Where does the state come from? Political theory says that it rises out of the general will of a population, and that its character reflects their political desires: a “social contract” that legitimizes its authority.
Recently, Ted Cruz made news when he responded to a tweet made by a self-righteous “American Studies” professor from Harvard. This is what the professor said: “The USA, created by int’l community in Treaty of Paris in 1783, betrays int’l community by withdrawing from #parisclimateagreement today.”
After enduring Cruz’s Constitutionalist tirades, the professor replied: “Sad. US Senator, Harvard Law degree. Doesn’t know that national statehood requires international recognition.”
This anecdote is interesting because of its implicit, rather than explicit, content. Never mind that the notion of predicating statehood conditionally on the approval of vague international governance greatly stretches the premises of state sovereignty under the Westphalian order. What we witness in this professor’s concept of politics is the creation of a new social contract.
The Westphalian order sought to protect the rights of states by developing a firm sense of state sovereignty. As a consequence, insurrectionists were not granted legitimacy under this system because they threatened the stability of states. When the international community recognizes statehood it is because they are differentiating between a phenomenon that is naturally an insurrection and a phenomenon that has naturally the trappings of a state. The Treaty of Paris, in this sense, was not a grant of permission to the United States to exist, but rather a formal post facto acknowledgement of the reality that the united states (plural) had successfully asserted their independence from Britain, and possessed all the recognized qualities of states (each of all thirteen of them). This sort of recognition wasn’t predicated on the “international community’s” fluid preferences, but rather a fixed set of principles behind the system of statehood itself.
This professor is inserting into that concept a notion of qualified sovereignty. She is creating a novel idea which holds that there is some mechanism of governance by which the international community gets to qualify the political rights of foreign persons upon their adherence to certain norms. She’s also suggesting that the scope of these norms is undefined: that because the US is now failing to share the same policy preferences as other countries concerning climate change, that it has “betrayed” the act which created it. She’s implicitly saying that the international community has grounds to challenge the sovereignty of a nation which betrays its contemporary preferences. She’s laying the logical groundwork for a global government.
This is how the social contract really works. The state creates itself, asserts itself, then justifies itself. The state is just an organization, a group of people with its own internal processes, external means, and self-generated prerogatives. It can be compared to a corporation, club, or even mafia. When conditions exist for such a group of people to become a state, they assert themselves: violently fight off the agents of the old state, and also anyone else (including the people), until they have unchallenged power. Finally, they rationalize their existence to convince people to voluntarily support them.
There was absolutely no social contract that supported American nationalism. More or less, people were politically organized into states. The states, explicitly, created the federal Constitution. And yet, by the time of Abraham Lincoln, many political thinkers were asserting that the act of ratifying the Constitution – because it included the words “We the People”, and a popular vote was involved – created the unitary American Nation. Thus, the American nation had authority through the social contract above and beyond the states. It’s an interesting notion, but I refer the reader to one Lysander Spooner to find a thorough critique of the idea.
The concept of American nationalism was a novelty that post-dated the ostensible creation of that nation. The state and its court eunuchs simply invented the idea out of whole-cloth, then made some flimsy connection to whatever ideas predated it.
This is what our tweeting professor has done. She’s taking the absolutely novel and unsubstantiated concept of global government, and trying to tie it to existing political norms. Once global government aggressively supplants all states, it will claim this logic to justify its existence.
That’s the truth about the social contract. It’s just some lousy excuse. What validates it is our willingness to grant it legitimacy. If we chose not to, it would collapse. And that’s why the state uses it.
(and isn’t our civilization an embarrassment that two products of the mighty Harvard actually had this discussion? Where are the grown ups?)
