THE
BEAR'S LAIR Back to
Westphalia By Martin Hutchinson
The 1648 treaty of Westphalia established
the principle that nation states could run their
internal affairs as they pleased - it was no
longer acceptable for Catholic states to invade
Protestant states because they didn't like their
religion (or vice versa).
Westphalianism
proved a vital organizing principle for the next
300 years, allowing significant periods of peace
to appear between all the wars - and thus
mankind's greatest boon, the Industrial
Revolution, to become established. We now appear
to be abandoning that principle - and the economic
and political implications of doing so are dire.
The Westphalia principle always had a few
holes around the
edges. Colonialism resulted
in frequent invasions of previously independent
states, some of which were justified to change
unacceptable domestic practices, whether fiscal
(Egypt in 1882), economic (the Transvaal in 1899),
or humanitarian (Spanish-American War, 1898).
There were however few if any invasions of "rich"
countries caused by their domestic policies and
beliefs, although conquerors such as Napoleon used
any unpalatable domestic policies of their victims
as a further excuse for aggression if it suited
them.
After the establishment of the
United Nations in 1945, intervention that
contravened Westphalian principles was deemed
unacceptable even in countries that would
previously have been considered ripe for colonial
rule. The Anglo-French attack on Egypt in 1956
established this rule, being brought to a rapid
halt by the United Nations resolutions and by
threats against sterling.
The Soviet Union
violated Westphalian principles by its invasions
of Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and
Afghanistan (1979), but the first two of those
exceptions were already considered part of the
Soviet bloc while Afghanistan, because of its
backwardness, was something of a special case.
Similarly the United States in its
invasions of the Dominican Republic (1965) and
Panama (1989) was protecting the Western
Hemisphere against Communism and the Panama Canal
respectively - the domestic policies of the two
countries were largely an excuse. Notably, the
United States never invaded Cuba, even though the
country was only 90 miles from Florida and its
domestic policies were about as unacceptable as
it's possible to get.
Since the 1989-91
breakup of the Soviet bloc, Westphalian principles
have begun to lose their force. The 1991 Gulf War
was scrupulous, some would say over-scrupulous, in
observing them - the Allies attacked Saddam
Hussein to remove him from Kuwait, but failed even
in the flush of victory to remove him from office,
though by the practices of previous wars they
would have been justified in doing so. In 1992,
the US invaded Somalia for humanitarian reasons -
and was forced to leave in humiliating failure. In
1994, it invaded Haiti for humanitarian reasons -
and installed a tyrant Jean-Betrand Aristide worse
than any who had gone before in even Haiti's
unhappy history.
Again in 1995 the United
States intervened ineffectively in Bosnia, where
Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, once allowed to
arm the Croatian forces, had already done most of
the hard work. Following that invasion, the US
imposed a peace, the Dayton Accords, which have
kept the peace but through incompetent meddling by
global aid agencies have prevented Bosnia from
establishing a viable economy. In 1999, the United
States again intervened in Yugoslavia for
humanitarian reasons, creating a new country,
Kosovo, that appears to be becoming an Islamic
terrorist state in the heart of Europe.
In
spite of George W Bush's call during the 2000
campaign for a "modest" foreign policy, the
violations of Westphalian principles have
continued. The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was
not one of them; the United States had suffered
deadly attack by terrorists sheltered by the
ruling Taliban government of Afghanistan (though
the continued US military presence once a new
government had been established is less
justifiable).
The 2003 invasion of Iraq
was a much more doubtful case; if considered as a
very belated completion of the Gulf War, or if the
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had been found,
it would have been justified under Westphalian
principles. In the event, the justification became
the removal of Saddam Hussein, which had no such
Westphalian foundation.
Finally, we have
the attack on Libya, which is as anti-Westphalian
as was the 2008 Russian assault on Georgia. In
Georgia, the Russians took advantage of a
rebellion against an internationally recognized
government. In Libya, the invading forces have
done the same, the difference being that there is
more of an international consensus about the
unpleasantness of Colonel Gaddafi than there was
about the benign, reforming and democratically
elected Saakashvili government of Georgia.
The change in the world's practices is
indicated in the fact that there was a much better
case for Libyan intervention in 1969, when the
brutal Gaddafi overturned by force the benign and
pro-Western King Idris, yet no such intervention
took place or was even seriously proposed.
The assault on Westphalian principles has
not however been confined to the military sphere.
Supranational courts such as the European Court of
Justice and the International Court of Justice
demand the right to interfere into even the
minutiae of domestic arrangements in those
countries foolish enough to submit to their
jurisdiction. Since these courts are entirely free
from any kind of democratic control, the result is
that the values of the international salariat
prevail over the wishes of the peoples concerned,
without any hope of redress. As the Gaddafi case
has shown, such courts have an additional
disadvantage - it has become impossible to ease
dictators into retirement, because of this risk to
them that, as happened to Slobodan Milosevic, they
spend the rest of their days rotting in The Hague.
Economically, the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) promotes its own brand of
anti-Westphalianism and damages the credit rating
of the countries it "helps" by demanding rights of
first repayment. The classic case of IMF damage is
Argentina, forced into "neo-liberal" policies in
the low-commodity-price 1990s which forced down
living standards and ran up international debt,
while lacking domestic support. Argentine economic
populists have since felt themselves vindicated by
a successful return to autarky and debt default in
the high-commodity-price period after 2003.
Ukraine, where the IMF held back credits to the
struggling pro-Western government of Julia
Tymoshenko and has since granted a $15.6 billion
facility to the pro-Russian thugocracy of her
successor, is another case in point.
A
further erosion of Westphalianism has come with
the increasingly intrusive "anti-terror"
bureaucracy in the financial sector, and the
excuse it has given meddling governments to
investigate offshore bank accounts. As any Brit
knows who was reasonably wealthy (somewhat
wealthier than the Hutchinson family) during the
1940-79 period of exorbitant taxes, high inflation
and exchange controls, a numbered and untraceable
Swiss bank account is a key civil liberty to
protect one's family against loathsome
expropriation. That civil liberty is no longer
available, it appears, and one now needs to be in
the billionaire politician-buying class to protect
one's family wealth.
As alarming is the
attempt by France and Germany to bully Ireland out
of its low corporate tax rate, on the grounds of
"unfair tax competition". Tax competition between
states, both within and between national
jurisdictions, is one of the few mechanisms we
have to prevent governments from absorbing every
penny we earn. Anything that diminishes it is
accordingly a major step further on the road to
serfdom. Ireland's fate in this matter, I read in
the Financial Times, is likely to be dictated by
the rise of the populist Euroskeptic True Finn
party, which may prevent the Finnish government
from agreeing to the stitch-up. It is abundantly
clear that as lovers of economic liberty, we are
all True Finns now!
Economically, the
decline of Westphalianism greatly raises the risks
of one or other catastrophes within the global
economy, and of its overall decline. Rogue states,
no longer secure against invasion even if no
threat to their neighbors, will take care to arm
themselves with nuclear weapons, thus raising the
cost to the West of the inevitable international
confrontations. In economic policy, the strong
will increasingly attempt to prevent "unfair"
competition from the weak, either in favorable
tariff rates, in low corporate or individual
income taxes, or through providing an especially
receptive and secure home for savings.
The
ultimate goal of the anti-Westphalians is of
course a world government, dominated by
unaccountable supranational bureaucrats even if it
includes some electoral fig leaf (which will be
entirely unrepresentative, because the global
population of 7 billion is far too great to be
adequately represented by 1,000 or so delegates,
the maximum that can usefully participate in a
world congress). Unlike the various alarums and
excursions in the Middle East, that fate genuinely
is worth fighting against militarily - but one
must wonder whether the free peoples of the
world's sovereign states will wake up to the
danger before it is too late.
The treaty
of Westphalia was the most critical event in the
emergence of our modern civilization. By allowing
states to develop freely with less danger of
invasion from a stronger, ideologically hostile
neighbor, it produced the intellectual flowering
of the scientific revolution and the
Enlightenment, followed by the economic flowering
of the commercial and industrial revolutions. By
allowing Westphalian principles to decay, we risk
reversing the immense advances in human happiness
that those developments brought.
Martin Hutchinson is the author
of Great Conservatives (Academica Press,
2005) - details can be found on the website
www.greatconservatives.com - and co-author with
Professor Kevin Dowd of Alchemists of Loss
(Wiley, 2010). Both are now available on
Amazon.com, Great Conservatives only in a
Kindle edition, Alchemists of Loss in both
Kindle and print editions.
(Republished
with permission from PrudentBear.com.
Copyright 2005-11 David W Tice &
Associates.)
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