Peace and Democracy
Reason’s Hit and Run blog links to two articles of interest to the question of when war can be right. Nick Gillespie addresses directly the question of How Many Dead Iraqis? Make sure you also read the comments!
Another interesting bit is Doug Bandow’s A Capitalist Peace? whose subtitle is “Markets, more than democracy, may be the key to preventing war.” That subtitle is a bit misleading, because while free markets may be what leads to peace, according to the article democracy leads to free markets.
But Gartzke argues that “the ‘democratic peace’ is a mirage created by the overlap between economic and political freedom.” That is, democracies typically have freer economies than do authoritarian states.
The wider issue is important, though: “There’s no panacea for creating a conflict- free world.” The article does not (though the book might) address the issue of whether sanctions, which limit economic freedom, are bad for peace, nor whether peace is more important than what sanctions are in response to.
The discussion reminds me of a course I took in college, and instructor Richard Rosecrance’s book, Rise of the Trading State•. Rosecrance had the misfortune of his book coming out just before the Internet changed the ground rules of global networking. It, and Bandow’s article, call to my mind Bill Moyer’s statement about Marshall McLuhan’s global village.
It strikes me that Marshall McLuhan was right when he said that television has made a global village of the world... but he didn’t know the global village would be Beirut.
In line with that, Rosecrance has written a new “Rise of” book, The Rise of the Virtual State•. With its subtitle, “Wealth and Power in the Coming Century”, it sounds a lot like Alvin Toffler’s• PowerShift•. Toffler’s vision wasn’t as peaceful as Rosecrance’s. Rosecrance’s next book, “What is this state thing, anyway?” will be available in 2006.
Back to Bandow, open markets may be more important than democracy in encouraging peace, but a more important question is, is peace more important than freedom?
In response to When is it right to stop mass murder?: The question about the war in Iraq isn’t how many people died. It’s whether or not we can ever be justified in removing another government that engages in mass murders of its own people.
- A Capitalist Peace?
- “Markets, more than democracy, may be the key to preventing war.”
- The City of God
- Will the infobahn bring people together in peace, or in war? Will the global village be utopia, or Bosnia?
- How Many Dead Iraqis?
- Various estimates of dead Iraqis, and hearkening back to complaints of dead Iraqis from sanctions before the war.
- Rise of the Trading State•
- An early book--it just became available in 1986 when I took the author’s course at Cornell University--on how intertwining economies can be a force for peace.
- The Rise of the Virtual State•
- “Anticipating a different model for the world in the next century, Rosecrance sets down the basic principles that will govern it. He [paints] a picture of an emerging world in which ownership of land will be less important than control over processes and services, a profound difference from the system that has dominated throughout history.”
- PowerShift•: Alvin Toffler
- The author of Future Shock is still going strong decades later. PowerShift is a pre-Internet description of what a fully-connected society is going to look like. The thesis is that (a) there are three sources of power: knowledge, wealth, and violence; and (b) knowledge is rapidly becoming the most important source of power in the modern world. To the point where wars will not only be fought over information, they will be fought with information.
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- One’s never alone with a rubber duck, you know. This is the most brilliant, inspired nonsensical satire since Lewis Carroll.
“I don’t want no peace, I want equal rights and justice.”--Peter Tosh