The state's monopoly legitimate use of force

[godol shmok]

I have found this clip recently linked on another site and liked the line of argument of Peter van Uhm.

Question: What are good arguments for the state monopoly of the legitimiced use of force? If there are none, what do you propose?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=gHX5lAslnTc

Please, enjoy and discuss.

[yupper]

I have found this clip recently linked on another site and liked the line of argument of Peter van Uhm.

Question: What are good arguments for the state monopoly of the legitimiced use of force? If there are none, what do you propose?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=gHX5lAslnTc

Just to be clear, the argument made by the general in the video is not that nation-states should be the only 'actors' in the international realm who can 'legitimately' use force and violence. Nation-states -are- the only actors in the international realm who can 'legitimately' use force and violence. This is a reality that is enshrined in international laws and conventions pertaining to wars and armed conflicts, such that any non-state or non-state sanctioned actors who engages in (mass) violence would by definition be categorized as 'terrorists' or 'criminals'--for no simpler reason than the fact that international treaties and conventions of this nature are drafted by nation-states, and that international institutions through which these treaties and conventions are produced are constituted by a membership of nation-states. There really isn't a need to "make good arguments for" this because this is the accepted 'norm.' It is not in question by anyone (which is not to say there are not those who debate whether nation-states -should- be, or that they can be 'trusted' as, the only actors in the international realm who can 'legitimately' use force and violence).

But this is not what the video you linked is talking about. The argument being put forward by the general in the video is basically a call for countries like Netherlands to engage in a more aggressive stance towards international military intervention--the "peacekeeping" kind--on the grounds that international military intervention by liberal democracies reinforce international stability and security. It's a very conventional argument that has become the most prevalent post-Cold War 'justification' for increasing and/or sustaining nation-state military spending and security apparatus, in particular by political constituencies in 'middle power' nations.

I am not going to put forward any arguments here about the validity of that claim since I don't want to have that debate over an internet forum, because there isn't going to an argument made by the 'for' or 'against' groups that I haven't already heard before. But I just want to help clarify what the video is actually about.

[godol shmok]

a good and legitime response

So, I should maybe ask:

How can we describe the relation between citizen and the state's monopoly of using force?

[yupper]

a good and legitime response

So, I should maybe ask:

How can we describe the relation between citizen and the state's monopoly of using force?

That would be the 'social contract' between the sovereign and the people it governs--a constitution--that simultaneously institutionalizes a (national) government and the 'citizens', which would normally stipulate the rights and obligations of 'citizenship' as well as who are empowered by the state to exercise force (law enforcement, military, etc.).

Hm.....maybe I am not clear on the question you are asking?

[godol shmok]

Well, I think, you're clearer than my question.

I would argument in a similar direction over the social contract.

[Dr. Croccer]

This made me even more proud of my country and my armed forces.

[Claudius Gothicus]

The Legitimate Monopoly on the Use of Organized violence? a good argument for it's legitimacy...

Well, there's a pretty basic and down to earth one... Survival.

Hunter Gatherers used ostracism and we use the Cops or other security institutions in order to maintain inner peace within communities, the idea that connects inner-peace and survival, in a modern state at least, is that without it the institutional processes that allow for our most basic social actions to reach a fruitful place can be fatally disrupted. Actions such as selling-buying, signing contracts, healing a person's wounds or simply sending a child to school are vital to the functioning of society, and actions that disrupt said processes without proper justification should be legitimately stopped.

And that goes from recklessly picketing an avenue and letting a man in an ambulance die to far worse, like organizing a guerrilla that actually kills civilians to generate fear and instability. All of those threaten a community's survival and the answer to all of those are legitimate uses of the Monopoly on Violence.

Outer peace(the ability to maintains one's community safe from outer harm) is far easier, as the general said a peaceful world is a huge boost to allow for peaceful communities.

BTW: That trooper in the video was hot

[shikaka]

If we go down to the basics, a government is an institution which has the monopoly of violence and umpire, to fund these two, he has the right to tax citizens.

Everything else is an extra where the government wants to give you something - for increased taxes of course - no matter if you want it or not. (healthcare system, state public transport companies, fire brigades, schools funded by the state, etc.).


I could imagine a society where violence and umpire is not a state monopoly. People in a village for example could hire and arm guards to protect them, and could hire lawyers and judges to work out laws which suit their needs. If the people can live without it, they could choose to NOT have laws against smoking or marriages, they could choose to NOT tax companies in their neighbourhood. They could choose to prefer group marriages and the like. What they want.

Of course, this is only theoretically true. This could only work if the people, when introducing this kind of anarchist self-government, have roughly the same resources. It is easy to see that if someone is very wealthy when this type of governing is introduced, he can 'bend the rules' and use his capital to oppress people.
Basicly an ideal state for me is anarchy. BUT I am quite aware that it is not possible to implement when there are big differences in capital between people. (the last chance imho was when socialist countries adopted capitalism)


In my opinion for most people a centralized government is a sickness they cannot live without. They think that being robbed every month (payroll taxes) is better then to plan everything for themselves (savings for later years, private healthcare and the like).

[Claudius Gothicus]

If we go down to the basics, a government is an institution which has the monopoly of violence and umpire, to fund these two, he has the right to tax citizens.

Everything else is an extra where the government wants to give you something - for increased taxes of course - no matter if you want it or not. (healthcare system, state public transport companies, fire brigades, schools funded by the state, etc.).

Well, one could argue that those are basic necessities of Modern Societies as well. The rather complex nature of modern world forces governments to expand their tasks, from purely security-related to more population-management oriented.

I could imagine a society where violence and umpire is not a state monopoly. People in a village for example could hire and arm guards to protect them, and could hire lawyers and judges to work out laws which suit their needs. If the people can live without it, they could choose to NOT have laws against smoking or marriages, they could choose to NOT tax companies in their neighbourhood. They could choose to prefer group marriages and the like. What they want.

Lol, who's going to maintain the legitimacy of currency? unless you want to make a case for payments in food, and other materials. But that would only lead to a warrior chaste.

Of course, this is only theoretically true.

Even on a theoretical level the anarchocapitalist idea that villages and communities could somehow permute goods for protection fails. Because when it's far more useful to use your weapon against the food producers you are not going to conform to a simple wage.

This could only work if the people, when introducing this kind of anarchist self-government, have roughly the same resources. It is easy to see that if someone is very wealthy when this type of governing is introduced, he can 'bend the rules' and use his capital to oppress people.
Basicly an ideal state for me is anarchy. BUT I am quite aware that it is not possible to implement when there are big differences in capital between people. (the last chance imho was when socialist countries adopted capitalism)

Social Structures are inherently asymmetric, from a biological, cultural and economic point of view there's no way of acquiring the paradise like symmetry that anarchism requires to function properly.

In my opinion for most people a centralized government is a sickness they cannot live without.

Typical first world complain, you never lived in Somalia or even some mildly failed states in the third world so you don't really know how does ''de facto decentralization'' work like for the average citizen. It's nasty, and centralization of functions in a single State within a determined territory is actually a blessing.

They think that being robbed every month (payroll taxes) is better then to plan everything for themselves (savings for later years, private healthcare and the like).

None is robbing you of anything, you wouldn't be alive and enjoy the fruits of internet browsing without the existence of the Centralized Western State.

[Menelik_I]

Well, one could argue that those are basic necessities of Modern Societies as well. The rather complex nature of modern world forces governments to expand their tasks, from purely security-related to more population-management oriented.



Lol, who's going to maintain the legitimacy of currency? unless you want to make a case for payments in food, and other materials. But that would only lead to a warrior chaste.



Even on a theoretical level the anarchocapitalist idea that villages and communities could somehow permute goods for protection fails. Because when it's far more useful to use your weapon against the food producers you are not going to conform to a simple wage.



Social Structures are inherently asymmetric, from a biological, cultural and economic point of view there's no way of acquiring the paradise like symmetry that anarchism requires to function properly.



Typical first world complain, you never lived in Somalia or even some mildly failed states in the third world so you don't really know how does ''de facto decentralization'' work like for the average citizen. It's nasty, and centralization of functions in a single State within a determined territory is actually a blessing.



None is robbing you of anything, you wouldn't be alive and enjoy the fruits of internet browsing without the existence of the Centralized Western State.

The OP set the discussion in very abstract terms about Magical Market wand and you responded in kind with Magical Taxes made the internet possible ... this is not going anywhere, so both of you guys should quit because you are both discussing abstraction one of a sentient market and the other of a idealized Government has the sentient arm of society.

This discussion could have been about the virtues decentralization and about what point does a benefit becomes too diluted to justify being taxed for it ... or whether Fee user system is more moral than taxing.

I am just doing this because I care for your sanity because market forces gave me a job so laze I have time to care for people I don't see, and government collected taxes before I was born to educate me in mombo jumbo psychoNerd to help distressed people they didn't know existed

[AdamWeishaupt]

@Menelik_I
The question may appear less abstract to you when you ask what went wrong when Peter van Uhm's father got a rifle that could not reach the other side of the river.

[Dr. Croccer]

If we go down to the basics, a government is an institution which has the monopoly of violence and umpire, to fund these two, he has the right to tax citizens.

Everything else is an extra where the government wants to give you something - for increased taxes of course - no matter if you want it or not. (healthcare system, state public transport companies, fire brigades, schools funded by the state, etc.).

I could imagine a society where violence and umpire is not a state monopoly. People in a village for example could hire and arm guards to protect them, and could hire lawyers and judges to work out laws which suit their needs. If the people can live without it, they could choose to NOT have laws against smoking or marriages, they could choose to NOT tax companies in their neighbourhood. They could choose to prefer group marriages and the like. What they want.

The problem with this kind of reasoning is that it is backwards. It simplifies the nature of government and then argues that modern government, which isn't simple, is therefore unnecessary. The fact is that full, modern governments weren't suddenly invented by cavemen, the development of what we now call governments has been a long, arduous process for millenia, in which human societal organisation has constantly adapted itself more and more as it has been confronted with new problems as we have developed as well. So we've come from family bands of hunter-gatherers to our present situation. The society that you have imagined has existed, and it has developed in order to deal with problems as they came along.

[Farnan]

BTW, an easy definition of a failed states is one in which the government is no longer seen as possessing a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

Such as Somali where other actors are seen by the people as having the ability to legitimately use force.

[shikaka]

Well, a state which uses the monopolies of violence and judging for taxing to pay for things the populace never asked for, is pretty f.cked up too.

Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors ... and miss

[yupper]

Just to reiterate, the video has -nothing- to do with the debate about nation-states' monopoly over the use of force/violence. The general in the video is trying to make the case why a country like the Netherlands needs an actual military (rather than just a token one)--that's his 'thesis.' The one justification he focuses on extensively in his speech, aside from "national defense", is international military intervention and peacekeeping missions--now more frequently re-framed as 'peace building' or 'nation building' missions since the invasion of Afghanistan.

This is the sort of speech officials from the military or defense departments/ministries give when they are trying to justify sustained or increase military spending, or when they are concerned that 'government budget discipline' might translate to cut-backs for the armed forces (which is, after all, a branch of the government). Particularly so for 'middle-powers' like the Netherlands, Canada, Japan, and so on, who traditionally forgo the need for enormous military spending because of their position of international neutrality, alliance to a hegemon (like the US), and other reasons. It has nothing to do with the nation-states' monopoly over the exercise of force and violence (which he already assumes).

The (non-)debate regarding why nation-states have the monopoly on the use of force and violence goes something like this:

Nation-states are not the only 'actors' in the international realm, but they are the only ones who can legally and legitimately exercise force and violence--as in they the only ones who can legitimately have a standing army but not anyone else. Multinational corporations, international institutions, non-governmental organizations, etc. cannot legally have their own military, cannot declare wars, are not treated as nation-states by international treaties and conventions governing war and the use of force. Why?

The main reason for this, I already summarized in my first reply to the OP. If anyone is interested in learning about a debate that, quite frankly, no one is actually debating (anymore), they should look up 'War Making and State Making as Organized Crime' by Charles Tilly. It's a rather dated article from the 80's, prior to the end of the Cold War, in which Tilly basically argues that nation-states are like crime syndicates who run protection rackets--they hold entire communities and populations hostage (through the threat of nuclear and 'conventional' war) in exchange for 'protection money' (security/military spending supported by taxation). His arguments are more complex than my gross-simplification here, as his concerns are primarily with how nation-states emerged as the dominant polity of the contemporary era, even though it's a relatively new phenomenon (the 'Peace of Westphalia' is less than 400 years old), what other forms of community were eradicated in the process, whether it will be that way for the foreseeable future, and the age old question of 'power' (which -is- a debate within international relations scholarship).

[AdamWeishaupt]

Just to reiterate, the video has -nothing- to do with the debate about nation-states' monopoly over the use of force/violence. The general in the video is trying to make the case why a country like the Netherlands needs an actual military (rather than just a token one)--that's his 'thesis.'

Well, you can say sovereign rights (e.g. jurisdiction, defense, taxes etc.) come as a consequence of the social contract in the hand of the public (the citizen state) whereas earlier these and other rights were distributed on various individual and cooperate persons (e.g. the right and privilege to carry arms, high jurisdiction in the hand of local Lords, etc.). - My idea has been to argument in favor of having "an actual military rather than just a token one" by referring and in context of modern constitutional democracy. I understand that the argument is in a way not so coherent as it would need to be. The debate is not so entirely fictional, however, when there are attempts to abolish the armed forces.

[yupper]

Well, you can say sovereign rights (e.g. jurisdiction, defense, taxes etc.) come as a consequence of the social contract in the hand of the public (the citizen state) whereas earlier these and other rights were distributed on various individual and cooperate persons (e.g. the right and privilege to carry arms, high jurisdiction in the hand of local Lords, etc.). - My idea has been to argument in favor of having "an actual military rather than just a token one" by referring and in context of modern constitutional democracy. I understand that the argument is in a way not so coherent as it would need to be. The debate is not so entirely fictional, however, when there are attempts to abolish the armed forces.

Yes, you are right that the debate was never really about who has the right to use violence and force (which is really why I remarked that this is not a debate IR scholars have any more), but was always about 'sovereignty' (as a modern resolution of the question of authority) and power.

The debate about nation-states' monopoly over the use of force and violence may have had some traction in 80's and particularly in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, when people like Fukuyama argued that the dissolution of the Soviet Union meant that liberalism had triumphed as the superior ideology and all that was left for humankind was the Kantian 'progress towards reason' until we reach the 'end of history.' Fukuyama has already been soundly critiqued by countless people, even before 2001, but there are more sophisticated liberal institutionalists who have argued that the era of globalization has witnessed the diffusion of nation-state sovereignty upwards to multilateral and international institutions and downward to sub-national forms of collectivity (e.g. John Ruggie), and that at some point, the nation-state as a polity might become obsolete--which meant it was conceivable that the institutional and legal basis (authority) for the use of force and violence may eventually be located somewhere else. For them, the nation-state (and a global polity composed of nation-states) is not the ideal form of community as held by conventional beliefs, and there are arguably good reasons for them to make such arguments.

But these people were not talking about abolishing the armed forces per se--they were talking about the possibility that the authority over the use of violence and force would transfer from nation-states to (perhaps) multilateral and international institutions, which in their view would make inter-state and intra-state wars less likely. At the time, most of them believed that inter-state and intra-state conflicts (and the subsidiary violence that derive from them) were the most most violent forms of conflict--clearly an inheritance of deeply held beliefs that evolved from the two World Wars and the Cold War. Obviously, their positions have been modified since 2001.

Now, there are a number of IR schools of thought which would be categorized as "anti-militarism" (and obviously a great deal of conventional literature and opinions that argue for small or limited armed forces), but to be clear, I don't know any IR scholarship that "attempts to abolish the armed forces", even the Foucauldians and Agambenites who argue that the modern nation-state is a polity dedicate to the waging of 'permanent war'. Technically speaking, for them abolishing the armed forces would do nothing to change that, because it would just mean that nation-states have found more efficient and cost-effective means of waging war. But perhaps I am conflating two arguments that you intended to be separate and distinct? If so, then I apologize.

[AdamWeishaupt]

If so, then I apologize.

Why should you apologize for writing a good and intelligent response?