North Korea – what the hell
What the hell have we been doing while North Korea turned itself from a comedy Stalinist dictatorship with a mad leader in charge of a ridiculously large military which occasionally exchanged small-arms fire over a disputed sea border into a comedy Stalinist dictatorship with a mad leader in charge of a ridiculously large military which torpedoes non-hostile ships across a disputed sea border, and has half-a-dozen-plus nuclear warheads and medium-range missiles to put everyone off doing anything about it? Seriously, what the hell. What. The. Actual. Hell.
We let a state run by an absolute nutter (and his dead father) aquire nuclear weapons in basically the last decade. And what did we do? Slap on a few sanctions which will not affect the ruling élite one jot. Nothing to stop it getting to the point where we essentially cannot take any action beyond token sanctions for fear of nuclear retaliation – the “they won’t actually use them” argument is unconvincing when it comes to Kim Jong-il.
Why? In a word, China. In a few more, China and its UN Security Council veto. But also a fairly serious lack of will to take any other route – a UN General Assembly resolution, over which China has no veto; or unilateral military action without a UN resolution, something neither the Bush Administration or the Blair Government were particularly averse to. OK, so there are some issues with taking unilateral military action (even just airstrikes against reactors) against a country with 1.21 million people in the armed forces, but the threat would have been an awful lot more persuasive if North Korea knew they couldn’t rely on their Chinese buddies to stop it.
The UN is fundamentally broken. It gives ridiculous influence to one outright undemocratic country and one Chinesely-undemocratic country. It is incapable of anything more than sending peacekeepers – if you’re lucky. International law prohibiting unilateral military action would make sense (not that it would stop Israel) if the UN were capable of authorising liberal intervention. But it isn’t, and so protecting people from dictators has to be done illegally, with the tacit understanding that no-one cares as long as it works; or not at all. If the UN is to be good for anything, it needs to be a club of democratic nations, dedicated to spreading democracy, via the barrel of a gun if neccessary.
If the UN had been capable of taking action against Saddam, which was needed and justified, we would have been able to do it in such a way that Iraq did not collapse into anarchy the moment his statue got dusted with the Stars and Stripes. It would have worked. If Bush and Blair are morally guilty, it is for failing to plan and implement an ordered replacement of Saddam, and for failing to protect civilians. An undemocratic state is an illegitimate state is no state, so they had every right to invade in the interests of the people of Iraq. But much of the blame also has to lie with the framework of the UN.
Liberal democracy is an ideal we should not be afraid to spread with the assault rifle and the targeted bomb, the paratrooper and the jet fighter. But we are, and that is why we have to be afraid of Stalinist personality cults spread by the hand grenade and the nuclear missile, the torpedo and the million-strong Red horde.
Sean Whitton
May 27th, 2010 at 8.10 pm #
This article turns on the assertion
‘An undemocratic state is an illegitimate state is no state …’
You need to do some significant work in order to be able to assert this, because otherwise there are a myriad of reasons for holding the view that a reader could draw out.
So I assume that the power of a state has to be in the hands, somehow, of the people that live in it in order for that power to be legitimately exercised over them. It is very far from clear that representative democracy – what the West espouses and what is perhaps the only practical democratic system for anything bigger than a city-state – achieves anything like this. A government can have the capability to pass laws indiscriminately upon the populus with less than half of the popular vote. And alternative election systems have many problems of their own.
Justify your assertion if this is to work.
Jonathan
May 28th, 2010 at 10.03 am #
My basis is that no power beyond a minimal interpretation of the harm principle can be wielded without being in the hands of the people. Constitutional safeguards are needed to ensure the state doesn’t overstep the harm principle (the room for democratic discussion comes in exactly how the harm principle is interpreted in terms of government spending etc.).
No current state quite lives up to this. But our current liberal representative democracies (the more proportional the better) are a good approximation, and provided political freedoms are present, can be transformed into this ideal without the need for revolution or foreign intervention. Saddam’s Iraq or Kim’s North Korea cannot be transformed without military action.
Sean Whitton
May 28th, 2010 at 3.52 pm #
Okay, your argument regarding the current state of the world’s countries works for me. However, take a closer look at this:
“My basis is that no power beyond a minimal interpretation of the harm principle can be wielded without being in the hands of the people.”
So as long as the people vote for it, they are allowed to oppress minorities? If so, you’re not being particularly liberal – and if you’re not being liberal, appealing to the harm principle seems rathr vacuous.
Jonathan
May 28th, 2010 at 4.02 pm #
The key phrase is minimal interpretation, and I said “the room for democratic discussion comes in exactly how the harm principle is interpreted in terms of government spending etc.” [emphasis added]. No government should go beyond the harm principle. But whether we are harmed more by having to work longer hours to fund greater government spending on (say) more tanks, or the lack of those tanks is a subject of legitimate discussion.
One cannot answer all political questions with “harm principle”, so an intervening power should stick to those that unambiguously can until it can install a liberal democracy with a constitution which prevents the new, democratic government going beyond the harm principle.
Sean Whitton
May 28th, 2010 at 5.09 pm #
You miss my point. I am suggesting that you are giving the people the power to make laws that are *blatantly* not in line with the harm principle, such as the supression of all people that like a certain kind of music, or hold a certain set of political beliefs, etc. This is what your democracy (and given history, probably will) do, surely? This issue is far beyond pragmatic debate over whether or not we should build some tanks.
Jonathan
May 28th, 2010 at 7.42 pm #
Am I right in saying you are objecting to democracy on the grounds that it can lead to tyranny of the majority?
As I’ve said before, the solution is constitutional safeguards. If we have an immutable section of the constitution which says “No law or action of government shall prevent the free pursuit of autonomous agents’ own conceptions of the good unless the pursuit of those conceptions harms unwilling others.”, we have a problem as solved as it can be within the constraints of the real world (I am not getting into an argument with you about “real world”.)
Sean Whitton
May 31st, 2010 at 11.23 pm #
What I think here is not relevant; I am not decided on democracy. I am trying to understand how your argument works, if it indeed does!
How is an immutable rule democratic if a small intellectual cadre put it in place over the majority, then?
Jonathan
June 9th, 2010 at 10.32 am #
There is a fundamental conflict between unfettered democracy and liberty – the tyrranny of the majority. We ought to view democracy, though, as being largely a means to the end of liberty. Therefore democracy can be restricted to protect liberty. That rule is undemocratic, but it is pro-liberty, and that is what is important.