Fairly Symmetrical

Ref: USS Clueless: The Fringe of the Fringe

Den Beste says:

Of all the odd statements in here, easily the most strange one is this:

The authority of the state derives from its goals.

That goes totally contrary to my political belief, which is that the authority of a state derives from a mandate granted by those who are part of it. This statement turns out to be the key to understanding Treanor's fundamental politics: he doesn't see states as being permanent entities, nor as being ones associated with physical locations.

Actually, surprisingly enough this didn't originate with Treanor. In fact, it was (or at least, is very similar to) one of the major influences in the French Revolution -- which was heavily informed by political philosophy of the early to mid 1700's, much like our own American Revolution. In that Revolution, the government was considered to receive its mandate from "the will of the people" -- but not in any way most Americans would interpret that phrase. The *goals* of the state served as pure justification for any action the French government -- whose every act, by definition, was the righteous execution of the "will of the people" -- might take, including terror, purges, executions, and torture. I believe that the state was also defined similarly to Treanor's ravings -- as the pure expression of a set of political goals, rather than any physical location or constituency. One can verify this by scanning the original French Constitution's language.

For more on the topic (and I know I've plugged this before) check out a book called Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light, which is a comparative history of the French and American revolutions and their ideological underpinnings (as well as a dissection of why the American Revolution was so much more successful, at least from a classical liberal point of view). Anyone who shares Den Beste's political beliefs (or who finds the anarcho-fascist viewpoint utterly incomprehensible) might find the book instructive.

One final note: it's not entirely bankrupt to consider a state a non-permanent, non-physically located entity. One can easily speak of states that no longer exist, or a state "in exile" (much as Taiwan has considered itself China "in exile"). Depending on one's sympathy for them, one might even consider the existence of a Palestinian "state", despite the fact that it has no borders and exists almost purely at Israel's sufferance. The definition of state is fairly nebulous; we can't demarcate by ideology (else the US itself would not be a state) nor by race/ethnicity (ditto). We could define a state as a population or area governed by a common system and instance of government, but that runs the risk of identifying the local union or Rotary Club a state, which doesn't seem right either. Also, one might consider the smallest state possible. Can one man be a state? What if he's a head of government (a King, perhaps) in exile? What if he's a billionaire who buys an old oil platform in international waters, raises a flag over it, and lives there alone? (I don't believe Treanor's "Europe" is a valid state, but it's difficult to articulate a precise definition of "state" that correlates with my "common sense" of whether something is a state or not.)