June 17, 2006
From the desk of Jane Galt:Thought for the day
On selling sovereignty:
Angola is the kind of situation that made me think very differently about sovereignty, and about the kinds of politics, both conservative and leftist, that mark the achievement of sovereignty as the initial and necessary condition of achieving prosperity and freedom. Sovereignty is the material resource that the Angolan elite controls and sells, not oil. They are rentiers who extract wealth from selling permission for extraction. But they’re no different than a car thief who hotwires a car parked outside a suburban home, drives it fifty miles, and then sells the car on eBay. The difference is not in what they do, but in the legal and governmental mechanisms that permit what they do. The car thief is going to run into trouble establishing a title that can be transferred legitimately. The Angolan elite has no such difficulty.All the international institutions which exist recognize them as possessing title to sovereignty. They’re the ones who send representatives to the United Nations. They’re the ones who fill embassies around the world. They’re the ones that the World Bank or NGOs speak to and reach agreements with. That’s not a conservative or liberal thing, not a failure of the United Nations or of the Bush Administration. It’s an indictment of the entire interstate system built up over the course of the 20th Century, in all its parts and particulars. That system gives titles and ownership to thieves, and allows thieves to sell their goods to supposedly legitimate businesses.
I’m profoundly skeptical about the kind of quasi-governmental aspirations embedded in a lot of international development efforts, about the desire to govern local communities in quite profound ways in accordance with visions and plans sketched out a thousand miles away from the places where they will be implemented. But why not ask that the interstate system of the 21st Century, including non-governmental organizations, serve a few of the most minimal functions of government with regard to property and commerce? I can’t buy a hot car and expect the government to sanction my ownership. If I pass cash under the table to get the car, the car stays hot, and I can expect it to be taken from me at any time to be returned to its rightful owner. All the petroleum that comes out of Angola today is equally stolen. The people who peddle Angola’s sovereignty have no right to sell it, and those who buy it know that perfectly well. We need some kind of global system that refuses that transfer of title.
Emotionally, I agree with Mr Burke. In practice, I think it will be hard to establish a system for determining what constitutes valid sovereignty without making the international development community even more offensively paternalistic than it already is.
Posted by Jane Galt at June 17, 2006 08:24 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksA few thoughts here.
First, is any government different in principle from Angola unless it has the consent of the people who are governed? The people of China and Saudia Arabia did not ask to be ruled in their various fashions; they merely submitted to it.
Second, the "stealing" of unexploited natural resources from "the people" of Angola is an idea that is full of semantic pitfalls. Perhaps the real crime is that for the duration of its occupancy, nobody in Angola has been allowed to own anything in the western legal sense; so the theft takes the form of denying original ownership to begin with.
Third, assuming that the government of Angola allowed the stuff to be stolen, how do we redress that? We can either have a higher authority—such as the UN—or we can do the "have your big brother beat up the neighborhood bully," which, with the US acting as the big brother, is how most people appear to think that democides should be stopped (when we can get them to admit that the slaughter should be stopped).
Or, the US can offer statehood to a region of Angola that feels particularly used by the current regime. Granted the s***storm of international outcry would be loud, but I've observed that the volume of international outcry tends to vary proportionately, and not inversely, with the justice of the act that provokes it.
Posted by: John on June 17, 2006 09:45 AMOur current conceptions of "sovereignty" date back to 18th and 19th century monarchies, who inherited their privileges from distant ancestors who were nothing more than armed robbers on an immense scale. Don't expect to find anything just or democratic in those ideas.
How places like Angola manage to make things even worse than the worst monarchies is that they mix monarchical sovereignty with socialist ideas, which blow away the practical and theoretical limits to the power of nearly all monarchs. Most kings knew that destroying the middle class would destroy the source of their own wealth; socialists can spin theories by which the middle class "deserves" to be destroyed and ignore the practical consequences. Even if a king was too stupid to realize the consequences of trying to steal everything in his kingdom at the same time, few kings had enough soldiers and tax collectors to make too big of a dent in the economy; now totalitarianism is possible.
Posted by: markm on June 19, 2006 10:43 AMmarkm,
Destroying the middle class did not necessarily destroy the source of the king's wealth. But it almost certainly destroyed his ability to defend it from other kings. So perhaps the way to deal with the worst rulers is to look the other way when the army of a more advanced country invades and takes over.
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