NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 7, 2011
De fato
My little treatise for today - which I will entitle, De fato ("On destiny") - is inspired by a Dutchman from the 17th century. Huig de Groot, or Hugo Grotius as we say in Latin or English, is as large a figure in the history of international law as one might hope to see. As ever, given my day job as a political commentator, often on international affairs, I was trying to understand the legal principles which lie behind, or might possibly lie behind, the life of nations. You know: war and peace, stuff like that. (Libya and Syria were on my mind.)Also as ever, I found myself distracted by an issue quite different from the one which I was supposedly researching. Not, Hugo Grotius and the legal basis for the intervention of one state into the affairs of another; but rather, Hugo Grotius and the whole idea of what is a state. Just before my reader turns to the comics section, let me say that this is a question that concerns all of us, and is going to concern us more and more. The reasons for this can be seen in the news almost everywhere: from the disintegration of governments in the Middle East under pressure from Islamism and that "Arab Spring"; to growing ethnic disharmonies in comparatively new nation states across Africa and Asia; to the debt crises that are threatening to bring down whole economies, as well as cultures of "entitlement" in America and Europe. In one cycle of history, we are coming to the (retrospectively predictable) end of a century of revolutionary experiments, with nationalisms and socialisms variously conceived. I think the most important centenary we could "celebrate" would be that from June 28, 1914. It was the date of the assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, by Bosnian Serb terrorists, which triggered the "Great War." That in turn "enabled" everything from the Bolshevik Revolution, to the rise of fascism and Nazism, to the collapse of empires, to the blossoming of the Nanny State. It is the date on which I have come to fix, arbitrarily in my mind, the birth of "postmodernism" - which I define as the natural development of "modernism," from the Renaissance to the Reformation to the Enlightenment, forward. That is to say, postmodernism is simply modernism gone hog crazy. Or if you prefer, 100 years of statist tyranny, total wars, and raw barbarity, with destruction on a scale unprecedented through all previous human history. Yet through which, paradoxically, mankind has materially flourished, even while languishing spiritually, thanks chiefly to technological innovations that can be traced back to the battlefields. That is one historical cycle, but in a larger (wheels within wheels), we are coming, or have come, to the end of modernity itself. Grotius, as hinted above, was "the pioneer of international law." Unquestionably a genius, of real learning and poetry, he became so by applying a very Protestant theological mind, chiefly interested in rationalizing the claims of the Christian religion, to coldly tangible secular questions. Questions like: who should keep the booty after the Dutch captured a Portuguese merchant carrack during what was meant as a purely military altercation. (He argued the Dutch should keep it, incidentally; against some Mennonites who thought it ought to be returned.) He did not write or even draft international law, such as it is. The world does not work like that; one man never decides everything. What made him such a pioneer was his ability to ask very interesting questions. (His answers to them were subsequently amended over centuries of European debate.) But what interests me about him today, is not what he questioned but, as it were, what he didn't question. He didn't question the "nation state" as the irreducible responsible unit in world affairs. And his failure to question this was, to my mind, perhaps his greatest intellectual innovation. In a similar way, I have sometimes thought the major (and even more unfortunate) accomplishment of Immanuel Kant - the greatest "Enlightenment" philosopher, himself unquestionably a believing Christian - was to establish atheism as the default position in subsequent metaphysical thinking. But let's leave that to another day; we had enough on our plate already. I puzzle often about the origin of things. I do so because, unless we can understand how, when, where, and why things started, we cannot begin to think behind, around, and ahead of them. We will, in this case, take the "nation state" entirely for granted, as something that always was, and therefore always will be. When in fact, under current circumstances, its days are numbered. People who don't read history are not necessarily doomed to repeat it. (Sometimes we get lucky.) But they are doomed to complete incomprehension, when one of the ground conditions of our world suddenly passes away. And what emerges will never be entirely new: for the world is too round and circular for that. Older methods of governance will inevitably resurface. We should be thinking what they were, and what solutions they might offer. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top