LIBERTARIANISM, LIBERATION, SOVEREIGNTY AND BORDERS

Libertarians believe in “peace,” but not in sacred non-violence like Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s pacifism, which bears a close kinship to the attitude towards violence that seems to pervade the New Testament, seems to be a form of anarchism since it eschews violence in a principled and absolute way without, seemingly, providing any loopholes or exceptions that would justify legitimate violence by the state.

Libertarians adulate the American Revolution, believe in (enforcing) property rights, and uphold the common law. Each of these positions implies sanctioning violence, and the first one even sanctions war, specifically, the overthrow of a government that is (perceived to be) unjust because it is not based on consent and violates rights. Libertarians also believe that national self-defense is legitimate. So what do libertarians mean when they say they believe in “peace?” If they mean they oppose aggressive war, this is trivial. Everyone since Hitler opposes war in the abstract. Indeed, even Hitler paid verbal tribute to the condemnation of aggressive war by spuriously alleging intolerable provocations from the countries he wanted to attack. It is in the confused twilight zone between self-defense and pre-emption, subversion and revolution and law enforcement—all of which libertarians recognize—that wars find their genesis.

If government’s just powers are derived from consent of the governed (in any remotely plausible sense) then Saddam never had any just powers, any legitimacy. He was not a ruler but merely a pirate.

If the Americans had just cause for war against George III, the Iraqis most certainly had just cause for war against Saddam Hussein. His violations of their rights were vastly worse than anything the British Crown ever did, or even threatened. If the Iraqis had just cause for war against Saddam, that does not logically imply that we did. He was not oppressing us. And yet, if the oppressed have a right to overthrow tyrants, but non-subjects of the tyrants have no right to get involved, why did our revolution accept help from the French?

For me, the most morally powerful strand of libertarian thought is anti-totalitarianism. All the forms of freedom are tied together, and when all are absent the result is murderous social madness. The scene of Iraqis enthusiastically embracing their newfound liberty, like the scene of crowds cheering the fall of the Berlin Wall, seems to me to bear almost the same relationship to libertarianism that the scene of Christ on the Cross bears to Christianity.

Which brings me to what I can’t understand: why did libertarians oppose the war in Iraq? Granted, it was initiated by us, rather than by Iraqis themselves; but they could hardly mobilize under a totalitarian state. Anyway, plenty of Iraqi exiles were working with us—the sort of brave freedom-lovers that should be libertarians’ heroes. Granted, the war was funded by the government, money “extorted” (if you like) from taxpayers, but that seems like an operational peccadillo. Let’s just say (with the clever surrealism typical of libertarians) “it would have been better if the military were funded by voluntary donations on these kind of missions.” And get on with it.

If wars of liberation are considered valid now, that opens the door to an endless array of possible conflicts. When is regime change justified? Are only democracies to be considered legitimate? Who is authorized to carry out regime change, and when, and how? How are countries to be prevented from using “liberation” as a pretext for… well, some other kind of war? Does this mean secession movements are legitimate too? Difficult questions all, which lead into dangerous and uncharted waters, and which would make libertarians’ commitment to “peace” even more weird, compromised and tortured.

But the alternative is to embrace a notion of sovereignty which is profoundly un-libertarian, a notion—precisely Hobbesian, in my opinion—that the world is chopped up into little bits by invisible lines called borders, of arbitrary historical origins, that by being born into one of these little bits one gets to have one’s rights protected, or not, by a particular state, and, if one lives in a constitutional democracy, has the right and duty to uphold and protect the rights of others who happened to be born on that parcel of land, but no one else’s, and that on the contrary we must regard as “legitimate” whoever holds a monopoly of force within any given set of borders, regardless of how they acquired that monopoly of force, or how they use it. To doubt this notion (which is realized in the world, imperfectly, because of a configuration of physical force and ideas) creates practical difficulties; yet I strongly doubt if the notion is, at bottom, philosophically tenable.