All right, perhaps Mr. Wilkinson wasn’t saying that Ross dislikes Mexicans.  That is certainly how it came across, but no matter.  Not to worry, then–Mr. Wilkinson is just accusing Ross of holding repugnant and deeply immoral views that endorse the trampling of the human rights of millions.  That’s much better. 

Mr. Wilkinson was saying, and says again, that he thinks Ross wants a “less Mexican” America.  In one obvious sense, I suppose it is true that Ross thinks that preserving a common “core” culture in America (as Huntington might put it) to which immigrants assimilate is preferable to a hodgepodge society in which there are fewer and fewer shared traditions, habits and assumptions and little shared history.  Societies deeply divided along deep cultural and ethnic lines are not all together as successful as those that possess a common national and/or cultural identity; many multiethnic and multicultural societies are catastrophically unsuccessful.  These seem to be matters that can be tested empirically, so why are we disputing Ross’ relative affection for Mexicans or his concern about the Mexicanitas of America?  Why, indeed, bring up this question except as a way of trying (unsuccessfully) to undermine Ross’ position on immigration policy? 

To the extent that assimilation means that Mexican immigrants cease consciously embracing their Mexican national identity and replace it with an American one, then I guess Ross wants a “less Mexican” America, which is to say that he wants immigrants to assimilate.  {Cries of horror erupt from the audience; women faint; children begin to cry.}  The clear implication of this phrase “less Mexican” is nonetheless that Ross wants to get rid of the Mexicans here and that he singles out Mexicans in particular in his alleged populist nationalist enthusiasm.  Perhaps Mr. Wilkinson did not intend to conjure this idea with his phrase, but since the entire discussion of a “less Mexican” America comes from his interpretation of general remarks made in a book review it is difficult to see how the phrase was not supposed to be accusatory.

Even though he does not find Ross ever saying any of this explicitly about his own views, Mr. Wilkinson thinks he has sussed it out from Ross’ review of Who Are We? by Huntington.  This is curious, since the only sense in which this seems to be true is that Ross regards the lack of present-day assimilation and the abandonment of assimilationism by American elites as very bad things for cultural and national unity.  Manifestly, these are very bad things for cultural and national unity–of course, this matters only to those who think that these are important things to have.  Ross seems to want a “less Mexican” America in the same way that he might want a “less Chinese” or “less Indian” America.  (All of this must remain somewhat speculative, since nowhere has Ross actually said any of this!)  That is, he may think that America actually has a cultural inheritance that has made it what it is and which immigrants have adopted to some degree in the process of becoming American; that process of becoming will necessarily entail setting the old identities in the background.  This may or may not have much connection with his views on immigration policy, since it is possible for someone to be an assimilationist while supporting a fairly liberal immigration policy.  Indeed, assimilationism might encourage a more liberal attitude towards immigration, since this position takes for granted that assimilation is possible.  It may be made more difficult by the new circumstances of mass immigration from Mexico and Latin America, but that does not necessarily mean that an assimilationist believes in drastically curbing the flow of immigrants, except perhaps insofar as he is persuaded that the numbers must be reduced for assimilation to happen properly.  In the end, Mr. Wilkinson has proven that Ross is an assimilationist and that he believes that immigrants should assimilate.  Had he said this about Ross, I suspect no one would have batted an eye, but this talk of a “less Mexican” America gives the charge an entirely different spin.   

Plainly, Ross endorses–as does  Huntington–assimilationism in the conviction that assimilating immigrants to a common culture is what has worked to integrate them, inasmuch as they have been integrated, into American society.  For some strange reason, he thinks integrating immigrants is a good idea.  He also seems to think that it is something that does not just automatically happen, but must be actively encouraged.  I think Ross takes this view because he thinks cultural identity is meaningful and has political consequences, and he probably worries about this because the political consequences of cultural disintegration and ghettoisation are quite bad.  The post in which he is addressing the cultural consequences of capitalism, including free-trading, pro-immigration economic policy, seems to confirm my interpretation of his concerns. 

If I have followed all of this correctly, Ross criticises a more libertarian economic model because it works in part to undermine national identity and Mr. Wilkinson criticises Ross’ “nationalism” because the policies informed by that “nationalism” obstruct the workings of a more libertarian economic model (and, let’s not forget our “moral right to cooperate”!). 

In other words, Mr. Wilkinson’s entire argument with Ross boils down to Ross’ criticism of policies that by Wilkinson’s own admission and according to his own assumptions must be antithetical to national identity, inasmuch as “nationalism” is antithetical to a libertarian, open borders arrangement.  This tells us that Ross is a cultural conservative and Mr. Wilkinson is a libertarian.  This has ultimately illuminated nothing about the merits and flaws of different immigration policies, but simply restated that Ross thinks national identity is important and Wilkinson thinks it is an arbitrary and even immoral form of control.  Put that way, I don’t think Wilkinson’s side of the debate comes off as being very persuasive. 

Quibbling over whether Ross wants a “less Mexican” America is simply a distraction if it isn’t intended as a slap–we may as well say that Mr. Wilkinson wants a “more Mexican” America and assume that this has somehow forever discredited his position and ended the debate.  Happily, we don’t need to do that, since there are so many other ways for his position to be discredited.

Russia, China and other nations have an interest in seeing autocracy spread and in staving off democratic reform. ~David Brooks

I find the outline of the Kagan prescriptions as flawed as, if not more flawed than, I did Lind’s “liberal internationalism,” but that isn’t my main point today.  Still, let me make a few notes in passing before I move on.  I would note that Lind’s argument is most effective in attacking the weaknesses in the Kagan position simply by saying, “The existing institutions aren’t really broken–we just have to use them properly.”  The Kagan view is that we should create new institutions that will embody the fundamentally wrong assumptions that have led to the “misuse” or neglect of international institutions over the past 5-15 years (the short version of which is: we rule the world and everyone had better do what we say).  In a fight between between Lind’s mistaken view and the far crazier alternative view, I would take Lind’s side any day (which does not change my view of the flaws in Lind’s argument).

My main point is a much narrower one: this claim about the interests of Russia, China and “other nations” is almost entirely wrong.  The “nice” thing, if you like, about authoritarian nationalist regimes, which would be fair descriptions of both Moscow and Beijing at this point, is that they are not interested in changing the regime types of other countries.  Their interests lie in securing reliable trading partners and allies in various corners of the world.  If those allied governments are autocratic, so be it; if they are democratic, this is not a problem for the authoritarian nationalist.  Russia and China will do business with Germany gladly, and don’t care about its domestic politics except insofar as this might affect trade, but the Chinese will also be very cosy with Khartoum, because there is oil to be had regardless of the regime’s crimes.   

Washington has inexplicably cast itself as the revolutionary agent for global political change.  Russia, China and “other nations” have a vested interest in something relatively close to the status quo, or perhaps the pre-Bush status quo.  They don’t need autocracy to “spread”–they need to limit the expanding number of pro-Washington lackey, er, democratic governments around the world, which gives the impression of opposition to democratic reform.  Since so many of the “colour” revolutions have been shams or staged performances designed to mask the transfer of power from one batch of oligarchs to another, there isn’t much actual democratic reform for Moscow and Beijing to oppose. 

They may defend autocratic governments in the process of opposing pro-U.S. governments, or they might decide to support opposition groups in U.S.-allied states as a way of destabilising regimes allied with us (in much the same way that we undermine governments friendly to their governments).  Even this overstates their hostility to actual democratic reform.  They have no strong interest in preventing it, unless the government is friendlier to their governments than the foreign public is; they have no interest in promoting it, unless the people in that country are more well-disposed to their governments than the ruling elites are.  That is what a reasonably rational, self-interested foreign policy looks like; we might try it some time.  In reality, given the general unpopularity of the U.S. government in so many nations around the world, actual democratic reform in many parts of the world would be positively beneficial to Moscow and Beijing–they could probably detach Turkey, Jordan and Egypt (among others) from our system of alliances and influence tomorrow if the populations of those countries had a real say in the matter.  If Moscow and Beijing really wanted to hit us where it hurts, at least for some short-term gain, they would be much more active in encouraging the reform protests against Musharraf.  However, their establishments are just as concerned about what would happen if Pakistan descends into chaos as is ours, and China has its own obvious vested interests there.  These interests concern what is in the best interests of China (at least as interpreted, self-servingly, by the government in Beijing), and not whether there is a dictator or an elected prime minister in Islamabad.  They will maintain their strategic relationship with Pakistan regardless of these things, just as they would pursue their hegemonic relationship with Burma whether or not the government in Rangoon was a junta or an elected and representative one.

Note: Okay, in spite of what I said earlier today, maybe one blog post wouldn’t kill me.  Today has already been a rather long day, but intensive Arabic hasn’t proven to be quite the mind-killer that I expected it to be.  Then again, it has only been one day so far.  This is not going to be the beginning of a lot of nightly posting, so enjoy it while you can.  Now, on to the main event…

Reihan has responded ably to this Will Wilkinson post, which, among other things, says that Ross is a “populist nationalist” who wants to keep the Mexicans out because he just doesn’t like them (unbelievably, this was provoked by this post).  Naturally, coming from Wilkinson this is supposed to be an insult, though I rather enjoy the idea that everyone to the right of La Raza on immigration is a “populist nationalist”–this would give said populist nationalists a supermajority beyond our wildest dreams, and it would automatically make every opponent of lawlessness and amnesty a disciple of Buchanan and Dobbs.  This would be fine by me, and it would be great to have Ross with us.  Even so, somehow I think the analysis might be a little bit flawed.  Ross once mentioned that it is a lonely thing to be a moderate restrictionist, and I suggested a couple reasons why that is the case.  I should thank Mr. Wilkinson for validating one of my arguments.

Reihan notes that one important part of Wilkinson’s (truly bizarre) attack is simply, completely wrong:

Where exactly is Will getting the idea that Ross actively dislikes Mexicans? Could it be from … his imagination?

Mr. Wilkinson likes to imagine sinister things about people who would like to enforce the border and defend American sovereignty (you see, when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound like you’re engaged in some horrible act of oppression, but rather basic law enforcement), or he sometimes tries to make otherwise perfectly decent things sound like the equivalent of war crimes.  At least he didn’t call Ross “anti-cosmopolitan”!

There are many ways to go with this.  I could start by noting that no one has the “right” to enter another country–he enters by the leave of the people who already live there.  This control over who comes into a country is one of the main features of sovereignty, which is a very real and significant element of something we call “international law.”  Additionally, nations actually exist; they are not plots created by editors at The Atlantic to deprive Mexicans of higher earning opportunities (as much as I’m sure they all secretly yearn to do this above all else).  If Wilkinson wants to see some really serious “populist nationalists,” he might look to Mexican and other Latin American immigrants to find people who are under the strange impression that remitting money from here to their families back home makes their nation stronger and that they regard helping their own people to be not just a nice side effect of their pursuit of their “moral right to cooperate” (whatever this is supposed to mean) but one of the main reasons why they have come.  It might be worth adding that the more certain people wrap up manifestly undemocratic and unwise policies in the rhetoric of human rights, the less most Americans will respect the legitimacy of the very concept of “human rights,” since they might conclude, not unreasonably, that pretentious elitists drag out this phrase whenever they wish to abuse or in some other way take advantage of the rest of the country.  The more certain people feel the need to declare the sentiments of the broad majority “repugnant” because the majority thinks that there is no “right” for other people to settle in their country, the more they will find themselves isolated in their ever-smaller ghettoes of self-righteous irrelevance.  Anyone who would like to know why libertarianism gains few followers, read Wilkinson’s post.  If anyone would like to see why it is a very good thing that no one embraces libertarianism, read Wilkinson’s post.  

Self-governing peoples are supposed to be in control of their governments (I know this is a threat to liberty, but bear with me), and those governments are supposed to pass laws and enact policies consistent with what its citizens wish it to do.  Having then passed these laws and enacted these policies, it is the government’s obligation to its citizens to enforce the laws and follow through on its policies.  To do otherwise is to frustrate self-government and subject citizens to arbitrary government.  I thought libertarians were against arbitrary and lawless government, but at least in some cases that evidently isn’t the case.

Of all the commentaries I have read in the past six months, this [Luttwak’s] stands out as the silliest. Its tone reminds me of the ill-judged contempt with which the English used to regard eastern Europe. Poland, John Maynard Keynes remarked in 1919, was “an economic impossibility with no industry but Jew-baiting”. Czechoslovakia was nothing more than a fancy name for “the mountains of Bohemia”.

The reality in Keynes’s eyes was that people in eastern Europe would always stew in their mutual hatreds and shared incompetence. The sooner the Germans took over the whole lousy region, the better. After all, it was economically next to worthless as far as Britain was concerned.

Such notions underpinned what would become the policy of appeasement in the Thirties. Later, the same prejudices could be heard to justify inaction when it was Stalin who was conquering Eastern Europe. Indeed, you could still hear the old talk about “quarrels in a far-away land between peoples of whom we know nothing” during the break-up of Yugoslavia 10 years ago. ~Niall Ferguson

It’s not surprising that Ferguson didn’t like Luttwak’s argument–I thought Luttwak was making a good deal of sense, and certainly more than Ferguson has managed in six years of commentary writing.  What is Ferguson’s counterargument?  The 1930s!  Yugoslavia!  He forgot to mention Chamberlain.  Even for many Europeans, Yugoslavia was a “far-away land” or at the very least one about which most Europeans knew little and all the peoples of the former Yugoslavia would have been better off had the West kept out of the entire fight.  Indeed, there might not have had to be quite so much fighting had the West not bolstered and backed the separatist states.  James Baker was later ridiculed for saying “we don’t have a dog in this fight,” but here we are seventeen years later and still haven’t learned the basic truth that Baker was right about that. 

What Ferguson fails to address is the question of whether eastern Europe was actually worth going to war over as far as Britain was concerned.  If eastern Europe was so worthless to Britain, why would any British Government make security guarantees to Poland (which it had no means to defend or resupply)?  In the end, Britain did go to war over eastern Europe, which proved to be a mighty foolish thing to have done, so there is some disconnect here.  The power vacuum created by Versailles and Trianon, the treaties that ripped the guts out of the German Reich and obliterated the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, was going to be filled by one great power or another.  Ferguson takes it as a given that Britain should have been deeply concerned about this, when it was Britain’s concern with eastern Europe that dragged it and France into the war before  their rearmament was anywhere near sufficient and helped bring on Dunkirk and the disaster of France in 1940.   

Anglophone peoples seem to love to get into fights over parts of the world they know nothing about.  Saying disdainful things about foreign lands about which people in your country genuinely did and do know nothing is a reasonable thing to do, provided that you do not then presume to think that these lands are absolutely vital to your national security.  Of course, those preaching intervention don’t know any more about these countries than their opponents and usually know less (this is why they think intervention is a good idea and that it will work).

Ferguson never once addresses the claims of the Near and Middle East’s geopolitical insignificance, its miniscule industrial capacity, its economic retardation and its political sclerosis.  On every matter of substance, Luttwak’s article has not even been touched, much less refuted.  What has Ferguson managed to say?  Ferguson doesn’t like the man’s tone!  Luttwak says outrageous things!  Luttwak is heartless!  Ferguson waves his arms around, moralises and hectors, but does not actually offer a real response.  My conclusion is that a rational argument for the great geopolitical significance of the Middle East is not to be found, or else Ferguson would have at least gestured in its direction.  Instead of that, we get vague and dire warnings about Armageddon, and we’re supposed to come away with the view that Luttwak is the silliest of them all? 

Yglesias reminds us that, in the spring of 2005, supporters of the administration began crowing about the advance of democracy in the Near East.  Supporters believed a new era was dawning.  Critics of the “freedom agenda” said that democratisation would either fail or breed chaos.  True cynics, such as yours truly, never believed that there was much democratisation going on in the first place, but we did think that all of the hysteria was probably going to lead to trouble and said so at the time.  Two years later, guess whose predictions have been better? 

While we’re on the subject, here is a cover from that period that I bet the editors at The Economist wish they could take back.

Krauthammer’s “An Arab Spring?” (at least he kept a question mark in there) gives a clear example of the fundamental flaw in all of this democratisation talk.  The flaw is the belief that the type of government in a given country matters to our relations with that country:

The theory is that non-dictatorial regimes—which represent democratic aspirations and adhere to the democratic principles of the rule of law, protection of minorities, and human rights—are more likely to have normal relations with us.

It is almost never the case that dictatorial regimes actively refuse to have normal relations with us, but it is very often the case that Washington refuses to have normal relations with certain dictatorial regimes (while having perfectly delightful relations with other dictatorial regimes).  Instead of attempting to transplant the delicate orchid of representative government to a harsh, inclement setting in the hopes of somehow bettering relations between these states and our government, we might try a slightly less risky and hopeless strategy by…normalising relations with the states that we have been treating as pariahs.  Perhaps there would be one or two dictators who would hold out indefinitely and refuse normal relations, and that would present a more difficult problem.  However, for most states, especially those that are suffering economic meltdowns or deepening isolation, an offer of normalised relations with Washington would be most welcome.  The problem is that Washington does not want to make this offer, because the policy and political establishments believe it is unacceptable to have normal relations with these states.  Perhaps they can defend such a position, though I think it unlikely.  It is nonetheless remarkable to see such a straightforward statement of what democratisation in the Near East and elsewhere is supposed to achieve, since this statement reveals that the same goal could be reached simply by resuming diplomatic contacts and reestablishing formal, normalised state-to-state relations.

What is genuine liberal internationalism? It is neither a naïve idealism that ignores the realities of power nor a crude realism that ignores the power of ideals. ~Michael Lind

Oh, well, that clears things up nicely.  There is a little more substance to it.  Lind goes on to say:

Enduring international peace is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for liberal democracy. Why? In a world of recurring great-power conflicts or widespread anarchy, concerns about security may force even liberal democracies to sacrifice their freedoms to the imperatives of self-defense. This is what Woodrow Wilson meant when he said that the United States and its allies must make the world “safe for democracy.” A world safe for democracy need not be a democratic world. It need only be a world in which democracies like the United States are not forced by recurrent world wars to turn themselves into armed camps.

Obviously, even by this lower standard that Lind sets for Wilson’s foreign policy, it was nonetheless a magnificent failure, as the rest of the 20th century was to show.  That will never dim the faith of the true followers in the wisdom of Woodrow’s vision.  Behold:

A world of many, mostly small and nonaggressive nation-states will be less dangerous than one of a few empires battling to carve up the world.

One wants to ask: less dangerous towhom?  Everyone?  Citizens of the great powers?  Citizens of the small states?  Who knows?  Arguably, the age of a few great world empires was better, in terms of the prevention of armed conflict, for large swathes of Africa and Asia than the last century has been.  For Europe, the disappearance of their empires has brought two generations of peace and prosperity (under the admittedly artificial conditions of the Cold War and U.S. protection).  For Americans, it has been a decidedly mixed picture. 

This idea might be worth considering, except that the new states are not necessarily nonaggressive and the record following the two waves of new, smaller independent states after WWI and WWII have not exactly supported the contention that a proliferation of states is necessarily conducive to “global peace” and a less dangerous world.  Developing states and newly democratic states are among those most prone to resort to armed conflict, including both internal and international conflicts.  For those living in the regions where these states are found, life often becomes more dangerous as a result of self-determination. 

In the modern era, self-determination has been frequently driven by nationalism, which in turn can encourage irredentism and wars for national glory or the building up of national identity.  Indeed, the proliferation of states–and the weakening and collapse even of some of these states created in the 20th century–and the increased incidence of armed conflict around the world seem closely matched.  In any event, the increased number of independent states does not seem to have eliminated the causes of previously internal conflicts: for example, Eritreans warred against Ethiopians for their independence, and have since warred against them for territory and now engage in proxy wars throughout the region.  Depending on how foolish idealists draw the borders, the creation of a number of smaller states may be–and have been–an invitation to revisionist wars, nationalist wars seeking to unify a people scattered among several states or separatist wars seeking to break up artificial states created by the fiat of liberal idealists in the name of this very same self-determination.  

Here are some simple tests for the validity of the liberal internationalist vision: was Yugoslavia more peaceful before or after 1990?  How about the Caucasus?  Was Indochina peaceful after 1945?   

The key problem with Lind’s position, and that of his “genuine liberal internationalism,” is the assumption that there could be a “liberal international order based on sovereignty and policed by a concert of status quo great powers.”  Status quo great powers policing the world and an order based on state sovereignty are actually quite obviously incompatible things.  The great powers entrusted with these police powers have no incentive to respect the sovereignty of other states and sometimes have strong temptations to violate it.  This arrangement trusts the powers that have the least interest in respecting other states’ sovereignty with the role of guarding that sovereignty, but there is no mechanism that can check any one of the great powers if it abuses this role except for the intervention of another great power.  By making the policing of the world the business of the great powers, this system expands the areas of interest of all great powers to include the entire world.  As these spheres overlap and differing positions about how to police the world develop, they make great power conflict more likely, rather than less likely.  The entire thing is a recipe for trouble. 

It is not surprising that respect for sovereignty went out the window in the last sixteen years: this internationalism compels interventionism, and respect for the sovereignty of other states cannot be maintained alongside a desire to police the world, even when that policing is carried out by multiple great powers rather than just one.  This is actually pretty basic.  Great powers, even those that prefer to encourage stability and the international status quo at the state level, have an interest in undermining the sovereignty of weaker states.  This is how they wield control and exert influence and so remain great powers.  The disorder or violence within some states will provide the great powers with the pretexts for intervention that match the great powers’ interests in acquiring greater control.  Once the governments of the great powers are committed to sustaining a “peaceful” world order, respect for state sovereignty is bound to wane. 

Lind calls the “democratic hegemonists” and “liberal imperialists” heretics, but they are simply the logical evolutions of a misguided internationalist vision.  I appreciate what Lind is trying to do: he would like to keep the world safe from liberal interventionists and neoconservatives (who wouldn’t?), and he believes that it is necessary to reclaim the mantle of internationalism from interventionists, but the two cannot be separated.  What must be rejected at the root is the impulse to try to govern the world.  Unless this is done, the “democratic hegemonist” and “liberal imperialist” offshoots of internationalism will continue to come back again and again with every foreign crisis and every foreign conflict that can be deemed, however arbitrarily or incorrectly, a “genocide.”  The war against Yugoslavia should remind us how easily this “legitimate” loophole to sovereignty was used and abused to pursue purely hegemonist goals.     

The contradictions of the liberal internationalist position become more apparent as the article proceeds.  For instance, Lind writes:

The United States should support legitimate self-determination movements, with the caveat that in some circumstances autonomy within a federation may be more practical than independence. Many of these today involve Muslim nationalities ruled against their will by foreigners, such as Palestinians, Chechens, Uighurs and Moros.  As in the Balkans, US support for such nationalist grievances would weaken the jihadist movement by depriving it of issues capable of mobilizing Muslim anger [bold mine-DL].

This is a remarkable view.  First of all, it is remarkable that Mr. Lind would suggest that support for these separatist causes would weaken jihadism, since jihadis have become the major force in most, if not all, the separatist/independence movements mentioned here.  This was also true in the Balkans, which did not stop Washington from supporting the Muslim sides in the Balkan Wars.  It is also remarkable because it is almost completely identical with the view of liberal interventionists and neoconservatives.  Granted, the latter have a special place in their hearts for Balkan Muslims and Chechens, since they seem to be particularly interested in helping Muslims when they are fighting Slavs, but the logic and strategic justifications are the same: weaken the appeal of jihadism by aligning ourselves with the cause of oppressed Muslims around the world.  As many a disappointed, jilted neocon has noted over the last few years, jihadis have been entirely indifferent to American support for the cause of oppressed Muslim populations.  In reality, it is implausible that support for, say, Uighur rights has any effect on the strength of jihadism around the world.  For one thing, jihadism gains its strength at least partly from being a radical alternative to existing authoritarian regimes and as a vehicle for armed resistance to U.S. policies in the Islamic world.  Supporting the cause of Chechen independence addresses neither of these, while it definitely contributes to a worsening of the U.S.-Russian relationship to the general detriment of international stability.  

Muslim populations around the world tend not to notice Mr. Bush’s support for an independent Kosovo, for example, while they are more focused on the policies that seem to be or indeed are hostile to Muslim populations.  It is, of course, the latter that are the more potent fuel for jihadism.  If you want to weaken jihadi recruiting, a lot more would be accomplished by getting out of Iraq than lending support to the Chechens.  (Plus, it avoids the difficulty of finding excuses for Chechen terrorism.) 

The exceptions and qualifications keep piling up, until Mr. Lind’s liberal internationalism is not easy to distinguish from its more interventionist cousins:

Another exception to sovereignty would be the post-1945 ban on genocide along with a ban on ethnic cleansing.      

Well, that much was predictable.  Never mind that it was precisely this sort of exception-making that encouraged intervention in the Balkans and helped justify the invasion of Iraq.  Today, the cause celebre is Sudan, and tomorrow there will be another part of the world where we must “do something.”  If sovereignty is to be ignored each time such a conflict occurs, it will not be long before sovereignty becomes completely irrelevant.  The point is that almost every internal conflict can be described in terms of genocide or ethnic cleansing (the genocide convention’s definition of genocide is extremely broad), and when it cannot legitimately be called that it will nonetheless be so described by the propagandists.  Once you have made an exception to state sovereignty–the supposed pillar of this liberal international order–for this, you have essentially accepted that state sovereignty exists only so long as the great powers wish it to exist.  Their clients will retain sovereignty and the targeted small states that they want to dominate will lose it.  Mr. Lind’s complaints against the “democratic hegemonists” circle back and strike his internationalism with a fatal blow.

Cross-posted at Cliopatria and WWWTW

Because it isn’t Monday yet, here is a blog post (for all of you betting on my blogging hiatus, the clock doesn’t start until Monday): 

Fortunately, the modern world actually provides many different examples of mature electoral democracies. I’m not positive about this, but my sense is that a survey of two-party dynamics would indicate that something roughly resembling the American pattern is the rule rather than the exception. In Spain, gay marriage was brought in by the Socialist Party. Labour in Britain is the party of the unions and the party of gay rights and multiculturalism. The Liberals in Canada are opposed by low-tax, traditionalist Conservatives. And so it goes.

Obviously, this would be more a topic for rigorous academic research than a blog post, but my sense of things is that there’s some relatively “deep” reason that this configuration of political coalitions is so much more common than the alternative. ~Matt Yglesias

A couple points: relatively few other “mature electoral democracies” are trapped in the prison of a two-party system and “this configuration of political coalitions” that he describes is not necessarily all that common outside of a very narrow band of Anglophone democracies and perhaps a couple western European democracies.  To the extent that it is as widespread as that, it is a relic of Cold War-era political alliances that are becoming increasingly moribund.  Time was when economic liberalism (“classical liberalism”) was not at all amenable to socially conservative and rural voters and there was a time when traditional Christian social thought, and not its radical and heretical varieties, compelled a defense of the interests of labour.  Populists used to be quite at home in the generally more conservative party in this country, and it used to be that the party of progressivism and the party of corporate interests was the same party.  These are the much more normal, natural alliances of different interests in Western societies.  If I had to sum up the opposition between the two camps, it would be one of protection vs. exploitation/desecration. 

I think we are actually beginning to see small but significant movements towards a realignment that would ally social conservatives with economic populists and anti-imperialists (a sort of Bryan-Cleveland fusionism) against their opposite numbers.  This would be a sort of Christian conservative socialism, provided that it would be understood that this “socialism” need not have anything to do with state socialism.  This would be “left-wing” only in the bizarre world in which we live where it is considered “right-wing” to start wars and concentrate power and money in a few hands (the exact opposite is more like it).

On Monday, my intensive Arabic course begins.  Between that, dissertation writing and the new column, there won’t be any time for Eunomia for the next two months.  Depending on what happens in the next few months, I may also be away from this for all of August and September, too, and if certain things fall into place I could be completely swamped come the fall.  I will try to check in very occasionally, but the odds are that the best way to see my writing is to pick up a copy of The American Conservative(which you should already be reading anyway) or an issue of Chronicles.  It seems that all those hiatuses that I declared in the past, but never actually took, have caught up with me. 

I would like to take this chance to thank all of the readers and fellow bloggers who have made Eunomia as successful as it has been.  The first half of 2007 has been great.  I’ll see you all in a few months.   

Update: As a final treat before I go, here are Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan performing “Yeh Ladki Hai” from Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham.  Enjoy.

At last, the truth comes out (via Sullivan):

Embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ future was thrown further into jeopardy Friday when he was accidentally struck by a boom microphone, reversing a years-long case of amnesia and causing him to remember his true identity as hotshot Tulsa, OK pool and spa salesman “Cabana Al” Gonzales.

Up at Mecosta two months ago, some of the other participants and I were talking about politics and the subject of Gonzales came up.  Someone asked if I thought Gonzales would remain Attorney General, and I said that I thought he would eventually be gone before the end of the second term.  So far, my prediction doesn’t look very good, but I remain convinced that Gonzales’ position is simply untenable and his departure is inevitable.  He will leave office, whether under some pretext of “spending more time with the family” or not, before Mr. Bush.  Crucially, Mr. Bush will not fire him, but Gonzales will nonetheless depart. 

I am equally convinced that Mr. Bush will never pardon Scooter Libby.  Predictions of Bush pardoning Libby make much more intuitive sense, because Bush clearly risks more politically by refusing to pardon Libby than he does by keeping Gonzales.  Bush’s core supporters really want Bush to rescue Libby and drop Gonzales, but they want the former so much more that it isn’t even funny.  That is exactly why I feel confident that Bush will neither fire Gonzales nor pardon Libby, because it seems to me that Mr. Bush no longer really cares, if he ever did, what his core supporters think. 

Additionally, Bush doesn’t pardon many people.  He is famous, or perhaps infamous, for his lack of clemency.  Chalk it up to one final absurdity of the “compassionate conservative” administration that the President’s epithet could easily be the Unmerciful.  In any case, there is a review process that vets cases for possible clemency, and the odds that Libby will be recommended for a pardon are not very good.  If Mr. Bush were going to pardon Libby, he would need such a recommendation to serve as political cover for the decision.  In the absence of such a recommendation, Mr. Bush will not intervene. 

There are three other reasons why he will not pardon Libby.  First of all, Libby is not a member of the Texan inner circle.  I am not kidding.  The Texans who have followed Mr. Bush to Washington have his loyalty, but all other administration officials are potentially expendable.  Second, Mr. Bush has generally shown a willingness to let subordinates twist in the wind and serve as decoys that take most of the attacks from the media and the opposition.  Even when he does not fire them quickly, because of his supposed sense of loyalty, he allows them to take the brunt of the responsibility for things for which he is ultimately responsible.  Finally, the entire Wilson/Plame affair was the result of one of Cheney’s operations gone horribly awry.  For all I know, Mr. Bush may see Libby taking the fall for Cheney’s scheme to be a fitting end to a distraction and embarrassment for his, Bush’s, administration.  If that is right, Cheney’s requests for a pardon, if they have been made, will likely make Mr. Bush even less likely to pardon Libby when all is said and done.