Brexit: Why We're Against It in the Wider English-Speaking World

The Euro-Atlantic union is our own. Our Greatness lies In it, not Out

By Ira Straus

Americans and Britons have a common interest in avoiding a Brexit. I hope it will not be taken amiss if, as an overseas citizen of the Anglo-American world, I discuss why Americans see it that way. I wish to do so from the vantage point of our common history and the vast inheritance we have jointly build over the centuries, not merely from the standpoint of our immediate practical interests.

The Legitimacy, indeed Necessity, of American Comment

It is easy, to be sure, to take offense when a foreigner comments on an upcoming national vote. I sometimes see Americans responding that way, too. People around the world always comment on how we ought to vote. But we mostly take it for granted, much as Britons did in the days of the Empire. The others have fair cause to comment. They have an interest in how we vote -- usually, a constructive interest in our getting things right. It is obvious in retrospect that sometimes we should have listened to them more carefully.

America in turn has a vital interest today in preserving the wider Euro-Atlantic union that has been built around the dual cores of NATO and the EU, and this means we have a strong interest in avoiding a Brexit. Just as we had a deep interest in preserving a united Great Britain during the Scottish referendum, when we spoke up for our mother country.

It is for this reason that I request that the reader take this American comment in good spirit, not as an intrusion but as an overseas extension of the national dialogue.

The Larger Question neglected in the Debate thus far

I do not wish to focus here on the specific dangers that Brexit would pose to American and British interests, serious though those are -- worse instability in trade and finance, in a world economy already on the brink, with “unpredictable” consequences (as they say in diplomatic parlance); a less Atlantic-oriented EU; a renewed threat of Scottish secession; troubles for NATO... The former NATO Secretaries-General were well-founded in their warning about Brexit’s consequences; which is why they all joined in issuing the warning.

Nor do I wish to dwell on the benefits that Brexit proponents hope for, other than to remark on their regrettable lack of plausibility. If only a Brexit would make it easier for Britain to manage an effective policy on non-EU migration!  And if only a Brexit would enable Britain to make more of its special relationship with America! But alas, it wouldn’t happen; Britain has long since taken the special relationship as far as it can go, and there is precious little to be added. We had a century after 1865 to build the special relationship separately; the project reached its main limits already by the early 1900s. Further progress ran into a brick wall: America felt it would traduce its identity, derived from 1776, were it to reunite with Britain alone. The way out, paradoxically, was through Europe. It was by adding in third countries-- the Continental democracies -- that it proved possible to deepen the Anglo-American relation in the decades after 1900. This was done in stages, in Euro-Atlantic alliances after 1914, and in the series of Euro-Atlantic structures built after 1947.The Anglo-American special relation has grown further only by ceasing to be purely Anglo-American, and becoming instead the informal core subsystem of the institutionalized Euro-American special relation. And this is just what Brexit would undermine, sending Anglo-American relations backwards not forward.

These specific costs might, to be sure, be lumped together as “adjustment costs”, which exist with every major change, particularly a break-up. Because of the high adjustment costs of divorce, the starting assumption is always against it, in the absence of compelling cause.

“Adjustment costs” may be too dismissive a categorization for the specific costs in this case -- the costs of divorce would be quite severe in this case -- but plenty has already been said about these specifics on both sides of the debate. A convenient summary is at http://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-claims-factbox-idUSKCN0Z01GM.

This leaves me free to focus here instead on a larger question: Who are we Anglo­Americans; and what would we turn ourselves into, were the UK to exit the EU?

It is an issue of national sentiment and identity, or “who we are”. It is high time that we have a serious dialogue between the two sides on this issue.

Who are we Anglo­Americans ?

Who are we? And yes, we need to ask this for all of us, not solely for England. What would we turn ourselves into, if we dismantled the Euro-Atlantic system at whose core we stand, or part of it, or withdrew our role in it? It is this question that makes me feel it is not only within my rights to comment on Brexit; it is a kind of duty, as a member of the Anglo-American world.

The English-speaking peoples have had two great international imperatives in the course of their history: first freedom through separation, then leadership of the free through integration.

The older, separatist imperative is emphasized in our popular history books, with great panache; it comes at heroic formative moments of our countries, moments when our identity was sealed with a line of blood. But the integrationist imperative has become the actual one before us in modern times, when we live in a world where we are no longer a beleaguered fringe but are at the very core of the world order. And it too has been sealed in blood, though in ways less popularly remarked; the blood has not been used as effectively for identity-mapping as the earlier battles, but we have all been blood brothers as allies in defending each other in two world wars and a cold war, when rivers of blood have been spilt that made our national separation wars look like mere skirmishes, and when all our liberties have been at risk in a degree never even imagined in our formative years.

What made separateness a valid imperative for us in early modern times? A long but essentially temporary historical conjuncture: the fact that we developed modern liberty faster than the rest of the European world, apart from minor exceptions such as the Dutch. (To be sure, it was an imperative that many Brits thought we Americans carried too far even in those centuries, when we used it to break apart the British Empire in 1776. They have told us it cost us the Civil War of the 1860s, contrasting with their own peaceful abolition of slavery in their Empire in the 1830s. They have blamed our revolution for inspiring the French Revolution, bringing an end to the era of the liberal reformative enlightenment, leaving in its place a 200-year civil war on the European continent between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. They have credited our isolationism with twice tempting Germany into world war. And those were the arguable costs -- rather plausibly argued costs -- of a break-up for which there was a significant justification, far greater than the justifications for Brexit.)

What gives us today the imperative of integration? A development that we have reason to hope will be enduring, not just another conjuncture: the fact that we have become the leaders of the leading sector of the world. The world has changed profoundly since the early days when we needed to emphasize separation. Liberal democracy has spread across Europe and made major inroads worldwide. By 1830, all of northwestern Europe was under liberal, quasi-democratic regimes, alongside the Anglo-American world; Michael Doyle and other scholars say that a “democratic peace” began at that time in that space. Later, most of the rest of Europe made it there, too. And with America’s population growth, the Anglo-American world itself has changed from a periphery of European power to the center of European and global power.

This is what has reversed the imperative facing our countries: from separation from Europe, to leadership of Europe; from balance of forces, to integration of forces as the main principle of that leadership.

The new imperative was understood slowly. It took a long bitter twentieth century for us to shift our premises from separatism to leadership and integration. It is an achievement to be built on.

Britain, Greater Britain, and the Euro-Atlantic System

“If two small islands are by courtesy styled ‘Great’,” -- so wrote Sir Charles Dilke in 1868 – “America, Australia, India, must form a Greater Britain.” And the Greater Britain, held Dilke, was the seat of England’s future greatness: “Britain in her age will claim the glory of having planted greater Englands across the seas.”

Where is that Greater Britain today? It has morphed, a bit unexpectedly, into an organized Euro-Atlantic world. Despite losing its colonies, it has gained additional major industrial democracies as an organic part of its system. These democracies have been gathered together into a confederacy, one more sustainable than the Empire ever was.

Just as surely as England’s future in 1868 lay in the Greater Britain of Dilke’s time, so today England’s future lies in its role in the updated Greater Britain of the Euro-Atlantic system. England continues to play a pivotal role in maintaining the cohesion of this system, while the organizing core-power role has shifted west to America, already by the late 1800s the geographical center of the population of the old Greater Britain.

The old Greater Britain was the ballast that enabled the Pax Britannica to endure a century. The new Greater Britain -- which is also a Greater America and a Greater Europe -- is the cornerstone of the world order of today.

This is the key consideration for understanding what makes us unique and “great”. It is not that we are the most uniquely perfect liberal democracies in the world; by now that way of government has successfully spread to many other countries, and declamations over which one is most perfect have a petty aspect. Rather, it is that we are the leaders and core powers of this very set of modern liberal democracies.

More: We have organized these democracies into a cohesive grouping. It is by far the largest and strongest cohesive grouping extant in the world; its membership is made manifest in OECD with over 60% of the world economy and an even greater share of global military power. The organized unity of the industrial democracies is what makes them the core power of the world order: the point of reference for its functioning and the anchor of its stability.

This unity was built with tremendous labors, spanning 150 years. Dilke’s Greater Britain began to take clearer shape in the 1890s, when diplomats painstakingly brought a century of Anglo-American hostility to a close; the two powers became friends and de facto allies again. The democratic peace thereby also matured: from a tenuous empirical fact of non-war among countries that often still acted as adversaries who still feared mutual war, it grew into a consciously organized strategic unity among the core democratic powers, US and UK, albeit without formal joint institutions. Henry Adams called this informal union an “Atlantic System”; he projected that it was destined to draw France into the “combine”, and was already doing so, and in the next stage would draw in Germany, then finally Russia, securing world peace. And he hoped this would happen soon, lest instead there be a century of wars.

As we know, the wars came first instead. The lack of institutionalization of the Atlantic grouping made it harder, not easier, to integrate Germany in a solid way: there were no joint structures to fill in for the fact of Germany’s lesser sharing of the historical heritage of the original Western democracies. A world war ensued instead; it brought Communism to Russia whence came further assaults on the world order; the defeat of Germany and arrival of democracy in that country were not enough to integrate it with the West, leaving the chaos of events to push Germany back again into a hostile dictatorship; whence another world war. The lessons of this bitter experience led to the institutionalization of the Atlantic System after 1945, alongside the institutionalization of the global system in the UN. This was a second stage of the maturing of the modified Greater Britain. It succeeded where the earlier informal Atlantic system had failed: it integrated Germany and established a concrete, extendable democratic peace. This concrete space today spans all of Europe save Russia (which however also hoped to join it after 1989 and may yet some day), and crosses the Pacific as well to integrate the modernized countries of Confucian heritage.

The integration succeeded this time around primarily because America pushed idealistically for it. America had the size to be able to afford to take risks for integration, and it found inspiration in the federalist tradition that underlay the formation of its own Union. It in turn owed its size and strength to this tradition of federal unification; a tradition inspired in no small part by the Anglo-Scottish Union and its intellectual progeny, the Scottish Enlightenment. Federalism was the other side of the coin of our tradition of separation, and the greater side: the side in which we built a new expansive union in our freedom. It was our solution to the very real risk that our independence would lead us straight into a tailspin of fragmentation. It laid the grounds for our fitness in the 1900s when the time came for changing tack internationally, from the old spirit of isolationism to the new imperative of integration. But our new orientation ever remained, in America as in England, vulnerable in face of the strength of our other entrenched tradition, separatism.

The integration after 1945 succeeded not only because of institutionalization. It succeeded because American diplomats pushed for a two-tiered union, part European Union part Atlantic Community, not just a pure Atlantic Community. They were realistic about what integration was feasible: with Americans still very much attached to their own independence, and too big to unite as equals with European countries, much of the integration had to be subcontracted to a European subsystem. Thus the “Euro-Atlantic system”, as it came to be called.

America was willing, after the terrible costs and risks of the two world wars, to go as far as becoming deeply embedded in Europe as a military ally, and further, organizing a fair measure of economic and diplomatic cooperation in the Atlantic (and Pacific) space. But, unlike Europeans, it was not willing to become embedded in apolitical-economic union. American officials accepted this reality; on the Atlantic level they build NATO and OECD, while on the European level they empowered the national leaders, through the Marshall Plan, to start acting on their own repeated calls for a deeper union. Britain had an in-between situation: similar to European powers in size and location, but still with a Channel and a history of separate freedom. It developed a limited membership in the European project, replete with opt-outs.

It was by nature a jerry-rigged structure, like a split-level house, but that is no count against it. The inconsistencies of Euro-Atlanticism have been far less than those suffered in its absence.  And Britain, as an intermediary between the Atlantic and European levels, has played a special role in moderating its inconsistencies, keeping them manageable.

It is a special case of a basic point of all international relations theory, brought out well by the English School of Butterfield and Wight and Hinsley, which I should acknowledge having imbibed from my teachers Watson and Bull: Every system of international relations is by nature contradictory, as is national sovereignty itself; every structure for international society and cooperation is meant to reduce these inconsistencies, in part by absorbing them into itself. This raises the inconsistencies to a higher structural plane, making them usually less damaging, but an easy target for nationalist attack, seeking to raze the structure to the ground and restore an imagined simplicity of sovereignty.

The Euro-Atlantic system is just such a structure. It is the one that has done the most to reduce the inconsistencies in international affairs, ending the cycle of European-world wars that plagued not only the early 1900s but all of modern times since the 1500s. It is well worth its troubles.

The system grew deliberately but pragmatically -- and cumulatively. It extended far beyond the English-speaking countries, yet it grandfathered in the old Greater Britain at its core. Its membership kept growing, organically, as modernization and liberal democracy kept spreading; it kept apace in this way with the economic growth of countries not yet in its orbit. It maintained and even extended its global share; it repeatedly confuted the never-ending forecasts of a decline of the West. Its intellectual forebears -- and an impressive lot they were, Hakluyt, Pownall, Franklin, Adams, Dilke, Fiske,  Seeley, Mahan, Stead ,another Adams, Curtis , Lothian, Streit -- forecast the opposite of decline; they projected an ongoing growth, as long as unity would hold, and warned of a decline only if unity were to be sundered. Thus far they have consistently proved right. They put no final limit on this growth; rather, as the years went on, they began to think the Western community might keep expanding indefinitely, until it could someday encompass the global community. This remains a real possibility, distant though it looks from any near vantage point. Were such a day to arrive, Greater Britain would have evolved into the entire world.

Is it worth giving this up, for a moment of feeling proud and putting down the EU?

Britain’s global Greatness today: its strength and fragility

Fortunately, as we have seen, the revamped Greater Britain long ago ceased to be a mere verbal expression. It is a reality concretized in a series of joint institutions. This was what made the difference between success and failure -- catastrophic failures from 1914 to 1945, historically transformative successes (with the usual real-life admixture of blunders and complaints) since 1947.

This was possible in turn because the earlierGreater Britain of the U.K. and U.S. had shared far more than language: they shared an evolved way of government and society. It is a way from which other countries have taken much, to the point of coming also to share in most of it, first in Europe, next in the industrialized Asian democracies, more gradually elsewhere.

Our free society developed through a dual lineage, both national and European: common law and Magna Carta and Parliament, and also Greece and Rome, Christendom and Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment. These pan-European developments played a central part in Britain’s evolution as a modern society. They also gave the Continental countries a base for catching up with Anglo-American democracy more readily and thoroughly than other regions of the world.

It used to make for a proud Imperial fantasy to say that the countries of the Empire could be “regenerated” more easily than the countries of the Continent, but history proved otherwise. It still makes for nationalist reveries to speak of an Anglo-sphere instead of a Euro-sphere, but the reality of the British Empire is that it was always one of the European global empires. The rest of Europe was always closer in nature to Britain than was the Empire. The Greater Britain was always a part of a Greater Europe.

For centuries, however, this Greater Europe was rendered contradictory by the division of its core, with mutual conflicts and wars among its national powers inside Europe. It was rendered potentially consistent only late in the day, by the integration of its core after 1945 -- just when most of its periphery was falling away from it. The congealing of the core of the Greater Europe into a joint enterprise, designed as Euro-Atlanticism, was a tremendous development, of as great a historical import as the loss of its periphery.

This joint enterprise is the true bearer of the heritage of Greater Britain. It is the living continuation of the national project of Great Britain; the mighty river into whose waters the streams of Great Britain have flowed. Through it, the deepest hopes of Britain live on.

The deepest hopes of any society are its original hopes and its ultimate hopes: its original hopes for indefinite continuation of its people and their evolving achievements, its ultimate hopes for someday securely embedding its achievements in humanity at large. Britain’s deepest hopes do live on today. They live on in the Euro-Atlantic union and in all its future prospects. They could not live on outside of this.

All of the joint institutions of this Euro-Atlantic system -- the OEEC of the Marshall Plan, its children NATO and the ECSC, their heirs and supplements OECD, EU, NPA, and G7, and a host of lesser ones -- have been important for the success of the system: for realizing the hopes of their member countries, after traditional national power politics had failed those hopes and brought them to the edge of ruin. Two of the institutions, NATO and the EU, are indispensable.

At the same time, the institutions are all fragile. None of them can draw on the deep resources of national patriotism. Therein lies the balance of hope and fear.

Britain lies still today near the core of this system, not just as the birthing country of America, but as the bridge between the European and Atlantic levels of the system. Its inherent special relation with America, keeping America together with Europe; its membership in the EU, keeping Europe together with America and the Atlantic: it is a linchpin of the system on both fronts. De Gaulle said Britain would be a Trojan Horse for the Americans in the EU. Putting to the side the paranoid imagery, the fact is that Britain plays an indispensable role as a mediator of the system on multiple levels. The cohesion of the system would slacken without it, and would risk collapsing altogether.

That is the context within which we need to see the meaning of a potential British withdrawal from the EU. It would leave a gaping hole in the Western edifice.

From Greatness to Tailspin?

No island is just an island. Britain is part of a vast Euro-Atlantic Main. Its greatness is bound up in the main to which it has done so much to birth.

A Brexit would no doubt be accompanied by enthusiastic nationalistic declamations, but it would leave the actual Britain diminished globally. Even the local Union of Britain and Scotland would be at risk. The issue of Scottish independence would come up again, sooner or later making it to another referendum. The processes in Northern Ireland would be negatively impacted, no one knows how much. The “great” could go out of Great Britain itself, leaving only an inner Britain of England and Wales. And even that inner core could unexpectedly come into question, in such a fundamentally deteriorated situation.

That is how tailspins proceed. Brexit would begin a potentially fatal cycle of narrowing of perspectives.

The narrowing of perspectives would be contagious. The EU would be the first place of contagion, likely sending the Union into a further tailspin. EU exit is already becoming fashionable in several countries. Brexit would legitimize it. The ghosts of the old nationalist Europe could return sooner than people have imagined.

No one knows how far this tailspin would go, either. Contagion is itself contagious, in a chaos event. The reason quarantines are used for diseases is because diseases are a form of chaos, and chaos metastasizes at a geometrical pace, feeding upon itself and leapfrogging over boundaries. Chaos easily becomes a fashion, and it is the easiest of fashions to spread; there are messy conditions everywhere, and disaffected people ever ready to take up the torch. The synergies of chaos work effortlessly; its elements always fit together for making more chaos, with no need for a neat fit among them. Vast, venerable realities can be dissolved overnight when chaos gathers momentum. One has to expect the unexpected in a chaos event. Thus, again, the “unpredictability” of the consequences.

America would be an early place for the mood of chaos to spread. In this presidential election year, it would be greatly influenced by the nationalistic trend of a Brexit.

A nationalist America in turn could send NATO into a tailspin. Writers have noticed some local problems for NATO from a Brexit: an independent Scotland could deny NATO nuclear visiting rights; Orthodox Greece could leave the EU and NATO and align with Orthodox Russia; other countries could join suit. But there is yet to be considered the impact on American thinking: the potentiality for fostering an American mood of junking its own alliance system, an American equivalent for Britain junking Europe. Hints of this are already being given, as yet only as a bargaining threat. In an actual bargaining process, when dis-unification is the trend outside the room, the threat of separation easily turns into the reality.

This is the other reason why I feel it is a kind of duty of mine to comment on Britain’s referendum options. A vote for Brexit would affect American thinking and policy in ways that Britain would surely not like.

Our Historic Prospects in the Balance

If Brexit is rejected and the Euro-Atlantic system avoids major visible decline in the coming year, the system is likely to continue to hold America’s support, no matter who is elected President here. The wave of nationalistic sentiment that is sweeping my country would pass.

But if the Euro-Atlantic system begins cracking, in this moment of its historical vulnerability -- and Brexit would be a major structural crack -- this would lend an aura of realism to the go-it-alone tide in America. It would favor the candidate who speaks in the strongest nationalistic language; and it would bend the policies of the country away from Europe, no matter which candidate ultimately wins.

The belief in the obsolescence of the Western system is widespread in America. It is fed constantly from both ends: by Right isolationists and unilateralists, and by Left journalists and academics. Both sets, Left and Right, use the language of 1776, playing powerfully on America’s separatist impulses. NATO has been called obsolete every year since 1989 by major media commentators; more often called obsolete, in fact, than its relevance has been pointed out. It is said repeatedly that America could save money, and lots of it at that, by jettisoning its allies. The reality is quite opposite; NATO is a net boon for U.S. finances, without even speaking of how Europe had cost us far more without NATO, prior to 1949, than it has since. But few indeed are those who know this. The myth that American finances are drained by NATO is one that goes uncontroverted, to be taken up by a Trump, and equally by his opposite numbers on the Left. Among elites, this myth is sometimes found useful, as a means of delivering a threat to exert pressure on Europe to spend more on defense. It risks becoming a game of chicken when conditions are unstable.

There is a real chance, 50-50, that America will elect Trump. This need not be a problem in itself for Europeans; the election of Reagan was met with similarly derision and prophecies of doom, but turned out well. Nevertheless, there are risks; and there would be much indeed to fear from it, if Brexit were to set a disintegrative international stage as context for his election.

Brexit would, first, further increase the likelihood of Trump getting elected: it would discredit the foreign policy of his opponent, make her establishment credentials look useless or worse, and lend credibility to his nationalistic lines, making them sound very much in tune with reality. It would then proceed to increase the likelihood of a Trump presidency turning out harmful internationally.

The effects of a Trump presidency would depend heavily on whether the Euro-Atlantic system is holding or disintegrating. If the system were holding when he came into office, Trump would presumably work to make his mark within the system, as he has indicated, not against it. He talks of being a rebuilder, and of wanting to build it bigger and better, like the buildings that bear his name. But if the Euro-Atlantic system were collapsing, Trump could easily slip into the simple nationalistic, pull-out-of-NATO posture that journalists have attributed to him -- not entirely accurately, but it is a fair enough representation of the emotive trend in his rhetoric. He has said that he would threaten withdrawal, as part of the bargaining process; in a post-Brexit mood of spreading nationalism, the instinct of the public would shift toward demanding too much and proceeding with withdrawal. And American withdrawal would -- unlike a Scottish withdrawal -- spell the end of NATO.

The end of NATO would in turn undermine what would be left of the EU. It would pull out the main cornerstone that has underpinned the EC/EU since its beginning: the cornerstone of NATO’s strategic unity, achieved by unifying its nations’ military plans and integrating their forces and training. NATO is what ended the long history of separate national military plans and conflicting national global strategies. The EU would never have been possible without this underpinning. Were NATO to disappear, some Europeans would no doubt rush to push for filling in this gap with a military union on the EU level, but all the trends would be in the opposite direction. And European military union never succeeded in the past, when circumstances were much more propitious -- not even when America was demanding it of Europe.

That is what a tailspin looks like. It is no fanciful nightmare. It is a realistic nightmare.

America and Britain would both be diminished by Brexit. We would be diminished in our very essence: in the sum total of what we have made of ourselves over the course of our history. We would be diminished in the leadership role the Euro-Atlantic construct has given us in the world. We would be diminished in our prospects in the world. We would be diminished in our national futures.

This overall damage must be counted on top of the specific damages Brexit would do us. America’s professional diplomats would no doubt work hard -- Trump himself has hinted at this -- to limit some of the specific damages, but they could not stop the overall damage from being considerable.

We should not underestimate the risk that the damage would prove catastrophic, despite all efforts to contain it. Western unity is unusually fragile today: fragile popularly in face of resurgent nationalism, fragile on the ideological level in media and academia, fragile financially in face of the economic downturn and weak recovery, fragile strategically in face of fifteen years of failures to deal effectively with Islamist terrorism. This fragility spells multiple susceptibilities to being sent into a tailspin. It is another part of what is meant when people speak of “unpredictable consequences” from Brexit.

The West has faced still worse dangers in the past, to be sure. It faced German nationalism and American isolationism in the 1930s, when the Atlantic alliance was subterranean; it only barely got back up to its feet to meet the challenge before it was too late, and at a terrible price. It would be foolhardy to feel confident and underestimate the risks before us today.

In today’s conditions, it is all too easy for disintegration to feed on itself. The ripple waves of a Brexit could unravel piece by piece the entire edifice of Western unity that our countries have built over the course of the last 150 years, at cost of much blood and treasure.

An unraveling of the West would in turn take down the entire global order with it. The unified Western world is still the only cohesive core of the world order, despite the much discussed rise of the rest.  Ideologues on the Left might welcome its collapse, and so might some on the Right; but in the actual non-Western world, there would be no gain from Western disintegration, only a spread of chaos. We have seen this movie play out before: Germans a century ago prophesied a “decline of the West” and imagined in it the warrant for their own national glory, but only got from it a path to their final destruction as a separate sovereign nation.

Our true greatness is embedded in the structures for unity we have built up with our neighbors -- the countries that have become most like us. Reversion to geopolitical competition among these countries would be suicidal, but it is not impossible. It happened with Germany in the interwar years. The tit-for-tat of national self-assertion against each other, and next the nationalist ideological argumentation against each other, usually develops in gradual stages, but it feeds quite naturally on itself once it gets going. It was in fact the normal fate of our countries for many centuries, in the absence of serious joint international structures. It is our modern joint structures -- the serious one like the EU and NATO -- that stand between us and that fate.

It is much hoped over here in America that these dangers will fade into the mist after June 23, and the Euro-Atlantic world will breathe a sigh of relief with the EU reaffirmed. We breathed such a sigh of relief the morning after the Scottish referendum, like a nightmare had lifted. We mean too much to each other, to be able to pretend not to care about these matters. And we have built too much that is worth preserving over the long course of our history, to watch much of it get thrown out overnight in a fit of irritation.

Ira Straus, PhD, is U.S. Coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO (1992 to present), and Chair of the Center for War/Peace Studies. Both are independent policy analysis organizations. In the 1980s he was Executive Director of the Association to Unite the Democracies. He has taught international relations at universities in the US and (as a Fulbright professor) in Moscow, Russia. He studied under and worked with the late Adam Watson CMG, formerly of the Foreign Office, later secretary of the English Committee on International Relations Theory; and studied a term at Oxford under the late Professor Hedley Bull. The opinions expressed here are solely his responsibility. 

Who's the Artist?

Easy quiz, right? It's right there on the video: Guster - Do You Love Me. You mean artists, no? Adam Gardner, Ryan Miller, and Brian Rosenworcel! Hold on, did you actually mean Jon Sarkin? That's my point. It's all of them. But we haven't included Chad Carlberg, the director of the video. Or anyone else who participated and might have improvised something important. Still is there a hierarchy of creativity? If yes, how do we determine the hierarchy? Is it intuitively obvious? Do we give most credit to the the root cause, the seed of the project? Or is it just a matter of being on the front page and political muscle?

This applies to any creative project, from video clips to software systems. Yes, engineering is not just science. It's an art as well. Is it important who the artist is? Yes. Because ultimately it's about remunerating someone for their contributions to society. We could say, let the market place decide. But in a project, monetary value has yet to be established. To make sure there's no violent conflict once the bear is skinned and the fur is sold, we bind ourselves contractually to how to share the potential profits. Saying that everyone is equal seems wrong at face value. If I hire someone to serve olives with little red dots in them, it would hardly be fair to give them an equal portion.

But that's where it stops being easy, especially when it's unclear what is to be created, such as a new software system or a very novel and difficult to make movie. We haven't even included the concept of capital. It's a very important part. But to stay focused on the "creators", I steer away from that here. Let's just assume the project is being financed with sweat equity. Sometimes, who will ultimately contribute is unclear at the outset. And, what the value of that contribution will be.

You could say, well, who knows? There no way of knowing and hence, whatever assumptions are made at the beginning and whatever someone can negotiate themselves to goes. Yes, and we can just stick with whatever we have been doing for the last X period of time and not improve our ability to fulfill the Basic Imperative. My question here is if there is a better way of establish who should be fairly remunerated so that their future endeavors can potentially be better financed. Who wants a bunch of millionaire olive caterers and an Edwin Howard Armstrong? Perhaps Armstrong is a bad case for project based remuneration. Maybe his case is more of corporate theft and political muscle. But how many ingenious contributors to a project were left broke and never heard of because they were unfairly treated in the initial settling of contracts? What about the Winklevoss Twins? Well, by no means broke. Perhaps I can't come up with a good example because we just don't know about these "lost" talents? Or maybe its just not a big problem.

I'm not claiming there's a better solution than what we currently have. I'm just wondering if there is perhaps a better way of doing things. Is there? I want to wake you from your dreams...

Evolutionism, a New Moral Framework

Ethics have been plagued by relativism or the difficulty in establishing a of set of universal axiomatic rules founded in reason and confirmed by our sensations of right and wrong. I propose that we can solve the problem by extrapolating a moral framework from a simple statement that most of us can agree is a near necessity as such for those who might follow. I call this statement the Basic Imperative:

Act such as to maximize the survival chance of our distant descendants.

I am convinced that the Basic Imperative unfolds like a beautiful fractal, giving rise to a set of guidelines that will help us behave in the right way.

Further reading:
The Basics of Evolutionism
Distant Doomsday Test
Distant Descendants, Dystopia or Utopia?
Multiple Species?

Single-payer System, Classic Socialism

Regardless of what you may think of a single-payer universal health care system, one thing aught to be clear: it's straight up socialism. Socialism is the concept of centralizing the administration of our means of production to achieve a more efficient and egalitarian outcome. If we make the government the sole provider of basic health insurance, we have centralized the control of who gets compensated for what medical services. However, presuming we allow additional private insurance for services not compensated by the government, the system will not be strictly socialist. Nonetheless, having centralized the process of getting compensatory authorization for the majority of all medical procedures, I don't know what else to call it but... socialist.

The unfortunate thing is that in many circles the term socialism has acquired such a derogatory connotation that once the term is used it shuts down all meaningful conversation. Now, I happen to believe that the best economic systems are neither socialist nor completely "free". As a federalist I believe in subsidiarity and the Rule of Law. It's appropriate for the government to impose rules about what CANNOT be done in specific markets. Without clear rules, organizations will inevitably use whatever means that afford them an upper hand, regardless of whether such means demonstrate prowess, ingenuity and service excellence in their specific field.

Though I believe it's necessary for the government to impose basic (sometimes strict) rules, it's hardly ever good for the government to actually administrate the means of production. The temptation is to think that centralization inevitably leads to optimization by the removal of unnecessary redundancies. But redundancies are not necessarily wasteful since they stabilize the overall system by making the system more resilient to failure. The best systems in my view are those that balance centralization and localization as well as conciseness and redundancy. I have no doubt that we need universal health care. But I'm wary of single-payer systems because I don't think they strike the aforementioned balance. A so-called "public option" seems far more attractive though I have yet to reflect on whether, as claimed, it would ultimately destroy the private industry, and thereby in the end institute a de-facto single-payer system.

One thing is for sure: it's unfortunate that the term socialist has acquired such an accusatory tone. Though I strongly disagree with some of the core tenets of the socialist movement, socialism is a useful term for describing the concept of centralization in our economy. And, let's face it, Americans have been employing and benefiting from clearly socialist structures since 1930's. It's neither knew nor un-American. But the fact that socialism isn't "un-American" doesn't mean that socialism is good either. Only the most banal use the words good and American interchangeably. We need to move beyond superficial phrases like "a single-payer system is bad because it's socialist". Yes it is socialist. But so what? Why is socialism bad? Ah, now, where getting there. Socialism is bad because...

Redesigning our Economy, Part 1

In the early part of the last century, nations began to abandon the gold standard in favor of fiat money. The possibility to redeem money in specie was finally given its global death blow in 1971 when the United States terminated its obligations under the Bretton Woods Agreement. Today, the government in theory controls our money supply by pure fiat. But unfortunately it's not that simple since new value is also created out of thin air as private entities create and trade options and securities. The only portion of the supply that a central bank controls is how much so called printed money is in circulation (whether such printing is physical or by lowering requirements on electronically held banking reserves is irrelevant). However, even the supply through the generation of private securities is not beyond the control of the government since the private sector can be regulated through legislative acts combined with judicial enforcement. Ultimately, we are in the position to decide how our monetary influx is to be controlled in order to prevent extreme fluctuations in our economy.

Although the government should not due to organic principles be considered one and the same as We the People, the government aught not to be needlessly vilified and equated with totalitarianism as soon as it exerts any form of centralized control. I won't argue this point here in any great length since it deserves a well thought through post in its own right. Suffice to say that I would claim that a stable society, in fact any system per se, perfectly balances centralized and local control. A perfect government allows We the People to regulate the government through occasional intervention (such as elections), potentially overthrowing the established order without reverting to violent revolt.

The money supply, being one of the non-localized pillars of a stable society aught to be under maximized central control by the government. I will even go one step further, claiming that our money supply aught to be maintained by automatic so called homeostatic mechanisms. However, how money is borrowed and lent should remain a purely localized (i.e. private) matter. To be more accurate about my claims, it's not that the government's authority to use the money supply as a control mechanism should be enhanced. To the contrary, that authority should actually be removed from both the government and the private sector as much as possible. The only responsibility the government should have is to execute the homeostatic mechanism required to maintain a steady cost of money.

Some have naively advocated a return to the gold standard. Note that this in effect returns money supply into the private sector by making mining companies responsible for establishing a influx of specie (unless, of course, gold mining is nationalized). And even if this were to be considered acceptable, there just isn't enough gold to guarantee redemption as our global society expands and intensifies its activities. We need to peg money to something more fundamentally intrinsic than material goods: human labor, or to use a more modern term, services (since labor has become equated with physical rather than mental work).

The flaw of any specie-backed currency is that no specie has in-and-of-itself intrinsic value. On the surface it may seem as if some raw materials, such as gold, have lasting value. This is simply not true. All materials are only as valuable as that for which they are used. It's only by putting them into the context of a service that they are of any importance to us. Gold or iridium cannot be eaten or drunk. None of the elements of the periodic table are on their own sufficient to support biological functions. And a thing can only be said to approach an intrinsic value if it serves our most basic biological needs. Only a few abundant combinations of naturally occurring elements come close to sustaining life as such (e.g. water and air).

Gold only seems valuable in-and-of-itself because of its imperishable and non-toxic nature. Perhaps it also seems to have constant value due to a human propensity to being attracted to all things that glitter. But copper has been a specie to back currencies as well, so its less the superficial value of the bright color of gold than something else that caused it to have such importance to our money supply until 1971. It was the durability combined with the relative rarity and difficulty of extracting gold that caused it to be used as the predominant basis for money. Though it may seem ridiculous, imagine for a moment that water (which can be said to have some form of "intrinsic" long lasting value) were to be used as specie. That would mean anyone could introduce new money into our economy by simply draining a lake.

Gold and all other materials from oil to uranium are worthless to us unless we put them to good use. And all other useful materials, such as livestock and grain, are perishable which makes them particularly unsuitable for backing any currency. So what are we left with to back the value of our money? Nothing except humans. Humans may be perishable, but their brains, their capacity to store information and and their inherent will to apply themselves makes them invaluable to other humans. This may sound obvious, even silly. It can be argued that humans are sort of useless unless they know how to perform some particular service. And although it is true that a neurosurgeon is not born from the womb, almost all humans have the natural capacity to learn.

Recorded intellectual property is perhaps the only thing beyond our brains which is intrinsically valuable to us. It's only in the context of intellectual property that iridium, oil, coffee beans or horses are of any importance to us whatsoever. But again, intellectual property is less than useful without the knowledge and experience in how to apply it. All real value circles back to human labor per se. And even if a lawyer is paid more than an orange picker, there is a lowest common denominator that renders any sentient human useful. Hold this, do that, suction here. Not like that, like this. What a few instructions and just a little training almost any human (except those whose brains have been severely compromised) can be put to good use.

Therefore, all currency is ultimately backed only by human labor, regardless of whether it is redeemable in some given specie or not. Fiat money is simply a gradually heightened awareness that the only ones who can ultimately redeem money is those who can, under extreme circumstances, require human labor through obligatory civil and military services. The only institution that has and should have that authority is our government (i.e. that which governs us). Only a pure anarchist would claim that the government should have absolutely no capacity to control human labor (and it can be argued that a truly anarchist society cannot exist by virtue of the very meaning of society).

It is not wrong for the government to demand certain actions as long as it respects a set of fundamental human rights that are constitutionally enshrined. Without the authority to demand labor, government could not exist. There would be no ability to rapidly expand our military and civil structures when under a foreign threat. In the U.S. and some other countries there would be no juries of peers. There would be no judicial sentencing beyond forced imprisonment (i.e. no one could be required to redeem themselves through community services). Such authority should not be equated with slavery. Slavery is an abomination because it places the capacity to enforce labor in private hands and suspends our most basic civil rights.

Interestingly, a debt to the government is indirectly a transfer of its authority to demand labor to a private party. When you buy a treasury bond (or obligation as it is known outside the U.S.), the government ensures in good faith that it will redeem that bond at a future point of time (it is obligated to do so). The way the government ensures its ability to repay you is through taxation, by selling further bonds or printing more money. The latter two are of illusory means of paying back since the first is just a crazy Ponzi scheme and the latter is just creating empty value. Printing money causes the value of all the money currently in circulation to decrease, thereby artificially eliminating the government's debt. It is no more than defaulting on an obligation. If we are lucky, it's a temporary band-aid for the economy. In the worst case, it's the Weimar Republic and hyperinflation, followed by a collapse of government as such. As I just said, it is the same as an institution defaulting on its obligations. And seriously, who except marginal extremists wants the government go belly up?

Taxation is what is of real interest. What is taxation? Taxation is nothing more than the government making you work for its benefit. It's the mayor means by which the government can legitimately redeem its debts, with other words back its obligations through human labor. Even if unlike obligatory civil and military services the government does not enforce you to work, the government enforces you to share the fruits of your labor through taxation. Since no one can really stop working and survive without someone else picking up the slack (i.e. providing charity), the government is guaranteed an income. It may not be outright controlling your activities, but taxation guarantees that you are in part laboring for the government whether you want it or not. Which is probably why many of us feel all grumpy about it. Very few of us like to be forced to do anything.

Public debt requires the government to transfer the benefit of your labor to some specific private entity (or foreign government). It's not slavery per se since it does not enforce specific activities that can potentially violate human rights. But it's akin to slavery because it enforces us to be in the servitude of someone who lent us money without any recourse to defaulting. Many try to wave this to the side by claiming public debt is just a debt to ourselves. Incorrect. Public debt is a debt we have to a specific entity. Yes, we (through our elected officials) chose to acquire that debt. And if there was no obligation to honor a debt, who would lend anyone money? But under private lending circumstances, an entity has a mechanism by which it can nullify its debts. We the People have no such recourse. Let me remind you that debtors prison was eliminated a long time ago with good reason.

Public debt is transferred from one generation to the next. The conventional opinion is even that if a government is overthrown, its successor government inherits the debt of its predecessor. Something is clearly wrong. How does a generation escape the sins and profligacy of its parents? I've read crazy claims such as the one that most spending is for the benefit of the next generation anyway. I simply do not buy that argument. I believe most debt is created to adjust for our mistakes, not because we are so fantastically generous to our children. Otherwise all of our spending would be directed to education and never to rescuing distressed financial organizations. Yes, there is such a thing as raising money to improve infrastructure. But is it really for our children that we do this? When we as a society spend money on a bridge or a scientific project, we do it with the hope that it will benefit us and not some distant future generation. The benefit for our descendants is a happy byproduct. Unfortunately, continuously deferred public debt (issuing bonds to pay for matured bonds) not only enforces our yet to be conceived grandchildren and great-grandchildren to pay for the benefit of our smarts. They will also have to pay in a very direct way for our grievous mistakes.

Obviously we cannot introduce a means by which the government is allowed to renege on its obligations. That's not my point. The government is not an entity like any other entity. If the government has a legal commitment it must be obligated to live up to that commitment under all circumstances. My point is that the government aught not to have such obligations in the first place! Some of you are going to sarcastically snark at such a suggestion. A government without public debt? How will the government save us from the brink of an economic meltdown or social catastrophe without being able to run a deficit? Well, there aught not to be the potential for sudden economic meltdowns. And social catastrophes should not be handled by borrowing money from war profiters, but by obligating private entities to directly serve the good of their commonwealth and by paying higher taxes.

Well, hunky dory and pinky roses. Perhaps we don't live in a perfect world and economic meltdowns are inevitable. Just like famines were inevitable in most countries before modern agricultural practices. We are not at the end of history! To accept extreme fluctuations in the economy as a natural part of human society is defeatist. Yes, all systems sway from higher to lower activity. But they don't teeter at the edge of extinction every 50th year (unless, of course, they're a human society that thinks its reached the end of history). Regardless of whether or not you reject Ricardian equivalence, you must answer to what extent offsetting the costs for solving a current crisis to the next generation is acceptable.

Obviously, if the future of humanity as such is at stake, maximizing labor efforts at any cost, even to future generations, is in order. But even if you are the most ardent Keynesian, do you really believe that bonds represent so more powerful a tool than taxes that it always trumps taxation when we are under economic duress? If public deficits are acceptable, then at least they aught to be temporary measures to overcome a temporary hump, not as it is and has been in the U.S. since Andrew Jackson, a permanent fixture of our economic structures.

I suspect most believe in a happy medium between bonds and taxes. But in my opinion, long term bonds always smell of deceit specifically because the Ricardian equivalence does not entirely hold. Everyone's awareness is tremendously heightened when tax issues are under discussion. And the reality of taxation presents itself directly as we file our returns, pay our gas and buy our clothes. But how many are continuously tracking at what level securities are issued by the government and to whom? To support the legitimacy of bonds is like objecting to elections because people are to dumb to vote. We are so jaded by our national debt that despite some occasional ruckus in the bowls of our national debate, we have become impervious to it. Perhaps it is irrelevant, a giant Ponzi scheme that doesn't really affect anyone because no one is willing to call our governments bluff (our own self delusion, so to say).

Unfortunately, in our global economy equating national debt with a debt to ourselves is no longer even remotely accurate. We are no longer playing a Ponzi scheme with ourselves and our grandchildren. We are now a bunch of strangers fueling each others excesive expansion and consumption, hoping, praying that the other ones won't get cold feet. I'm not trying to argue that incuring debt is fundamentally wrong. People and businesses need to be able to borrow money to further their (and thereby society's) progress. What I am arguing is that it's wrong for governments to incure debt when their is a more direct and transparent way for them to raise money for communal needs such as education, public transportation, law enforcement and basic health care. The government is the only entity in society that can legitamtely levy cumpolsory taxes. It does not need to borrow money if it has none.

Here it's certainly necessary to distinguish nations with emerging economies from nations with well established economies that are politically integrated into higher structures. The State of New York can receive adequate tax funds from both its own population as well as the entire tax base of the U.S. Federal Government. Burundi, on the other hand, is hard pressed to lift itself out of its own poverty. It depends on external funds for its progress. Creating incentives for such investments is important. I'm more focused on countries like the U.S.. But that said, I believe that even in the case of Burundi, intergovernmental lending and borrowing may not be the answer. Such lending does not seem to have had a great track record for equalizing the wealth discrepancy between nations. The answer I suspect is in local micro-funding at the private level, thereby generating a healthy private sector that the government can levy its taxes against.

The argument for issuing bonds often focuses on the effectiveness of offsetting costs to a time when a project is completed and capable of generating a benefit (or revenue) for its constituency. Seen from this perspective, even a transfer of cost to another generation can seem legitimate. Why should I have to pay now for something I will not immediately benefit from? The problem with such intergenerational arguments is that it assumes our capability to know what will be of any benefit. Every project is associated with a risk which burden only those who decide to be involved with the project should carry. When we engage intergenerational projects, who should shoulder the risk? Those who decide to engage in the project or those who those who engage in the project believe will benefit from it?

Imagine if I took out a loan to send my two young sons to an extremely expensive elementary school and put the loan in their name. I keep paying only the interest on the loan until they graduate from high school. At that point the full principle becomes due. But since its in my boys name, I wash my hands and leave it up to them. Okay, maybe I'm a little more generous and I extend the maturity to a point when I think they might be able to pay for it, say age 30. Would that be fair? They are, after all, the primary beneficiaries of their elementary school education. The glaringly obvious problem, of course, is that they did not have the capacity to consent! I chose their elementary school based on my belief of what their future aught to entail.

To me, this metaphor clearly illustrates that issuing any government bonds with a maturity beyond 15 years is unacceptable. I say 15 because that seems to be the rate at which culture switches from one generational view to the other. And 15 years is the average age it takes for a person reach maturity (even if you're really not truely matured untill you hit 50). One could argue that the longest maturity should be half of a lifespan. which (ignoring population growth) is roughly when those when those who could consent start becoming the minority. At some point I will hopefully have a little more time available to mathematically model what the maximum acceptable length of time for a bond to mature aught to be.

The problem is that the ability to issue bonds always creates the temptation to defer the debt by issuing yet another bond to pay for bonds that are about to mature. I'm leaning towards finding bonds an all together unacceptable means to raise government funds. If bonds are to be issued at all, they should always be issued only with a direct consent from a strong majority of the entire electorate (through referendums). And at their date of maturity, the should definitively be paid back through additional taxation specifically marked as a repayment for that specific public debt. This would  make the whole electorate fully aware about their previous profligacies (and thereby to some extent establish Ricardian equivalence) without the need for a complete economic meltdown.