States, Sovereignty, and History

0:00In the program, the topic, this topic is listed as state sovereignty and history, which is what I'm talking about. My title is Sovereignty International Law and the Triumph of Anglo-American Cunning. But anyway, that's just me. This all started out because they kept offering us more wars. I mean, I would have been happy to work on some other areas. 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. 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.

1:06And 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. 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. But I think a very pointed response. So we've kind of forced into this same activity. The only good thing about having more of this interesting foreign policy is that it tends to polarize. Polarization, as Murray would have said, is good.

1:51It makes us more radical. It makes us try to get closer to the fundamental question. So if that's what they want to do, fine. We accept the challenge. Okay, well, let's talk about states and the state system. The state system, as we know it, at least symbolically arises with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the era of the so-called Wars of Religion, and established a rule-bound cartel of sovereign territorial states. I take this cartel term from Guido Hulsman. And in this cartel, the states are externally considered equal to one another in standing. They're internally hierarchical, so the state's sovereign internally, and you have to obey the rules of your rebel.

2:40And then outwardly, the states at least make some attempt to treat each other by the same rules, and they have developed a whole complex set of diplomatic rules and procedures. 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 The competition is European states begin sending out explorers and annexing territory and making wild claims.

3:29You know, I claim, you know, this continent in the name of so-and-so, and then they'd fight about that. And so there'd be negotiations and also some actual battles in these territories for control. Now, of course, the people are fighting in, say, the Americas or Africa and elsewhere aren't considered part of the state system. One reason being that they're generally infidels, but they also often don't have a state, so they don't come within whatever few benefits might arise from this system. Now, as the state system comes into play then in the 17th century, 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.

4:22And 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. But you had to kind of deduce it from seeing what actually was done in different places, compare the customs and the laws. And they admitted there could be some deviations from strict natural law, so some place over here might, by municipal law, allow slavery, which seemed to be a bit of a contradiction to this kind. So it left it kind of under a moral cloud, but nonetheless this is a practical sort of science The State System is horizontal with relations between the units considered at least theoretically equal, whereas internally we have a vertical relationship between the state and the population.

5:25And they're being no agreed upon superior, because in 1648, among other things, 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. 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. 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. Okay.

6:12Surviving by self-help and agreement and other measures. Now, Ian Shaw, a noted international lawyer, says that actually states tend to obey the prevailing rules much more than you'd expect. There is a way in which there is cooperation. In fact, there's now a whole new school of social constructivism, and they're talking about how, gosh, ideas are important, and we have to think about ideas and history, as opposed to some other schools of international relations. I'm afraid they're probably going to take a postmodern turn and go off in some weird corner, but nonetheless. So I want to take a little time to say a little bit more about sovereignty as such, since now we're hearing from so many quarters that it's withering away and it's being relativized and it's going to give way to a new secular millennium to be led by the UN or the United States, whichever gets there first.

7:14It's a rather restrictive choice. Well, the celebrated C.H. McIlwain said that in Rome we have the first actual sovereign But then he chides the Romans for not theorizing sovereignty. The Romans had dominion in the... Romans never admitted to having an actual frontier. There was a line, it was just they hadn't conquered the next thing. The Romans are a bit like the Americans. They think their institutions are so great that everybody should enjoy them. But in the Middle Ages, of course, there is no overarching state-like entity of this sort. And what you find in the Middle Ages is a jurisdictional multiplicity and relative sovereignty with competing claims of the papacy and the German emperor to supervise the whole system.

8:05And this rested on a non-event, and a non-event is the failure of anyone to reproduce an empire in Western Europe after the Roman project collapsed. 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. 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. Okay. Whereas the modern notion of sovereignty is that the ruler makes the law, is in some sense the source of the law. 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 and a whole process of state-building competition.

9:08This might be the downside of European decentralization in a way. But nonetheless, out of the struggle, we begin to see, certainly in the 16th century, the rise of larger territorial states who eliminate some of the competitors and then develop the state system to handle competition amongst these larger units. And they also get rid of some competing political forums. These are the city-states in Italy, and in the north, the city leagues, the Hanseatic League and so forth, which is an interesting attempt at solving these protection problems, okay, these, the leagues. And the territorial monarchies do this by tending to exclude units that aren't like their own from any participation in the system, 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.

10:14Now, we have these states competing, or these monarchies, and larger ones surviving the struggle. 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. and the modern notion of sovereignty in France, England and Spain. There are a couple of steps in this. I'll try to be brief. One thing the kings do is seize on the church notion of the corpus mysticum, the mystical body. And then they say, well, actually, the realm is something like that. There's a sort of mystical body there and the implication there is, of course, Of course, on really rare occasions, you might be morally obligated to sacrifice yourself for the faith.

11:00Well, certainly this ought to be true. You ought to sacrifice yourself for the king once in a while in an emergency. 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. This is a great classical Republican notion. And also, as this theory of sovereignty is being created, there's a lot of people using organic analogies in which the realm, the state is a body, the people are parts of the body, the king is the head. And now we derive these organic analogies, except when someone like Hobbes, Hegel or Lincoln says the same thing in different languages, somehow it's more persuasive and then finally the law of corporations is appropriated by writers on sovereignty because you hadn't had the development of legal theory of corporations to explain the guilds and other bodies municipalities that are risen in the later Middle Ages and they're saying well actually the the king he's just the most inclusive corporation except the you

12:11can't get out of that one the membership isn't really optional but there's just 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 These New Taxes and State Building and so on. Okay, well, let me probably pick up speed here. Well, some of the theorists of this new kind of bottomless sovereignty are Bartolus of Sassaforato, Machiavelli, Jean Baudin and Thomas Hobbes.

13:02It wouldn't be up for sovereign. It wouldn't be right to just think of the poor king as just an agent providing a, actually providing protection to people and ask for it. Now, that would just be wrong. So, as Jacques Maritain points out, under their conception, the king becomes a separate and transcendental whole, and sovereignty is thus a property held by someone, instead of just a means to its security provision, to which self-owners have agreed. So the whole idea of agency disappears from the picture, pretty much. There's a little trickery, though, because Hobbes will still use the language of contract, compact, or covenant to show that people consented originally. 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.

13:51It's very much like Harry Jaffa's view of the American Constitution, of course. 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. So property right is also on sufferance. It's just something conceded to you by the Chicagoites or Hobbes from the King. Now, again, with some later writers like Hegel, you get an even less, I would say, hard to think of Hobbes as a liberal. Some writers insist on using this because of certain notions he uses.

14:40He actually talks about individuals, but only to get rid of them in his analysis. But these writers like Hegel don't even really think about individuals that much. are all part of various complicated holistic bodies and internal relations take over and so on. But for Hegel, the state really comes into its own in a war. And then it's the rallying point for the common good, and this is uncontestable. And this is when the state is most state-like. So it's the same thing Randolph Burns says during World War I, Robert Hegel thinks this is good, and Morton didn't think it was so good, but yes, war is the health of the state.

15:25Okay, now some people have written that there's a sort of North American exception, that the American Revolution proceeded along lines such that we didn't really sign on knowingly for this notion of sovereignty, the notion that would have pleased the international lawyers. And this is interesting, and it's a respectable argument, but of course somewhat denied in practice. John Taylor of Caroline, in my opinion, is the most interesting writer on this. 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.

16:11And then we, in the course of the American Revolution, some portion of the people set up new institutions to provide for their security. At a later stage, delegates from these 13 political societies organized another agent to protect their interests. But nowhere does he see the necessity for using the notion of sovereignty. 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. I think it's a mistake to adopt it at all. In relative terms, I'd defend the States, but anyway.

16:59So it was a nice try from John Taylor, but the opposing view had always been present, I mean Americans read Blackstone. Blackstone says there on like page two that there has to be a single power that is final and absolute in any state. Blackstone already gives you this. And in my opinion most of the prominent founding fathers were essentially Hobbesians who managed to use a certain amount of Republican and Liberal language while pursuing their Hobbesian assumptions. And I'll grant that Hobbes is good on describing states in a way. I can't see these ever really giving you any reason to want one. It's another matter. In any case, so then we have this big struggle over the implications of some of these ideas.

17:46So 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, Arrestus Brownson and the St. Louis Higalians go around proclaiming the absolute sovereignty of the Union. It's a question of which unit is sovereign. They say it's the Union, and then the sovereignty is pretty much absolute, except sometimes they attribute it to the people, which is just a dishonest dodge that doesn't really need to detain us very much, except that it's very powerful. I mean, it has ideological import that you go around telling the people are sovereign. Okay, fine, but what does it really mean? It means the government is sovereign.

18:34And every four years you get to pretend that you're part of the sovereignty by wasting your time voting. Now one of the St. Louis Galions, Denton Snyder, these guys are actually quite influential. One of the St. Louis Galions became one of the first U.S. Commissioners of Education in the 1880s. Reverend Rush Dooney has a very interesting book that traces some of these thinkers through, down towards John Dewey and other perpetrators. So Denton Snyder saw the American Union after the war as the affirmation, quote, of all particular states in a larger whole which recreates them in such a process, as Merle, Merle, Merle, Merle-Curdy is now paraphrasing here, Snyder's view, such a process might well end in the development of a world state Corresponding to the world spirit, and the American federal system was the model.

19:31So now it's suddenly, well, we solved our problem with the Union, and now we just give this to the world. Just bring them in. You know, okay. And this is a constant theme, by the way, that I've been running into, and more I go through the political science literature. You start in 1880 and move forward, and it's always there. Now, one of the other aspects of this war, which I won't go into, is total war. 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. But it also corresponds to the legal concept that's in place by now, which is positive law.

20:19And as Mr. Brankowski, who writes on these things, says, in the positivist scheme of things, people have no national standing. The state determines their rights. So if the state is threatened by a rebellion, we can just do anything it needs to do. Yes, there's no national standing. Okay. So you wouldn't be surprised to have total war undertaken by people that have a positive law of view. I mean, others might too, but it seems less problematic this way. Okay, well, how has the state system been operating since its inception? I mean, what has it meant that states claim sovereignty and they clash once in a while? Well, one thing it means is that it has direct implications for the process of state building.

21:08So by the late 13th century, the kings in Sicily and France were collecting taxes. This is when you begin to see something like regular tax collection, and it was for the defense of the realm. They say, well, we just have to have this, you've got to pay it, that's it, for the defense of the realm. So taxation, in a way, is the original war power. I'm going to talk about what the war powers might be, this vague notion that comes up from time to time. And then they invent the formal declaration of war. I mean, we have a lot of people now, every time the president maneuvers some devious fashion into a war, and in Congress votes their support, but doesn't actually say they're declaring it, they don't say they're declaring it, then we get people that say, oh, they should be held to declaring war.

21:53The problem with that is, if they actually declared war, they've got a blank check. It's even worse, in a way. I mean, it's constitutionally more honest, The declaration of war opens up a whole set of theoretical consequences. This is why they invented declarations of war, so that they could say, well, we're having a public war, everybody's involved, you all have to contribute, some of you have to go get killed, and so on. So it's actually part of the same process. Nobody ever declares defense. Why is that? Okay. Okay, so then, as these kings are competing, and maybe in the, of course, they're stuck for revenue. So the successful state, you know, will conquer some territory, get more revenue, build bigger forces to conquer something else.

22:43And there's a kind of cycle for the successful ones. So it's extraction, conquest, taxing, extraction, or something. Charles Tilly talks about this. But there's a limit. And this is why they provoke all these revolts in the 17th century. 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. 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. So you begin to get to perfection of public debt with the invention of the institutionalization of dishonest banking in London.

23:39Now, what's going on with the legal theorists? 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. So you've got a sort of trajectory, Suarez, Crotias, Pufendorf, Vattel. 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. They're simply adapting natural law language. Each writer is a little bit worse than the other. You're actually beginning to espouse a positive law doctrine within a kind of natural law language. So some of them will say, well, suppose you just have natural individuals and they'd have certain rights and duties to each other.

24:28Well, each of the kings is sort of like a natural individual, and so they'd have certain rights of the same kind. And you begin to have all sorts of rather dubious analogies of this kind. and so you get really, I think objectively, further and further into a positive law notion, whatever the language is that they're using. 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. Well, you don't have to have a king to keep this operation going. You can get rid of the king. You just say the people are sovereign now, so it's a republic, but you have the same sovereignty.

25:13Then it becomes a mass democracy, and now it's liberal, whatever it is. All these reforms get rid of the king. No one gave up the idea of sovereignty. If anything, they made it more absolute and made everyone feel personally uplifted by participating in it. I have my 280 millionth portion of the sovereignty, whatever it is. I don't remember what the population is anymore of this country. It keeps growing. Anyway, that little fraction of the sovereignty, for all the good it does me, well, I can feel proud about that. So the bureaucrats and the mass democratic electorate replaces the king. But nobody re-thinks sovereignty.

25:58Now you might think that everything's kind of doomed. You've got the total claim to sovereignty and you've got constant competition between these states because they are still allowed to go to war. There's no one to stop them and they don't have any ideas that might mitigate that. Well, what happens for about a century and a half? This is starting in some part of the 18th century and through much of the 19th. You have the adoption of a code of civilized warfare and V.J.P. Veale has a book that's very useful on this. So practically the international lawyers and the practical statesmen say, well, we've got to quit worrying about just war theory.

26:43We just won't get anywhere if we try to figure out who's right in a conflict. 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? 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? 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? And so for a period, you have, by practice and custom and treaty, the development of relatively civilized warfare. Again, pretty much only applies in Europe.

27:30I 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, at least not too strictly. Robert E. Lee, but again, there's always an exception, and Indian wars weren't conducted under rules of this kind. Nobody conducted colonial wars in Africa this way. Okay, but between European, Christian monarchies and so on, the rules were followed for a while, which was probably important because that's where a lot of the wars could potentially take place. And Gustav de Molinari wrote an interesting essay on this in 1854, that there The Peaceful Pursuits from the Ravages of War

28:40This 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. Why wouldn't you trade with the so-called enemy during a war? That one stops people at first, but if we believe that commerce is good, then the war is about other questions. Anyway, why mess with commerce? Okay, Rothbard has a summer discussion in an unpublished piece on the Confederation period. And he talks about how the American statesmen under the Confederation were always pushing the envelope, trying to get Sweden or Prussia or the Netherlands to agree to wider definition by treaty of the rights of neutrals.

29:33And they're basically moving towards trying to get people to see that you should protect all forms of commerce, protecting neutral commerce during a war. Now, as we know, both these ideas and the ones Molinari talks about didn't really take hold to our cost later. Just later, Molinari, here's an interesting remark, he says, he remarks that of the Crimean War that there's some mistake being made when the Tsar, hoping to punish his enemies, prohibited the export of cereals and metals while England sought to punish Russia by preventing the movement of the same products. I mean, this is the mercantilist way of looking at economic of Warfare seems rather internally contradictory.

30:28But Moenorrie was certainly right to stress the ill will that blockades and destruction of private property bred

30:38in the longstanding national animosities has something to do with how the other side's troops behaved the last time they were on your land. If you protected property, the animosities wouldn't be as great. So instead, no one reforms naval warfare and blockading and so forth, and we see this during this war. The northern government is always interrupting shipping and trade and annoying the British government. The British government doesn't say much because it saves the precedents. And in 1915, they're stopping our neutral shipping out of fear that some food or something might get to Germany or Austria. And then we protest, however feebly. Brian protested more than his successor, the Secretary of State.

31:28And then everybody said, oh yes, yes, but your Mr. Seward said this in 1862. So you see the logic of your own argument, why this sort of interference with neutral trade was reasonable. So they were very good at saving up precedents, at least, given that. 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. Of course, it's like another concept. Rothbard has a little pamphlet on the myths of the Cold War. 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. But they say, well, but there's no state to speak of, and if we don't intervene, there'll be a power vacuum.

32:17And the Soviets will just be drawn in to this power vacuum. It's just an inevitable thing. And Rothbard said, well, this is just another importation of a misleading analogy from the natural sciences. There's no power vacuum. It all depends on what people do. What someone decides to do. There's no legitimate power vacuum. 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. I mean you can't say, you can't do this sort of thing. 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.

33:14So 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. 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. So the balance of power anyway, but again, and I just mentioned that because it reminded me of balance, equilibrium, power vacuum. Well, it's hard to say there's any such thing as a balance of power. Now, the older realists like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan would use this in a kind of historic literary kind of way and say, The Theory of Money and Credit

34:31to work this out. It's more like what Mises calls thymology, if anything. It's certainly not some pseudoscience. 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. The English monarchy has had certain reasons, once in a while it wants to do something, intervene somewhere, or maybe they are worried about some power being too big. But let's get a German point of view on this just for fun. And this is the political historian Otto Hintze writing about 1915. Otto Hintze says that England's conception meant that the continental powers should destroy each other by constant warfare, which England would pay for and subsidize one side or the other in order that England might have a free hand at sea and in the colonies.

35:31Well, that's a little less benevolent reading than when we're used to where the British are just sitting benevolently offshore balancing, just kind of being the benevolent offshore balancer, doing a good deed, kind of keeping the fractious Europeans from killing each other. Well, it doesn't seem to be quite that way. Okay, so what happens to the state system and this temporary code of civilized warfare? Well, what happens is World War I. Okay, not only does that destroy a number of the states, those that were empires, it also pretty much is the end of any attempt at self-restraint and the use of weaponry. Also, it's the death of common sense and having any idea of whether it was worth it. I mean, you know, some of you know that there was this Jewish-Polish businessman Yvonne Jean-Bloche, who made a lot of money, so he had some time to sit down and think.

36:27So he wrote a multi-volume work, I think published around 1910 and 1911, multi-volume work, and he said, well, there's a lot of explosives around now, and there's these Gatling guns, and machine guns, and there's barbed wire. The next bar will be very short, because the 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. 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. 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.

37:15But, I mean, of course, he was right about the sort of thing that would logically happen, but he underestimated the idiocy of the politicians, the public, everybody involved in making decisions. Couldn't have foreseen Marshall Haig, people like that. You know, well, all right lads, over the top, this time we'll break through. Soften them up as shelling. As far as I know, the shelling never softened anybody up. One reason was the Germans were being, were very organized and they built concrete bunkers. They didn't dig a hole in the dirt and sit in it like the British did. But nonetheless, for various reasons, the shelling didn't have the effects. I mean, but have we ever seen any predictions of how a war is going to work really unfold the way that the optimists say it will?

38:09Probably not. Okay. Well, let me get back on the trend of the talk. Well, all we want is so horribly, there's a horrible catastrophe for civilization. In fact, Schumpeter uses the word catastrophe with regard to this war. But some people say, well, we can't let this happen again. We'll have to have a league to enforce peace. This is the beginning of the collective security delusion or legism. They call it legism. It's actually originated semi-idealistic for formers who just accidentally happen to be near the top leadership of the British Empire. And their thinking seems to be that, well, if we had a League of Nations that would stop trouble when it started, we could shift some of the costs of having the empire onto others and also pose as guardians of peace and prosperity.

39:00That's a bit cynical, isn't it? 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. 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. And Woodrow Wilson was one of the biggest ones. 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. Well, that's one way of organizing world peace, I mean, you know.

39:45So this is kind of in that tradition, because it's going to, particularly once the war is over, and they had some debate. Well, should we set up this league during the war? Should we set up a league during the war and we'll get all the good powers who happen to be on the allied side and let them be in the league and then we can organize the league while we're defeating the terrible central powers? Or should we wait? Well, of course, they wait until the Treaty of Versailles and then Wilson is embarrassed having helped craft the league and the covenant because the Senate doesn't buy it and the U.S. doesn't join the league and so on. I thought it probably limited the damage the League could have done. The usual progressive interpretation is that we didn't join the League and this led to World War II.

40:32But if there had been the League, probably if we had been in the League and had actually ever made a decision, we would have had a war somewhere sooner. What's the point of a League to enforce peace if it doesn't go to war? What's the threat? I mean, the whole problem is supposed to be there's no judge, there's no common superior over the states. 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. You're basically creating a glorified military alliance. So the genealogy of the League of Nations runs like this. First you have the Triple Entente, made up of good powers. Then they invent the League of Nations. And then later on you have somewhat the same powers, sort of Entente II. They invent the United Nations.

41:19is basically a glorified military alliance that proceeds under the cover of this collective security rhetoric, which at least does sound plausible, I suppose. Okay, so that's my cynical take on this. As Rothbard said, the whole problem with the collective security idea is that it guarantees that no war can ever remain limited. I mean, there's some minor clash in who knows where, And then the collective security types have to take an interest in it and they almost inevitably would tend to make it a larger conflict than it needed to be. I mean, I suppose if you're really cynical, you could say that it's unfortunate that someone shoots the Austrian Archduke, but absent the alliance systems that existed in 1914, which are approximations to some kind of solution to the collective security problem, Absent those big alliances, Austria would have trounced Serbia, and millions of people would have been happier.

42:22Not the Serbs, but nonetheless, it limits the damage. It seems to me that to not think in these terms, possibly, potentially, I mean, it's not a predictive science. We have to go by other methods. Okay, so what happens next? Well, the U.S. doesn't join the League, but the Kellogg-Briand Pact is signed by a number of the powers. Wars, everyone's in a good mood that week, 1928. Everybody agrees that war is bad, that war is outlawed. All the powers have agreed that they won't use war as a method in their foreign policy. 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. 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.

43:08How do you know which side was just? Well, how do you know who's acting in defense? Well, sometimes it's not clear. Everyone will say that he's acting in self-defense. So this suddenly resolved the problem, but it created a rhetorical proposition that war was now a crime. The problem with that is then they're going to want somebody to prosecute it, and then they're going to take this all a step further. And, again, not self-enforcing, 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.

44:00and the sect that believed in this kind of doctrine was particularly strong in the United States and included a number of secretaries of state. And then a whole school develops and you can trace the whole development in the pages of the American Journal of International Law. Let's go back to about 1920 and read forward and you'll see the triumph of the collective security guys. Until you get into about the 1980s and you'll see a split and you'll see that some of the collective security guys really argue in ideologists. They really believe in this stuff. And you'll see that about half of them simply use the argument whenever it's convenient for this week's American Foreign Policy. So there's actually a split in that journal. Okay, but let me have to fast forward a bit.

44:47Okay, so then we have the next four in the United Nations and the UN Charter, which reads like a mixture of the US Constitution, The Treaty, the Utopian Manifesto, and the Rules of a Private Club such that you can have a war in Korea, but you can call it police work, so it's a very strange thing. But the Cold War rendered it somewhat useless. The Cold War meant that, with the Russians having a veto and so forth, China out of the picture, unrecognized, mostly. The UN wouldn't work as planned. Well, actually, I don't find that very tragic, how it worked as planned, who would have had, well, some different problems. But, nonetheless, the United States went on through many years of the Cold War, ignoring the UN as much as possible.

45:37And when the Soviet Union collapsed, it looked like the UN could work as a sort of American front, as planned. 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. 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. Okay, so follow through this journal, particularly the writings of a guy named Michael Reisman. 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.

46:25And it's absolutely true. Everything that's done, he will show you that it's consistent with the deepest reading of international law. So he's rather interesting in that respect, but I don't want to take time. I mean, he once proved that the UN should suppress Rhodesia because Rhodesia was a threat to the peace. Well, why was Rhodesia a threat to the peace? Well, Rhodesia, which wasn't attacking anyone, had a white minority government that had a dispute with Britain, but this would cause bad feelings in the rest of Africa. And bad feelings could lead to conflict, and that could lead to war. So the very existence of this government was objectively doing harm. This is a postmodern argument, so now we have postmodern international law, subjective feelings for being consulted in 1968. It's rather interesting. It reads like a U.S. Supreme Court decision any time after World War II. You pile up subjectivities, unlikely chains of causation, and announce that the Constitution actually means that up is down. In fact, he actually writes that

47:34And it's a good thing that the UN Charter doesn't define the key terms, that way there's room for making policy. So in effect, it's just a legislature in his mind. And he's happy when, of course, provided it does whatever the United States wants done that week. Okay, well this brings me, well I still have a few minutes, to an important trend in the literature. 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.

48:21In 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. So what's interesting to me is the ideological trend. 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. Well, what we're seeing is a new piece of rhetoric and invoking Immanuel Kant and the proposition that democracies are really lovable, why they're just inherently peaceful, they never attack each other.

49:18The original claim was that democracies were inherently peaceful, and when this debate broke out about 20 years ago, someone pointed out, well, this democracy attacked that state, and look at that, Look at that, we've got all these long lists of democracies attacking people, and they said, Oh, that's too bad. Well, democracies never attack other democracies, and the fact that they attack other people actually just proves their virtue, 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. So, they're attacking no longer a problem, and then they set up what are called dyads. They make a long list of dyads, pairs of states. Okay, and they say, well, has Norway attacked Denmark lately?

50:04No, see, democracy causes peace. Well, has Sweden attacked Finland lately? No. Has the UK attacked the US lately? No, see, democracy causes peace. Well, wait a minute. It could be they've had two disastrous world wars and they're tired of it. 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. That could be a factor. Treaty partners don't usually attack each other, leaving aside the Greeks and the Turks. 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. 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.

51:01There's a whole school that's been cluttering up the political science journals for 20 years. 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. Well, I'd say following his implications really go. You have to give him credit. You shouldn't even talk to him. 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, 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.

51:49Well, 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. If all the nations held slaves, there'd be peace. So the slavery peace theory, I'm working on, just for fun, the fascist peace theory. I mean, how often did any fascist nations attack another fascist nation? Maybe fascism causes peace. I mean, fascists. So you can convert all the states to fascism, and they realize they're separate national destiny. How often do socialists attack one another? And you say, oh yeah, but China and Russia have border disputes. in Vietnam Invading Cambodia. But if you're good at this kind of theory, the way the democratic peace guys are, you'll say, oh, that's an exception.

52:39Or Cambodia wasn't really socialist. So if you argue with someone like Rudy Rummel, and you say, well, they had elections in the southern states and the northern states, so the Confederacy fighting the Union seems to be, at least, At least, republics fighting each other, maybe democracies. You'll say, oh no, no, you have to disqualify the South. They're not really democratic because they're holding slaves. Or you go back and say, well, what about Britain fighting its colonies? And we admit that's not democracy, but they're fairly liberal. Sometimes they confuse the word liberal, republic. And they say, well, no, no, no, no, there's fewer people voting in Britain. So you can't count that. So no example you can think of can be counted. So no example will disprove that democracies don't attack, because you always redefine the democracy.

53:28Now why am I bringing this up at all? Well, one, it's a snare and a delusion. It's remarkably self-serving and stupid. It's also been constantly quoted by Bush, foreign policy spokesman, democracies don't attack each other, and the more democracy we have, however we get it, the world will be a better place. And going back in the Clinton administration, the foreign policy spokesman are already using this new bit of armament. Okay. So to bring the topic back around, what we actually seem to have is mad social science reinforcing a dubious proposition which serves the ideological function of justifying at least one imperial project.

54:16It's not very satisfactory. 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. Any questions? Argument?