North Korea Folds

"North Korea says it will not retaliate despite 'reckless provocations' from the South, which held live-fire drills on the flashpoint island of Yeonpyeong. The North shelled the island last month after similar drills and had threatened more retaliation this time. But state media quoted the army as saying it was 'not worth reacting. UN Security Council talks ended without a deal on the weekend, reportedly after China refused to agree to a statement critical of its ally, the North.'"

BBC 12.20.2010

Liberal Imperialism and Global Security

Jedediah Purdy.

“Liberal Empire: Assessing the Arguments”

Ethics and International Affairs 17/2, (Fall 2003).

The Global Security Argument for liberal imperialism holds that imperial policy promotes global security. The combined threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction mean that “global security may require that entire regimes be brought forcibly to heel” (37), and that this would entail forcibly removing them from power and replacing them with a democratic government.  Purdy advances two arguments against this argument. 

First, he claims that liberal empire presupposes the existence of hegemony, a single “dominant superpower,” when in fact the world is rapidly shifting from post-Cold War uni-polarity to economic and military multi-polarity.  As Russia regains its military momentum, as China slowly liberalizes, as India continues its massive economic boom, and as the European Union matures, American dominance begins to look less and less stable.  In the new multi-polar world, as in the old, respect for the rules of sovereignty have a great deal more practical importance to human welfare than they did during the period of alleged American ascendancy, since no single entity had, nor presently has de facto authority over matters of global security.

Second, he claims that an American policy of unilateral intervention is likely to have perverse incentives for nuclear proliferation.  Some states will take such a policy not as a deterrent to seeking nuclear arms, but as a prod.  He does not say so, but this claim, if true, would buttress the prior objection, because if and when nuclear proliferation accelerates, the prospects for US hegemony will dissolve more rapidly.

Facebook, Territory, and the Demos

"The reason we think that territorial or historical or national groups ought make decisions together is that, typically if not invariably, the interests of individuals within those groups are affected by the actions and choices of others in that group. Those common reciprocal interests in one another’s actions and choices are what makes those groups appropriate units for collective decisionmaking, at least in a rough-and-ready way.  Rough-and-ready, because (as flagged by the recurring qualifier, 'typically if not invariably') the correlation between territoriality or nationality or history and shared interests is far from perfect. Not every person who lives in a given territory is affected by the actions and choices of every other person in that territory; not every person in the territory is affected by every collective decision of the demos constituted on the basis of residence in that territory. Ditto for historical or national groups. Constituting a demos on the basis of shared territory or history or nationality is thus only an approximation to constituting it on the basis of what really matters, which is interlinked interests."

Robert Goodin
"Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives"
Philosophy & Public Affairs 35/1 (2007), pp. 40-68

Turkish Military on the Outs?

Jonathan Head
BBC 12.16.2010

"A trial of nearly 200 retired and serving military officers has begun near Istanbul. They face charges of plotting to bring down the government of the Islamically rooted Justice and Development Party seven years ago. The alleged conspiracy, one of several being investigated, has divided opinion in Turkey. The armed forces say that the plot was no more than a seminar to discuss hypothetical scenarios. Twenty-eight serving generals or officers of equivalent rank are among those in the dock, and the trial could go on for months... [W]hile the once-powerful armed forces commanders have at times complained about their colleagues being put on trial, the fact that they have done nothing else has convinced many Turks that the era of military intervention in politics is now over."

Liberal Imperialism

Jedediah Purdy 

“Liberal Empire: Assessing the Arguments”

Ethics & International Affairs 17/2, (Fall 2003) 

Purdy defines imperialism as the view that 

(1) states or peoples are politically unequal, and 

(2) this inequality can help justify military intervention.  

There are two kinds of imperialism. Weak imperialism holds that states are unequal in their ability to represent the will of their peoples. Strong imperialism holds that peoples are unequal in their capacity for self-rule.  Weak or strong, liberal imperialism holds that states might justifiably impose democratic political arrangements on foreign peoples in order to render them capable of self-rule.  Purdy aims to undermine what he takes to be the three central arguments for liberal imperialism.  I'll summarize Purdy's objections to liberal imperialism in subsequent posts; here I will simply outline his gloss of the arguments he will attack. (Names for the arguments are my addition.)

1. The Global Security Argument. Liberal imperialists argue that imperial policy is prudent, because it promotes global security.  The combined threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction mean that “global security may require that entire regimes be brought forcibly to heel” (37).  He does not mention the so-called "Democratic Peace Hypothesis," which suggests that liberal societies tend not to go to war with one another, but presumably he has something like this in mind.

2. The Human Flourishing Argument. Liberal imperialists argue that the promotion of (a specific conception of) human flourishing justifies imperial policy: “Such a consideration begins from an idea of what the most basic and general human interests are, and proposes that the domination of one people by another, at least for a time, may be necessary to achieve them” (37).  

3. The Duty of Assistance Argument. Finally, liberal imperialists argue, along deontological lines, that imperial policy may be justified as a means to stop or prevent certain prohibited actions, such as genocide or other severe wrongs.  Purdy does not appear to explain why the prohibition of genocide and similar atrocities would help support a specifically liberal imperialism, but presumably such an argument would need to claim that state violations of democratic rights are severe enough in kind to warrant coercive intervention by external force. 

Preventive War

Summary of Whitley Kaufman.
"What's Wrong with Preventive War? The Moral and Legal Basis for the Preventive Use of Force."
Ethics and International Affairs 19/3 (2005) pp. 23-38.

Here Kaufman argues that both commonsense morality and the just war tradition support preventive--and not just preemptive--war. That is, he argues that war against a future, but not yet imminent, threat is morally permissible, but only under the legitimate authorization of the UN Security Council.

Kaufman argues that Just War Theory does not univocally prohibit preventive war--in fact, he claims, a series of reputable philosophers of international relations have supported preventive war, with some caveats. Kaufman cites Augustine, Grotius, Gentilli, Pufendorf, Vattel, and Vitoria as scholars who have supported, in one form or another, the permissibility of preventive war. Modern readers often project their own idealistic, pacifist agendas onto historical just war theorists. Kaufman mentions a resolution passed by the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, an article by Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane, and an essay by Gary Wills as examples of philosophers who apparently take for granted that the Just War tradition straighforwardly condemns preventive war. While historical scholars were often wary of the potential for abuse of preventive war, Kaufman claims, they were not such staunch opponents of it as modern scholars generally believe.

He disregards consequentialism as capable fof providing a complete moral framework from which to address the question of preventive war. The central argument for preventive war is the same that justifies war in self-defense: "One is entitled by natural law and natural right (within limits, of course) to protect oneself and one's citizens against unjust harm"(Kaufman 28). If war is necessary to avert a future wrong, then it makes no moral difference whether the war happens sooner or later. Thus, if imminence is taken to mean temporal proximity, then future attacks need not be imminent to warrant anticipatory response. If, however, the real worry motivating the importance of temporal proximity is that of epistemic certainty, this provides no principled argument against preventive war either. First, even imminent attacks are not certain, since the attacker could be bluffing, or could simply "change his mind and withdraw." Second, says Kaufman, "one can surely be reasonably certain (at least in some cases) that the attack is forthcoming even before the moment of imminence"(Kaufman 30).

Next, he persues an argument from analogy between domestic coercion and the international use of force. Preventive force is used domestically in restraining orders, prohibitions on carrying weapons, and conspiracy laws. In the context of domestic law, individuals are justified in using force only in self-defense precisely because state coercion tkes care of prevention; if there were no such institutions, individuals would have greater leeway to exercise preventive measures against perceived threats. If international relations, therefore, is similar to a state of nature, then individual states are justified in using preventive force against likely attackers. Of course, the representation of international relations as a state of nature is changed somewhat by the creation of the UN, and Kaufman turns to that next.

Finally, Kaufman argues that the UN's authority, and specifically that of the security Council, has assumed the role played by a state government in the domestic analogy: it possesses a monopoly on the use of force, especially the use of preventive and retributive force. Kaufman recognizes that some legal scholars (Glennon, Franck, and Ramsey in particular--see p. 34-36) have questioned the legitimate authority of the UN, and have argued that the UN's recent failure effectively to protect states from aggressors--through the use of preventive force, where necessary--represents a return to the state of nature. It is argued that this, in turn, grants states the moral authority to exercise the preventive use of force. Kaufman responds that the UN Security Council's refusal to use preventive force in recent cases had more to do with the perception that war, in those cases, was not necessary, rather than with a prohibition on preventive war.

Kaufman concludes that while Just War Theory does not prohibit preventive war, the legitimate authority to engage in it rests with the UN Security Council, and not with particular states. The rule of law requires that states submit to the UN's legal authority whether they agree with its judgments or not.

The Genderless Capacity to Choose a Life

Martha Nussbaum.
Sex & Social Justice.
Oxford University Press (1999).

"Think what real people usually hold in awe: money, power, success, nice clothes, fancy cars, the dignity of kings, the wealth of corporations, the authority of despots of all sorts--and, perhaps most important of all, the authority of custom and tradition.  Think what real women frequently hold in awe, or at least in fear: the physical power of men, the authority of men in the workplace, the sexual allure of male power, the alleged maleness of the deity, the control males have over work and shelter and food.  The liberal holds none of these things in awe.  She feels reverence for the world, its mystery and its wonder.  And she reveres the capacity of persons to choose and fashion a life.  That capacity has no gender, so the liberal does not revere established distinctions of gender any more than the dazzling equipment of kings.  Some liberal thinkers have in fact revered established distinctions in gender.  But, insofar as they did, they did not follow the vision of liberalism far enough.  It is the vision of a beautiful, rich, and difficult world, in which a community of persons regard one another as free and equal but also as finite and needy--and therefore strive to arrange their relations on terms of justice and liberty.  In a world governed by hierarchies of power and fashion, this is still, as it was from the first, a radical vision, a vision that can and should lead to revolution.  It is always radical to make the demand to see and to be seen as a human rather than as someone's lord or someone's subject.  I believe it is best for women to embrace this vision and make this demand." (79-80)

United Russia

Clifford J. Levy
NYT 12.11.2010

"Local officials even emblazoned logos of the governing party, United Russia, on city bulldozers to give the party, not the government, credit for fixing roads.  On Election Day, hundreds of soldiers from a military garrison were marched to a polling place and ordered to vote for United Russia, according to nonpartisan voting monitors.  It was as if the governing party and the government had merged, just as in the Communist era. And in many ways, they have. United Russia effectively controls regional governments, prosecutor’s offices, courts, police departments and election commissions."

The Neoconservative Moment

Summary: Francis Fukuyama
"The Neoconservative Moment"
The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq.
Cambridge University Press (2005). pp. 170-85.

In "The Neoconservative Moment," Francis Fukuyama argues that Charles Krauthammer's "democratic globalism" brand of neoconservativism is too realist and too idealist by turns.  Democratic globalists, according to Krauthammer, believe that American military supremacy should be used to "support U.S. security interests and democracy simultaneously."  

Fukuyama argues that Iraq was hardly a strategic threat, even less a global, existential threat to freedom.  But even if it had been it was clear from the beginning that neither the nature of Iraqi society nor the United States' past experience with regime change lent themselves well to the prospects of success. Finally, Fukuyama argues that democratic globalism fails to appreciate the value of legitimacy, and overlooks the fact that many of our allies "did not trust us...to use our huge margin of power wisely and in the interests of the world as a whole."  The US can no longer count on post facto legitimacy as it did during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was a competing power, and the United States and its allies agreed that frequent demonstrations of resolve, in the form of military action, could be beneficial.  

Focus now is on the Middle East, and a pre-emptively and frequently intervening superpower is as unlikely to coax the Arab world into democracy as force is unlikely to drag them into it. Fukuyama advocates a gentler, more multilateral brand of democratic globalism: reinstate diplomacy and coalition-building, promote democracy “through all of the available tools,” be more realistic about our abilities, be better prepared for nation-building when the need arises, and build institutions.  Whether this can be called ‘neoconservativism,’ Fukuyama does not know.

The Political Economy of Hierarchy

Summary: Gary Miller.
Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy.
Cambridge University Press. 1992.
Introduction, pp. 1-13.

In the Introduction to his Managerial Dilemmas, Gary Miller explains that his main aim in the book is to connect two different literatures on hierarchical organizational control: organizational economics, with its emphasis on incentivizing self-interested employee behavior, on the one hand, and political science and organizational psychology, with their emphasis on organic processes of leadership able to inspire employees to transcend self-interest, on the other.  The tools needed to build a "theoretical bridge" between these literatures, Miller maintains, are to be found in modern game theory and political economy.  

Organizational economics, rigorous as it is, generates incorrect predictions about the kinds of incentive structures we should expect to find in firms subject to competitive pressures in a free market.  This means that “Either competitive market pressures are less likely to discipline hierarchies than economists have imagined, or else there are reasons outside of current economic theory that egalitarian incentive systems are more efficient than those typically prescribed by economists." (7)  

Miller will therefore adopt an institutional approach to the political economy of hierarchies, since this has the best potential to explain outcomes produced in contexts with high transaction costs, information asymmetry, inefficient property rights, and multidimensional exchanges involving non-monetary goods like status and services.  Following Ronald Coase, institiutional theorists believe that hierarchies allow firms to avoid some of the transaction costs associated with using the price mechanism to coordinate exchange rates: under hierarchy, the employee and employer benefit by allowing the employer to have "broad discretionary authority" over the employee by means of a single contract, rather than negotiating a price for each particular service the worker provides.  

This discretionary authority as an important feature of organizational behavior.   Ultimately, Miller believes he can explain how authority is established in firms, why these firms exhibit persistent inefficiencies that weaken their ability to solve market failures, and the extent to which managers who inspire cooperation--voluntary deviations from self-interested behavior--can minimize those inefficiencies.

Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Peace Prize

Bjoern Amland
AP 12.10.2010

Liu Xiaobo

"China was infuriated when the prestigious prize was awarded to the 54-year-old literary critic, who is serving an 11-year prison sentence on subversion charges brought after he co-authored a bold call for sweeping changes to Beijing's one-party communist political system. Beijing described the award as an attack on its political and legal system and has placed Liu's supporters, including his wife Liu Xia, under house arrest to prevent anyone from picking up his prize. On Friday, uniformed and plainclothes officers guarded the entrance to the compound in central Beijing where Liu Xia has lived since the October announcement that her husband would receive the prize. China also tightened a wide-ranging clampdown on dissidents and blocked some news websites ahead of the awarding ceremony. China has also pressured foreign diplomats to stay away from the Nobel ceremony...17 other countries have declined to attend, including Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba...China warned that attending the ceremony would be seen as a sign of disrespect."

Hackers and the Information War

Ian Drury
Mail Online 06.12.2010

"Julian Assange has distributed to fellow hackers an encrypted 'poison pill' of damaging secrets, thought to include details on BP and Guantanamo Bay.  He believes the file is his 'insurance' in case he is killed, arrested or the whistleblowing website is removed permanently from the internet.  Mr Assange - understood to be lying low in Britain - could be arrested by Scotland Yard officers as early as tomorrow... Mr Assange, a reclusive Australian, has infuriated and embarrassed the U.S. in recent months by releasing hundreds of thousands of classified documents."

The Security Council and the Cold War

Summary: Christine Gray.
International Law and the Use of Force. 
Oxford University Press (2004).
Chapter 7: "The UN and the Use of Force," pp. 195-205.

The UN Security Council was originally intended to be the locus of sovereignty for a new body of global governance. Made up of five permanent members--Russia, China, the UK, France, and the United States--and ten (?) more members elected for two-year terms, the Security Council was supposed to have direct command over its own armed forces, with which it could intervene, when necessary, to repair breachs of the peace or acts of aggression.  Its legal authority is mostly spelled out in Chapter VII of the UN Charter.

But that vision of global governance never came to pass.  First, the UN was unable to levy troops or commandeer resources the way Article 43 said it should be able to.  And second, the Soviet Union and the United States alternately used their veto powers to prevent the Security Council from authorizing interventions, effectively paralyzing it throughout the Cold War. Despite having been derailed by non-compliance with Article 43 and by superpower gridlock during the Cold War, in 1988 the Security Council again began to authorize interventions. But in them meantime, the General Assembly co-opted the authority to authorize interventions itself, giving rise to a practice now called 'peacekeeping', and started issuing recommendations to the Security Council on matters actively under its consideration.  

These actions were in direct violation of Articles 11 and 12 of the UN Charter, yet in spite of the lack of any legal justification, peacekeeping operations are now accepted as legal by all member states.  Fifteen instances of peacekeeping occurred during the Cold War, and Gray and others observe that the practice of peacekeeping underwent four distinct stages of development between 1948 and 1988: nascent (1948-56: Middle East, India/Pakistan, North Korea), assertive (1956-67: Suez, Lebanon, Congo, West New Guinea, Yemen, Cyprus, India/Pakistan, Dominican Republic), dormant (1967-73; no interventions), and resurgent (1974-1987: Suez, Golan Heights, Lebanon,  Iran-Iraq).   This process has greatly eroded the separation of powers between the General Assembly and the Security Council, and in practice the two now appear able to accomplish many of the same political functions.

Immediately following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990, the Security Council passed Resolution 660, which declared a breach of international peace and security and demanded that Iraqi troops withdraw.  Shortly thereafter, the UN also passed Resolution 678, which authorized 'all necessary means' to uphold Resolution 660, a generally accepted euphemism for the use of force.  This was to be a model for subsequent authorizations.  [Incidentally, it is Resolution 678 that the UK used to justify its intervention in Iraq in 2003.  They claimed that Iraq's violation of the cease-fire agreement reinstated the authorization granted in Resolution 678, which had merely been suspended, not terminated.  In any case, Gray claims that "the optimism prevalent at the time of Resolution 678 has since dissipated." (205)]

Singer's "Animal Liberation"

In “Animal Liberation,” Peter Singer argues that human exploitation of non-human species is a “continuing moral outrage,” because there is no justification for treating the interest of any being which has interests as less morally important than the like interest of a human being. Justice is a matter of treating equals equally, but not all inequalities matter for the relevant conception of equal treatment: for example, we should not think that minor genetic differences between races or sexes should result in different social, civil, or political rights even if those differences were found to correlate to small but measurable differences in average IQ. In short, Singer argues that it would be objectionably speciesist to believe “that we are entitled to treat members of other species in a way which it would be wrong to treat members of our own species,” because the relevant capacity for equal treatment is the capacity to suffer, and the members of many, many animal species have that capacity. He then draws out the implications of this view for current practice: vivisection, animal research, and factory farming are all morally impermissible because they brutally harm animals—animals who, by virtue of their capacity to suffer as we do, are thereby also entitled to the same level of respect and compassion.