Subject: Westphalian politics

From: priestesspisces@hotmail.com (Priestess Pisces)

spent this early morning hour drinking and reading history house.. a
fav of mine..

thought i'd share this one with yall
(of course check the archives on this site.... well worth the read)

http://www.historyhouse.com/uts/westphalia/

This Under the Sun column published 10/1/2001

"The only safe way to destroy an enemy is to make him your friend."
-Abraham Lincoln.
George W. Bush, whose own daddy was never very good at "the vision
thing", has proclaimed that most visionary of things: a New World
Order. Bush and his advisors would like their response to the
terrorist attacks on America to replace World War II as the world's
defining conflict. The fact that Bush has declared a new doctrine
("our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government
that supports them") has newspapers like the Economist declaring that
the heretofore comically inept[1] Dubya may be history's successor to
Truman -- a statement that manages to dishonor the memory of a man who
grew up fighting in the (first) Great War, not boozing it up with the
boys in the Rangers' dugout. We here at History House have seen this
New World Order before, and we're not entirely sure we liked it the
last time it made the rounds ... four hundred years ago.

John Quincy Adams, the nineteenth century's somewhat brainier
Dubya[2], echoed famously isolationist George Washington when he said
that

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be
unfurled, there will be America's heart, her benedictions, and her
prayers. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

Nice Guys Finish Last
So in 1821 the Greeks, fighting for independence from their age-old
enemies, the Ottomans, got the finger from then Secretary of State
Adams. A century later, that bumbling idiot Woodrow Wilson decided
that foreign policy was a good place to practice piety. Hitler and
Communism provided a fortunate, if unique, convergence of aims:
America could do good while looking after its self interest. But
politician cum rock star Henry Kissinger reminded us in the 1970s that
the best foreign policy is selfish. For the better part of 2001 Bush
followed in Quincy and Kissinger's footsteps and decided the right way
to conduct foreign policy was to shoot the world the biggest bird in
recent memory.[3]

So why does Dubya, so skeptical of military adventurism, now think the
best policy is to go abroad "in search of monsters to destroy?" A bit
of old-fashioned revenge might be entirely excusable, but the
declaration that America will no longer respect the sovereignty of
nations deemed to be harboring terrorists has Bush stating for the
record that the US will, without the benefit of so much as a flux
capacitor or sports almanac, leap four hundred years back in history
to join the countries of the Middle East and Central Asia. Perhaps we
should explain.

God's Got the Best Armies
In the first half of the seventeenth century Europe stumbled out of
bed with a horrible hangover: the Reformation. The Catholic Church,
always handy with a solution for times like this, invented the Jesuits
and unleashed the Counter-Reformation. In the name of religion, the
Catholic Hapsburg Empire, followed swiftly by the Holy Roman Empire,
started a series of wars against Protestant nations that turned
Europe, and especially Germany, into an anarchic hell of pillaging
mercenaries, famine, disease and rape.[4] "We live like animals,
eating bark and grass" noted one peasant -- who probably wouldn't feel
that much better off in twenty-first century Afghanistan. Another
noted, "Many people say there is no God." Decades of this finally got
Protestants and Catholics alike to thinking that maybe there was
something they were missing -- after all, God was the whole reason
they got into this mess.[5]

The problem was that every time a local peace treaty was signed, some
meddling nation would want to come and reconquer the locals. The
peasantry grew understandably hacked off at having to adopt whichever
religion their local Duke had that month. It was an intractable
problem for nearly half a century: anyone with an army felt compelled
to go subjugate some people and convert them to their brand of
Christianity.

Bygones
It took six months for delegates of the nations of Europe, holed up in
Westphalia in 1648, to come up with a solution. Their answer was one
of those things that, like electricity or canned beer, was so
innovative that we now take it for granted. We cannot imagine life
without it: the sovereignty of nations. Agreeing to disagree, the
rulers of Europe decided that the only way to stop war was to declare
that the internal affairs (which in those days really meant the
religious affairs) of a nation were off-limits to external meddling --
even if God was involved. In the words of the delegates, faith would
be divorced from diplomacy. This system worked, notwithstanding the
ideological hiccup of the Napoleonic wars, to preserve the general
peace in Europe for another three hundred years. It's also why we
can't go occupy Quebec just because we don't like Celine Dion.[6]

The entire world today is based on the Westphalian notion of
sovereignty. The UN is practically a shrine to it. By stating for the
record that he will freely police the internal affairs of states that
he does not agree with, Bush is driving a stake into the heart of the
system.

Big, Round Decisions
Is that a bad thing? After all, the dirtbags who leveled the Trade
Towers don't seem the type of people to be especially worried about a
dusty old treaty. But abandoning non-interference forces some very
stark decisions on the United States, questions that are sure to
deeply divide the country. After all, this is a country which can't
come to a consensus on the real vs. fake dilemma of Britney Spears'
chest.

Who is it OK to go police? Afghanistan seems to be acceptable to most
people right now. But what if the government of Pakistan fails? Should
we go in there? Well, once we've announced it's okay to solve other
countries' internal problems, we wonder if India might not be quite
pleased to go straighten out their irksome neighbor. And even if a
country does decide to police another -- how are they to achieve
success? Does anyone imagine that US cops and infantry will be able to
effectively provide law and order in Pakistan? Or Iraq? We here at
History House are quite sure that the Turks would love to waltz into
Iraq and bust some Kurds up... all under the similar anti-terrorist
pretext. Is this OK?

The Westphalian delegates decided it was better to forbid all these
activities than to start down the slippery slope -- they had thirty
years of hell fresh on their minds when they did it. We have thirty
years of peace and two "Law and Order" spinoffs on TV. We probably
think we're up to the task.

On the other hand, what good is trusting another nation, like
Afghanistan, to police its internal affairs, when that nation can't
control its own borders and is openly hostile? Unless the US is
actually willing to run Afghanistan as a foreign territory, then it
might be time for some "nation building" so there's some people there
we can trust. Hm. We here at History House wonder how far all of this
return to pre-Westphalian politics has been thought through.

If George Carlin were Secretary of State, he'd advocate building a
fence around the whole place and waiting a few hundred years. He may
not have a bad idea.

Footnotes
1-A phrase you probably associate most strongly with the Italians.
2-For those playing along at home, John Quincy Adams was the only
other president to follow his father into office. He didn't accomplish
much.
3-It wasn't really that long ago that even the Europeans were burning
Bush in effigy.
4-Ah, religious wars always bring out the best in people
5-In an interesting side note, one military commander of note for the
Holy Roman Empire became so addled during the course of the war he had
his men kill every dog, cat and rooster in every village he came to.
6-More's the pity, really

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Original file name: Westphalian politics - converted on Wednesday, 10 October 2001, 17:00