So, what does Internationalism have to do with the State*, I hear you cry? Well, it’s the starting point of a long argument that will take several posts. The first part of this is to look critically at the State, and see what we think of it.

Leviathan, or Violent Monopolies?

So why do we think government should exist? What is the basis for having a State? Weber said that the state was any body which held a monopoly on violence to impress order onto a set of people. This takes the rather Hobbesian position that people, left to their own devices, will tear the world apart (the Leviathan) which I broadly agree with – although someone I know thinks people would co-operate with each other to survive without a state.

I would refute this optimistic position by saying that while small groups (up to, say, a hundred) might be capable of sustained spontaneous co-operation, they would have to defend their resources from other (less scrupulous) groups, and with no legitimate authority to defer to, no law saying who “owns” resources etc, the only way to resolve these disputes is with violence (or rather that sooner or later it will come down to violence.) This is Hobbes reworded.

I would also say/concede that the idea of co-operation in the name of collective prosperity is what States are all about in the first place; and as such humanity will naturally form States, derived from these small co-operative endeavours, in order to stave off the Leviathan in potentia, whether it ever exists or not.

The reason the Leviathan is a valid argument in modern times, if in ancient times it was only ever a scary story, is that we have very large, complex societies now, with lots of portable resources to fight over. If a government were to suddenly collapse, the results would (in the short term) be disastrous for the population, and even if a steady state was reached without a government the quality of life for the former citizens of the late State would be much reduced.

In this sense I argue that Anarchy is a real and present danger to people currently living in States, because it would result in either a sustained Leviathan or more likely a government formed in a power vacuum, with chaotic arrangements of informal power (like the legally-immune Revolutionary Guard in Iran, for example.)

So, the State is better than the only alternative; we would rather have government than not at all. But let’s look critically at the state anyway, and see what we think.

The worst, apart from all the others…

Democracy, if successfully implemented as it sort-of is in much of Europe, the US, Canada, and a few other places**, allows the people to kick out governments without using violence. In other types of states, as found in China, much of Arabia, and parts of Africa, including rather topically Egypt, you need to practically start a war in order to oust the government.

This is not good! We said that the state was necessary in order to prevent anarchy and mass suffering – requiring a decent into the Leviathan every time your leader becomes complacent or corrupt is no substitute. As physicists might put it, it’s the difference between stable and unstable equilibrium; whether you’re rolling around in a valley or perched on the top of a hill. Real democracies may change government every few years, but they rumble on in relative prosperity in spite of this; think of it as oscillating about a mean point at the bottom of a dip. Autocracies and dictatorships require armies of secret police and soldiers to hold the government in place, at the top of the hill pushing from all sides; a constant energy input into scaring people out of challenging their government publicly, which sustains it’s authority.

The real measure of democracy, thus, lies in the freedom of political speech. If a group can become government peacefully simply by pointing out the problems in the existing government clearly enough, then democracy has successfully made the State into something better than Anarchy. Otherwise, there isn’t much difference between the two.

So, surely, that’s the answer: conquer the world and install democracies!!1

Well, no. The thing is that you cannot “install” real democracy without killing a whole lot of people (and persuading others to kill a whole lot of other people too). Democracy is about power to the people; the movement needs to come from the people, not be impressed from without.

That said, I am not necessarily against all outside influence. If the people are trying to install a democracy over an autocracy and the autocracy is fighting back, then I have no problem with an international body intervening to crush the autocracy; Egypt take note, be sad/glad I am not UN Secretary General right now***.

But, assuming that the world eventually becomes a set of well behaved democracies, each with their own State, national interest, and stable political process, what’s next? Is this Utopia?

The Final Hurdle

I have one remaining problem with multiple real democracies. What happens when their interests collide?

We have a whole diplomatic bureaucracy built around the National Interest of a huge set of States, which range from competing for natural resources to disputing territory. Note that until now we have not had to mention land: it is only when more than one State is involved that who “rules over” land becomes important for any reason. People have been buying and selling land, of course, under the watchful policeman eye of the State ensuring no-one steals anything from anyone else, but when land is disputed by Countries you have war and death rather than mere litigation.

You might try and argue that a democracy won’t ever start a proper war with another democracy, but you’d be wrong. Even ignoring modern wars like the Israel Palestine conflict (where the refusal to allow the formation of a State causes immense economic deprivation and plenty of violence,) in a world of rapidly shrinking resource reserves can you really say that two grown up countries definitely wouldn’t come to blows over oil or even water shortages?

The problem with the Webian formulation of the State was that it needs a monopoly on violence. You can’t have competing monopolies; that’s just a market. And States aren’t set up to act in a market; they’re built on “Sovereign Power” and have armies and Nuclear Weaponry, and deal in absolutes. The diplomats may hold enough power for now to prevent war by promoting trade and compromising over things, but the delicate balance of this arrangement could easily be disturbed by a significant natural disaster or resource crisis.

Why States have failed

Thus, the crux of my argument; having more than one State is unstable and will result and has resulted in an international Leviathan****, we need a Superstate which really does have a monopoly on violence.

In order for this Superstate to be any better than the status quo, however, it must be measurably democratic. No totalitarian world autocracy thank you very much, but a genuine bumbling intellectually-conflicted noisy rabble, who aren’t inclined to riot because the standard of living is too good, and if they want to really sort things out they could always stand for office.

This idealist position; that we need a World Superstate rather than coexisting nation States, is not necessarily practical. It is not necessarily implementable in the sense that we now understand our governments. I will explore how we might build a Superstate and what it might look like in my next post on Internationalism.

But for now, I hope I have convinced you that in theory the idea of a single World Superstate is better than the idea of lots of separate, armed, competing ones.

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* State with a capital S refers to the Country/government/bureaucracy, and state with a small s means a state of being.

** That list should probably be longer, but I’m afraid I don’t have time to read up on every government ever at the moment. Not China, possibly not Iran (but Ahmadinejad is more popular than you’d think..) and definitely not N Korea or Myanmar/Burma.

*** The UN is the wrong organisation to jump into conflicts like this; I only invoke its name because it is the only organisation recognised worldwide as impartial and with an army. I’ll go into more detail about why the UN should never be part of a federalist movement in a later post.

**** North Korea’s undocumented atrocities against its citizens, the conflicts in the disputed holy lands, Western soldiers stationed in Baghdad, the ongoing violence in rural Afghanistan and Pakistan, and so on and so on.

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