Growing Pains

Reflecting on our cursory group explorations of international organizations striving toward reasonable cooperation, it bears considering we have only just put our toe in the water.   We attempt perspective, but see global community through the lens of a very short history of broad international engagement and young, idealized forms of government and economy.  Democracy, the dominant filter, while visited to some degree in our ancient past, is historically new, an experiment we continue to refine, playing with means by which to temper it because in its purest form, it is unwieldy on the scale of application necessary to national governance.   We salt each experiment, to varying degrees with republicanism, socialism and even oligarchic or autocratic elements.   From a Western perspective, it is good, it is ours, but It is not a perfect animal.    

Just as Hobbesian theory emerges against a backdrop of profound scientific discovery, a century of religious discord, the Thirty-Year War, and the ever-present arm of the Church, contemporary socio-political dynamics unfold on the tail of an equivalent timeframe marked by unprecedented technological advances, world war, cold war, guerilla wars of scale, technological warfare, and a relatively recent universal awareness of the vast spectrum of cultures and belief systems we share between us.  This recognition at once, fosters appreciation for diversity and community, and fuels extremism and separatism.  We are evolving and understandably tripping along the way.  But, for all the bumps, we are making some positive progress.

As one group (Erica, Kristin, Andrew) notes in referring to the Peace of Westphalia, attempts at cooperation are not new, but morph through time.  We mature, they evolve.   The world shrinks, our efforts grow.  The formation of the League of Nations constituted a concerted attempt to reconcile, on a global scale and preemptively, our competitive and cooperative inclinations.  For several reasons cited by the group, it failed, but laid the groundwork for the next incarnation of a global body in the United Nations. Humankind seeks peace in spite of itself.

 

The organizations discussed in our class presentations have several things in common. Most notably, they strive for a rational approach to cooperation, but are structurally wanting in means by which to ensure compliance.   They tend to be more successful, as a whole, on social and economic endeavors than on those related to stability and peace. They are not granted teeth for the latter.   Politically, we have not matured sufficiently to omit coercive mechanisms from any of these without sacrificing the efficacy of the agency, nor have we found means by which to consistently and effectively employ coercion.   The UNSC is a particularly frustrating case in point.  Its very mission would seem to warrant an international security force distinct from the those of the nations which it represents and, as the presenting group (Kyra, Jesse and Christine) noted, departure from a self-defeating power structure within both it and the larger organization. Though possibly necessary to the entity’s viable inception, these are remnants of another time.     

The thinker, however brilliant, is bound by temporal context.  Hobbes sought answers in absolute albeit, popularly sanctioned, sovereignty.  If one were to liken socio-political development to that of a single human being, this could be compared to the desire of a child expanding discovery of the world, still unable to completely release itself from its parent’s hand. It feels the enormity of the world and comfort in the thought of absolute authority to provide security.  From the perspective of a later time, that world, if tumultuous, is small.  Hobbes proposes a solution to civil war, but his discussion beyond his familiar world eludes to “other” as threat from which the state must defend.   As we discussed in class at length, concepts Hobbes introduced, in addition to principles of state sovereignty and balance of power that came out of the Peace of Westphalia in his day, remain foundational to the development of social, political and economic world in which we find ourselves today.  Others, despite eloquent delivery, fail to resonate.  It was time to let go. We evolved through a subsequent age of revolution, rebellion reminiscent of early adolescence, inspired by thinkers who drew from Hobbes, but formulated entirely different perspectives regarding the rights of man and equality.  For all our progress, I would suggest we are still navigating social and political adolescence as, in the face of threats potentially lethal to us a species, our world calls to us collectively to do something other than do battle, dig in our heels, or submit.