the early 20th century down to the
present and see the battle being fought out.
Now the short story version is that the new international law thinkers won the battle probably
by the mid-1950s.
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.
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,
There's a number of these writers who are still complaining about these trends.
Some of them are still writing in the early 50s but then are swept away in the enthusiasm for the Cold War
or because they're being overtaken by a younger generation who believe in these new notions of collective security.
And this amounts, of course, to redefining the whole nature of war and peace
and international relations and international law in a very fundamental way.
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,
saying in effect that, well, the whole thing breaks down conceptually because you can't quite say it's a world government,
Although some thinkers decided you had to go to a world government, that would be the only way to resolve the problem.
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,
the only way they can think of to prevent war is in effect to have some big enforcement power on a global scale.
You see this clearly in the writings of someone like Lionel Robbins.
All these latter day liberals have a tendency to think that this is the ideal solution,
some sort of world government is unfeasible and dangerous as that might sound to the rest of us.
As a quote from the the New Republic of all sources in 1915 saying the League of Peace,
that's what they're calling this proposal, would either be the old imperialistic alliance under
a dishonest name, or else it would be a highly conservative federation which would keep its members in a very straight pacifist jacket.
There is no stopping point between at a league to prevent war.
Such a league would either grow to a world federation or would break up in civil war.
So the war problem is reintroduced in some other fashion.
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.
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.
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.
One of my favorites was this Clarence Stride, who wrote a couple of books during World War II.
At Union, now with Britain, we had to have this big Anglo-sphere federation.
And if you read his constitution carefully, there's some unfortunate omissions.
There's no Second Amendment in this proposed Anglo-federation.
There are some other problems.
Okay, well, I suppose I need to fast-forward a little.
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.
Well, how was the League supposed to function? Well, the League was, had its sort of central
committee in which the major powers would vote when the situation came up and define
the aggressor. Okay. And then it would call upon the members to boycott, put sanctions
on the aggressor, which is a new name for what used to be called a blockade, which was
was at least traditionally considered to be a preliminary action or act of war, but now
this is supposed to be the instrument of peace, so we can see this constant redefinition of
the fundamentals.
Well, Murray Rothbard liked to point out, and does this more than once, that the logic
of Collective Security is something to widen any war that might break out to the greatest
possible degree.
Now everyone has a duty to be on the right side and support the correct side and you
begin to have this notion that every little war that could occur between two minor states
will necessarily mushroom into a much larger conflagration.
Well, in a way, of course, there's an analogy
to the big alliance systems that preceded World War I.
These were an attempt to solve
what the international political theorists
called the self-help problem under the anarchy
that exists between states.
You have big alliances and this makes you safer
because no one will dare to attack your big alliance.
The problem is, of course, if this depends on the controls it did in August of 1914,
then you've got the potential for a very large war.
And it's no accident that this whole League of Nations and United Nations concept
is in a line of descent from the Entente.
It's basically the military alliance of certain Western powers writ large.
and say, well, the Entente was good and defeated the Kaiser,
so we just need to have the same organization
with the same good powers running it on a global scale,
get everyone talked into agreeing to this.
And the UN, quite literally, I mean,
Roosevelt starts talking about United Nations during the war,
there's no organization, it's just his slogan
for the powers that are fighting Germany, Japan and Italy.
This is United Nations, it's clearly the military alliance
that suddenly is said to have given birth to a world order
and a new organization with a charter.
But first I have to say something about
the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928.
It's a rather innocent looking document.
It's rather brief.
It's on the web if anybody wants the text.
It's just a couple of articles.
And Secretary Kellogg, in a fit of American idealism,
supposedly went around and got many of the powers
to agree that the war was a bad thing,
and they all agree that they wouldn't resort to war
as an instrument of policy.
Now, of course, all the ratifying powers
in ratifying this innocent sounding document
said that, of course, they all reserved the right to judge
when they had to defend the particular state.
But no, they did agree that war was a bad thing
and they wouldn't do it except in self-defense.
Well, this is incoherent
because you will always say that you're doing this in self-defense.
And so the pact, in a sense, is said to have been a failure.
Now it's coming to be appreciated as a major turn
in the sort of rhetorical development
of these new notions of international law
and collective security.
In fact, part of the legal rationale
for the Nuremberg trials was that all the powers had agreed
that war was outlawed.
So you couldn't launch a war.
Then it followed that anyone who launched a war
was guilty of aggression,
and then they kind of plea bargained everything down
and are up, and they said, well, then this would mean
of course planning an aggressive war would be bad,
and then buying paper clips
to make the aggressive war possible would be bad,
and having the intention would be bad,
and you get a whole kind of English law proliferation
of separate charges once you decide that somebody
was preparing all those years for an aggressive war.
So it's like saying that, well, Saddam Hussein has this regime and he has some weapons.
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.
Therefore, everything he's done to have a military at all is part of this great crime.
So the distinction between defense and offense, or weapons of offense and defense, is somewhat nebulous anyway, at least it's not completely obvious.
Well, now it just becomes completely arbitrary,
subject to the definition of whoever is deciding
who the aggressors are.
So hence the significance of the Kellogg-Briand fact.
And a number of writers began promoting this new notion.
One of them is Dennis Frank Fleming,
later Cold War revisionism fame,
but he's basically a Wilsonian.
Quincy Wright, he's a real titan in this field.
For years, I thought of him as just a sort of a peace guy, a general kind of guy advocating peace.
Well, it turns out on further examination, all the peace guys are simply advocates of collective security.
There are very few real peace guys in the literature, except for some extreme leftists and Mennonites and libertarians.
They're all collective security guys who believe that the only way to have peace is to impose it by force,
bringing back that paradox where you're making war and calling it peacemaking.
And you begin to see with these writers and then also of course in the practice at Nuremberg and
another later war crimes files and so forth the claim that this new international order
should be able to reach individuals. So you get this whole Madisonian dimension where Madison says
that well the problem with the confederation is that the central government can't reach down to
to individuals and take their money and slap them in jail,
and any proper system, this should be possible.
So you have this constant sort of,
particularly with the American writers,
this constant set of analogies
between American federalism as it turned out
and how the world order should turn out, okay.
Of course, if you think that the way
the American Federation turned out wasn't good,
you might judge these things differently.
But anyway, Secretary of State Henry Stemson and Cordell Hull
went around in the 30s acting as though everyone had agreed
that war was outlawed and war was now a crime,
developing this rhetoric and so forth.
And we see this increasingly employed.
and employed.
And so in short order, we do have the Second World War
with all those complications
and coming together this, the UN Charter,
which is supposed to embody this new thought,
this new international law.
By the way, I should go back and say that, of course,
one of the central points of this new idea
of international law was that, well, neutrality was obsolete
because that's the bad old international law
which assumed that states would just independently go to war
and people could be neutral.
This is bad, you can't be neutral.
And so nobody wants to work on rethinking
or deploying any of these older rules of neutrality,
which I suppose we would think were about the best thing
you could get under the circumstances.
So the U.N. Charter reads like a weird combination of the U.S. Constitution, utopian aspirations,
an ordinary treaty of alliance, and a set of rules for a private club.
And Hans Kelsen has a very biting essay on the preamble to the U.N. Charter in which
he points out this sort of American aspect of it, among other things.
And somehow this is going to make collective security into a going concern, but of course
there's some practical aspects, it has to be something that might actually be practicable.
So you have to have in effect a central committee of the big powers to actually have the weaponry
and then we'll vote, so a majority of these big powers actually will make these determinations
about who's the aggressor, who should be boycotted, who should be sanctioned, who should
and of course this broke down because some of the powers at this level of the organization
weren't speaking to the others so the Cold War cut across the whole happy prospect of
collective security so the certain dodges were resorted to again part of the living
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
and the Soviet Veto or the threat of a Soviet Veto and so forth.
So there's been some development along these lines.
Now I want to mention, okay, I've already mentioned
the Nuremberg Trials as sort of being a sort of test case
of this new notion.
And there's an interesting critique by a fellow named Schick
in the same journal that I related to,
the American Journal of International Law.
And he points out there were other ways to accomplish this.
I mean, if someone who's just felt need to punish
certain German politicians at the end of World War II,
wouldn't exactly have been impossible to set up
a German court under a German state
and have the enemies of these people handle the case.
You don't need to go through all this rigmarole
of setting these precedents.
Now, there was, as I say, some persistence
To the older school and to the 50s, so that for instance, Borchard writes a kind of blistering
critique of the Truman Doctrine as part of this emerging American globalism under this
kind of rhetoric.
But I want to quote a couple of things from John Bassett Moore because he's just very
lucid and he's one of the older international lawyers and he writes in 1933, the President
So the United States has no power,
either under the Constitution or under international law,
legally to decide the question
of whether a foreign government is de jure,
or in other words, established in conformity
with the Constitution and laws of the country
over which it actually rules.
Nor did Congress have this power.
Congress has the power under the Constitution
to make some policy decisions about retaliations
and things that actually occur during O.R.
But nowhere does it say we are in the business
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
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.
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.
So here's Wilson opening up this characteristic can of worms.
And this is important of course because this has all come back in a big way to haunt us.
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.
Everyone, everywhere in the world has a right to a democratic government.
Well, of course, we see how this plays in the crisis with Iraq.
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.
So there's a number of these themes that go straight back to Wilson.
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,
or this new conception of international law is emerging. He says,
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.
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.
Peaceful processes fell into disrepute. We began to hear of the war to end war.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Okay, so that's part of the rhetoric.
Now, I can say a lot more about the critical school
because these people like Jessup and Borchardt
and more had quite a lot to say and it's still very good.
And this is why these were the favorite international lawyers
of the old right isolationists.
But I wanna forge ahead to the trajectory
that's then followed from the 50s to the present
by this new school.
and particularly I'm thinking here of the American writers,
although there's analogs elsewhere.
After all, one of the great friends
of the notion of collective security was Maxim Litvinov,
the Soviet foreign minister.
He was always trying to conjure up threats
to collective security in the interest
of getting some shelter for Stalin.
Now, it's interesting that I think you can see the process
worked out in this one journal.
Okay, the American Journal of International Law,
which we'll call agile because they are agile.
Their positions always seem to coincide with an apology
for US foreign policy at any given time.
But you can also follow it very closely
in the career of one writer,
and this is this W. Michael Raisman.
I don't know if he's related to an economist
of this same name.
He's quite fascinating because he begins writing in this journal in 1968. He's now the editor.
And the first article co-authors with the editor then, Meyers and MacDougall,
and it's an explanation of how it's perfectly reasonable to boycott and starve the Rhodasians
for their various crimes, such as claiming independence
from Britain, which oddly enough, we had done that ourselves,
but somehow it's wrong to do it in the 1960s,
particularly if you have a racist regime.
So that's his first contribution, of which I'm aware.
Then, fast forward to 1988, he's writing this long piece
with the co-author, James Silk, about what law applies
to the Afghan conflict.
Well, wouldn't you know it?
The law that applies in the Afghan conflict favors the United States and doesn't favor
the Soviet position. That's surprising. Plus that same year he has a kind of manifesto
in which he says in this journal that the war of the Afghan people is a people's liberation
struggle with an exclamation point. And that's true because at that time they were good Muslim
fanatics whereas later they weren't recently. And he has a piece on war powers under the
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.
By 1990, he's talking about how sovereignty must everywhere give way to the emerging conception of human rights.
Okay, so human rights trump all these old sovereignties, and then so forth, with, I suppose, there'd be an obvious exception to this.
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.
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.
Peace. Well, again, you could fall back on what Tacitus says, that they create a desert
and call it peace. Okay. Great quote. So perhaps it is consistent after all, a longstanding
tradition of Roman imperialism. And then the last article of his I've seen is called In
Defense of World Public Order. Now you have World Public Order. Okay. And this is in October
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.
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.
Okay, Britain's an enlightened power, it's just been certified here. And so what the Rhodagians did is illegal.
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,
and Independence, although one would think that declarations of independence are always a bit unilateral, but this is one of the rhetorical devices.
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,
that it's really under the sovereignty of the UN. He actually uses this term sovereignty of the UN, or they do.
But on other points in the argument, he appeals to the sovereignty of Britain, which is somehow the overseeing power.
So he has a choice of which sovereignty he can bring in if he needs to use the concept of sovereignty.
But now, what justifies this? I mean, how can you say, here's the Rhodesians, they've declared independence,
you don't like their government, you think it's a bad government internally.
But what's the reason for placing them under blockade, even though that's just called sanctions?
How can you blockade them? They aren't doing anything to anybody,
except they have a form of government internally that some people don't like.
Well, it's because they're a threat to peace.
What's a threat to peace? Well, it's a bit subjective, it turns out.
It's a threat to peace, and the Charter turns out to be rather flexible on this.
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.
So suddenly we do have a living charter.
And he says it's actually good that they don't specify
in the charter very strictly what some of these things mean,
that they didn't define the key terms
like threat to the peace.
This is good, because this means you can decide them
as you go.
So what we have is the legislative model
that Bruno Leone talks about supplanting
the sort of judicial model.
You don't have defined terms, you just make them up
and you say, well, it's threat to the peace
because we say it is.
But then he has a little more, he's got a,
he says that it makes the neighbors feel bad.
So the Africans in neighboring countries will feel bad
and this adds to their tension
and this might ultimately cause a breakdown in peace.
Actually, it never did.
I mean, in South Africa, which is the real poster boy
for evil in this part of the world, supposedly,
was always trying to turn away immigrants
who wanted to move there
because the place was more productive
and the black run regimes, but that's a minor point.
So I find this fascinating, we've already got
the kind of postmodern subjective notion of harm
creeping in, but of course this is what you would want
if you were running an arbitrary system
and pretending it was law, you'd want to be able
to change the meaning or define things as you go,
you'd want a living constitution or a living UN charter
and then so on, otherwise it's not very workable,
People hide behind the guarantees,
and you can have people hiding behind
constitutional guarantees when they're doing bad.
So that's the simple, there's more,
but it's kind of a great article
because it's so symptomatic of everything we hear now,
but this is already in 1968,
so he's 30-some years ahead of his time
in working out this kind of discussion
in relation to Rhodesia.
Okay, now let me see, did I just misplace a page?
Okay, I think I did.
Well, I want to say a little more.
What I think is interesting right now
is the way in which we have this sort of
emergent ideology.
But in a way, there's a tension.
There are people that really believe in this stuff.
There are people who really accept this gospel
of world government.
And now that the Cold War's over
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And there's also a continual discussion of the relativity of sovereignty.
After all, you can't just have people out there respected as equally sovereign powers.
And in practice, of course, there was always a limit to that.
But the older international law rested on the notion.
Well, I was saying, well, the notion is bad. After all, if someone were sovereign and did bad things, you couldn't punish them.
But I have a quote here. This is Colin Powell in January saying,
We continue to reserve our sovereign right to take military action against Iraq alone or in a coalition of the willing.
I'm getting tired of thinking about this willing business, but anyway.
So there is one power that will still claim sovereignty when it's convenient
and then adopt this UN rhetoric and derogation
of anybody else's claims to do
something the United States doesn't want done.
Now, as I've said before,
I think one of the worst aspects of this,
and you can see it kind of putting
the present peace movement in a rhetorical corner
is the appeal to the UN,
as though the UN were the source of the undercut
I'm gonna have to find a new argument
if the United States manages to conjure up votes
in the Security Council for the much promoted war.
But on the face of it, by appealing to the UN
and treating this as a source of law,
then anything the UN said was a just war
would be a just war, and that would be the end of it
because it's a legislative model
of how these problems are resolved.
So that's an interesting problem right there.
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
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.