In other words, it could be that the fractious and increasingly nationalistic politics of today are how things naturally are — and the anomaly is this decades-long period of cooperation and harmony.
He calls the internationalist approach “liberalism,” and he laments its inability to persist.
Contrast with Yoram Hazony.
For centuries, the politics of Western nations have been characterized by a struggle between two antithetical visions of world order: an order of free and independent nations, each pursuing the political good in accordance with its own traditions and understanding; and an order of peoples united under a single regime of law, promulgated and maintained by a single supra-national authority. . .
the imperial rulers of the ancient world saw it as their task, in the words of the Babylonian king Hamurabi, to “bring the four quarters of the world to obedience.” That obedience, after all, was what ensured salvation from war, disease, and starvation.
And yet, despite the obvious economic advantages of an Egyptian or Babylonian peace that would unify humanity, the Bible was born out of a deep-seated opposition to that very aim. To Israel’s prophets, Egypt was “the house of bondage,” and they spared no words in deploring the bloodshed and cruelty involved in imperial conquest and the imperial manner of governing
Hazony sees the quest for international order as intrinsically imperialist. He has a forthcoming book that extends these arguments.
I believe that this is an issue that is particularly challenging for libertarians. We believe that national borders restrict freedom, including the freedom to live where you want. But what if every project to get rid of national borders is one in which power is concentrated in a central authority?
The historical trend for almost any of these projects has certainly been in the direction of continuous expansion of centralization, standardization, uniformity, and decreasing sovereign prerogative and room for diversity or maneuver for member jurisdictions, well past the point of any justifiable requirements for a functional federation. The trouble with centralization is that with monopoly there is no feasible way to exit, and there is no containment of failure. You are putting all your eggs in one basket, and history teaches us there are just too many bad baskets out there.
We believe that national borders restrict freedom, including the freedom to live where you want. But what if every project to get rid of national borders is one in which power is concentrated in a central authority?
Isn’t this true with the EU an Euro? Europe has all kinds of nationalist candidates in individual nations against the EU and yet the actual policies are mostly trolling and not significant changes to the EU or Euro. So the Hungarian leaders ends women studies at two universities versus imposing trade tariffs on German cars. Brexit has no real strategy. And it seems there is plenty of Muslim Immigrant bashing although Brexit focused more on Polish Immigrants. Or look at Donald Trump’s renegotiation of NAFTA which Mexico agreed a list of minor changes that will never be monitored ($16/hour minimum wage etc.) and threw Canada under the bus. And yet it appears the Merkel/Macron axis is gaining power in Europe.
Probably the main point here is libertarians are getting what they want in the long run (centuries here) but short term there is lots of disappointments and mudslinging.
1) In the post Cold War period, we are certain companies dominate the global market: Tech is the obvious example of crossing borders and look at the popularity of Disney Marvel or animated movies. So some of this ‘imperialism’ is not national but large corporations taking control.
2) The more international business sells across border means international type courts will take hold. And what happens when a nation crosses a large business? Right now the US plays global police force to contain international issues and this can not last forever. So it does lead to more international organizations.
3) Are libertarians comfortable with the Chinese model? They love the dominance of pro-business of the government but the government is controlling the individuals and creating cronyism system. (Feels a lot like 1950s America or 1980s Japan where most people are benefiting economically that made it easier individuals to comply. In the 1950s the local government/church was the control on the individual behavior.)
4) The more global business is, the less local community/government/church can control individual behavior.
This is why I think anarcho-capitalism ought to be the ideal held out by all liberals and libertarians: a thoroughly decentralized order (anarchism – all interactions are voluntary, down to the individual) with a authoritative core idea (capitalism – respect for property), rather than an authoritative central personality.
If you have property rights, then somebody has to enforce the property rights. The power to enforce property rights is also the power to ignore property rights, or to redefine them to your liking. Anarcho-capitalism doesn’t work.
In the early post-Soviet era, practice was for businesses to hire a “khrysha” (“roof”) to protect them. Khryshas almost immediately became the Russian gangsters you may know from action movies. As the Russian saying went, “there’s no roof under your roof”; people had no defense against a bad khrysha.
It is curious that migration and global commerce have become sacralized.
Is the US military now a global guard service for multinationals?
This ties into the theme of Jacob Levy’s Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, that there is this constant tension between localist and centralizing thought within classical liberal traditions. One possible reason is that different people value different types of autonomy. If you are a cosmopolitan intellectual, your autonomy is typically much better served by the kind of freedom of movement and exchange a large empire can create. If your identity is tied up in your deep rootedness in a particular local tradition, you may feel a nation of similarly-rooted folks shores up your autonomy against imperial rationalism.
Two things seem clear to me historically:
(a) that almost every movement of power from nations to supranational authorities comes with some significant cost to liberty
(b) that that cost is arguably often, though far from always, outweighed by the immense benefits of restraining national/local authority and creating large areas of consistent freedom.
Some examples of (b) would include
— the US Civil War, where the very real centralization cost of consolidating the Union has to be put in perspective by the enormous wins of crushing the institution of slavery and clearing the way for the Great Migration refugee flow
— the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which despite the forcible suppression of nationalism was substantially freer than any of its successor states (and much friendlier in particular to people who did not fit its component nations’ exclusivist narratives, e.g. Jews)
— most controversially perhaps, the modern European Union, where in return for a significant increase in regulatory and perhaps tax burden, you get the immense win of continent-wide free movement of people and goods.
Good comment.
The continent is smaller than the world, and the world manufactures goods too.
The EU, however, puts the world behind a tariff wall. The EU’s tariff on sneakers is 17%. That’s not free trade.
The EU blocks the free movement of most goods from most parts of the world. When Joseph Chamberlain tried to foist this kind of protectionism on the British he called it “imperial preference.” What do the EU’s cheerleaders call it? They don’t even acknowledge the reality of EU policy. The whole point of Project Fear and Project Sneer is to avoid having to respond to specific facts with persuasive arguments.
Hazony is spot on. He writes:
For 350 years, Western peoples have lived in a world in which national independence and self-determination were seen as foundational principles. Indeed, these things were held to be among the most precious human possessions, and the basis of all of our freedoms. Since World War II, however, these intuitions have been gradually attenuated and finally even discredited, especially among academics and intellectuals, media opinion-makers, and business and political elites. Today, many in the West have come to regard an intense personal loyalty to the national state and its right to chart an independent course as something not only unnecessary but morally suspect. They no longer see national loyalties and traditions as necessarily providing a sound basis for determining the laws we live by, for regulating the economy or making decisions about defense and security, for establishing public norms concerning religion or education, or for deciding who gets to live in what part of the world.
Open borders has only recently become the centerpiece of libertarian dogma. It is helpful here to distinguish between the anarchist and classical liberal schools of libertarianism. One certaintly doesn’t read about it in the classics of the golden age of classical liberalism hundreds of years ago. Classical liberalism has always acknowledged the need for governance. Even nomadic peoples had rules about who was a member and who was not.
Cowen is completely correct and underscores the complete accuracy of Hazony when he writes “I am more comfortable with the alternative position that the citizens in the other NAFTA member countries count for just as much as Americans.” The elites are utterly indifferent to the welfare of ordinary US citizens. One wonders if Trump is paying Cowen to say this stuff. The ignorant and bigoted oikophobia that is the hallmark of the DC punditocracy is not just Trump’s magic carpet, but proof positive of the intellectual bankruptcy of our ersatz intellectual class.
But getting back to the point, your post highlights just how under-appreciated the centrality of the principle of subsidiarity is to classical liberalism.
Self-determination is the ability to participate in some meaningful way in one’s governance. Without the electoral college, the rest of the United States would largely be governed by California and New York. The EU has no similar protection for individuals in their local governance despite explicit incorporation of the principle of subsidiarity in its foundational documents.
Recognizing and appreciating, as David Bosnich writes “that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.”
There can be no practical libertarianism without subsidiarity.
Exit is another central concern. Before the welfare state, when there was a frontier and when factories in the cities could put people to work, concerns about wards of the parish were localized. If you didn’t like your governance, you could move somewhere. If you were unable to contribute where you moved to, you would likely be moved along somewhere else where you could. Now you face huge financial penalties if you seek to exit the US, assuming you can find another country willing to accept you at a reasonable price. Subsidiarity allows a certain amount of freedom to move to more favorable jurisdictions, but exit has been sharply curtailed. Political structures are largely inimical to maintaining a right of exit, witness Brexit. It seems a fundamental requirement of any system of governance going forward has to a functional, friction-minimized right of exit. The centralizing forces must have a counter-balance. As the EU and the US Supreme Court illustrate, power without restraint only metastasizes into chaos.
I can’t help thinking of Elinor Ostrom, who won a very deserved Economics Nobel for her work on “the commons.” She found many, many examples of local people successfully dealing with common pool resources, contrary to the assertion in Tullock’s famous “The Tragedy of the Commons” that the only alternatives were central ownership and management or cutting up and privatizing.
However, the locals always had to have a way of excluding outsiders, people who couldn’t be relied on to support the local customs against over-exploitation.
It wasn’t Tullock, but Garret Hardin who wrote Tragedy of the Commons. Tullock may have commented about it, but he didn’t write it.
Fun fact: Hardin is also arguing for limiting breeding rights (his words) to control population based on his notion of the commons. There is really a lot to dislike in his piece, but it is amusing how everyone seems to have forgotten the eugenics and limitation of reproductive rights he espouses.
The eulogies for John “Invade the World / Invite the World” McCain shed some light on this question.
Think of the new Establishment dogma as: Washington Is the New Rome. For Washington to, in effect, rule the world, it can’t be seen as privileging Americans just because they were born American citizens. That kind of favoritism would alienate non-American elites and could cause rebellions. Instead, the rest of the world must be treated as equal in rights with the lowly American masses. This includes extending some rights to non-Americans, such as the right to live in America, while dispossessing non-elite Americans of some traditional rights, such as the right to democratically decide upon immigration policy and the right to criticize foreigners who are allowed into America.
Hardt & Negri made a compelling argument for the latter at the end of the last century
http://www.angelfire.com/cantina/negri/HAREMI_printable.pdf
Curiously, though, their conception of the Multitude that would rise up against Empire was leftist, revolutionary and likely to come from the developing nations of the south, not the rightist/reactionary vanguard in the developed West we are seeing today
http://rebels-library.org/files/multitude.pdf
That “decades long period of cooperation an harmony” was otherwise known as the Cold War – it was significantly less harmonious than Cowen’s memory. People only unite when they have a common enemy; come peacetime the coalition predictably falls apart. As the Arabs have it: Me against my brother. Me and my brother against my uncle. Me and my uncle against the stranger.
“increasingly nationalistic politics of today ” << I see less US nationalism today than at any time since I remember, about the time of JFK's assassination.
What is nationalism?
nationalism. noun. Devotion, especially excessive or undiscriminating devotion, to the interests or culture of a particular nation-state. The belief that nations will benefit from acting independently rather than collectively, emphasizing national rather than international goals.
or, from yourdictionary:
noun
Nationalism is defined as being devoted to your country, or the feeling that nations should act independently instead of working together.
An example of nationalism is the Made in the USA campaign.
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Elites claim that "love of country" = racism & xenophobia, and call that excessive patriotism and nationalism.
Most normal folk "love America", even tho we don't think she is perfect. There certainly is an increase in "fractiousness", when the elites claim that each and every criticism of our prior Black President Obama was racism, and thus bad. All political correct crap is an increase in fractiousness, and the more the gov't has gotten involved in pushing legal punishments on politically incorrect folk, the more fractious society will be.
Republicans have long wanted "live and let live", altho many Christians have long wanted a more gov't supported Christian country with Christian norms. The elites are giving up on real tolerance — and that is intolerable to the normals, to whom the elites have been increasingly not tolerating.