copyright © 2014 by Thomas Gangale
@ThomasGangale
@ThomasGangale
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Having pubilshed my book chapter section on "The Transnational Islamic State" on 23 September 2014 as an international coalition began military operations in Syria, and my book chapter section on "The Submerged State." on 24 September 2014 in the wake of the United Nations climate change conference in New York, I might as well publish other section of the chapter, "Transnationalizing Earth," which speculates on trends that are influencing changes in the Westphalian nation-state system, or outright challenging it. The book manuscript is far from being in shape for publication, but I would like to circulate some of my ideas and hopefully stimulate discussion in the academic and policy communities. --TG
The persistence
of sovereign states bereft of territory due to sea level rise, the incremental
integration of Europe, the People’s Republic’s finessing of control over the
other two Chinas, the transnational caliphate, and the American imperial
project, present different solutions to the human need for security, community,
and prosperity. The first is constrained by geography; only low-lying states
will fall into this category. The next three are constrained by cultural
geography: the European Union is unlikely to expand beyond the Continent, North
Atlantic islands, and the Mediterranean; the Celestial Empire has its defined
constellation of culturally and ethnically related governments; and a caliphate
seeking to expand beyond predominately Islamic regions would precipitate no end
of wars. The fifth vision, that of imposing global security via absolute
mastery of outer space, is constrained by the ability to finance it, the tenacity
to maintain it, and the sagacity to employ its capabilities with restraint so
that, although all other states may resent it, few will be threatened by it. To
extend the unipolar moment indefinitely, Stephen Walt counsels for the US to craft a strategy of
self-restrain: to present a “mailed fist, velvet glove” and “practice random
acts of self-abnegation (2002).” In short, Uncle Sam should be avuncular.
The conundrum, as Kenneth
Waltz (2003, 29) put succinctly but eloquently just as the US was gearing up to
invade Iraq, is that “absence of threat permits policy to become
capricious.”
Waltz and his school of his thought continue to believe that the unipolar
moment is unstable and cannot be maintained indefinitely, and it must
eventually devolve into multipolar anarchy. On the other hand, Craig sees no
credible path from a unipolar world to a multipolar one.
The poor prospects of another multipolar order
have led younger realists to conclude that the logic of realism today points
toward the necessary formation of a world state. A world state would, by
definition, be able to deal with subnational terrorism in a manner completely
different from how it is being addressed today, by treating it as crime rather
than as international aggression. Dealing with terrorism would become a
question of international law and enforcement rather than one of foreign policy
and war; the United States would no longer be- come the focus of terrorist
enmity. A world state would, by definition, deal with the longer-term threat of
global nuclear war by taking possession of all weapons of mass destruction,
just as states today, following the dictum of Max Weber, possess a monopoly
over all war-making weaponry. The obstacles to forming an actual world state
are so staggering that it is a simple matter to dismiss it as utopian fancy. Be
that as it may, for realists it has become the only logical alternative to
unipolar American empire in an anarchical world (Craig 2004, 170-71).
The world that Craig
describes as inevitably leading to a catastrophic nuclear war is one in which
the United States retains global military superiority, but has failed to
achieve military supremacy through absolute control of Earth orbit. However,
the global military supremacy that the US is seeking through developing and
deploying a leak-proof missile defense and absolute mastery of Earth orbit
would mean the end of the anarchic Westphalian system. The American Empire,
rather that being a theoretical concept debated among intellectuals, would
become a fact. Just as in the 1st century BCE, the Roman Republic, comprising
most of Italy, ruled over a larger Mediterranean world-system of noncitizens,
so the American Empire would consist of a republic of citizens within its
national borders, beyond which would be a global dominion of noncitizens,
disempowered and subject to its whims. In many ways, this is the current state
of the world; it is a world of states enduring ever-increasing constraints on
their policy choices in the face of the American super-Leviathan. Robert Keohane (2003) points
to the problem that the institutions of globalism, in which the US plays a
dominant role, fail to provide democratic accountability. In the time of Thomas
Hobbes (1651) it was sufficient for the sovereign to provide the security of defense,
law, and order to legitimate his rule; in the age of self-determination and
human rights, this is no longer sufficient. Washington is democratically
accountable to only five percent of the human race, and the other 95 percent
who are increasingly affected by the policies of Washington rightly resent
this, for regardless of how benign Washington believes its policies to be, they
are nevertheless made in the national interest, not necessarily in the global
interest, and as Waltz points out, in the absence of threat policy can become
capricious.
Creating a world state from
this empire would entail extending citizenship to non-Americans. Many Americans
would resist this, just as Romans were reluctant to extend citizenship to
non-Italians. The assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE was a conservative
reaction against his radical agenda, which included empowering the common
people, expanding the citizenship, and admitting uncouth, longhaired Gauls into
the Roman Senate, all at the expense of the ancient Roman nobility of the
Senatorial Order (Parenti 2003). His adopted son, as the emperor Augustus, did
not care to hazard a repeat of that mistake; rather, he catered to the
conservative nobility as his political powerbase. He also was politically
astute enough to disguise his benevolent autocracy in constitutional offices,
his innovation being merely that he held these several powers simultaneously,
and some of them for life. Augustus asked the Senate’s advise as much as he
expected its consent, and Rome went right on thinking that it was still a
republic. It was another two and a half centuries, by which time both the
Senate and the People of Rome had lost complete control of the government to
the increasingly arbitrary rule of the emperors, before one of the most
monstrous of them, Caracalla, decreed all free inhabitants of the Empire to be
Roman citizens, in order to increase the tax base.
Hopefully it would not take
the transformation of the American republic into a disguised autocracy, which
is where Chalmers Johnson fears that it is heading, to extend the citizenship
to its universal empire. America would need to either relax its self-image as
an exceptional people or recognize other longstanding democratic states as
being the domains of equally exceptional peoples, or reinvent that 19th century
image of the melting pot greeting Europe’s “tired, poor, huddled masses,
yearning to be free” through Ellis Island as a 21st century vision of a global
melting pot, in which Lady Liberty embraces the entire human race: invigorated,
prosperous, upright, and free. Of course, there can be no representation
without taxation; in exchange for participation in the American political
system, Europeans would be expected to bear the full expense of NATO, including
its American components, Japanese and Koreans would be expected to pay for the
American security blanket in East Asia, and so on. The free ride would be over.
This should not be an
impossible deal for wise statesmen to negotiate, given that on a conceptual
level there is something in it for everyone, and given that the alternatives
are an autocratic and increasingly capricious Pax Americana that provides the world a peace scarcely worth its
sacrifices, or the eternal peace of a world laid waste by a thermonuclear convulsion.
Half a century ago, the man who directed the development of the first missiles
intended to deliver nuclear warheads opined on the urgency of establishing a
new home for the human race.
I say let’s do it quickly and establish a
foothold on a new planet while we still have one left to take off from (Von
Braun 1965).
6: "The Global Federal State"
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