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

Steve Randy Waldman — Ersatz individualism makes the American collective strong

Here’s a statement that I don’t think will be too contentious, across the ideological spectrum:
"The American way is to draw sharp distinctions between winners and losers, in order to encourage people to hustle." ...

But, in the lingo of economics, consider the “social welfare function” embedded in this story. The claim is emphatically not that this system maximizes some measure of aggregate utility that could be decomposed to a sum of individual welfares. On the contrary, it celebrates as necessary large costs in individual welfare for the sake of impersonal characteristics of the aggregate: “prosperity”, or “strength”. It is an entirely collectivist justification for policies that are deeplyharmful at an individual level, if you take seriously at all the idea of diminishing marginal utility. The individualist approach to maximizing welfare would be to redistribute. If we (contentiously but commonly) assume people share comparable utility functions, aggregate utility is maximized by taking from the rich and giving to the poor. At least in a methodological sense, it is socialists who are the individualists, attending to the sum of individual welfares, while unsympathetic capitalists rely upon collectivism to justify their good fortune and the policy apparatus that magnifies and sustains it.

As SRW observes, there is a divergence on the right between Libertarians and conservatives on this matter. Libertarians deny any collective influence, whereas the most important factor for conservatives is the strength of the nation, especially relative to other nations. Conservatism pretends to be liberal, being based on individualism, but it is inherently Tory, holding that political and economic strength arises from rule by the best for the good of the nation, and not necessarily the people. What's good for America is not necessarily good for all or even most Americans.

This post is sure to spark an interesting philosophical and historical discussion over there. I suggest reading de Tocqueville's chapter on enlightened self-interest along with it: How The Americans Combat Individualism By The Principle Of Self-Interest Rightly Understood, Democracy in America, Chapter VIII.

Interfluidity
Ersatz individualism makes the American collective strong
Steve Randy Waldman

Chris Dillow — Neoliberalism's Unintended Consequences

One of the oldest rhetorical tricks of free-marketeers has been the appeal to unintended consequences; state interventions, they claim - often reasonably - don't work out as intended. But it's not just statist policies that are vulnerable to unintended consequences. So too is neoliberalism, as Ed Miliband's speech yesterday made clear.

That speech was an echo of Karl Polanyi. Back in 1944 hepointed out that pretty much all industrial societies had seen a retreat from laisser-faire and rise of statism since the late 19th century: 

"If [the] market economy was a threat to the human and natural components of the social fabric...what else would one expect than an urge on the part of a great variety of people to press for some sort of protection?" (The Great Transformation, p150)

Stumbling and Mumbling
Neoliberalism's Unintended Consequences
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle (UK)

Washington's Blog — Ayn Rand Was NOT a Libertarian

Many people assume that Ayn Rand was a champion of libertarian thought.

But Rand herself pilloried libertarians, condemning libertarianism as being a greater threat to freedom and capitalism than both modern liberalism and conservativism.

Washington's Blog
Ayn Rand Was NOT a Libertarian
WashingtonsBlog

Rogue Economist questions the MMT JG

In the last 2 years, I have been discovering this new economic paradigm called MMT. I have come to realize that it is the best system to accurately depict the current realities of the monetary system, and is very comprehensive in explaining and anticipating the economic effects of certain financial, central banking, economic policies. Recently, however, I'm beginning to discover that it seeks to change the current economic order, and proposes an entirely new economic system to what we have now. It looks alien to me, and I'm open about the possibility that I'm not seeing the entirety of what is actually being proposed (Because if I have it right, it looks very statist to me, and I completely veer way from MMT here).

Read the rest at The Rogue Economist Rants
Questions about the job guarantee-driven economy
by Rogue Economist