Consider the Western tradition of limited government, individual liberty and open elections. Historically, free institutions appeared and persisted in national states such as England, the Netherlands and Scotland—countries built upon a dominant national language and religion, as well as a history of setting aside internal differences to fight common enemies. In “Considerations on Representative Government” (1861), John Stuart Mill argued that it is no accident that free institutions exist in such countries. As he wrote, “It is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of government should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.”
Peter Berkowitz offers a critique.
Hazony asserts that independent national states have an interest in promoting an international order of independent national states. Such an order, he insists, “offers the greatest possibility for the collective self-determination” and “establishes a life of productive competition among nations, each striving to attain the maximal development of its abilities and those of its individual members.” But Hazony has little to say about the alignments, legal arrangements, and political institutions that would undergird it. And he declines to examine the circumstances under which national competition turns counterproductive, vicious, and indeed a threat to life on the planet.
I believe that on Monday Russ Roberts’ podcast will be with Hazony. All this relates to his about-to-be-released book.
I look forward to the podcast episode and his book. We must always remember to avoid the nirvana fallacy when discussing govt power.
I am getting lost on the libertarian philosophy to jurisdictions, in general.
Libertarians have property rights, implying boundaries. They would accept property owners agreeing to jurisdiction for common enforcement. Why would this process stop at national boundaries? Some nations are the size of a city state, making them OK to Libertarians. They need nuance in their rule.
Accepting a hypothetical outcome from one process is not the same as accepting a real outcome with some similarities from a different process.
Any kind of arrangment or relationship which is supposed to be some kind of collective partnership operating by discussion, agreement, and general consensus instead of a mere dominance hierarchy of orders and obedience cannot maintain such a character and comity wheneven one party claims a right to make decisions on its own and can simply unilaterally impose un-bargained-for and unwanted consequences on any other.
Any matter that affects everyone should be handled by mechanism which include everyone, or you’re likely to have an unhappy marriage, and maybe even a divorce. If you take away the possibility of exit, you take away one of the main structural incentives limiting abuse, which gives rise a situation analogous to moral hazard (i.e. more abuse will come about because it has less severe negative consequences). (Note, this is not a comment on marital dissolution, I am merely using it as a metaphor.)
For example, look at what happened recently in Europe. The European nations came to the first of a series of agreements in convention in Dublin in 1990 regarding which countries would have responsibility for handling asylum / refugee applications, with one of the important background assumptions being that creating a zone of free movement of people inside Europe required some kind of ability to trust any other country to do its duty in enforcing common immigration regulations on people trying to come in from outside Europe.
In this particular instance, the agreement was to formalize the common international principle (also supported by the U.S.) that genuine refugee cases cannot go ‘forum shopping’ for mere economic reasons and should stop moving once they are safe from the particular danger that caused them to flee, and then file whatever other applications they wish to make from there. If they keep moving, they can be deported back to the first safe country (or first country of entry), a principle which the European Court of Justice upheld last year.
But in 2015 the Government of Germany unilaterally backed out of its obligations, without agreement or even consultation with its fellow member states, and let in over a million people over their objections, and then had the temerity and chutzpah to say it didn’t have to keep them, and then to issue travel documents and insist that that every other member state had to take in their fair share by means of mandatory quota system.
In the US, where there is free movement between states, it would be as if there was no real central border and immigration enforcement entity, and each state was responsible for certain border protection and immigration matters, and then California declared itself an open-borders and sanctuary state, and then tried to force Georgia and Wyoming to take and pay for their ‘share’ of the new entrants, not to mention forcing the new entrants to go to states where they didn’t want to be, which was California. All of a sudden the support for free internal mobility without having to show anyone proof of legal status would decline significantly.
One thing which independent and sovereign nation states – conducting affairs with each other by means of consensual, reciprocal, and provisional agreements – prevents is one group of people getting completely railroaded by another group of people, merely because they are stronger, richer, or more numerous.
What ends up happening in these debates is that people tend to say, “Well, but it’s good to railroad those people if it is for a good thing, and if they are bad people doing bad things. It’s only bad if it’s bad people railroading good people to acheive bad things.” That is, an ideologically moralized version of what should be the answer to Who, Whom? When some group of people finds themselves on the receiving end of such railroading, without sovereignty, they really have no other option but to respond with internationally provocative and disruptive measures.
The international system of independent soveiegn nations is built on the assumption that people will disagree as to what the good and bad things are, that if things are obviously “good” then it shouldn’t be so difficult to get most people to agree to it – and if you start making exceptions without consensus, you will end up with clear abuse as in the above example, or monstrously terrible wars like the Thirty Years’ War the likes of which the Westphalian system was constructed to minimize by means of tolerance of a diversity of views between different terrorities (though not within them) for the sake of peace.
The question of the appropriate or optimal places and scales at which to draw the lines are matters of historical contingency, geopolitical and technological realities, and human psychological and social considerations. But the answer of “nowhere” is simply a guarantee of abuse and unnecessary aggravation and worse.
A married couple that feels nothing but disdain for each other gets divorced. Government is different. If “the people” are the problem, then government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do to people against their will.
But the people and the government are stuck inside the same house, tormenting each other. The EU won’t let the British divorce them. In the same way that the KKK was the armed wing of the Democratic Party a hundred years ago, today the IRS and the FBI are agents of the Democratic Party, at least from the perspective of the Republicans. From the perspective of the Democrats, ICE is a Nazi goon squad.
Why should any Democrat be forced to fund another white supremacist Nazi war for oil? Why should any Republican be forced to pay for Bill de Blasio’s re-opened rubber rooms?
While I agree with almost everything you wrote, the world is not composed solely of cohesive, legitimate nation states. The world doesn’t even agree on what makes a nation state legitimate. Situations like Syria force people and nations into considering more desperate measures.
I want to quote this from the op-ed: “In certain respects, today’s demands for the imposition of universal standards of speech and belief are a reversion to a pre-Westphalian view of the world. Like universalists of the old school—whether Christian, Muslim or Marxist—the new liberal universalists tend to reject the constitutional, religious and cultural diversity of independent nations. As they see it, the way of life they propose—the downplaying of national distinctions, the unrestricted movement of peoples and goods, the elevation of individual judgment over tradition in all areas of life—will provide what everyone needs. Not surprisingly, the correlate of this rejection of diversity among nations is often a disdain for diversity of viewpoints at home, in one’s own country.”
Of course, “home” and “one’s own country” should be in scare quotes. As in, “So-called ‘home.'”
That’s how we say “the people.” It’s always an insult now, spat out with a sneer. “The people” are just “the voters.” And the voters smell. The FBI’s Peter Strzok has pointed that out. Because the voters are garbage people, as Politico’s Marc Caputo has explained.
The idea of “the citizen” (le citoyen) was once imbued with so much mystique. Sail west, and people boasted of the rights of free-born Englishmen, in England and America. But that was an interregnum.
I like the cut of this fellow Hazony’s jib, as they say. Not sure that Berkowitz entirely disagrees with him, just pointing out topics he didn’t discuss and where he came to a conclusion by alternate means than Berkowitz would have preferred. Still, I preordered a copy of the upcoming book. Hope Harzony cuts you in for promoting it.
Every story in the New York Times is the same story: The government raped the people again today. So net neutrality is a violation. John Brennan may or may not have a security clearance, and this is an outrage committed against the stupid American people.
The idea used to be that maybe a disunited electorate would lead to a weakening of the welfare state, but that’s wishful thinking. And the same with the warfare state, because it turns out you can wage war without the people rallying around to it. The government can wage war without any people at all. Drone warfare has its welfare equivalent: Are Democrats happy to have passed the Affordable Care Act? Do Democrats feel today that the process was worth it?
Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. But not huge enough to keep hold of Congress in 2012, or the White House in 2016. Even the voters of Massachusetts weren’t on board with Obamacare. Obama lied over and over and over again. Was it worth it?
The government called it Ted Kennedy’s seat. Scott Brown said, “It’s the people’s seat.” So the people are the problem. Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever. Call it Jesusland. It’s the hicks and the racists with the low-sloping foreheads.
If you live in the San Fernando Valley or Inland Empire you don’t get the breezes you get in Malibu. But the government of California is in control of energy policy all over the state, so the people of California have to put up with what what gets done to them. It’s a repeat of Merkel’s policy: Pretending to save the planet, but actually just making people pay higher bills for an intermittent power supply.
Wishful thinking was that the EU isn’t business as usual. Eliminate the people, and eliminate the rent-seeking. That was the idea. But actually there’s a great deal of cronyism even in the absence of any electorate. The government can wage a war on consumers without any electoral considerations to tempt them this way or that. Take “the people” out of it, and the government is left alone with its own stupidity. And that’s in full supply.