[lbo-talk] Newsflash: social democracy causes terrorism

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sat Aug 6 09:19:44 PDT 2005


Luke Weiger wrote:


>http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

They do have half a point, in that it's hard to conceive of social democracy (and socialism) without strong national borders. And if you believe in freedom of movement, that's a real problem.

I've quoted Hayek on this before, and I'll do it again:


>Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, pp. 142-143:
>
>The definitely antagonistic attitude which most
>planners take toward internationalism is further
>explained by the fact that in the existing world
>all outside contacts of a group are obstacles to
>their effectively planning the sphere in which
>they can attempt it. It is therefore no accident
>that, as the editor of one of the most
>comprehensive collective studies on planning has
>discovered to his chagrin, "most 'planners' are
>militant nationalists."4
>
>The nationalist and imperialist propensities of
>socialist planners, much more common than is
>generally recognized, are not always as flagrant
>as, for example, in the case of the Webbs and
>some of the other early Fabians, with whom
>enthusiasm for planning was characteristically
>combined with the veneration for the large and
>powerful political units and a contempt for the
>small state. The historian Élie Halévy, speaking
>of the Webbs when he first knew them forty years
>ago, records that their socialism was profoundly
>antiliberal. "They did not hate the Tories,
>indeed they were extraordinarily lenient to
>them, but they had no mercy for Gladstonian
>Liberalism. It was the time of the Boer War and
>both the advanced liberals and the men who were
>beginning to form the Labour Party had
>generously sided with the Boers against British
>Imperialism, in the name of freedom and
>humanity. But the two Webbs and their friend,
>Bernard Shaw, stood apart. They were
>ostentatiously imperialistic. The independence
>of small nations might mean something to the
>liberal individualist. It meant nothing to
>collectivists like themselves. I can still hear
>Sidney Webb explaining to me that the future
>belonged to the great administrative nations,
>where the officials govern and the police keep
>order." And elsewhere Halévy quotes George
>Bernard Shaw, arguing, about the same time, that
>"the world is to the big and powerful states by
>necessity; and the little ones must come within
>their border or be crushed out of existence."5
>
>4 Findlay Mackenzie (ed.), Planned Society,
>Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: A Symposium (1937),
>p. xx.
>
>5 Élie Halévy, L'Ere des tyrannies (Paris,
>1938), p. 217, and History of the English
>People, Epilogue, 1, 105-6.



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