Scott Ferguson — The Shape of Law

Titled Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Care (University of Nebraska Press, July 2018) my recent book develops the insights of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) for critical theory and aesthetics. While the modern Liberal imagination treats money as a finite, private and decentralized exchange instrument that seems incapable of serving all, MMT’s state or “chartalist” approach to political economy insists that money is an inalienable public utility that can always be mobilized to meet social and ecological needs. In Declarations, I trace the historical repression of chartalist ideas to the rise of modern Western metaphysics through the negation of the medieval Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas. I uncover the impoverished social topology upon which both Liberal modernity and critical aesthetics have historically relied. Ultimately, I labor to redeem critical theory and aesthetics by recovering a more capacious social topology from the Thomist theology that modern Western philosophy supplanted.

Here, I would like extend this project by complicating the Westphalian model of sovereignty, which MMT’s state theory of money presumes. My contention is not that international finance, supply chains, and NGOs somehow render the modern-nation state powerless or passé, as theorists of globalization regularly claim. Rather, I contend that the metaphysical suppositions behind modern Westphalian sovereignty obscure globalization’s interdependent legal architecture, while simultaneously naturalizing a politics of irresponsibility. In response, I argue, MMT would do well to return to a Thomistic topology of law and politics, which figures law as the center of global interdependence and governance as unavoidably answerable to all worldly forms....

Unless one has the background to understand this —I studied Aquinas in some detail in grad school and am familiar with the works of many Thomists, such as Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson — one is likely to be lost. The issue can be simplified by distinguishing the great chain of being, of which Thomism was and is only one statement, and the universe according to natural science. As the modern age replaced the medieval age, the great chain of being came to be viewed not only as supernatural but also dogmatically based.

Modernity can be viewed as the attempt to replace a worldview based on the great chain of being with the scientific world view. This was initially mediated by deism, in which the laws of nature were viewed as the clockwork that the the "Creator" put in motion at the beginning and then left to itself. Eventually, that non-naturalistic assumption was also abandoned, leaving a purely mechanistic model that excluded the non-empirical from knowledge about reality. However, this invited relativism. Indeed, Modernism is now in the process being replaced by Post Modernism, and truth is in crisis.

The task that faces humanity now to avoid falling into a pit of relativism or ideological dogmatism is to recover balance by reconciling the great chain of being with the universe of natural science by showing how the later is a subset of the former rather than a replacement for it. In my view, this involves relating the great chain of being to perennial wisdom as the testimony and teachers of the wise extending into prehistory and found around the world. In order to serve in this capacity, perennial wisdom must be shown to be not only compatible with naturalism and also a necessary complement to it rather than presented as grounded exclusively in supernaturalism. Since perennial wisdom underlies all cultures, this would provide an anchored worldview for globalization.

Arcade
The Shape of Law

Scott Ferguson | Associate Professor and co-director of the Film & New Media Studies Track in the Department of Humanities & Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida., Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and, co-founder of the Modern Money Network: Humanities Division

Angelique Chrysalis — 'The nation state is back': Front National's Marine Le Pen rides on global mood

In an aircraft hangar on the French Riviera, as thousands of supporters waved French tricolour flags, France’s far-right Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, boomed proudly from the stage: “The time of the nation state is back!”

She praised Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and said plans to build walls across the world – including one to keep out migrants and refugees at Calais — showed a return to “the time of borders”.

The Guardian World News
'The nation state is back': Front National's Marine Le Pen rides on global mood
Angelique Chrisafis in Fréjus

Germany feels the heat, too.

Angela Merkel's party suffers slump in Berlin election
Philip Oltermann in Berlin

George Friedman — In EU and US, nationalism is rising, not fascism

George Friedman argues that nationalist leaders and movements in Europe and the US are not fascistic but nationalistic (and some are xenophobic, although Friedman does not mention this). I think this is correct. "Fascism" is being used as a convenient club against political opponents owing to superficial similarities, just as socialists and even social democrats are often tarred with being "communists."

Nationalism is the core of the Enlightenment’s notion of liberal democracy. It asserts that the multinational dynasties that ruled autocratically denied basic human rights. Among these was the right to national self-determination and the right of citizens to decide what was in the national interest. The Enlightenment feared tyranny and saw the multinational empires dominating Europe as the essence of tyranny. Destroying them meant replacing them with nation-states. The American and French revolutions were both nationalist risings, as were the nationalist risings that swept Europe in 1848. Liberal revolutions were by definitions nationalist because they were risings against multinational empires.

Now the American Empire is similarly asserting itself, along with its minions and cronies in vassal states, with the predictable result that push back is rising as conditions deteriorate for more and more people under the boot. This opposition to the boot on the throat is being mischaracterized as "fascism" by the empire's propaganda machine.

EurActiv
In EU and US, nationalism is rising, not fascism

George Friedman, Stratfor

ht Don Quijones at Raging Bull-Shit

Bill Mitchell — The co-option of government by transnational organisations

Today, some more analysis of the debate about globalisation and the capacities of the nation-state. We consider the debates in the early 1970s about the power of transnational corporations and the claims that they undermined the capacity of the nation-state to further the interests of the population. On the one hand, the free-market liberals claimed that the emergence of the transnational corporation was a move towards increased global efficiency and the nation-state, which served narrower interests, would be swept aside, along with its regulative structures, by this trend. Global welfare (and solutions to international poverty) would be maximised by the demolition of national borders by transnational capitalism. This view considered the nation-state to be ‘dispensable’ – that it only served narrow interests and the global organisation of production no longer required national governments to operate in this way. The Marxist position was, understandably, at odds with this view. It considered the nation-state to be indispensable to the growing needs of international capital. This was in the sense that governments could provide essential stability to reduce the risk of transnational operations. My position is more in line with the latter view although it clearly recognises the relevance (and power) of the national governments in which they choose to operate. Further, these transnational corporations are typically very large firms within the nations they operate. it is hard to differentiate the political clout that being large exerted from the influence of being global. Certainly, the early literature was not clear on that issue.…

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The co-option of government by transnational organisations
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Richard Falk — A New World Order? ISIS and the Sykes-Picot Backlash

One of the seemingly permanent contributions of Europe to the manner of organizing international society was to create a strong consensus in support of the idea that only a territorially delimited sovereign state is entitled to the full privileges of membership. The United Nations, the institutional embodiment of international society, recognizes this principle by limiting membership in the Organization to ‘states.’ Of course, there is an enormous variation in the size, population, military capabilities, resource endowments, and de facto autonomy among states. At one extreme are gigantic states such as China and India with populations of over 1 billion, while at the other are such tiny countries such as Liechtenstein or Vanuatu that mostly rely on diplomacy and police rather than gunpowder and armies for security. All four of these political entities have the same single vote when it comes to action in the General Assembly or as participants at global conferences such at the recently concluded Paris Summit on climate change, although the geopolitics is supreme in the Security Council and the corridors outside the meeting rooms.

From the point of view of international law and organizational theory, we continue to live in a state-centric world order early in the 21st century. At the same time, the juridical notion of the equality of states that is the foundation of diplomatic protocol should not lead us astray. The shaping of world order remains mainly the work of the heavyweight states that act on the basis of geopolitical calculations with respect for international law and morality displayed only as convenient. Yet the political monoculture of territorial states remains formally the exclusive foundation of world order, but its political reality is being challenged in various settings, and nowhere more so than in the Middle East.…

Is the Westphalian model breaking down?

The Westphalian model is uniquely European and it was imposed by European colonialists on the rest of the world. Is it suitable basis for a world order now, or is it an extension of European imperialism and colonialism?

Foreign Policy Journal
A New World Order? ISIS and the Sykes-Picot Backlash

Richard Falk

Richard Falk — ISIS's challenge to the statist world order

One of the seemingly permanent contributions of Europe to the manner of organising international society was to create a strong consensus in support of the idea that only a territorially delimited sovereign state was entitled to the full privileges of membership.
The United Nations, the institutional embodiment of international society, recognises this principle by limiting membership in the organisation to "states".
Of course, there is an enormous variation in the size, population, military capabilities, resource endowments and de facto autonomy as between the various states. At one extreme are states such as China and India with populations of over 1 billion, while at the other are such tiny countries such as Liechtenstein or Vanuatu, but all four have the same one vote when it comes to action in the UN General Assembly or votes at the global conferences on climate change.
From the point of view of international law and organisational theory, we continue to live in a state-centric world order early in the 21st century.
This is somewhat surprising, especially in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa where the "states" were often arbitrarily imposed a century or more ago to satisfy colonial ambitions and took no account of the wishes and identities of the people living in a particular geographic space.
Yet without exception nationalist movements and their leaders throughout the world, although aware that the colonial demarcations of boundaries were not rooted in ethnic, religious and historic experience, nevertheless refrained from challenging the idea that a politically independent state should be delimited by the same boundaries as the prior colonial state.…

It is against this statist background that some recent Islamic practice with regard to political community and world order is innovative and challenging. When explaining the revolutionary process in Iran that unfolded in 1978-79, Ayatollah Khomeini insisted that what was happening in Iran should be treated as an "Islamic Revolution" rather than an "Iranian Revolution".

What was being asserted was that the relevant community was the Muslim umma, which has not been actualised in recent times but deserves the loyalty and adherence of believers whatever their location in national space happens to be. Such a view was more aggressively articulated in the declarations of Osama Bin Laden, whose worldview was Islamic, which transcended the secular realities of statehood and nationalism, and expressed what might be called an Islamic cosmopolitan worldview.

The most concerted challenge of all directed toward state-centricism has been mounted by ISIS, and especially by announcing the establishment of a new caliphate in the Middle East, whose contours were based on governance patterns in Syria and Iraq rather than on the boundaries of existing sovereign states.

ISIS leaders also boasted of "the end of Sykes-Picot," the Anglo-French originally secret agreement in 1916 that led to the formation of the modern statist Middle East in the territories formerly administered by the Ottoman Empire. So far, ISIS has made good on its claim to govern the area it controls by sharia law strictly applied, and thus defy the sovereign territorial authority of both Syria and Iraq.

There are at least three elements of this non-state pattern of control that are worth noticing. First, ISIS seems to have no interest in being accepted as a state or to be treated as a vehicle of self-determination for Syrians and Iraqis living under its authority. ISIS rests its authority to govern exclusively on a sectarian claim to be applying Islam.

Secondly, by discrediting those states that were imposed on the region after World War I, ISIS is claiming a superior political legitimacy to that conferred by international diplomatic procedures or through admission to the United Nations.

Thirdly, significant portions of the Sunni population that is dominant presence in the caliphate welcomed ISIS, at least at first, as a liberating force freeing the population from Shia oppression and discrimination and more effectively offering social services at a grassroots level.

In effect, ISIS has successfully raised questions about the political legitimacy of states imposed by colonial authority and accepted by indigenous nationalist movements.

The takeaway. Defeating ISIS may not resolve the issue now that it has been  raised.

This questioning of statism in the Middle East is likely to be more durable than ISIS itself. 

Middle East Eye

ISIS's challenge to the statist world order
Richard Falk

Kelley Vlahos — A Blackwater World Order

After more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s most profound legacy could be that it set the world order back to the Middle Ages. 

While this is a slight exaggeration, a recent examination by Sean McFate, a former Army paratrooper who later served in Africa working for Dyncorp International and is now an associate professor at the National Defense University, suggests that the Pentagon’s dependence on contractors to help wage its wars has unleashed a new era of warfare in which a multitude of freshly founded private military companies are meeting the demand of an exploding global market for conflict. 

“Now that the United States has opened the Pandora’s Box of mercenarianism,” McFate writes in The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What they Mean for World Order,“private warriors of all stripes are coming out of the shadows to engage in for-profit warfare.” 

It is a menacing thought. McFate said this coincides with what he and others have called a current shift from global dominance by nation-state power to a “polycentric” environment in which state authority competes with transnational corporations, global governing bodies, non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), regional and ethnic interests, and terror organizations in the chess game of international relations. New access to professional private arms, McFate further argues, has cut into the traditional states’ monopoly on force, and hastened the dawn of this new era. 

McFate calls it neomedievalism, the “non-state-centric and multipolar world order characterized by overlapping authorities and allegiances.” States will not disappear, “but they will matter less than they did a century ago.” He compares this coming environment to the order that prevailed in Europe before the domination of nation-states with their requisite standing armies.…

In an interview with TAC, McFate said the parallels between that period in history and today’s global proliferation of PMCs cannot be ignored. He traces their modern origins to the post-Cold War embrace of privatization in both Washington and London, both pioneers in military outsourcing, which began in earnest in the 1980s.…

“In an idealized world the companies with the best practices and best performance records would end up with all the contracts, and the bad actors would be eliminated from the field,” said Singer. “That hasn’t happened in regular business, much less when you cross regular business with what you call politics.” 

Or war. Get your seat belt on, because if McFate is right, it is “back to the future,” and any choice we might have had in the matter is long gone.

Just a matter of time before they are armed with air and sea power, and WMD, too. We should be seeing some action cinema on this theme soon.

The American Conservative

A Blackwater World Order
Kelley Vlahos

Gary Younge — Who's in control – nation states or global corporations?

Around the world, calls for national autonomy have grown. Minorities are blamed but the real culprit is neoliberalism…

"Power today is global power, the power of the big companies, the power of financial capital." — Brazilain Dominican friar Frei Betto 

The limited ability of national governments to pursue any agenda that has not first been endorsed by international capital and its proxies is no longer simply the cross they have to bear; it is the cross to which we have all been nailed. The nation state is the primary democratic entity that remains. But given the scale of neoliberal globalisation it is clearly no longer up to that task.…

"By many measures, corporations are more central players in global affairs than nations," writes Benjamin Barber in Jihad vs McWorld. "We call them multinational but they are more accurately understood as postnational, transnational or even anti-national. For they abjure the very idea of nations or any other parochialism that limits them in time or space."

Pushback?

The Guardian

Who's in control – nation states or global corporations?
Gary Younge

The nation state is the locus of democracy. Neoliberalism aims at transcending nation states and their lows or controlling them through oligarchic democracy where representative democracy exists.

David Fields — Globalization: A Fetish of (Post) Modernity

Throughout the enormous literature on ‘globalization’ there is a common theme that worldwide social, political, and economic transformations have contributed to reconfigurations and re-articulations of the world-system. The contention is that due to to recent technological revolutions in communication, media, and transportation, a ‘new international division of labor' has ensued a unique 'global' sociological imagination; the national 'state' as a principle of structuration is unsatisfactory for the social scientist - the 'space of flows' has replaced the 'space of places' (Ruggie, 1993). Dynamic connective configurations beget 'transnational' corporations omnipresent vertically disintegrated and horizontally integrated in an irresistible Gramscian transnational historic bloc of 'neoliberalism'.

This approach downplays the primary force driving globalization, which is financialization - the international transformation of future streams of (profit, dividend, or interest) income into tradeable financial assets. The systemic power and importance of financial markets, financial motives, financial institutions, and financial élites manifestly delink the national state from perceived social, political, and economic processes....

Naked Keynesianism
Globalization: A Fetish of (Post) Modernity
David Fields