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The Danger of the Microstate
Submitted by Scott Scheule on Tue, 2008-08-26 15:54.
People should be more worried than they are by the fragmentation of states. Consider that shortly after World War II, there were around 60 states. Today, there are almost 200 (depending on how one counts quasi-states like Kosovo, and weird cases like Taiwan, which everyone has agreed is both a state (because it clearly has independence) and that is not a state (to mollify China), and there are even stranger beasts). A lot of this increase is due to decolonization, but in recent years, the main cause has been, essentially, ethnic separatism. Because ethnic groups are mixed together, ethnic separatism is a recipe for civil war, ethnic cleansing, and worse. And because most ethnic groups are tiny, the resulting nation states can be too small to govern themselves – Kosovo is an example, again. They either become failed states, magnets for terrorists and drug smugglers, or wards of powerful states or what is mischievously called the “international community.”
That's Eric Posner, on the new "nations" of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
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Not to mention the "social
Not to mention the "social race to the bottom", where global capitalists profit from tax-competition and lack of labor regulations to increase their greedy profits :)
hrmph
Insofar as states are harmful in some positive relation to their relative size, that the earth is finite and that to be a state requires a territorial monopoly, we ought to cheer the formation of as many states as possible so that the evil influence of any given state which happens to be more powerful than the rest is reduced according to that relation.
The alternative is to say that there ought to be only one state, for whatever reason. The historical reality that coups d'etat and state collapses seem to happen far more often to smaller, weaker states than to larger more powerful ones ought to argue convincingly against that notion.
Though I suppose there is yet one more - which we may perhaps term "Goldilocks" - position: that the current number of states is just right.
Whatever. Just one more reason to not read The Volokh Conspiracy.
There are advantages to the
There are advantages to the current situation where some states have much more power than the rest. It creates a disincentive against causing international mischief for most states, because they know that they will lose if the superpower gets involved.
I can easily imagine a scenario where a micro-state world is more violent than the status quo. A block of 4 nations thinks it can conquer 3 other nations, then those 3 nations quickly forge an alliance with 2 more, and the situation escalates until the world is at war.
I'm not sure what the optimum number of states is, but I don't think it is an order of magnitude off from what we have now.
Ignores the variable of 'liberalism'
The US and Mexico are not at war nor will be at war anytime soon. Same with the US and Canada. The US and Mexico have vastly different wealth and ethnicity, yet there's no war between the nations. Why not?
While portions of Eastern Europe are mired in ethnic warfare, it's hard to imagine war breaking out between England and France, even though those countries fought dozens of wars over the last few hundred years. Why?
There's a societal evolutionary point beyond which liberalism dominates, beyond which people become more worried about the season finale if Lost than about the grievance they're supposed to have against people across the border because their great-great-great grandfather was maimed in a war. They realize that the costs of war are great and life without war is pretty damn good.
Large portions of the world have evolved culturally into this mindset, though large portions of the world continue to be mired in the zero-sum game.
Agree to a point
There's no disputing the datum that war with Canada or with Mexico is unthinkable to pretty much anybody to the point of being comical even as a suggestion.
And yet, I recall reading that just prior to WWI, Europeans were thinking that they'd moved past war. So, why am I really so confident?
Yes, governments wage war,
Yes, governments wage war, and then use the threat of war to form cartel. One of the main arguments put forward by politicians during the recent proposal for a European constitution was that it would put an end to the risk of war.
Speaking of the absurdity of a war against Mexico or Canada :)
The following comment on the
The following comment on the original thread is good:
it's a new world out there
In the bad old days a sea coast nation needed a large navy to exist and a land nation needed a large population for cannon fodder. Just as Col. Colt "made" all people equal, nukes and cruise missiles make all nations equal else why is the US people petrified of pissant little countries?
Time to try the great experiment - 50 sovereign nations under a mutual defense pact - that the phony Constitution KO'd.
Clash of civilizations?
"The US and Mexico are not at war nor will be at war anytime soon. Same with the US and Canada. The US and Mexico have vastly different wealth and ethnicity, yet there's no war between the nations. Why not?"
One reason would be that they are all Western civilizations, so although they could theoretically quibble over resources or territory, they have no fundamental clash in values that would lead to endemic war. According to this theory, then, the number of nations is irrelevant; conflict will happen wherever there are civilizational faultlines.
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