Is social democratic organisation the only way an elected government can maintain their legitimacy against intrusion from non-state movements?

An aspect of globalisation is over-lapping sovereignty. For instance legislation from a nation-state to ban spam and gambling is futile. Data and money are globalised. They cannot be controlled effectively by a nation-state.

Weak-states find similar problems in their borders. Under Turchin's model of cliodynamics, new egalitarian movements of collective action coalesce and form in areas of weak state control.

We see this through Hamas and Hezbollah; both of which established their civil governance legitimacy by providing social services and order before being involved in a political push for government.

For instance Hamas;

Hamas, running for the first time in national elections, vowed to fight corruption and lawlessness in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. While it moderated its stance toward Israel, not mentioning its goal of destroying the Jewish state in its official platform, the movement says it won't give up its arms.

Along with its fight against Israel, Hamas has built its popularity over the past two decades by providing health services and social welfare programs that weren't available from the Palestinian Authority and international refugee organizations.

In the case of Hezbollah they rival the Lebanese Government in employment;

The outskirts of Beirut are known as the dahiya , Arabic for "suburbs." It has come to mean the poor, dense and sometimes dangerous maze of slums that is also Hezbollah-land. Its dirty alleys are crammed with concrete-block shanties.

Gnarled masses of wire run from one building to the next, illegally tapping into electrical, phone and television lines. While lights burn brightly in trendy downtown Beirut, the dahiya is often eerily dark because of sporadic electricity.

Hezbollah has become an enterprise in the dahiya, often outperforming the state. It runs a major hospital as well as schools, discount pharmacies, groceries and an orphanage.

It runs a garbage service and a reconstruction program for homes damaged during Israel's invasion. It supports families of the young men it sent off to their deaths.

Altogether, it benefits an estimated 250,000 Lebanese and is the country's second-largest employer.

The Islamic militia which now controls Mogadishu followed a similar path. Their governance became more palatable through their application of health services, law and order prior to taking over the capital.

Lee made the comment that in many of these places Islam's dependence on sharia as part of the religion makes it easier to establish cohesive order.

He continues;

This same drama will play out time and again. Whichever group proves best at bringing civil order will first win the hearts and minds of the people. Once these hearts and minds are won long enough to come to power, all that needs to be done is maintain civil order relative to the expectations of the people.

It appears that the nation-state has to maintain not only civil-order but services in a homogeneous manner. Any heterogeneity in that coverage allows for discontent to arise, or in the case of chronic absence of social services, a socially based non-state competitor to arise.

Hamas and Hezbollah are examples of this. While they have radical ideologies, they also invest socially and locally to ensure popular support. In the absence of elections to legitimise them, this becomes their sovereign base.

Australia is on the neo-liberal side of liberal democracy. It is a low taxing state by world standards and has a fairly libertarian approach to most issues - outside of nation-state authority.

Australia sucks in approximately 30% of the nation's production as taxes and then spits it back out. The federal government is the largest economic entity in the country which makes many companies and industries dependent on the government to remain viable.

Australia is a welfare-state, or aspirational-state as a I called it recently. Australia invests heavily in education, health, services, infrastructure, etc. In the name of re-election and monopoly on legitimacy, there is no area that it will refuse to act as an agent for voters.

But the reach of those services are not always homogeneous and leave vacuous pockets. Especially in areas that have existing authority structures that can challenge the nation-state's structure.

The recent tensions in Wadeye, Noerthern Territory which arose explain this. From an article by Jack Waterford in the Canberra Times;

There's no real work, or prospect of any, the health and education system is a shambles, housing is appalling, and the cost of delivering services is phenomenal. The communities are artificial anyway, composed of different and antagonistic groups, and there is a lot of drunkenness, fighting, domestic violence, trauma, suicide, imprisonment, apathy and despair.

No civil order, no services, lack of dignified social mobility; so why hasn't an Aboriginal group popped up like Hamas or Hezbollah has to provide local social services?

The conditions being described are similar to Palestine or Southern Lebanon. Canberra and Darwin is probably fortunate that what can be called Aboriginal religion is not unified, and lacks a seductive radical strand as Islam does.

From images I saw in the SMH and ABC, the Aboriginal kids causing disorder dressed in the stereotypical American 'gangsta' fashion, rather than traditional Aboriginal tribal identification or radical indiginous movements.

Aboriginal culture certainly has a cultural/tribal equivalent of sharia law. If order and social services remain chronic, it is possible that an Aboriginal movement will arise in these vacuums to perform the functions Canberra and Darwin will not.

Then again the cliodynamic answer would be that no movement has arisen as the Aboriginal people have low Asabiya, and lack the social cohesion for unified collective action.

Liberal democracy only appears sustainable if it adopts a welfare-state approach to order and social services. This brings into question the libertarian belief that commercial services will fill the vacuums where the state leaves.

As is seen in the Middle East, collective groups bound by religion have replaced the nation-state as the main supplier of order and social services such as health.

The smallest of the liberal democracies are the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. They tax the least but still spend heavily on areas such as health and welfare. The US spent nearly 650 billion USD on health and welfare.

This was the single biggest expenditure by the US federal government, greater than defence and debt servicing. This figure does not include the money that the American states, counties and towns spend on health and welfare.

The US, despite being the most libertarian of the liberal democracies has a public health system. The government and industry does not survive without those subsidies.

As this graph shows [source pdf], the US is one of the highest public providers per capita amongst nations.

It should be noted from that graph that most nations spend between $1000 and $2200 USD per capita on public health. There is rough consensus on government involvement in health services.

The equilibria for a nation-state to remain an unchallenged political entity is somewhere between 30% and 50% GDP taxation, most of which goes to providing order, civil and social services. That seems to be the cost to ensure a universal approach to services that stops non-state social and collective competitors from arising.

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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.

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.

From TheAustralian; Al Queda to establish an Islamic State in Iraq .

The name 'Al Queda' is being used for everything and anything now; by both fundamentalists, malcontents and the western media and governments. It will end up becoming a verb, rather than a brand, like xerox did from overuse.

From the article:

A RADICAL plan by al-Qa'ida to take over the Sunni heartland of Iraq and turn it into a militant Islamic state once American troops have withdrawn is causing alarm among US intelligence officials. ... According to an analysis compiled by US intelligence agencies, the Islamic State has ambitions to create a terrorist enclave in the Iraqi provinces of Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala, Salah al-Din, Nineveh and parts of Babil.

Pretty brainless if true. Hezbollah has all the power and trappings of a state without the overhead of actually having to be a nation-state. It is autonomous in southern Lebanon and can fight a neighbouring nation-state to a stalemate if it wants to. There is no need to establish an Islamic state in order to control the politics. Nation-states are too expensive and annoying to bother about. I doubt 'Al Queda' is planning this, the smart ones will do a Hezbollah, the dumb ones will just add 'scare' lead-ins for the western presses.

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

Another data point for a state having no legitimacy unless it takes a social democratic approach. Nathanial Fink describes the counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan:

Consider, for example, the question of roads. When U.N. teams begin building new stretches of road in volatile Afghan provinces such as Zabul and Kandahar, insurgents inevitably attack the workers. But as the projects progress and villagers begin to see the benefits of having paved access to markets and health care, the Taliban attacks become less frequent.

Non-state actors gain their political legitimacy in the same way. Hezbollah and Hamas both have social democratic and judicial components which not only replaces a weak state but helps keep it out of those areas.

Hezbollah is the second largest employer in Lebanon. It runs hospitals, orphanages, discount pharmacies and garbage collection. All of those are services which governments in Australia provide.

Fink continues with the benefits that a social-democratic approach bring:

New highways then extend the reach of the Karzai administration into previously inaccessible areas, making a continuous Afghan police presence possible and helping lower the overall level of violence -- no mean feat in a country larger and more populous than Iraq, with a shaky central government.

Basically it extends the reach of the state, and hence, its legitimacy. The state is essentially a technology for the reduction of organised and arbitrary violence.

There appears to be an equilibria where the state must supply a certain level of services and infrastructure to maintain its popular legitimacy. Ironically market approaches to services are eroded the state to an extent and allowing non-state actors to rival the state in social approaches and hence challenging the legitimacy of weak states.

It appears that the correct approach to a weak or failing state is spending on social democracy rather than an authoritarian, dictatorial or pure neo-liberal approach.

The 700 Billion bailout failed to pass the lower and more democratic house (national character rather than federal) with those in tight electorates voting against. Despite this the fed pumped 630 Billion into the system anyway and markets still fell. The banking system is too big for one nation-state - even a hyper-power with the reserve currency - to effect. The money flows are simply too large.

It most likely means that the only way a nation-state can recapitalize failing institutions is by nationalization and taking over the assets like the US did AIG. This is not politically acceptable in the US, and rightly so, as it is considered socialism, however it leaves the other alternative that these bank fail via the free market and the remaining stronger banks and investment houses survive and expand in that environment.

This can mean economic turbulence within a voting cycle, and that means politics will get involved. Unfortunately for the US the republican party is without leadership and the White House is distrusted by Congress.

Update: The market indexes were down about 7% today. While dramatic, it will be earnt back quickly. It isn't the end of the world.