On Wed, 9 Oct 2002, Nathan Newman wrote:
> But the act remains-- re: my harping troops in Little Rock analogy --
> that government is inevitably based on elements or repression, by the
> nature of the Leviathan compact that is government. I don't buy the
> anarchist utopianism of dispensing with it, so I prefer the checks and
> balances structure to restrain its excesses to get its advantages.
This is also why your domestic/international analogy makes no sense to me, and why I wish you'd stop harping on it :o) In domestic affairs, anarchy may be hard to conceive of. In international affairs, it's the the only reality we've ever known. There is no single overarching authority. There never has been. There are only individuals, individual states. According to the argument of Leviathan (and if the analogy held), this would mean we were in a state of international civil war, the worst of all possible worlds. But we're not, actually. It's more like a permanent state of nature, in the full ambivalence of that term. And while it may not be as organized as we'd like, there's no disputing that it does display a rulelike nature and it's not unworkable, just like the anarchists say. Short-lived bands of organized individuals (individual states) are as close to order as we've ever come in matters of international force.
The problem with the Little Rock/Kosovo analogy is that it presumes away the whole core of the problem. It presumes that having or not having, or being or not being, a central government makes no difference -- that action in a situation where there is one (Little Rock) is essentially the same as action in a situation where there is not one (Kosovo).
There is a qualitative difference between a legitimate central government imposing on a local entity that disputes its authority (as in Little Rock) and a large individual state imposing on another in a situation where the is no operative central government to overawe them both. If you want to make analogies, a big kid in the neighborhood physically forcing you to change your behavior and saying the whole community thinks like him is more like US leadership in the world than what happened in Little Rock. Mind you, if you're being a dickhead and he's a good guy, that might be good for the neighborhood. But it's not government. It's not inchoate government. It's more like the opposite of government. And it's not something you want to raise to a principle. On the contrary -- you want to dispute the principle even when you approve of the outcome.
To put that differently: the only way the Little Rock analogy would apply is if the invasion was organized by New York, Pennsylvania and California. It's not hard to see how people could be for the proposed outcome of integrating Mississippi schools and completely against that way of proceeding as containing the seeds of national disaster -- as destroying the foundations of better common government rather than fostering it.
I'm not saying there are no good arguments for intervention in any situation. I'm just saying if you follow your analogy to its end, it leads to the opposite conclusion. And that's if you accept that it's close enough to be applied at all, which I don't.
Lastly, the UN, because it has no compulsive Leviathanic force, is not a proto-government analogous to a domestic one. It's a coordination mechanism, and a means of organizing and institutionalizing peer pressure, which is something very different. Something grander may grow out of it some day. But it will have to be by a process completely different from that described by Hobbes, and completely different from the historical consolidation of European nation states.
Michael