Do only democracies have the right of self-defense?

Do only democracies have the right of self-defense?

Fed up with the leftist drum beat of “multilateralism,” Hadley Arkes writes that America has the right to defend itself, and doesn’t need to wait on the approval of the U.N. or Europe or anyone else. That is of course true. But, as is so often the case with neoconservatives, even when you agree with their specific position on an issue, you find yourself put off by the reasoning they use to support it, and by the world view that underlies that reasoning.

The problem with Arkes’s treatment is that he justifies the right of self-defense, not as an instrinsic right possessed by all men and nations, but as a special right possessed solely by democracies. He writes:

[The U.N.] cannot displace the authority of those officers [of the U.S.] who bear a direct, elective responsibility to the people whose lives have been endangered.
The American people brought to the world something new under the sun in that Novus Ordo Seclorum—that new order for the ages: What was altogether new in the world was the claimed right of human beings to govern themselves, under a government drawing its powers from “the consent of the governed.” In that vein, one of the most summoning lines in the American Revolution was that our lives and freedoms simply could not be secure if the protection of our people was placed in the hands of people who bore no elective responsibility to the American people… . Have we forgotten—or even worse, overthrown—the first principle that came out the American Revolution and the grounds of our own freedom? But we are asked precisely now to forget when we are asked to place the security of the country, not in the hands of officers who are directly accountable to the American people, but in the hands of governments that bear no responsibility for our safety or well-being.

Here Arkes is needlessly mixing up the question of popular government or democracy, “the consent of the governed,” with the question of sovereignty. A sovereign nation—whether its sovereign power resides in a king, or an aristocracy, or the people, or a republican mixture of the three—has a right and duty to defend itself, period. A medieval king had the duty to defend his people from harm, even though they had not elected him. To base our right of self-defense on the Declaration of Independence and the “consent of the governed,” as Arkes does, suggests that only democracies have the right to defend themselves from foreign adversaries. This is like saying that only in a democracy does a person have the right to defend himself against a murderer, or to own and transmit property, or to have his interests represented in a court of law, or any other ordinary right that existed well before the founding of the United States. So ideologically minded are the neoconservatives that even such a commonsense idea as the right of national self-defense is intelligible and palatable to them only if it is presented under the aegis of democratist ideology.

In much the same way that post-’60s liberals seem to feel that America labored under fascist darkness prior to the 1960s, neoconservatives and Straussians seem to imagine that there was no moral and political order worth mentioning prior to the Declaration of Independence. It is as though the Declaration, with its timeless, universal, abstract truths, were the sole source of political wisdom and moral authority in the universe. This reduction of our heritage to one document (or rather to one sentence in that one document) leaves Americans cut off from any larger substantive tradition and history, stranded in their own ideological self-conceit.

Yes, the American Order represented something new and great in the world. But, with all due respect to the neoconservatives and Straussians, it was not wholly new. It was built on the totality of Western civilization, including medieval Christendom, which had fully worked-out understandings of sovereignty, power, and the right of self-defense.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 30, 2003 03:12 PM | Send

Comments

There is a more sinister implication to the argument that sovereignty arises from democracy: it grants license to democracies to wage war against non-democracies. This may seem like a good idea to neoconservatives who want the US to launch attacks against the regimes in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt. (I think I’ve got them all, but its so hard to keep track of the neocon targets these days.) But this is incredibly short-sighted. The argument that sovereignty arises from democracy invites other democracies, or even non-democratic international bodies, to ponder whether the US has the correct degree or type of democracy.

Neoconservatives considering this formulation should ask a European whether George W. Bush was democratically elected. And then they should ask themselves whether they want the world’s perception of our national sovereignty to depend on how democratic a country others think we are.

Posted by: Wakefield on January 30, 2003 7:05 PM

Wakefield addresses a specific manifestation of a general problem we’ve discussed before. Liberalism denies traditional objective morality and replaces that morality with liberalism itself; thus there are no moral constraints on liberalism. It isn’t so much that liberals (e.g. neocons) act in a terribly unprincipled manner because the end justifies the means, but rather that the end ontologically IS the means. The liberal religion identifies itself (and its liturgy, democracy) as being identical to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful: to be a democracy is itself ipso facto to be good, true, and beautiful. This contrasts radically with Christianity (at least in its traditional form), which sees itself as a teleological way to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. In this religious identification of itself as primary intension of the good liberalism is very much like Islam and quite distant from traditional sacramental Christianity.

Posted by: Matt on January 31, 2003 1:47 PM

Another way to put Matt’s point is to say that liberalism is a form of modern totalitarianism, the view that we can fully grasp and institute the summum bonum here and now. Orthodox Islam comes closer to such a view than it should because Allah is so transcendent he drops out and the concrete perfect all-encompassing law takes his place. Traditional sacramental Christianity is the opposite pole. We don’t have the law in any concrete form and we are all sinners.

Posted by: Jim Kalb on January 31, 2003 5:15 PM

The most obvious piece of evidence in support of what Matt and Mr. Kalb have said about Islam replacing transcendent morality is the way that Muslims never seem to speak of things in terms of right and wrong, good and bad, but only terms of Islamic and non-Islamic. What this means is that here is no moral standard outside of Islam by which human behavior, including that of the Muslims themselves, can be judged.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on January 31, 2003 5:53 PM