Haretina Kukuri continues to impress. This young woman is making me think harder and with greater breadth and depth than I have in decades. Her latest major essay, “The Metaphysics of Geopolitics,” is a tightly compressed, brilliant disquisition on the levels of commitment and valuation that condition interactions between States.
Haretina’s whole essay deserves your attention, but I could not help focusing on one segment of her observations. It concerns the unique, dualistic nature of the utterances of governments:
J. L. Austin observed in How to Do Things with Words in 1962 that certain sentences describe nothing and simply act, so that when a judge says "I sentence you" or a minister says "I now pronounce you", the saying is the deed. John Searle built a theory of social reality upon the idea, and Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities in 1983, applied a related logic to nations, for money, borders, presidents and states exist because enough people agree that they do, and the agreement is kept alive by speech and ceremony.
A great deal of geopolitics is therefore performative utterance.
Recognising a state admits it to the club, a declaration of ceasefire creates an obligation, and designating a group as a terrorist organisation alters what everybody may lawfully do to it, so that a coronation, an inauguration and a treaty signing are each a spell cast with a lawyer in the room.
Concentrate for a moment on the central gem of that passage:
Because enough people agree that they do.
For those things are not material things. They are not “given” in the way that the Earth is “given.” We conjure them into existence. Think of that gathering of learned men in 1787 in Philadelphia, and of what they produced. Did a nation arise when they proclaimed their document ready for release? Did it arise on June 21, 1788 when the ninth state, New Hampshire, agreed to the Constitution? Or was it something inchoate, floating in the void where all abstractions live, that only acquired power and weight as millions of colonists transferred their allegiance – mostly without realizing it – from their local satrapies to the larger Union? And just how long did that process take?
Reflect on how those questions illuminate the concept of sovereignty. Reflect also on this: When one State dispatches its armed forces in an attempt to impose its will on another State, what process has been invoked? Is it purely military and material? Or does it couple to the nature of the State itself: what it must, may, and must not do lest its sovereignty be weakened?
Take your time over it.
Long ago, in a seminal essay I’ve copied from site to site, I wrote:
Today the world is riven into roughly two camps: those who believe, albeit fuzzily, in the concept called rights, which defends the life, liberty, and property of the individual, and those who reject that concept and its implications. The latter group provides our sociopathic monsters. It also controls most of the governments of the world, and by extension, most of mankind.Friedrich Hayek believed sociopathy to be an asset to one who seeks political power; that monsters, in part because of their monstrousness, have a better chance of rising to command the forces of the State, that institution whose agents exert coercive power over others without fear of legal consequence, than those of us who are constrained by moral scruple. (See the chapter "Why The Worst Get On Top" in his classic volume The Road To Serfdom.) If Hayek's contention is correct, the ascent of such as Stalin, Mao, Hitler, et alii is not an aberration but the working-out of a process controlled by certain hard incentives and disincentives.
As we can easily see from history, a sociopath at the helm of a modern State, with the State's resources and many techniques for enforcing its will, is the most fearsome of all political developments. The death tolls attributable just to Stalin, Mao, and Hitler total perhaps a hundred million. It should be obvious that whatever mechanisms their States possessed to filter out their kind were inadequate to the task.
But equally obvious is the importance of the powers of the State to the carnage they wreaked. Without those powers, they would have been three unpleasant old men, little more. The State put huge guns into their hands, guns too large for their victims to oppose.
“Three unpleasant old men.” I doubt any Gentle Reader would contest that characterization of the dictators enumerated above. But in command of a State with its array of agents and coercive methods, they became the architects of great horrors. In only one of those three cases did the horrors end – and it wasn’t because their author repented of his sins. Other States had to do the job.
It has seldom been the case since the Peace of Westphalia that a State has fallen to its own subjects. In both the French and Russian Revolutions, substantial fractions of the subjects of the dying States continued to believe in them and support them. Yet that fidelity and tribute failed to maintain them. That strongly suggests that a threshold of allegiance exists on which the health of the State depends. That threshold, if crossed, fatally weakens the abstraction, such that it can be dissolved by a sufficiently determined force.
But note: Sometimes, when a State begins to falter, the States around it will prop it up. Neighboring States apply the means required to stabilize it. That demonstration of external allegiance is among the strangest phenomena in geopolitics. When I wrote, in the Foreword to Freedom’s Scion:
The States of Earth exist in an anarchic relation to one another. Each has its own regional code of law, which might differ markedly from all the others. Despite several thrusts at the matter over the centuries, there is no "super-State" to enforce a uniform code of law over them all. More, they view one another as competitors in many different areas; their populations and institutions are often in sharp economic competition with one another. Thus, they are often at odds. They resolve important disputes among them through negotiation or warfare.Yet individuals manage to move among them with a fair degree of facility and (usually) little risk. Cross-border trade is commonplace, in some places torrential. Though wars are frequent, they seldom result in major alterations to the overall political pattern. The uber-anarchy of Terrestrial society exhibits more stability than one would expect from two hundred well armed, quarrelsome States, each of which perpetually schemes at snatching some advantage at another’s expense.
…I glossed over that “States supporting other States” phenomenon with little consideration and even less thought. Yet today, it’s one of the most important aspects of life on Earth. A little reflection on how America’s major alliances arose, and on those cases in which American support failed to perpetuate an existing State, will illuminate that coupling too brightly to be ignored afterward.
Early in her essay, Haretina issues a partition of sorts:
What does a decision maker treat as more real than the evidence laid in front of him?
Ask it at four levels and the whole argument takes shape.
Where the answer is a sacred value, he holds something that no price can purchase,
where it is a clock, he carries a settled belief about the direction in which history is travelling,
where it is a ritual, he trusts words and ceremonies that make a thing true merely by being said.
And where it is a private oracle, he relies upon the person he summons when the evidence has run out.
Most analysis dismisses all four as static around the true variables, whereas my contention is that they govern how the true variables are used, so that a forecast which leaves them out will be right for years and wrong on the one day that matters.
Even at the sacred level of values among States, there appears to be a great deal of variety. Haretina explores some of that variety in the subsequent material. But floating above those “provincial” values is one value that unites all States. Indeed, it sustains the entire world of statecraft.
That value is the maintenance of the State-system itself.
No State, whatever its conflicts with other States, can afford to have large numbers of people anywhere question the rightness and necessity of States. Should any confluence of events cause the hoi polloi to look at one another and say “We can do without this violent, brutal, murderously expensive notion,” the biggest house of straw in the history of Mankind would immediately be ablaze.
The belief in the necessity of the State is indispensable to all States. That fiction is infinitely more important to every State than any value it openly purports to advance or defend. It’s the supreme sacred value that eclipses all others. Every State is absolutely committed to it. So are a multitude of other organizations, interests, and individuals whose existence the State makes possible.
Benjamin Franklin knew it:
“Gentlemen, you see that in the anarchy in which we live, society manages much as before. Take care, if our disputes last too long, that the people will come to think they can just as easily do without us.” – Benjamin Franklin, to the other delegates to the Constitutional Convention
It’s but a glimpse at a high, remote mountaintop, a peak still too far off for men to attain. But like other metaphysical abstractions, a glimpse will sometimes suffice.
Legitimacy is the secular word for faith." -- Haretina Kukuri
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