August 13, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:So lately it seems that
So lately it seems that every morning I go over to Steven Den Beste’s page, get an idea, and blog about it, and then – spit-spot! -- I’m done for the day. Steven, if you’re ever in New York, I owe you a beer.
This morning our topic is international law. I’m suspicious of international law for several reasons. For one thing, its proponents are awfully selective about the agreements they consider binding. For example, every internationalist I’ve ever met is against our involvement in Vietnam. Yet we had a treaty with Vietnam saying that if they were attacked, we’d defend them. Perhaps we should never have made the treaty, but that’s a different question: once we had made the treaty, how come internationalists don’t think we should have gone in there and pushed the North Vietnamese back to the sea.
[Of course, this may not be a good example, since the vast well of ignorance on the subject of Vietnam means that most of the internationalists I’ve met are unaware that we had a treaty with Vietnam. They are also usually unaware that North Vietnam and South Vietnam were never one nation. The few I met who had gleaned that fact somewhere argued that North Vietnam attacking South Vietnam wasn’t like a real war of aggression because they were ethnically the same. Which means, I think, that Hitler was right about the Sudetanland, and also, that we can feel free to invade Canada at any time. But I digress.]
For another thing, there is a presumption that international law will generally produce the right answer. But let’s imagine that the structure that many internationalists imagine enforces this international law – the UN and by implication, the security council, had been in place to deal with the conflicts it was the supposed answer to – the two World Wars. Would there have been a World War II? No, because America would have vetoed it; we were not, in 1939, prepared to commit troops to halt the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Most of Europe would now be part of Greater Germany.
I think that what most internationalists like about the idea of “International Law” is that it is essentially stasis. Internationalists like the idea because they think it means that we’ll only get into conflicts where right and wrong is obvious and a clear majority of the world favors action. Well, first of all, the current enforcement mechanism is the UN. Many of the countries in the UN are dictatorships. Yet they also get a seat. [And Taiwan, a democracy, does not. How’s that for “Fair”?] A tiny dictatorship gets the same vote as a huge democracy like us. You think the senate arrangements in the US are unfair? How about “Mali, Albania, and Cuba think we’re being unduly harsh by calling what’s happening in Rwanda “Genocide” and refuse to ratify any intervention.” Of course, that’s not how the security council works. But the way the security council works with all those vetoes is that the more serious a conflict is, the less likely we are to do anything about it, because action would mean someone’s ox getting gored.
And second of all, there’s no particular reason to believe that a clear majority will respond even to an egregious outrage. Germany and Russia slaughtered tens of millions of their own people between 1930 and 1950, and you couldn’t have gotten a majority of the nations in the world to vote to intervene. Both of them conquered large swathes of external territory and weren’t too nice to the natives, and you couldn’t have found a majority of nations who would vote to fight them on it. Exactly how serious a conflict do we need? Because as far as I can tell the only thing a majority of the nations in the UN agree on is that Israel needs a good ass-whuppin’, and I’m sorry, no one who’s seriously studied the region can argue that that’s because it’s a clear-cut case of right and wrong. Especially since the "wrong" in question was ratified, indeed initiated, by the UN itself.
This speaks to another point, which is that we don’t have any kind of enforcement mechanism for this sort of binding international law. Den Beste points to the complete inability to find an even modestly disinterested jury (except in remote places no one cares about, at which point it’s not even an issue, because no one cares.) This is a very important point. Another important point is that we cede to law enforcement a monopoly on certain kinds of force; without it, the system would be vulnerable to the first bad actor who didn’t make nice-nice and play by the rules. This kind of monopoly is obviously very attractive if you are a nation that doesn’t have any force to speak of anyway, but Sadaam and his ilk aren’t going to hand their armies over without a fight, and the US isn’t going to disarm while there are still people who would like very much to see us brought low.
And even if we did cede such a monopoly, to whom would we give it? To the UN, where a nation that still engages in the slave trade sits on the Security Council? The only body we could trust with such power is one that is elected democratically. A world government, in other words. But hand over the power to vote on the world to people who are desperately poor, completely uneducated, and have no more experience of democracy or the civil institutions that support it than their caveman ancestors? Can the US live with a billion souls in India voting on, say, how we run our economy? I mean, they’ve done such a fabulous job with their own. It’s a very nice idea, but it will be a hundred years or more before the majority of the world’s peoples who are not living in stable democracies would be ready to join such an organization without regarding it as an easy opportunity to enrich themselves by looting the developed nations. I mean, if I were a migrant worker in Pakistan, and I got to vote for politicians who promised to redistribute all of the US’s wealth my way, I would. After all, it’s not fair that we’re so poor and they’re so rich – and how am I to know that shipping all their stuff here would be a one time stunt that leaves us all poorer in the long run? They didn’t give courses in political economy at the school I didn’t attend because I was too busy knotting rugs.
In short, international law has never existed the way the internationalists posit, and can’t without a host of massive institutional changes that are not possible in the foreseeable future. And even if it did, it’s no guarantee against tyranny. In fact, it’s a better guarantee that if a really nasty tyranny arises, we’ll all be sitting around with a dumb look on our faces when the huns pour over the wall.
Or we’ll find that in order to allay the outsized power of the US, we’ve created an even bigger power that is even less accountable for its actions.
Posted by Jane Galt at August 13, 2002 6:23 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>