A Republic, If You Can Fight It

 

At the last session of a college seminar on nuclear weapons and strategic defense, my seminar leader, astronomer Mike Lecar (RIP), raised the question of how to ensure world peace without expensive and ineffective defense systems. Mike introduced those of us who didn’t know him to Immanuel Kant, a polymath who, inter alia, had been a fellow astronomer - Kant was one of the first people to speculate that nebulae were actually “island universes,” or galaxies. The Sage of Konigsburg acquired greater fame as a philosopher, in which capacity he wrote several essays on political philosophy, chief among them “Perpetual Peace” (1795) In his essay Kant argued that republicanism was a necessary precondition for world peace: citizens of republics were far less likely to start wars when their own blood and treasure were at stake, and more accustomed to relationships structured by contract than by dominion. Necessary, Kant wrote, but not sufficient: one could not fully guarantee an end to war unless those republics were bound together in a constitutional federation, akin to the social contract between individual citizens.

Eirene, by Ludwig Knaus

Kant’s speculations, recast as “democratic peace theory,” became popular with interventionist American policy-makers in the twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson justified American intervention in World War One as “making the world safe for democracy,” which in turn would prevent another global conflict. Bill Clinton argued that the promotion of democracy would make permanent the peace created by the Fall o’ Communism™. George Bush II justified the invasion of Iraq by claiming that the United States had a responsibility to establish democracies in Southwest Asia, and to support democratic “color revolutions” in nations like Georgia and Ukraine. All three of these presidents agreed with Kant that representative government was not the sole guarantor of international peace, that some form of trans-national institution had to harmonize those republics’ interests. For Wilson, the League of Nations would serve this purpose; Clinton and Bush, both skeptical about world government, assumed that free international trade under the World Trade Organization would do the job. Or that God would intervene.

In practice, the concentration of coercive power in the hands of a few sovereign states prevented either of these international systems from functioning equitably. The League of Nations became the bagman for the British and French Empires, dividing the spoils of Ottoman and German defeat among the Great War’s victors. The WTO and the International Monetary Fund became the servants of multi-national corporations, helping them strip-mine the public assets of the old Communist bloc and the global South. Both of these would-be world governments destroyed their own legitimacy within half a generation. 

Their fatal flaw was a misconception that dated back to Kant himself: individuals in a republic are not analogous to nation-states in an international system. States are defined by Max Weber as entities enjoying “a monopoly on the legitimate use of force” within a given geographical era. Individuals within a social contract, on the other hand, cannot legitimately use force except in self-defense, and then only if the state is unable immediately to defend them. Nations one may define as political communities with shared sets of historical grievances. Citizens aren’t supposed to go around with chips on their shoulder, even if many do; nations, on the other hand, almost always have someone or something they want to fight. What is anti-social in an individual is acceptable, even laudable, in a nation-state. National leaders we are accustomed to regard as responsible if they are willing, often eager, to break, burn, and kill on their country’s behalf. One cannot fashion any sort of international order out of such antisocial beings, unless the order be a giant global prison run by the strongest inmates.

Nor can one assume that such a world-prison is a suitable place for the kind of intelligent beings capable of deducing the nature of galaxies. If we want to imagine a peaceful future conducive to science, culture, and human flourishing, however, we must imagine one that rejects the poison of nationalism and the concept of “legitimate violence.”

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One question, though: Do republics actually tend not to fight one another? Political scientists have not come up with a satisfactory answer to that question, because one can easily undermine any historical examples raised to support or undermine democratic peace theory with the No True Scotsman tactic. One need not adopt the absolutist posture of many political scientists, however. If we define a republic as a government featuring 1st Separation of government powers, 2nd Competitive multi-party elections, and 3rd An electorate including at least 20 percent of the population, then the number of republics - representative democracies, if you prefer - would seem to have increased worldwide since 1795. Concurrently, the number of inter-republican conflicts decreased. The United States made war on the Mexican Republic and the Confederacy, the First French Republic conquered Venice and the Netherlands, the Second French Republic destroyed the Roman Republic of 1848, Britain and Finland fought one another (somewhat half-heartedly) during the Second World War, and Iceland and Britain fought a bloodless war over cod fishing in the mid-twentieth century. There are other examples one might adduce, but they tend to conflate constitutional monarchies in which the non-elected sovereign has actual power (e.g., Wilhelmine Germany) with representative democracies. I suspect that elected officials are more adept at compromise and at gracefully chickening out of conflicts than kings and dictators, since the former skill helped them get elected and the latter helped them get along with other officials. From the skills and foibles of crooked politicians may yet come a more peaceful world order.

The Yellowing-Trees Month, in Brief

 

What I’ve been reading: The True True Story of Raja the Gullible, by Rabih Alameddine. A biography of modern Lebanon, from the perspective of a gay schoolteacher and his formidable mother. As is often the case with good writing, the fictional parts of the story seem more believable than the non-fictional ones.

 

Videos and films of note: 28 Years Later (2025), which is as good as people say. Since Danny Boyle has (IMO) never made two good movies in a row, I’m relieved to learn that Nia DaCosta will be directing the sequel.

 

Noteworthy remarks by one of my offspring: Addressed by my daughter to the crescent moon: “Hello, Earth’s fingernail." 

 

Quotes that make me less worried about the potential collapse of liberal democracy in America: “Truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”

 

The title of this post borrows the Ukrainian word for October, Zhovten, the Month of Trees Turning Yellow. One of my students, on learning that some Indigenous nations (like the Senecas) named the months of the year for natural events, told me that the same was true of the Ukrainian language. That's the Cool Thing I Learned Lately. 

One or Two Bright Spots

Some good news, courtesy of Fix the News (formerly Futurecrunch). Heaven knows we could all use some:

Researchers discovered that the drug Lenacapavir eliminates HIV infection completely.

Global tuberculosis deaths fell to their lowest level in history. 

In South Asia infant mortality fell 75% between 1990 and 2022. 

200 million more children have acquired access to clean water and sanitation at school since 2015. As of 2024, about 500 million children worldwide have free or nearly-free school lunch. 

In Brazil, the deforestation of the Amazon has fallen by 50% since 2022. 

In the United States, the removal of four dams from the Klamath River has been completed ahead of schedule. No word on whether the new administration plans to put them all back.

Power companies, corporations, local governments, and individuals installed 660 GW of new solar power generation this year.

Thailand and Greece (inter alia) legalized same-sex marriage.

NASA launched the Europa Clipper mission, which should please fans of 2010: Odyssey Two.

Everything else is pretty terrible, but that’s not exactly new.

Another Candle

Some years ago I began a series of posts on charitable organizations I supported and whose signal I wanted to boost. I suppose I preferred cursing the darkness, since I only managed to light two candles (so to speak) before discontinuing the series. I think it is past time to renew that effort. Our social fabric will always need mending, and of late that fabric has seemed more frayed than usual - but perhaps also more reparable.

I’ve long been annoyed by institutions’ emptying issuance of tribal land acknowledgments, an act which seems to me like a social prayer without works. (Cf “thoughts and prayers” to victims of gun violence.) I think if one is going to admit to living on another person’s property, one should at least make an effort to pay rent. Some institutions do so; most, I think, don’t bother. 

As an individual I find that my resources are too straitened to make more than nominal compensation to Indigenous Americans; as a student of Native American history, I find it important at least to make the attempt. 

Like Scott Berg, I have made the American Indian College Fund my de facto landlord. The AICF is a thirty-five-year-old, Native-run charity that grants scholarships to about 4,000 Indigenous American students pursuing associates, bachelors, or postgraduate degrees. It also provides financial aid and training to personnel and programs at the United States’ thirty five Tribal Colleges and Universities. (All of these, by the way, are grievously underfunded. The United States government is the biggest deadbeat tenant.) The latter help develop programs in education, computer science, and language revitalization. About 70 percent of the Fund’s revenue goes to scholarship recipients, making it a reasonably efficient eleemosynary agency. Even so, the AICF can only provide aid to ten percent of applicants, so the need for its services and for donors is considerable.

The World Is a Garden and We Are All Flowers

“I for one do not lament the passing of social organizations that used the many as a manured soil in which to grow a few graceful flowers of refined culture” - Theodosius Dobzhansky, quoted in Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (1979), 186.

 

Dobzhansky himself, 1966 (via Wikimedia)

 

Raised by elitist parents and schooled at a high-toned college - “four years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery,” to steal a phrase from Orwell - I in my youth grew accustomed to the argument that high culture could not exist without social inequality. The masses toiled and were taxed and exploited so that mannered commentators could discuss affairs of state on Sunday-morning television, philanthropists could endow galleries of art by past and present masters, and well-educated authors could write of adultery and ennui in the suburbs. Friedrich Nietzsche, a popular fellow on high-toned college syllabi, epitomized this aristocratic view in Chapter Nine of Beyond Good and Evil, claiming that only “a society believing in…differences of worth among human beings” could produce men of elevated spirit. These great-souled men, in turn, should rule a society that “is not allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation and a scaffolding, by means of which a select class of beings may…elevate themselves to their higher duties.”

Exhausted and alienated by my parents' and contemporaries' elitism, how delighted I was to encounter, early in graduate school, Dobzansky's quote and his democratic attitude in a work by one of the modern masters of history. Braudel was a scholar as canonical in his way as Nietzsche, who nonetheless devoted his career to study and celebration of the everyday and common. People and the societies they create are ends in themselves, culture is produced and reproduced by everyone, the great innovators and artists of history owe much if not most of their insight to their teachers, contemporaries, and disciples, and nearly everyone has a good story to tell.* These observations and beliefs became all the more important for me to retain as American political and economic leaders adopted, in the early twenty-first century, the principles of one of Nietzsche’s bastard offspring, Ayn Rand. The United States’ headlong rush toward aristocracy slowed somewhat in the 2010s - more so during the recent unpleasantness - but the belief that most people don’t matter very much remains a compelling one for a powerful minority.

(The title of this post is from the underrated film Party Girl [1995].)

 

* I’d like to claim that I learned most of these lessons from my graduate-school training and subsequent reading, but actually most of it came incidentally, from magazine articles and genre fiction. I learned of the categorical imperative from one of George Will’s columns; of the diffusion of creativity and good stories through the general population by way of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and another underrated film, The Good Girl (2001); and of the idea that “solitary” geniuses were usually inspired by other, more obscure geniuses from some of Stephen Jay Gould’s articles. The universalist definition of culture I will admit to acquiring from the essays of Clifford Geertz.