From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Wed Aug 07 2002 - 20:01:55 MDT
On Wednesday, August 07, 2002 1:03 AM Samantha Atkins
samantha@objectent.com wrote:
>>>I think the U.N. is fine as a place for governments to get together
>>>and try to discuss things and work out problems.
>>>
>>
>> Yeah, things like how to pick on other societies and divide up
spheres
>> of influence...:)
>
> You mean as opposed to only the US deciding how to divvy things
> up under cover of the "War on Terror"?
Since the US pretty much controls and funds much of the UN, what's the
difference here? Even when the US is at odds with the UN, what's the
difference? Two different elites fighting for control?
>>>The problem is
>>>that the U.N. and its supporters are trying to evolve it into a
>>>World Government.
>>>
>>>Something I will fight tooth, fang, and claw.
>>
>> I'm sure that will stop them.:)
>
> It was part of the original idea to have it be in some senses a
> world governing or directing body over some domains in order
> for nations to have some recourse other than war when they
> disagreed and to act as a body for forming international
> standards and addressing international concerns.
You might argue that it's worked in this respect. After all, there
hasn't been a world war since the UN's formation. Of course, the kind
of multipolar coalitions that led to the two world wars -- and analogous
world wars before, such as the Seven Years War -- also did not exist, so
it could just be correlation and not cause here. (I tend to buy into
the realist or neorealist argument here rather than the institutionalist
or liberal ones. Why? Until the late 1980s, it was really a bipolar
world and now it seems a unipolar one, since the US, the one world
power, has no serious rivals.)
But a more serious question would be not to praise the UN, but to ask if
it's necessary to accomplish these goals and even efficient at the ones
it does accomplish. Save for the little wars, the 19th century was
relatively peaceful in Europe from the end of the Napoleonic Wars until
the stuff in the Balkans. There was no UN back then. (One could argue
that rivals spent more time fighting in and over as well as to build
their colonies, but the same happened under the UN with the US and
Soviets divvying up the Third World.)
> That is not
> that unreasonable an idea. The notion of one government united
> the entire world is of course very old and again not necessarily
> a horrible idea depending on the nature of that government.
Given that one world government would have much more power than anything
else, I don't see how it could be checked. It might start out being
tame and relatively benign -- the reason why people would advocate it
and probably acquiesce to it -- but in the long run, it would decay and
there would be little alternatives until somehow such a world state
could be taken apart.
I kind of see this like Rome. The Romans were probably better to be
ruled by in the short run than to be ruled by local and very arbitrary
kings and the like. However, in the long run, Roman despotism was
nearly unstoppable and only fell after hundreds of years of social
decay. I certainly don't want to repeat the experiment and hope that we
get it right this time. (For one thing, so few have seemed to learn the
lesson and many, even on this list, seem to believe that if only they
had power or if their system were in place, everything would be better
or okay.)
Cheers!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
See "Testing Evolutionary Explanations" at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Testing.html
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