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."

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.

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 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.

Your Human Right to Democracy

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 21.

1. Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
   
2. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
   
3. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
   

Hampton on Authority

Jean Hampton
Political Philosophy, p. 5:

To summarize, we can define political authority along the lines suggested by one recent philosopher [Joseph Raz] as follows:

Person x has political authority over person y if and only if the fact that x requires y to perform some action p gives y a reason to do p, regardless of what p is, where this reason purports to override all (or almost all) reasons he may have not to do p.