Why They’re Called “Cockroach Caucuses”
(posted by Kevin Carson)
Via Jacob Sullum at Reason Hit & Run. Anti-eminent domain activists in Clarksville, Tennessee face a SLAPP lawsuit for “defamation,” for stating the rather obvious fact that their local government is controlled by real estate developers. You think?!! I mean, come on: you could be set down in any community in the country, at random, and state with near certainty that the local government is the showcase property of local real estate developers.
Tulsa blogger Michael Bates coined the phrase “Cockroach Caucus” to describe “the ‘Developers, Chamber, and Establishment’ party,” which is a
cluster of special interests which has been trying to run the City of Tulsa without public input, and preferably without public debate.
The Tulsa World, in particular,
is more than just an observer of the local scene. It is an integral part of the tight social network that has run local politics for as long as anyone can remember. This network… has pursued its own selfish interests under the name of civic progress, with disastrous results for the ordinary citizens of Tulsa and its metropolitan area….
The Cockroach Caucus is most recently infamous for convincing state and local elected officials to pour $47 million in public funds into Great Plains Airlines…. It went bankrupt, leaving local taxpayers liable for millions in loan guarantees. Many leading lights of the Cockroach Caucus, including World Publishing Company, were investors in Great Plains Airlines.
The Cockroach Caucus has wasted tens of millions in public funds on failed economic development strategies…., and has bent and sometimes broken the rules of the land use planning system to favor those with political and financial connections. The same small number of connected insiders circulates from one city authority, board, or commission to another, controlling city policy, but beyond the reach of the democratic process.
Harvey Molotch used the slightly more polite term “Growth Machine.”
In my own area, Northwest Arkansas, the Cockroach Caucus/Growth Machine is largely coextensive with a nominally private organization called the “Northwest Arkansas Council.” Made up largely of the CEOs of locally headquartered corporations (Tyson, Wal-Mart, J.B. Hunt), the Jim Lindsey real estate machine, and ex officio representatives of local government, the group was formed to lobby for corporate welfare for themselves infrastructure projects to benefit the local economy. The Council amounts, in reality, to a shadow government which formulates local government policy free from Freedom of Information mandates, with the near cetainty that they will be rubber-stamped by local government with a minimum of debate.
The NWA Council was responsible, for example, for railroading through the NWA Regional Airport. It lobbied behind the scenes in 1990 to get five city and two county governments to vote to create a NWA Regional Airport Authority, which under state law would be an immortal corporation with power to condemn property and levy taxes. What’s more, it got the local governments to suspend the normal requirments for prior public announcement, multiple readings, and debate, and to pass ordinances creating the Authority on an emergency basis. When the fait accompli was announced, it sparked the most divisive political conflict in years, with a heavily motivated and organized movement of anti-airport activists. Nevertheless, as might have been expected, it was a done deal. The airport opened in 1998. The full story is here, if anyone is interested.
The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas, of course, was and is a faithful cheerleader for the project, editorializing only just recently on how blessed the region was to have so much local business talent doing such wonderful things for us. If what they were doing was so good and all, why’d they have to go about it like a goddamned pack of sneak thieves, skulking about in the night? As Cool Hand Luke might say, I wish you wouldn’t be so good to me, Cap’n.
Just about every metropolitan area in the country has some such gang of Good Ol’ Boys running the show, I would imagine.
Anyway, as the Clarksville story demonstrates, “Cockroach Caucus” is a good term for such local elites: like your ordinary variety of cockroach, they don’t much like having the lights shone on their activities.
The Clarksville Property Rights Coalition’s campaign against the local redevelopment project included a newspaper ad asserting that Mayor Johnny Piper, City Councilman Richard Swift, and Downtown District Partnership member Wayne Wilkinson ”are all developers,” and continued:
This redevelopment plan is about private development. Our city government is controlled by developers….This redevelopment plan is of the developers, by the developers, and for the developers.
Swift and Wilkinson have responded with a SLAPP suit for $500,000 in damages.
Wilkinson, by the way, is affiliated with CMH Commercial Properties. Sure as hell sounds like a “real estate developer” to me. So is he ashamed of being a real estate developer? Or is he just ashamed of being a cockroach?
July 10th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Local politics explained in one sentence.
July 10th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Kevin,
How would your mutualism deal with this problem? I mean, isn’t a city government effectively a co-op style government? It doesn’t seem to be very effective form of governance. There is too much pressure for an interest ( like developers ) to capture the government and divert it for their own interests. How do you prevent this?
July 11th, 2008 at 12:46 am
Libra: Well, ultimately, as an anarchist, I’d do away with government altogether (in the sense of an agency with the power to initiate force and fund its services with compulsory taxation). The heart of the problem is the ability of government to shift costs off of privileged classes and onto the taxpayer; and that’s pretty much the essence of government. So the ultimate goal of mutualism, like every other form of anarchism, is to eliminate the coercive state as the bulwark of exploitation. But that’s a long way off.
Intermediate steps in that direction involve decentralizing city government and services as much as possible, substituting direct for representative democracy, mutualizing city services (i.e., reorganizing them as consumer co-ops), and shifting funding of public services as much as possible to cost-based, voluntary user fees.
A big part of the problem is the sheer size and centralization of city government. Many of the “good government” reforms of the Progressive Era were deliberately designed to make local government less democratic and to reduce the influence and participation of ordinary working people and local small businesspeople in government affairs. Such measures included increasing the size of electoral districts, replacing neighborhood with citywide bodies, electing local officials at-large instead of by ward, and intergovernmental authorities. For example, before the nearby city of Fayetteville switched to ward representation (the time period when it voted to create the Airport Authority, btw), it had several at-large directors on the City Board. And surprise, surprise, surprise! they all lived within a few blocks of each other in the same rich neighborhood in the northeast part of town.
Representative democracy doesn’t even work for a city of 50,000, let alone a continent-sized nation.
July 11th, 2008 at 11:39 am
I’d do away with government altogether (in the sense of an agency with the power to initiate force and fund its services with compulsory taxation).
How do you prevent a conqueror from invading and setting up a compulsory tax system? In the modern world, defense consists of cruise missiles, fighters, and nukes. Perhaps a city/state could support this defense force, but anything smaller would be impractical to defend.
July 11th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
The most powerful army in the world, armed with fighters and nukes, was defeated by punji stakes and guys in black pajamas carrying supplies on bicycles.
A decentralized, stateless order, with small-scale production for local markets, would have very few high-value targets worth crossing an ocean and attempting to occupy a territory where the civilian population owns more small arms than all the standing armies in the world put together. And with tens of thousands of individual communities, the entire territory would have to be occupied, one community at a time–there would be no central government to surrender.
No World Trade Centers, no Pentagons, and a befuddled look on the faces of the natives when you demand they “Take me to your leader.”
July 11th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
The most powerful army in the world, armed with fighters and nukes, was defeated by punji stakes and guys in black pajamas carrying supplies on bicycles.
There are two broad interests that battle for control over American foreign policy. I’ll call them the “Missionary” interest and the “Imperial” interest. Missionaries want to impose their ideals upon the world. In the case of the U.S., this ideal is “Liberal Democracy”. Imperialists want either to colonize or to extract wealth. These are broad generalizations, but they are generally accurate.
The reason the U.S. “lost” in Vietnam is because domestically the Missionaries won. A 100% imperialist power would have acted very differently. It would have simply said, “Surrender, or we’ll nuke Hanoi” and that would have been that. Missionaries cannot do that, because they have moral qualms.
The same goes for the Middle East. If the U.S. was truly an imperial power, it would simply seize all the oil from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq. Halliburton would be worth trillions of dollars. If anyone resisted, they would be massacred. Iraq is a quagmire not because of “asymmetric warfare”, but because the goal is nonsense. Establishing a “liberal democracy” is a logical impossibility in a country where the majority of people do not believe in liberalism.
I’d characterize our Iraqi policy as about 80% missionary wishful thinking and 20% imperialist. Can you imagine the Romans or the British East India company actually letting the Saudis and Kuwaitis keep the bulk of the oil money? The fact that no one even proposes confiscation demonstrates just how missionary the U.S. is. ( Note - personally I dislike both imperial and missionary foreign policy, I’d prefer we’d mind our business.)
Getting back to your original example, here’s what would happen to your anti-state:
If the invading power is 100% imperialist and wishes to colonize the land with its own people, it will grant an ultimatum: “You have one week to get off your land and onto a ‘reservation’ before the neutron bombs arrive.” The invader does not have to conquer all 10,000 villages going door-to-door. It simply needs to make an example of any villages that resist, the rest will fall in line.
If the invader wishes to tax and make money, they will grant a charter to an imperial company to rule a section of the country. The officers of the corporation will instruct the natives which crops to grow and which products to make. If the natives resist, down fall the neutron bombs. There is simply no resisting an invader that has superior fire power and a willingness to make collective reprisals. The tactic of making examples of resisting populations has worked for every invader, from the Romans to Ghengis Khan to Sherman to Harry Truman.
If the invader is a Missionary power , then who knows might what happen. Perhaps it would be forced conversions, with massacres of any village that dared attack the beloved priests. If the missionary power was the United States, it would keep asking, “who wants to be the government? I have all this foreign aid to give!”. Eventually, one of the mutualist communities would defect. The community leaders would convince the U.S. State Department that they wished to establish a modern parliamentary democracy, and that they needed military and foreign aid to end the chaotic anarchy and to set up a democratic government. The U.S. would be happy to help, and your mutualist anti-state would soon be converted into a nice liberal democracy, complete with a seat at the U.N. and a bright colored polygon on the world map.
If you’re really lucky, the missionary power might actually leave your anti-state alone. It depends on the ideology of the power. But again, a power that is as missionary as the 21st century U.S. is a historical anomaly. Relying on the kindness of others is not an effective strategy for community survival. Assume your enemy will be Genghis Khan, not Gerry Ford.
July 11th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
I would characterize most of the American Empire as being more subtle than “missionary.” What does America’s elite class really want? Access to resources, bases for power games, influence over trade policy, and access for businesses. It proved to be more convenient to establish close ties with local elites and bring them into the system. It’s less messy than planting your flag and subduing the locals.
Iraq is different from most of the empire, and consequently it’s a mess, because it’s not what we’re used to. Maybe part of the reason why we do it this way is our “missionary” instinct, as you suggest, but it’s still an empire in its own way. It’s just a remarkably pragmatic one. To those of us here it may seem like a very obvious empire, but I said this to a British colleague and he laughed at the idea that anything less than full colonization could be called an Empire.
The beauty of the American Empire is that it’s almost invisible if you don’t want to look for it.
July 11th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
If you doubt the US is an imperialist power, I suggest you read William Blum’s “Killing Hope” or Noam Chomksy’s “Deterring Democracy”.
The US controls its client states/vassalages the same way it controls the individual American states: Through usurpation, bribery, and dependency creation where possible, through violence when necessary. Talk to a Timorese, an Iraqi, a El Salvadoran or a surviving Branch Davidian if you want to know what US imperialism is like.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Keith and Thoreau-
Perhaps instead of using the words “Missionary” and “Imperialist” I should have said “Missionary” and “Lucrative”. The United States is a “Missionary Imperialist”. As such, it is vulnerable to asymmetric warfare because it has moral qualms about collective reprisals and using nuclear weapons. A 100% “Lucrative Imperialist” would have no such qualms, and would have easily liquidated the VietCong with neutron bombs before a single punji stick was laid down.
I completely agree that the U.S. controls most of the countries of the world through the mechanisms Keith describes. What’s significant is just how indirect (and inefficient ) those methods are. An efficient, lucrative imperialist would simply seize the $30 trillion worth of oil reserves in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It would be neither difficult nor messy, after all, we already occupy both countries. Let me reiterate: $30 trillion dollars. Can you name any empire in the history of the world that would allow the natives of a vassal state to keep $30 trillion dollars?
As a political democracy, the U.S. is a tyranny of factions. Those factions include Exxon, Halliburton, Fox News Jingoists, etc. But the most powerful faction is the State Department/NGO/Ivy League/Brussels/World Bank/Bono axis. This faction is a missionary faction, not a lucrative one. It killed overt imperialism and morphed it the new form of NGO-dependency-based-imperialism, WTO imperialism, etc. Today, no one even talks about seizing the Saudi oil fields, there are no Pinochet’s ruling in South America today, Rhodesia and apartheid are no more, the East India Company no longer exists - all these facts are a testament to the power of the missionary faction. Note though - in its attempts to rearrange the world in way more pleasing to Harvard professors, the missionaries routinely f*ck up countries in worse ways than if the faction had been purely lucrative ( reference Zimbabwe, or any IMF policy ).
July 11th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
The natives of the vassal state don’t get to keep $30 trillion. A small clique with close ties to our elite clique controls those resources, invests that money through western financial institutions, buys American weapons, and does business in the west.
It’s not about Americans or Saudis getting that $30 trillion. Most Americans and most Saudis won’t see a dime of it. A small clique controls it. Which is the way all empires work, except that in this empire some of the members of the clique wear different types of flag pins on their lapels.
July 12th, 2008 at 12:53 am
Libra,
I think you’re creating a false dichotomy between the “missionary” and “imperialist/lucrative” components of the mixture.
On the one hand, the missionary aspect works hand in glove with the imperialist aspect, as a legitimizing ideology, and the actual content behind the idealistic-sounding rhetoric is pretty realistic. For example, the kind of “democracy” the “missionaries” want to spread in Iraq is the neocon spectator kind where the public chooses every few years between a couple of candidates from the same political establishment, one half an inch to the right and the other half an inch to the left of center, and then go back to their mosque socials and bowling leagues (and other aspects of “civil society”); meanwhile the political leadership takes its orders from the IMF and World Bank. American idealism usually uses a Mandela or Havel as the brand name image for the spectator democracy installed by the NED and Soros Foundation, but the actual substance behing the “Man in the Mirror” warm fuzziness is 99 44/100% Washington Consensus. The voice is Jacob’s, but the hands are Esau’s. So your 80/20 mixture for Iraq is probably right, but the other way around.
The other side of the coin is that the missionary legitimizing ideology makes it easier for the imperialists to live with themselves–to do well while doing good, as the saying is. Almost no ruling class in history has been purely imperialist/lucratice, in the sense you describe of being willing to devastate one town after another as part of a cold calculus of terror. And almost no ruling class has been able to hold power and maintain its morale while maintaining the cynical calculation of O’Brien of worshipping power for power’s sake, all the while rubbing its hands and twiddling its moustache like Snidely Whiplash. For a ruling class to cohere over time, it must believe it is the “good guys.”
I still believe, in any case, that the economic value of whatever assets existed to be seized or colonized in a stateless society would not justify the cost of acquiring and maintaining control over that society. For one thing, no matter how much the actual villages massacred or bulldozed might want to surrender, they would have no authority to impose their will on anyone else. And the appeal to a minority of waging war anonymously, and individually low-risk forms of asymmetric warfare, would be sufficient in itself to raise the costs of occupation beyond the economic value to be extracted.
July 12th, 2008 at 4:45 am
Oh, KC, I’ve been over this with you, how aggressors do not need to occupy. Like the early settler technique I mention in another thread, they only need to use extensive methods. They don’t get as much as they would with intensive ones, but it passes break even much more easily, and they can switch later.
To see what can work, read George Macdonald Fraser’s “Flashman on the march” for how things were in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), or Evelyn Waugh’s fictionalised (but based on his experiences) account of that country in “Black Mischief”. That, like Ottoman, Reconquista or earlier Moorish exploitation of frontier areas, relied on tax gathering expeditions that were simply wholesale plundering. Read “Rajahs and Rebels” to see how the Brookes took over Sarawak incrementally, including making similar but subtler expeditions against “Rebels”, noting the way Malay chiefs had previously dominated Sarawak’s watersheds from river forts - and note too that Irish chiefs once did the same.
To my mind the best hope to prevent such things lies in a combination of approaches described in John Bellair’s novel “The Face in the Frost”. The South Kingdom had split into ever smaller units over time, so the defensive units were still there but were too small to oppress their own. Also, “Seldom could a chieftain gather enough support for a civil war, but there was constant feuding, bickering and bullying”. On the other hand, “The North Kingdom was split… into seven lesser kingdoms… the High King was elected: he was usually one of the seven kings, but this was not necessary; his term was one year, and could be extended in case of war. He was given a standing army of ten thousand horsemen, but he would have been powerless without the support of the heptarchs… since any two of them could field an army greater than his. Besides, the High King was forced to leave his own domains in the hands of a temporary ruler… and reside at the beautiful, but defenseless, palace… His army was solely for use in defending the borders and - rarely - for waging war against a rebellious Northern king. In the latter case… the kings would decide whether the situation was grave enough to require action against one of their own number. Civil war was rare but when it did come the devastation was so great that it took generations for the North to recover.” North and South each maintained their own forts as part of a common defence system against outside invaders.
Put the two together, and you have a war leader king with no actual and effective power (I don’t mean what lawyers mean by power) to rule or extract resources, and essentially harmless voluntary units that can be called together in the face of outsiders. That would stymie the other tactics available to outside exploiters. The trick - a trick I do not know, though I do have some ideas - is how to stop something else less benign growing within this system’s shell, at least without making the prevention worse than the disease, in fact making it the disease itself.
July 12th, 2008 at 9:58 am
“As such, it is vulnerable to asymmetric warfare because it has moral qualms about collective reprisals and using nuclear weapons.”
Ever heard of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Sounds like a collective reprisal to me. What about Dragon Lady Albright’s remark that starving half a million children with an embargo is just another tool of foreign policy?
As for Vietnam, do you know what a “protective reaction strike” is? Ever heard of a “strategic hamlet”?
The US didn’t use it’s nukes in Vietnam because two other nuclear armed powers-Mao’s China and Brezhnev/Kosygin’s USSR-might have had something to say about that.
“As a political democracy, the U.S. is a tyranny of factions. Those factions include Exxon, Halliburton, Fox News Jingoists, etc. But the most powerful faction is the State Department/NGO/Ivy League/Brussels/World Bank/Bono axis.”
I like that. That’s actually a pretty good description of the internal workings of the American ruling class. But you left out the Israel lobby.
July 12th, 2008 at 10:01 am
“So the ultimate goal of mutualism, like every other form of anarchism, is to eliminate the coercive state as the bulwark of exploitation. But that’s a long way off.
Intermediate steps in that direction involve decentralizing city government and services as much as possible, substituting direct for representative democracy, mutualizing city services (i.e., reorganizing them as consumer co-ops), and shifting funding of public services as much as possible to cost-based, voluntary user fees.”
Yep. That’s the plan.
July 12th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Kevin -
Conquerors from history often do morally justify their massacres. Usually the rationale is, “If we don’t be true to our word and make an example of this city by killing everyone, then other cities might rebel/fight back, and more of our men will die.” This was the rationale for Hiroshima, Sherman’s March to the sea, the Holocaust ( see the Posen Speech), Roman annihilation of cities that did not pay tribute, etc.
Or just look at what the Mongols did: “Where they found local resistance, they mercilessly killed the population. Where the people did not offer any resistance, they forced the men into servitude in the Mongol army and the women and children were killed or carried off….Still, tens of thousands avoided Mongol domination by taking refuge behind the walls of the few fortresses or by hiding in the huge, jungle-like forests or the large marshes alongside the rivers. The Mongols, instead of leaving already defenseless and helpless peoples behind and continuing their campaign through Pannonia to Western Europe, spent the entire summer and fall securing and “pacifying” the occupied territories.”
I still believe, in any case, that the economic value of whatever assets existed to be seized or colonized in a stateless society would not justify the cost of acquiring and maintaining control over that society.
Land is always valuable, and neutron bombs are cheap. The American Indians did not have a central government that could surrender, that did not save them. Same with the conquest of Zimbabwe or South Africa. And according to Wikipedia, “Hungary lived in a state of feudal anarchy when the Mongols began to expand toward Europe.”
There are many examples from history of decentralized societies being wiped out/enslaved by conquering hordes with superior weaponry and tactics. Go off and create your anarchic society somewhere. I think I’ll stay here under the nuclear umbrella and let the king take his 30%.
And even in best case, let’s say your superior will power and guerrilla tactics win out, as in Vietnam. Isn’t it much wiser to have a navy and air force that can wipe out the barbarians before they reach your shore?
I’m in agreement with P.M. Lawrence. The trick is designing a stable military equilibrium that minimizes the sum of internal repression, internal civil war, and external aggression. A completely anarchic state minimizes internal repression but is wide open to external plunder.
The other justifica
So your 80/20 mixture for Iraq is probably right, but the other way around.
Of course, other ruling classes from history have come up with moral justifications for their rule.
Seriously, look at the tactics used by past conquerers. Imagine if Bush advocated putting Iraqis into “reservations”. Or imagine if he advocated openly burning Iraq to the ground until the people sub
July 12th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Ever heard of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Sounds like a collective reprisal to me.
Exactly. And when the U.S. used this strategy, it had no trouble occupying Japan. While the U.S. did some of this in Vietnam, it stopped short of nuking Hanoi, which meant as soon as they left, Hanoi conquered South Vietnam. Since 1945, the U.S. has gradually lost its will power to engage in overt, collective reprisals.
The US didn’t use it’s nukes in Vietnam because two other nuclear armed powers-Mao’s China and Brezhnev/Kosygin’s USSR-might have had something to say about that.
That’s definitely part of it. It also refutes Kevin’s point that it was “punji stakes and guys in black pajamas carrying supplies on bicycle” that won in Vietnam.
July 12th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Intermediate steps in that direction involve decentralizing city government and services as much as possible, substituting direct for representative democracy, mutualizing city services (i.e., reorganizing them as consumer co-ops), and shifting funding of public services as much as possible to cost-based, voluntary user fees.
Is property ownership still allowed? Land ownership? Can I freely contract to create a joint stock corporation? Can I start a for-profit bus company or a for-profit electricity company? Can I build a power plant?
July 12th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Here’s a crazy idea.
What about “radioactive punji stakes”, so to speak? By which I mean: do we have the technology to create a bomb or radiation-dispersal device such that, if activated, it would spread enough radiation all over the small community to make it totally inhospitable to life (and thereby useless for an occupying force)? If the communities could support a nuclear reactor, this would be pretty easy: attack us and face a Chernobyl.
The principle of such a community would have to be: a free, mutualistic life, or none at all. Admittedly, it’s probably tough to get enough people together who actually believe, and would live out to the end, “liberty or death”, but it’s an idea worth considering. The willingness to live such an ethic is definitely the limiting factor on the existence of free/principled societies — but that’s true all the time, so there’s no reason to single it out as remarkable in this case (i.e., if there is no “final straw” (whether it is liberty or not) past which people will choose death, then really there is no political ethic at all; it’s just: we’ll do whatever is most comfortable (which easily leads to unfreedom, corruption, etc.).
The idea behind the radiation defense: you only need one half of mutually assured destruction (”our territory will be completely destroyed”) to fend off an imperial force. And it seems pretty tough to beat a radioactively-scorched earth defense policy.
July 12th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
There are many examples from history of decentralized societies being wiped out/enslaved by conquering hordes with superior weaponry and tactics.
Yes, and there are counterexamples, such as the rise of city-states at the end of the medieval period, where local volunteer militias drove off lavishly armed, expertly trained professional armies. This is largely due to the natue of available military technology. Those city-states were later conquered when military hardware began to be more efficient on the large scale again, but in the 20th century, technology development has favored smaller and cheaper once again.
July 12th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
One thinker whose insights are highly relevant to this discussion is Martin Van Creveld, a Dutch-Israeli military historian who is arguably the very best in his field.
He argues that the state as it arose out of the Treaty of Westphalia and the time of the absolute monarchs is in decline due to the changing nature of war in modern times. The purpose of the monocentric state was to monopolize war against contending institutions like the aristocracy, cities, Church, etc., but this monopoly is being undermined by multiple factors. These include the growth of the global economy, the inefficient and expensive nature of modern states, improved communications and transportation technology and nuclear weapons.
Nukes have rendered war of the type seen in the past several centuries cost prohibitive. Meanwhile, these other changes have allowed for the rise of “fourth generation” military forces, which are basically non-state private forces waging war against states.
Examples include the obvious: Hezbollah, the FARC, Peoples’ War Group, Al-Qaeda, US street gangs, the insurgents in Iraq, et.al.
Van Creveld believes the nation-state system is declining and will give way to smaller, separatist breakaway polities or transnational federations with much internal devolution and a much greater role non-state institutions.
Incidentally, Van Creveld is not libertarian. He’s just a flat out Hobbesian and a realist in the Machiavellian tradition, which is one reason I find him to be a very refreshing thinker.
July 14th, 2008 at 12:44 am
Libra, you’re going to have to qualify your statement that neutron bombs are cheap. Seems to me that there’s an awful lot of expensive centralized infrastructure that goes into the development, production, storage, and ultimate delivery of such weapons, which requires a bunch of very smart people to maintain, and a large tax base to support financially. All these people have to be convinced that there is an equal or greater power which presents a mortal threat, or at the very least, that they should not care about that particular aspect of the state’s activities. That requires a sympathetic press and indoctrination system with little in the way of competition, something that is not at all guaranteed anymore.
And I don’t think Chinese and Russian nuclear opposition disproves Kevin’s point about Vietnam at all. It says to me that using nuclear weapons as a means to enforce one’s will is a dead-end in the development of military technology, except for the suicidal or the unopposed. A stable military equilibrium puts severe pressure on those who have the resources to develop weapons of mass destruction and the will to use them, which is why imperial America has thrown such a hypocritical fit these past few years.
Have you read anything by John Robb? He’s thinking along similar lines to Van Creveld, and his book “Brave New War” is a good summary of everything he talks about on his blog, http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/ He goes more deeply into why the US “lost its will” to conduct collective reprisals in the latter half of the 20th century.
July 14th, 2008 at 11:24 am
It’s also worth noting that there’s no serious support among anarchists for plans to form some sort of “pure” society on an uninhabited island or anything of the sort. By the time there are nuke-worthy anarchist communities that aren’t covered by someone’s nuclear umbrella, any potential aggressor state will be thoroughly riddled with anarchists and anarchist sympathizers of its own.
July 14th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
PML,
I actually considered the prospect of incurring your wrath when I wrote the comment, but I don’t think the objection you raised applies in this case: an attempt at conquest by a foreign state.
But the defense system you describe, with its skeletal framework of fortresses and inactive war chieftains, is probably doable on a federal basis in a stateless society.
Libra,
Your “special case” of nuclear deterrence by the Soviets and Chinese is one that’s likely to apply, at least so long as it’s needed anyway. The U.S. is probably the closest thing to a single hegemonic power the world will ever have. The future is likely to be one of fission, of large powers breaking up into progressively smaller ones. And so long as any single state maintains the size, resource base and ambition to attempt the kind of conquest you describe, there is likely to be an ever-expanding pool of “Russias” and “Chinas” to keep their ambition in bounds.
Domestically, I expect getting from here to there to be a long-term process, not an end state that appears overnight while the rest of the world remains dominated by the existing power structure. The series of fractures and devolutions PML describes in Ethiopia are one possible model–in the American case, the territorial state would be gradually devolve into a federation of local militias of some sort. The comments by Keith, Ian and Chris also touch on the general idea that a stateless society won’t evolve in a vacuum.