Re: National Sovereignty

"Charles J. Reid" wrote:

> > "Respect for national sovereignty is most heightened after a war, when
> > the treaty-making parties must first reach agreement on sovereignty
> > before they can agree on anything else.

> A case can be made that the diplomatic dances preceding the First World
> War -- the messages, the ultimatums, the closing down of embassies -- were
> all predicated on "respect for national sovereignty." It is difficult to
> find a case with more "heightened" "respect for national sovereignty."
> 
> Conclusion: a short examination of history will reduce your hypothesis to
> nonsense. However, your hypothesis may have more meaning today, where
> Corporate Feudalism makes international politics and law a sham. Doing a
> little diplomatic dance after hostilities today and in the future to give
> lip service to the traditions of "respect for national sovereignty" while
> manipulating outcomes behind the scenes may, indeed, be a phenomenon worth
> exploring, using your hypothesis as a point of departure.

I suspect that you misunderstood my remarks, Charles. I apologize for
the lack of clarity. My argument is that at the time the war comes to an
end, the parties agree, or are forced to accept, national sovereignty.
Otherwise, the war would not end. For WWII, I was thinking (a) about the
U.S. accepting the sovereignty of the Soviet Union over most of Eastern
Europe, (b) about the Soviet Union accepting the sovereignty of the U.S.
over Japan and Berlin, (c) about Japan's acceptance of the sovereignty
of the U.S. over Japanese political development, and the like. These
acceptances were begrudging and certainly did not reflect the moral
judgments of the citizens of the countries that accepted them. When the
balance of world power shifted, the people in the countries that had
agreed to respect national sovereignty naturally shifted their attitudes
toward it. For a country like the U.S. which became stronger, the
citizens began to question the right of sovereignty of the Soviet union
over Eastern European territories. I view the current attitudes of
Americans toward the Serbs, on balance, as reflecting this change in the
balance of power. If Milosovic had enough military power to inflict
damage on American cities that was only partly equivalent to that which
NATO and the U.S. has inflicted on Serbia, American  moral judgments
would not change significantly, but its respect for Yugoslavian national
sovereignty would.

Do you see now why I regard violations of national sovereignty as a weak
criterion for judging whether the actions of governments are right or
wrong?




-- 
Pat Gunning, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman
Web pages on Subjectivism, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises,
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