A recent thread had a bit of a clash about Gaddafi's Lybia and who should be blamed about its fate.
That to me is an excellent example of a couple of frequent and underdiscussed confusions that exist in current political discourse.
Namely, the illusions that are national autonomy and power of leadership. As a special case of the later, there are the often contradictory expectations that arise in international politics.
It is human nature to hope for simple, direct explanations for consequential events. But it seems to me that in politics those are rarely reliable or even possible.
The appeal is still there, though, and it leads people to somehow often "know" that very specific people are to blame for the fates of large communities that they can hardly understand or control.
A related phenomenom is the popularity of rather arbitrary and simplistic classifications. The first time I heard of Kemal Ataturk was right here in RF, when he was described as a "puppet ruler" of Turkey on behalf of that ephemeral "West", much to the surprise of many. In the broad strokes that many political expectations seem to demand, there is not a lot of room for nuance or complexity while evaluating nation leaders. There are puppets, there are dangerous rogues, there are saviors/rescuers of "deserved grandeur", and there are perhaps a couple more.
It seems to me that far more often than not that reliance in that half dozen or so of labels is dangerously misleading due to their huge partiality and patent unwillingness to consider the actual complexity of political reality.
More than that, it is also a factor in very confused political stances. Chief among them, there is the treatment of the idea of national sovereignity, which I personally find to be useless baggage to be disposed of. Nonetheless, sovereignity is still a valued idea by many, despite all the evidence that it is built entirely of wishful and unstable thinking.
That confusion manifests itself often in discussions about places that are acknowledged as nations and therefore presumed sovereign, even though their sense of community and mutual cooperation is often tentative or worse. An interesting artifact of that confusion is the automatic presumption of external responsibility. The end result are rather schizophrenic opinions about those troubled places:
- They must of course have their autonomy and sovereignity respected;
- Yet they are just way too troubled to be stable, and therefore the "great powers" are presumed to have the real responsibility over their fate, for good, worse or (more often) both.
From hearing many people, it would seem that the people least responsible for the existence of (say) a Pinochet regime in 1970s Chile, a Gaddafi regime in Lybia or an ISIS in the Middle East are the actual people directly involved in those situations, those who actually live them, suffer for them, and often die for them. One almost gets the sense that those are not actual people at all, but some sort of people-like drones with a strong interest in aligning to the expectations of foreigners that barely remember their existence.
In reality, of course, that is not at all the case.
It may have fallen out of favor to think in terms of huge empires, but it is very clear to me that actually expecting namely sovereign nations to truly be in control of their own present and future is (quite properly) a very unusual stance, to be taken only in a limited degree and under specific circunstances. But treating the perception of sovereignity as an endangered specimen, to be given all possible support and none of the duty, is not a sane answer to the very real contradictions that come with the mainstream model of international politics.
That to me is an excellent example of a couple of frequent and underdiscussed confusions that exist in current political discourse.
Namely, the illusions that are national autonomy and power of leadership. As a special case of the later, there are the often contradictory expectations that arise in international politics.
It is human nature to hope for simple, direct explanations for consequential events. But it seems to me that in politics those are rarely reliable or even possible.
The appeal is still there, though, and it leads people to somehow often "know" that very specific people are to blame for the fates of large communities that they can hardly understand or control.
A related phenomenom is the popularity of rather arbitrary and simplistic classifications. The first time I heard of Kemal Ataturk was right here in RF, when he was described as a "puppet ruler" of Turkey on behalf of that ephemeral "West", much to the surprise of many. In the broad strokes that many political expectations seem to demand, there is not a lot of room for nuance or complexity while evaluating nation leaders. There are puppets, there are dangerous rogues, there are saviors/rescuers of "deserved grandeur", and there are perhaps a couple more.
It seems to me that far more often than not that reliance in that half dozen or so of labels is dangerously misleading due to their huge partiality and patent unwillingness to consider the actual complexity of political reality.
More than that, it is also a factor in very confused political stances. Chief among them, there is the treatment of the idea of national sovereignity, which I personally find to be useless baggage to be disposed of. Nonetheless, sovereignity is still a valued idea by many, despite all the evidence that it is built entirely of wishful and unstable thinking.
That confusion manifests itself often in discussions about places that are acknowledged as nations and therefore presumed sovereign, even though their sense of community and mutual cooperation is often tentative or worse. An interesting artifact of that confusion is the automatic presumption of external responsibility. The end result are rather schizophrenic opinions about those troubled places:
- They must of course have their autonomy and sovereignity respected;
- Yet they are just way too troubled to be stable, and therefore the "great powers" are presumed to have the real responsibility over their fate, for good, worse or (more often) both.
From hearing many people, it would seem that the people least responsible for the existence of (say) a Pinochet regime in 1970s Chile, a Gaddafi regime in Lybia or an ISIS in the Middle East are the actual people directly involved in those situations, those who actually live them, suffer for them, and often die for them. One almost gets the sense that those are not actual people at all, but some sort of people-like drones with a strong interest in aligning to the expectations of foreigners that barely remember their existence.
In reality, of course, that is not at all the case.
It may have fallen out of favor to think in terms of huge empires, but it is very clear to me that actually expecting namely sovereign nations to truly be in control of their own present and future is (quite properly) a very unusual stance, to be taken only in a limited degree and under specific circunstances. But treating the perception of sovereignity as an endangered specimen, to be given all possible support and none of the duty, is not a sane answer to the very real contradictions that come with the mainstream model of international politics.
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