A jot; John Robb has a an interesting statement that contrasts the nation-state with the market-state .

From the article:

Whereas the nation-state used centralized control to enable slower regions to catch up, the market-state will need to accelerate (mostly by getting out of the way) innovation at the regional/community level.

This has implications for how Australian governance has heavily centralised into Canberra and forsaken the federalist structure for a unitary nationalist one. In the next phase of human development and achievement, centralisation, especially political centralisation, is a weakness - not a strength.

The WaPo has an article arguing for Vermont secession . The irritant causes are increasing centralisation which prohibits the state from expressing itself politically and in liberty.

From the article:

Vermont was once an independent republic, and it can be one again. We think the time to make that happen is now. Over the past 50 years, the U.S. government has grown too big, too corrupt and too aggressive toward the world, toward its own citizens and toward local democratic institutions. It has abandoned the democratic vision of its founders and eroded Americans' fundamental freedoms.

Vermont did not join the Union to become part of an empire. Some of us therefore seek permission to leave.

The article argues that imposition from Washington DC has meant Vermont has lost control of its National Guard (militia) which is fighting an imperial war 6,000 miles away. Additionally the state did not want to raise the drinking age to 21 upon Washington's demand. Washington imposed itself by removing federal highway funds - which is often the American equivalent of tied grants used in Australia to coerce the states into Canberra's will.

Vermont's argument for secession includes the reality that it is becoming cheaper and cheaper for small states to prosper under globalisation and market liberalisation. The market-state can be much smaller than the nation-state, especially, as in Vermont's case when it will be surrounding by trading nations such as the US and Canada.

We secessionists believe that the 350-year swing of history's pendulum toward large, centralized imperial states is once again reversing itself.

Why? First, the cost of oil and gas. According to urban planner James Howard Kunstler, "Anything organized on a gigantic scale . . . will probably falter in the energy-scarce future." Second, third-wave technology is as inherently democratic and decentralist as second-wave technology was authoritarian and centralist.

It will be interesting to see if the US does do some untying. Juan Enriquez wrote ; "There is ever more pressure on central governments to justify their existence."

cam

Interesting set of points describing the relationship between private military companies and the market-state (as opposed to the nation-state).

Couple of things that grabbed me, Schloky argues that the customer of a PMC is not the nation-state but the taxpaying citizen. Not sure what the ramifications of that are, also not sure I agree with it, given how remote a PMC's requirements are from civil understanding.

Another one is that the market will decide the bounds of acceptable violence, not nation-state regulation. Given that Australian Republicanism is a technological system for the minimisation of tyranny and violence this has serious ramifications for republican technologies and their implication.

Republicanism relies on morality to do a lot of the internal and individual regulation, such that as Harpur argued, war, or violence becomes impossible. This is a utopian republican future without a state that is self-governing through moral perfectibility.

If the PMCs are the customers of tax-payers, rather than nation-states, then their market bounds become the morality of the customers - ie tax-payers. This requires market like pricing efficiency so that behaviour of the PMCs can be judged constantly against the morality of taxpayers.

Can the markets enforce morality? This paper suggests there is a link between markets and morality [pdf] . Though much of the morality is in the name of economic efficiency it does have positive virtue which can be argued to be compatible with individual morality.

Even in a modern liberal market environment the speed of information flow and market behaviour has not been fast enough. Many have been caught conducting immoral acts, that have been adjudged criminal, but it took time to unravel or make these public. Enron is a good example of this behaviour.

So even in a strongly moral market environment PMCs may not be restrained by customer morality, and if they are, it may be after the fact.

cam

Where do the analogies between Rome and an Australian Republic coincide. Pax Romana was real, and Italy did benefit from the Roman commercial and civil view of citizenship and half-citizenship. Prior to Roman dominance of Italy there was constant warring between city-states, tribes, towns and the immigration of Gauls from the north. Rome's military extension halted the incursion of this violence - this is the Roman Peace or pax Romana.

None of that is constitutionally relevant though. These Roman gains were achieved through the sword and military dominance. The democratic systems extended back in structure to regal rome and were established for the purposes of military organisation and land-taxation. With the removal of the King, the Consul position that replaced the monarch were military positions. All the magistrate positions, other than the praetors, were expected to be generals and lead Rome in provincial expansion.

This is where the Roman system becomes alien to a liberal democratic nation-state. Rome was an agrarian martial state. Wealth came from land, and expansion meant greater wealth. A downside of this process was that pro-consuls became wealthier and more militarily capable than the consuls in Rome which was the cause of the civil wars in the late republic, until Augustus strengthened Rome's central military capability. Arguably the English empire was an agrarian martial state as well, and as it moved to a nation-state, the colonies, rather then being a source of wealth to the center, became an expensive drain. Consequently the English exported responsible government which maintained political dependence, but lowered the costs of political influence in an empire that was relying less on land and more on industrial production.

Today a political structure that is for the purpose of expansion has no merit. The technology of a Westphalian nation-state has meant that there is a lot of stability between nations and when there is war, the original boundaries of the nation-states are kept to. The military of a nation-state is less for expansion, provincial administration and colonisation than it is defence. Additionally the Commander-in-Chief is a civil position and not intended to directly conduct warfare unlike the Roman Consuls who were generals first and civilian administrators second.

We are currently moving to the Market-state structure courtesy of modern telecommunications and transportation. Rather than the heavily centralised political systems of a nation-state, the market-state rewards local and decentralised innovations. As John Robb wrote:

Whereas the nation-state used centralized control to enable slower regions to catch up, the market-state will need to accelerate (mostly by getting out of the way) innovation at the regional/community level.

The nation-state is constantly having to justify its massive overhead as well as its legitimacy. Smaller semi-political and semi-militaristic movements, such as Hezbollah, have proven that they can fight a larger and more powerful nation-state into stalemate. In Iraq we have seen this type of warfare paralyse a nation-state's civil legitimacy entirely.

So what lessons can a Roman Republic offer a modern Australian Republican. Well not much really. An agrarian martial-state which expanded to empire has little relevance to a liberal republican market-state. One is centralised, militarised and oligarchic - the other is decentralised, civilised and democratic. Rome was pre-Montesquieu and had separation of magistrates (or executives) while a republican principle is separation of powers, not positions. Where a martial-state and nation-state respond to crisis with a centralised military, a market-state responds with decentralised volunteer civil structures such as the Bush Fire Brigade and State Emergency Services.

A republican market-state has a written constitution, decentralised structures, separation of powers, universal rights (not limited by citizenship), political equality and legal equality. Rome lacked all of these.

x-posted to Gary Sauer-Thompson's philosophy site.

Just prior to the Second Punic War, Rome's greatest diplomatic weapon was its military projection and the Pax Romana it could provide. Rome did not conquer so much, as city-states and kingdoms willingly placed them self into the Pax Romana and allowed Roman military projection to protect their borders and interests. Spain was largely conquered in this way, as was Greece.

In 221 BC Rome had provinces in Sicily and Sardinia. To their west was the military power of Carthage, and to their east the fractured remnants of Alexander's Macedonian Empire. Both of whom could threaten, not Rome's military power, but its Pax Romana. We see a different Senatorial policy from this point on, which was also reflected in Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus' military policy toward Carthage. It was not enough for Carthage to be beaten, it had to be beaten so well that it was in permanent submission and not able to threaten Roman military projection - ie Pax Romana.

This policy led to the Senate seeking to declare war on Phillip of Macedon immediately after the defeat of Hannibal near Zama. The assemblies declined the first declaration of war - they had after all been fighting the Carthaginians for close to twenty-five years, not to mention enduring sixteen years of Hannibal invading southern Italy and managing to have several cities in Campania revolt to the Carthaginian cause. Taxes were high, the land was under-producing, cities were just coming back under the Roman peace, and the population was tired of war.

But this has become a Senatorial policy of preventative warfare. This can be compared to the campaign against the Illyrian pirates and the Illyrian state that support the piracy, It only became an issue for Rome when their merchant ships were being plundered. A successful campaign was conducted against the piracy, but Illyria was not invaded or conquered. The goal wasn't expansion, it was protecting the Roman peace. However with Carthage, Macedon and later Antiochus; we see preventative and aggressive wars being conducted against possible military competitors to Roman military projection.

Does this Roman policy choice in 221 BC have any modern parables to Pax Brittania and Pax Americana?

The British peace was pre market-state, and the agrarian form of colonisation which was tied by the Royal Navy's control of the oceans became too expensive to maintain. This is when Britain began exporting responsible government rather than Naval colonies and governships - a process Australia knows well. Prior to the industrial revolution, and its leading to the establishment of market-states (non-mercantilist), Britain followed the Pitt Doctrine , via Arthur Herman:

But as a statesman in the 1750s, Pitt would turn the standard formula of sea-power and trade inside out. Instead of seeing the navy as a weapon for getting and defending overseas empire, he saw overseas empire as a tool for the navy, giving it the bases it needed to defend British mercantile interests and to increase its own global reach.

Again we see the British peace being based upon military projection, rather than the ability to conquer and take land. Napoleon tried the latter route, conquering continental Europe, and despite the success of Frankish militarism effectively made an unsustainable French Empire. Each time France or Spain came into loggerheads with Britain, the Royal Navy would blockade those nations - their projection power stopping any incursion of France and Spain into Pax Brittania.

What of the United States? It is the undisputed power in military projection and many American politicians , such as Al Gore, have restated the purpose of the American military as being able to bring peace and security to the oceans such that globalised trade is protected from disturbances. As an example of American power, the Australian Defence Force [ADF] has enough projection that any nation-state seeking to coerce Australia militarily can be stopped in the ocean approaches or the air-sea gap: except the United States. One American super-carrier would be a match for the ADF, two would mean the complete loss of Australian projection power.

However Pax Americana is a westphalian construct, heavily entrenched in the mores and norms of the nation-state organisational structure. The natural development of the market-state its reach, globalisation, erode that central political and military power. This makes the National Security Strategy Paper from 2002 extremely interesting. How is the United States responding to the non-Westphalian threats to the American peace?

From the NSS:

For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat--most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack.

We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today's adversaries. Rogue states and terrorists do not seek to attack us using conventional means. They know such attacks would fail. Instead, they rely on acts of terror and, potentially, the use of weapons of mass destruction--weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning.

Combined with the Doctrine of Pre-emption this is an attempt to re-establish, possibly by coercion, possibly not, a Westphalian organisational arrangement by spreading, not democracy and freedom, but Westphalian political structures, such as a Parliament in Iraq and the dominance of the Lebanese Parliament over Hezbollah. This includes the removal of pan-Westphalian structures such as the United Nations, who are not within the Westphalian system either.

We can probably look at the NSS Paper as being a recognition of the limitations of how the American Peace can be maintained in a globalised market-state world, which has increasing decentralisation, local innovation, and low barriers of entry for capitalisation. We are actually seeing in some areas, such as South Lebanon, that a nation-state is not necessary for some semblance of civil order and peace to be maintained. It may produce inferior governance outcomes to a nation-state, but in a globalised market-state system that is not as necessary, if anything the overlapping and tenuous control of a non-state body provides greater liberty such that greater innovation outside of regulatory regimes can occur.

The problem is a Hobbesian outcome, but it seems the non-state bodies provide services such as health, education, etc to maintain their legitimacy so this does not always seem to happen. The continuing disorder in Mogadishu is a warning of what can happen in that situation, but it doesn't have a competing nation-state body and non-state body with overlapping sovereignty competing against each other to provide services.

The symbolic threat to the westphalian American Peace was Sept 11th. Under Bush and Cheney the United States has responded by operating outside of the westphalian international system. It has conducted wars of aggression, established a domestic state of emergency (or exception) and dropped the pretense of the rule of law. The argument is that in this emergency we don't have time or the need to act within the parameters of the westphalian order as the enemies of the American Peace do not follow it at all.

But we are moving into the organisational order of global market-states. This is having an effect on how we judge violence and sovereignty. Centralised political organisation, such as the nation-state is being challenged and constantly required to justify itself, its overhead and cost. This is post-westphalian in that sovereignty can be over-lapping, and political/legal institutions compete for legitimacy through services. It also means that the peace through military projection is easily stifled. Iraq is a good example of this, that kind of peace can only come through a domestic embrace of Pax, which was a large part of Roman, British and American success.

x-posted to Gary Sauer-Thompson's philosophy site

When Canberra cherry-picks responsibilities from the states it is anti-federalism. When the states take from the local councils there is no real name for it other than centralisation. Tasmanian Councils are defending their authority and responsibility over sewerage and water. It is a familiar pattern, a crisis appears, and a central authority uses that crisis or emergency to covet new powers. It has been a dominant force in Australian politics.

The issue is the State Government of Tasmania wanting to take over the power of water and sewerage; as the water crisis demands that the local councils can't be trusted with the responsibility in a time of emergency. Which isn't true. Decentralisation is a strength; especially in politics.

One of the reasons a representative democracy is stronger than a monarchy or dictatorship is because it decentralises political power. The opposing force is the desire of the executive to collapse all power into themselves - which leads to a monarchy or dictatorship, so representative democracy is maintained at a cost.

There was an op-ed in The Canberra Times by Greg Barns recently that argued for separation of service delivery between the feds, states and councils. One of the reasons a market economy is seen as superior to public sector service delivery is that it promotes overlapping services and products. We commonly call that consumer choice.

Yet we view overlapping public sector service delivery as waste. I would argue that the road system is an example of overlapping responsibilities providing a good outcome; Australia has federal, state, local and private roads. These go through all sorts of political boundaries and their overlapping regulations and laws. Probably the only way roads could be provided is through that method.

Barns writes:

And what of local government? Why is it, that there are, for example, 144 local councils in Western Australia, 68 in South Australia and 29 in Tasmania, when the total population for these states is just over three million people?

Again; decentralisation is a sign of political strength. In a modern state innovation bubbles up from the most innovative areas; rather than the capital intensive industrialised nation-state who spends on the slow areas with capital accrued centrally in order for them to catch up to the faster areas. Australia is a good example of the capital intensive centre - the federal government does 85% of all taxation.