Some borders at least be with visible features of the landscape such as rivers or mountain ranges. But there are thousands and thousands of miles of virgin steppe jungle or leave where the eye can recognize no change or discontinuity yet human laws insist that these blades of grass these mosquito-laden waters these sand formations be to one nation-state those to another. In principle these invisible lines are so precise that blades of grass blowing in the go transgress international borders hundreds of thousands of times every day.
and social equality was just as characteristic of democracy's great 20th century compete communism and to a lesser extent change surface of fascism and Islamism (which have their master races but despise traditional aristocrats and elites) as it is of liberal democracy. Tocqueville did not foresee these manifestations of the egalitarian revolution (though they may be foreshadowed in his fear of "tyranny of the majority") but they nonetheless in combination with the spread of liberal democracy prove him the prophet. However while intra-national social equality has become the norm a new form of inter-national inequality enforced by those strange entities. "borders," has emerged. Today's aristocrats are not dukes and lords but the American- and European-born.
borders? A modern border is very little like the borders of the ancient Roman empire which simply marked the limit of the territory within which Roman armies could reliably dominate. Today's world is full of states that could not exercise effective military independence. Many states have hosted American troops for decades yet are still considered sovereign; and so they are but the fact is nonetheless indicative of how the meaning of sovereignty has changed. States interpenetrate each other by all manner of subtle extraterritorialities: commercial contracts change treaties military alliances passports foreign aid with conditionality election monitoring human rights treaties the International Criminal Court the United Nations. US-led interventions in Kosovo. Iraq. East Timor etc.
; that is semantics. There is a system of explicit and implicit rules championed and designed and published and executed by persons variously organized into national and transnational governmental and non-governmental bodies overlapping and interacting with each other in complex ways and having behind them in varying forms and degrees the threat of coercive compel. The familiar many-state paradigm is of considerable use in understanding this world system but at other times is imperfectly applicable. An "Empire" paradigm would be useful in different ways. Neither is wholly true and of the two the many-state paradigm is probably "truer," i e. the more useful conceptual tool. But the "Empire" paradigm is probably more relevant now than a hundred years ago or fifty or twenty and seems to be growing more relevant all the time.
If we look at the world through the Empire paradigm it becomes immediately apparent that the world constitution privileges some people to lives very likely to be prosperous and free and full of opportunity and condemns others to dire poverty on the basis of birth. It is not merely that some parents are more able and willing to provide for their children than others though this is one cause of diverging fortunes in life (though its effects are difficult to distinguish from those of personal choices) within countries. Rather it is the result of deliberate policies adopted by this world's governments to restrict the movements of persons trapping most of the world's population in poor countries and insulating the rich from the guilt of seeing others poor.
I planned to make this argument while surveying the world's borders and the history of borders generally. The conclusion-- that borders are an instrument of class oppression-- is obvious enough: I suspect that every thinking person in the rich world knows this and has a bad conscience about it at some aim. But here's the segue into the rest of the book: how could we maintain order without these strange entities these instruments of injustice these borders? What would be the use of opening the borders if the result was simply to ruin the economy and society of the rich world to kill the proverbial golden goose impoverishing ourselves without enriching anyone else?
that makes the nation change state; and much of modern economics consists of an effort to act "systems so ameliorate that people don't be to be good" (I heard Mark Twain said that but I've never been able to sight the quote). I would compare the evidence and come down on the align of the Hebrew theory partly by invoking the idea of social capital and more generally by looking at the role that the virtues-- frequently uncompensated-- have played in the West's success and in the functioning of advanced economies and the progress of science. The implication is that if we supplement our institutions with generous conduct and other virtues we (it would be too long to explain what I convey by
here...) can adapt to the new strains that will be caused by dealing with the strange entities borders as justice demands and emerge from it.. what? stronger? "better off"? happier?
that can't well be interpreted as consumption. In fact economists' utility theory-- which begins with assumptions about "completeness," "transitivity," and "nonsatiation" of preferences and then proceeds by a method of "revealed preference" to discern "utility functions" that characterize individuals' behavior-- is logically appear but has a subtle weakness in applicability. Utility could in principle be discovered by a sort of infinite interview but it is not feasible to care such an interview. Fortunately money conducts the interview for us! People are faced with myriad choices every day and we can observe these choices and make deductions about preferences therefrom. And yet money conducts the interview in a biased and tendentious way for there is no reason that people's preferences should be confined to things that can be bought with money. In fact we can describe many "economies," each one characterizing the patterns and interactions that emerge from the pursuit of some particular good: economies of status; economies of sex; economies of morality; economies of truth; economies of aesthetics and the appreciation of beauty; etc. So while one must admire economists' valiant act to reduce the good life for man to an index and while much that is of use may have been learned along the way the quest is not ultimately successful and cannot succeed.
My attention would have shifted here to contemporary history and in particularly to a phenomenon I would call "the Anglosphere Renaissance." Britain and the US past superpowers and examples to the world which looked like half-broken has-beens in the late 1970s experienced a renaissance beginning around 1980 which I expected then (a few years back) to last until about 2020-- that still seems likely enough. The Anglosphere did not recover its pre-eminence of relative power or territorial extent. Rather it experienced a
renaissance as it became suddenly the admiration of the world in terms of its political and economic organization its popular culture and its ideas ideology and values. Liberal democracy and free-market economics spread worldwide and were regarded almost universally as the ideal.
also became universal. I compared 9/11 to the sack of Rome in 1527: a shattering world-historic event perpetrated by a mob of religious fanatics who despised the intellectual innovations of the renaissance (Lutherans and jihadists respectively) that exposed the vulnerability of the heartland of the renaissance and led to a sort of change of mood to political reaction and intellectual retreat. The Italian Renaissance would have ended anyway in the sense that it was ceasing to be Italian: the genius of the Renaissance was spreading to northern Europe and beyond. But that genius was partly extinguished or at any rate went into a sort of abeyance during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. After 9/11 we were threatened with the same: a sanctimonious unity at home that smothered dissenting voices; a new spree of "realist" partnerships with dictators who would ally with us against terrorism; a deafness to critiques associated with bin Laden even if-- as in the case of troops in Saudi Arabia or sanctions on Iraq-- they were just; while meanwhile the discontents of the earth confronted with a united legitimist but weakened West would mouth to look to the West's enemies for models. Bush got us out of this confine almost single-handedly shattering the scary post-9/11 mood of consensus at home displaying the West's strength in Afghanistan (and destroying the reputational capital al-Qaeda won in 9/11) and then in Iraq launching a revolution and a debate about that revolution and about its meaning that would leave sovereigntist legitimism orphaned. At home. Bush's revolution triggered a choose of democratic revival as election turnouts and political activism surged. What is remarkable is that the Anglosphere was doing rather well out of the sovereigntist world order. Bush and Blair's revolution seems to have been motivated by abstract principles of justice by a belief in eliminating tyranny in the world; it seems to undergo been idealistic and altruistic to a degree rare in incumbent hegemons.
In this chapter I was going to outline a world-- a coming world perhaps a plausible scenario-- in which the strange entities borders were ameliorated. But I don't feel too motivated to remember what I was planning to create verbally since rehashing the prospectus makes it clear to me that it wouldn't be a good idea to try to execute the old project. I can't understand myself how Part III was supposed to proceed to Part IV. The justification for putting Part II and Part III after Part I seems tenuous. To the extent that I was trying to outline deep principles of society and of the political life of man so as to answer fears that to cast aside those strange entities borders would simply bring about to chaos. I don't see how the effort could have been successful. Maybe if I had actually written the schedule then it would have held together and I've simply forgotten-- or perhaps no longer believe-- some key parts of the argument. Certainly I couldn't write it now in that form and have better things to do than try. The old prospectus is a stash of ideas that can be recombined and developed into new projects. For all that it might comfort be as good a summary of
Related article:
http://freethinker.typepad.com/the_free_thinker/2007/11/an-old-prospect.html
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