The Desperate Necessity of Law

My friend Martin Kelly has written a withering review of Vincent Cable's latest book, The Storm. It chimes with some thoughts I had yesterday whilst travelling back to London on the train from Oxford, having met with some old friends and their family. My thoughts were provoked by the latest edition of Foreign Affairs Magazine.

Foreign Affairs works at a higher level than the Economist, which I have always thought is there to give people opinions and information--any opinions and information--which they can drop at cocktail parties and business meetings. FA, on the other hand, has some influence. It is where the sorts of people who host the higher end-parties get their opinions, whence they trickle into consensus and law with each olive in the vodka.

This month's particularly appealed to me since I have for some time been trying to familiarise myself with the international convention on the law of the sea. I think that this code, to which the United States is not signed up, is of critical importance to understanding how future conflicts over resources and territory might work out. It sets up an international agency with appropriation power over resources, known as 'the agency' to administer the sea bed not claimed by states, and the resources therein. In astringent style, this area is known as 'The Area'. The convention also seeks to set out rules about piracy, coastlines and traffic.

Robert Kaplan, in an essay touching on these themes, tries this month to link them to an insight which is not unfamiliar to any historian of the British Empire; that the world economy, resting nominally on the willingness of Chinese people to oppress each other and of the west to abandon its own industries, is and always has been, focussed upon the Indian Ocean.

Kaplan ties together the USA's recent understanding that it cannot afford the 1,000 ship navy that would be required to police this area with the rapid expansion of Chinese and Indian naval power. He makes a reference to Alfred Thayer Mahan, and a slightly silly market based fantasy of a 'plug and play' framework of crisis management in which naval forces could effectively be treated as the outsourced materiel of a globally-governed Indian Ocean regulator.

What this is all about is managing American decline, of course; but no one is going to honestly say that, especially not when trying to advance the interests of global capital.

Elsewhere in the magazine, Rachel Loeffler does a very good job of pretending that international powers influence banks rather than the other way around; her theme is the financial containment of Iran. Unfortunately, having detailed how Iran has been financially pressurised, she notes how Syria and South America, and sundry British banks, have, perfectly legally, allowed that regime to escape the consequences.

Mad, delusional articles about global weather engineering and quasi-religious invocations about the need to reform the American banking system follow; all of which serve only to illuminate that a science based on the manipulation of mood is not a science, and a 'new world order' based on global regulation is a joke. Indeed, as I realised the last, my final respect for Gordon Brown, which has taken a long time dying, slipped away.

I also note not one jot about the forthcoming bankruptcy of the American States, nor one warning that unemployment measured by benefit claims is unreliable in a world which depends on benefit being available, or the former workers being legally able to claim. These two facts alone make any articles on the American and world economy meaningless. Remember that, when journalists assail you with 'prosperity is just around the corner' nonsense in the coming days. We are experiencing the first years of the long end of the age of oil, and some people will just never see it.

All social structures require self-checking mechanisms. For the American territories in the late nineteenth century, for instance, the fourteenth amendment applied the Bill of rights and the requirement for a republican form of government to all the states. No more complicated legal code was necessary; people knew how to be American with very little oversight, and would be self-checking in a way that a parliamentary order would not have allowed. This in part explains the uniformity of the United States and the organisational diversity of the British Empire. Similarly, in the Roman Catholic church, the point of very limited papal and conciliar authority is to ultimately prevent any major diversion from the deposit of the faith; that is the point illustrated by but not embodied in Apostolic succession. For the Nazis, Volk, Lebensraum and Fuhrerprinzip kept people fighting right to the end, and for many today 'rights' fill much the same function.

The difficulty with these sort of meme-based structures is that, when reality fails to correspond or when local groups introduce divergence that they know at some level is incompatible, neurosis and hysteria result. I think that some very violent and strange behaviours can be explained in this way.

For those who belong to whatever the term for the global high middle class is--Christopher Lasch tried to call them 'managers of elite attitudes', though that is misleading and probably sounds better in German--social science consensus represents the meme.

Here's how it works. First, make an assumption based upon a tendentious reading of various 'facts'. Then turn those facts into statistics. Then present them as part of a process with the conclusions of which opinion formers agree; then call all who one suspects are not 'with the programme' mad, but in terms borrowed from psychology. Then one can be assured of uniformity.

This seems the real point of computer models and national security analysis and most journalism, and it is welcomed by the people of money and power whom it serves. I think there is a case to be made that liberalism has always been like this, but that is for another blog.

My point, which I'll make fully somewhere else, is that the Indian Ocean issue that Kaplan has elaborated on shouldn't be the basis for mad schemes of Naval competition. Nor, indeed, should the lesson of the great naval competitions before 1914 be forgotten. building up navies led indirectly to war, but then, except for when submarine war brought the Americans in, in world war one at least there were very very few real naval battles.

Sitting people down in the understanding of sovereignty, of human imperfectibility, and of a clear eyed-view of how much people could benefit from land-based energy cooperation and careful, managed trade, is going to be much better than markets and militarism. If that is based on a proliferation of political mechanisms and a nominal but vital commitment to the rule of law, all the better.

When I read mad schemes of development, or of economics, or think about the dangers of the straits, or the islands, or the pirates I have referred to all over this blog, I keep coming to the conclusion that the only solution that could ever last is the rule of law. This means real pooling of interests and the real political understanding of humanity--not of people as numbers or resources, but as people. That, as far as I can tell, is not what Foreign Affairs magazine seems to be about.

This is Easter. Today, resurrection Sunday, is meant to be a day of hope. There are times when I wonder if our flawed humanity will ever overcome to the world of law, reason, and love which can save us; but then I can appeal to my own organising principle and see how pointless despair is on a day like this.