Author: anthonybehan

Researching state legitimacy, AI, identity, critical theory, and how technology changes personal identity and the nation state. One wife, three dogs, six guitars, and a seldom used trombone. Work for IBM but this is completely independent of that.
History, monarchy

The Legitimacy of The King
Janina Ramirez: Her series on the Hundred Years War on BBC4 is revealing on the legitimation of the King.
Janina Ramirez: Her series on the Hundred Years War on BBC4 is revealing on the legitimation of the King.

Much of the history of the infrastructure of State harkens back to feudal and older systems of clan based fealty, where one clan is in the ascendant, and brings other clans under its wing, and the head of the clan asserts a right to rule through strength and politics.  Francis Fukuyama talked a lot about that in his book on The Origins of Political Order.  This kind of authority is still seen today in monarchial type totalitarian states like Saudi Arabia and (formerly) Ba’athist Iraq.  There are some similarities with Bashar al Assad’s Syria, but they are limited.  Wiliam Dalrymple‘s latest book Return of a King reminds us that Hamid Karzai, the current leader of Afghanistan, comes from the same tiny sub-tribe from whence the original ruler of Afghanistan hailed during the British War there in 1839.  The Divine Right of Kings was a principle that emanated from Reformation Europe, and in particular from a Theologically thin doctrine hastily assembled to facilitate Henry VIII.  This doctrine was in a sense the harbinger of modern secularism; the French Revolution abhorred the gap between rich and poor, and questioned how righteous the King really was, ultimately resulting in the schism between Church and State.

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bunreacht na heireann, China, constitution, Euro, Europe, Fukuyama, History, international community, Karl Marx, Philosophy, United Nations

Sovereignty, Poverty and Interdependence
sean_lemass_02
Seán Lemass, Taoiseach of Ireland 1959-1966. Lemass believed Ireland had given up its sovereignty to the International Community in the years after World War II.

Ireland has had a well documented, rather turbulent recent economic history.  Following on from the bursting of the property bubble and the attendant banking collapse, an extraordinarily myopic political decision to nationalise the exposure of the banks led to a sovereign debt crisis, and, ultimately, a bailout from the troika of the IMF, ECB and European Commission.  Apart from the loss of money, there was plenty dramatic wailing about the loss of National Sovereignty, and references to the War of Independence and the heroes of 1916 and ‘is this what they died for?’ rhetoric.  There was even a nuance to the sovereignty question, in that the country had lost her economic sovereignty, whatever that meant.

Now, politics has always had an uneasy alliance with the propriety of language, bending it to its will as any situation may have seen fit.  The distinction between economic sovereignty, and other sovereignty, one supposes, is that while we’re not necessarily allowed to award pay rises to civil servants, we are still permitted to invade England.  At least we have that, I guess.   Of course, the extent to which we are – truly – permitted to invade England is limited in exactly the same way as our freedom to spend money has been limited.  It is not a flat prohibition on action through coercive or other power that has limited what Ireland as a State can do; it is the threat of exclusion from international systems upon which we have become irrevocably dependent that limits our action.

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Euro, Europe, Fukuyama, History, international community, Karl Marx, Philosophy, UNDP, Zizek

Systemic Issues: Marx, Python, Equality and Capitalist Doom
Karl_Marx_001
Karl Marx. The man had his moments.

Charles Moore’s article in the Telegraph yesterday caused something of a stir. Equality, he said, was not really a good thing at all. What’s that you say? He must be an elitist! How uncool is that! Well, essentially he was arguing that in the context of women in the army, and in particular on the front line of the army, that it was one step too far. Women just are not as strong as men, and therefore shouldn’t be there. His argument weakened when he extended it into civil partnership, defining marriage in terms of the legal structures for its dissolution, which appears to me to be something of a non sequitur. In essence, Moore misses the point that ‘unconventional’ couples are not seeking access to the institution, but rather to its attendant rights; indeed, they are seeking to fundamentally alter the institution, and make it more inclusive, rather than simply more equal.

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Anonymous, Identity, internet, Moral Authority, Philosophy, Religion, Zizek

Zizek’s Technological Post-Humanism and Anonymous
anonymous
Anonymous: Abstract Technological Representation of the Excluded

As mentioned in my last post, Zizek identifies four apocalyptic antagonisms that threaten the liberal democratic status-quo.  They are ecology, technology, property and equality.  In relation to the technological post-human dystopia, Zizek attributes a leadership role to Ray Kurzweil, a noted thinker in technology futurism.  There are two kinds of post-humanism, it appears – a kind of robotic, artificial intelligence future as described in the fiction Asimov and the Terminator movies, and a bio-genetic technological Armageddon  of which I’m less familiar.

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Informal Economy, international community, internet, Philosophy

Global Political Movements
zizek
Zizek’s ‘First as Tragedy, Then as Farce’

On the plane to New York I was reading an interesting article in the Economist on The Politics of The Internet, that asked the question whether Internet activism could develop into a ‘real political movement’.  It was an interesting sentence construction, one that presupposed how politics should work, and that the real effect of significant change may not be within the system – in the form of a political party, one that spans borders – but with the system itself.  For example, open source software should not succeed at all based on the market based assumptions of equity distribution.  It succeeds in spite of the system, not because of it.  At the same time, I’m reading Zizek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, notwithstanding his pathological fear of footnotes.

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Informal Economy, Informal Justice Systems, international community, Justice, law, Rule of Law, UNDP, United Nations

The Informal State

logo-undpI posted just yesterday about the Informal Economy described by Robert Neuwirth as System D, where it is projected that by 2020 two thirds of the world’s workers will operate.  That’s an economy almost entirely independent of the state, and the nation state structure.  It all harks back to the Industrial Revolution, which spawned Marxism and the labour movement, a movement that brought communism and great intellectual struggle.  We have to believe that within those workers there will be able leaders; English as a language is increasingly unifying peoples.  It could be an interesting century yet!

I mentioned in passing yesterday that ‘In Africa, many tribes operate … with their own systems of justice’, though I did not have a reference.  This morning, my attention was brought to a recent UN Development Program (UNDP) report entitled Informal Justice Systems.  In it, the report states that ‘…80% of disputes are resolved through informal justice systems in some countries’. The claim is based on research by Ewa Wojkowska .  The combination of the Informal Economy and Informal Justice is of course mesmerising.  If those two beasts can find some resonance with an Informal Security apparatus, then hey presto, you have a de facto State, but not one in the conventional family of nations, rather is it more like some globalised feudalism, a million miles from Manhattan.

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africa, China, international community, Policing, syria

What Happens When State Legitimacy Dissipates?
stealth of nations
Bob Neuwirth’s book on the economies that operate completely independent of the State is an indictment on State effectiveness, and State Legitimacy.

In considering the concept of state legitimacy, we need to understand why is it so important?  I’ve mentioned before that there are two kinds of legitimacy as I see it, an internal legitimacy and an external legitimacy.  External legitimacy is that conferred upon a sovereign state by the international community, affording it standing in the community of nations, making it entitled to trade and interact in international affairs.  Internal legitimacy is that internal relationship between the state and its people, wherein the state is recognised as representative, or authoritative in matters such as justice, taxation and (to a greater or lesser degree) morality.

In order to understand why legitimacy is important, we should consider what happens when it disappears.  We need to consider this in respect of both internal and external legitimacy.  External legitimacy is perhaps easier to consider, as there are so many well documented examples, and because the legitimating forces are clear and easily measurable; when the international community describes a country as a failed state, it is primarily in relation to its external legitimacy.  Sanctions are usually the first indicator.  The International Community decides, in its wisdom, that due to some breach in the rules – formal or otherwise – a State, and in particular its régime, needs to alter its behaviour in order to be considered persona grata.  The State becomes isolated, trade opportunities become limited, and economic progress is retarded.  This happened in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Syria, Somalia – the list goes on.

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China, Extraordinary Rendition, law, Multi-National Corporation, National Identity, Policing, Rule of Law

The Assault on British Legitimacy
Passport_to_Pimlico_film
Scotland, Northern Ireland, maybe Wales? What about Pimlico?

The United Kingdom is under tremendous strain of late.  It may not appear to be at first glance, but considering the following points.

First, there is the long struggle as retrenchment from Empire finally reaches its apotheosis, and the multicultural misfit that has wracked both The Netherlands and France.  Legitimacy amounts to different things for each cultural grouping, whether that is the legitimacy of the police service (amidst allegations of institutional racism), or the problem with British Muslim representation.

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constitution, Extraordinary Rendition, Guantanamo Bay, international community, law, MNC, Multi-National Corporation, Rule of Law, United Nations

Blurred Lines: Defining Terrorism
terrorist-watch-list
Careful now! (image credit News With Attitude)

Glenn Greenwald’s most excellent series on Security and Liberty in The Guardian addresses most recently the definition of terrorism, and in particular the case of a gangland shooting where a man called Morales shot and killed an innocent 10-year-old girl by mistake.  The State of New York convicted him of being a terrorist, defined by state laws as acting with ‘intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.’  The interpretation of the court was that Morales actions were designed to coerce the entire Mexican-American community, and were therefore terrorist.  On appeal, the court not only rejected the terrorism conviction, but also sent the entire case for retrial, as the standards by which terrorist trials were conducted were different to those of non-terrorist offences.

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China, constitution, international community, Rule of Law, syria, United Nations

Will The Legitimate Syrian Government Please Stand Up?
Bashar-al-Assad-310x233
Bashar Al-Assad: Time’s Up

A draft declaration from talks in Marrakech on the situation in Syria from the Friends of Syria has recognised the opposition as ‘the legitimate representative of the Syrian people’.  Which is nice for them, I guess.  Not so nice, one would presume, for the president of Syria, Bashar Al-Assad and his friends.  Syria has generally been on the wrong side of US foreign policy, and even when the US has needed its support, for example in the lead up to the Invasion of Iraq in 2003, the extent to which it was willing to court Syrian support was arms length and defensive.  President Obama’s declaration of support for the opposition coalition yesterday was not unexpected, and is likely to hasten the demise of the ruling family in Syria, which has been in place for over forty years.

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