By Kel Kelly
It is the fact that nation-states exercise power beyond their borders and fail to allow “self-determination” in countries in which they interfere that many of the problems of the 20th century developed. This was the case particularly with respect to British, French, and American foreign policy, where these countries carved up pieces of Europe and the Middle East, arbitrarily assigning borders in order to break countries apart (Germany, Poland, Austria-Hungary, Palestine, etc.) or to assemble them by force (Czechoslovakia, Syria, Iraq, Jordan etc.).[1] The Allied forces, due to politics, recognized and protected existing borders when it benefited them (saving Poland and Hungary from the Nazis and the Soviets in 1939), and refused to recognize existing borders when it did not (failing to save Czechoslovakia from the Nazis in 1938 or the Baltic States from the Soviets in 1940). In creating countries in the name of “self-determination,” the Allies made some ethnicities more equal than others, by forcing the “bad” ethnic groups to be ruled by our friends, the “good” ethnic groups.
Due to politicians seeking power and alliances in 20th century Europe, border changes created minorities and international conflicts, regional and civil wars, and were often accompanied by violence and ethnic cleansing. People were not free to live as they wished, but only as rulers, although democratically elected, physically forced them to.
Our democratic, freedom-seeking leaders also intervene or don’t intervene in domestic affairs within other nation’s borders, such as when the U.S., paying “allies” to join them, invaded Iraq to save its people—particularly its gassed Kurdish minority—from a ruthless thug and to stop the Iraqis from accessing the same weapons that we have and use. Yet, when it came to the on-going genocide in Rwanda (resulting from one group trying to force another to live a particular way within defined borders), the U.S. apparently decided that those people were not worth saving, or that there were no strategic reasons for doing so. So much for saving human lives being a primary objective…
The inconsistencies are clear to those who take time to think about them. As Newsweek stated with respect to foreign policy in 1991:
What is sacrosanct about existing borders, given that many ethnic groups have plausible claims to their traditional land? Bush seems to agree in the case of the Palestinians—but not the Kurds, or Yugoslavia’s Croats and Slovenes. And some threats to international order stem from violence or political repression within the borders of a single country. Doesn’t “order” depend to some extent on the spread of democracy? Bush seems to think so in Cuba, but not in China. The president sometimes professes ambivalence about interfering in other countries’ internal matters (the clash between Moscow and Lithuania, for example). But he has plunged into the
affairs of Kuwait, Iraq and Panama.[2]
(Panama, incidentally, is a prime example of how the U.S. does not practice what it preaches concerning democracy. After we invaded that sovereign country to depose Noriega merely because he quit taking orders from the U.S. government, Panamanian citizens cried for free elections. Instead, the U.S. swore in its hand-picked Endara regime on a U.S. military base hours after the invasion.)
Sanctifying status quo boundaries has been the basis of U.S. foreign policy since the establishment of the League of Nations and its successor the United Nations, all based on the incoherent and disastrous concept of “collective security against aggression.”
This logic underlay U.S. intervention in World Wars I and II, and in the Korean War: first we determine (often incorrectly) which is the “aggressor state,” and then all nation-states are supposed to band together to combat, repel, and punish the aggressor.
A major flaw in this concept, as hinted at in the Newsweek quote above, is that when an individual aggresses upon another person, there is usually clarity, based on property rights, as to who is the aggressor and who is the victim. But what happens when nation-state A aggresses against the border of nation-state B, often claiming that the border is unjust and the result of a previous aggression against State A decades before? How can we be certain that State A is the aggressor and that we must dismiss its claims out of hand?
When nation-states arbitrarily claim individual property as belonging to their borders, and other nation-states want the land instead, or, those who rightfully own the land want to unshackle themselves from the current nation-state who holds them, troubles necessarily arise.
This essay is an excerpt from Kel Kelly’s book The Case For Legalizing Capitalism, © 2010 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. It was published under the Creative Commons Attributions License 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
[1] Churchill used to brag that he created Jordan in an afternoon.
[2] Charles Lane, “Haiti: Why the Coup Matters,” Newsweek (October 14, 1991), p. 34.,
http://www.newsweek.com/id/127115.
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