Is society made for man or is man made for society? Is the state a divine creation which man must not question, or is it a result of a “social contract” among men and subject to change when it no longer serves men? How do the rulers get their authority? Is revolution justifiable? Is totalitarianism or democracy correct?
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Man is a gregarious being. By nature he lives with his fellows and likes it. Indeed, no more cruel punishment can be inflicted upon an individual than to isolate him from other men for a long period of time.
Whether this love of being with other men is due to man’s basic and original nature, no one can say. However, it is clear that the earliest men of whom we know anything lived together. It may have been in a cave, or it may have been in rude shelters constructed of branches and leaves, or it may have been squatting beneath a tree or in the protection of some overhanging cliff; but wherever it was, the most primitive of men wanted to be near those of their kind.
The reason may have been the inherent desire for security and the realization that one man alone is dangerously exposed to his enemies, while two or more men together are better able to protect themselves.
But, whatever the reason and whatever the location, wherever we find evidence of man we find evidence of a number of men and women all living in a group. And, since all living together, whether it be of man or of beast, brings conflicts of purpose and desire, it is almost certain that the earliest of men organized some form of society, established some rules which were accepted by each one.
Probably the first rules were not consciously determined or set down so that all might learn. They were possibly accepted as right and necessary without much if any thought on the matter. It was out of these simple provisions for living together that the first social requirements grew.
Gradually an accepted body of customs and procedures evolved. These became tribal laws or rules of the social group. Those procedures which were found to preserve the group and protect it against enemies without and within were held to tenaciously, while those which did not serve this purpose were abandoned.
By this process tribal or group organizations developed with their ways of living which were handed on from the older generation to the younger. Some of these rules were learned by the young as they lived day by day among their fellows.
They saw others act in certain ways and accepted these ways as right Other rules were transmitted to the young in solemn ceremonies conducted by the members of the group on special occasions, the chief of which was that conducted when the young man was admitted into full membership in the tribe at puberty.
These unwritten customs and laws held the group together solidly, and anyone who dared to disobey even in the least was severely punished. Often death was the penalty for failure to follow the tradition. Here was a closely knit society, with laws, customs, and penalties, a society which passed on its traditions to each generation by example, word of mouth, and ceremonial rites.
Then came the time when these laws and customs were written down and a code of laws resulted, laws which were binding because they had proved themselves to be necessary for the preservation of the life of the social group. These were the beginnings of society and the state.
It was many centuries later that the philosophers turned their attention to this social organization and asked how it came into being and what was its nature and meaning. “Is it,” they asked, “a natural result of man’s living together, or does it have divine origin? Is it a mere convenience which is to be changed and revised as times change, or does it have a permanent status such that man changes it at his peril? Where is the power of the state, in the people or in the rulers who receive it from God? What is the best form of the state, and how shall man attain this?”
These questions and many others have occupied the attention of many of the great philosophers. Not only have they been the cause of much philosophic speculation, but they have served to stir men to wars and threats of war. Revolutions have arisen because men have differed in their answers to these questions and have been willing to die to prove that they were right In our own time men have fought world-engulfing wars because they were unable to agree as regards the answers to some of these questions.
The ancients believed that their gods were the ultimate rulers of the state, and that those of their fellows who held power over them had received their authority directly from the gods. Further, they accepted without question the belief that all the laws by which they lived were given to their ancestors by the gods and therefore could not be changed even in the least.
The early Greeks did not have their laws written on tablets of stone but rather in the minds of their leaders. The customs of their forefathers, customs developed through generations of tribal and group experience, were passed on to the group and interpreted and enforced by the old men. In time these customs were brought together and written down by Lycurgus. Here the rules for living together in a group or state were presented clearly so that everyone would know what they were and could obey them.
Among all these early peoples the group or the state was more important than any member or citizen. These ancient people recognized that the individual man could not live long and could not enjoy many advantages unless he lived in a group. Further, they realized that the greatest good for the greatest number depended upon the preservation of the group as a unit.
Consequently, anyone who by his acts threatened the safety of the group committed a crime deserving of the most severe punishment. It was necessary, they saw, to preserve the group even at the expense of the individual. When the individual and the group came into conflict, it was the individual who had to yield or be destroyed. It would be fatal to all if the group was destroyed.
The State as Viewed by the Early Greek Philosophers:-
The Pythagoreans, representative of this early point of view among the Greeks, taught that the individual should subordinate himself to the whole and should act at all times for the good of the state. Thus they taught their members respect for authority, the laws and civic virtues of the times, and the ideal of sacrifice for the good of the whole.
This same general position was taken by DEMOCRITUS. He held that each one should devote himself wholly to the good of the state because “a well-administered state is our greatest safeguard.” In another place he wrote, •”When the state is in a healthy condition, all things prosper; when it is corrupt, all things go to ruin” Since, he argued, the ultimate welfare of everyone depended upon the state, it was but reasonable to hold that the welfare of the state was man’s first concern.
After the Persian Wars (500 to 449 B.C.) Athens became the center of ancient Greek culture. The events leading up to these wars and the developments during the wars developed in the Athenians, among other peoples of the times, an interest in the problems of government and an interest in the democratic form of human living.
This led naturally to a growth of independent thinking which eventually resulted in a growing concern for theories of government. Men began to question the older blind loyalty to the powers of the state, and many began to assert their own independence and their right to a life more or less free from the dominance of the established government. Individualism was in the air. Some suggested that man should divorce himself from the authority of the group and hold himself free to challenge the group and criticize freely the older traditions.
The Sophists, led this advance into individualism. They centered attention not on the group, but upon the individual member of the group. They asserted his ultimate worth and independence. They proposed to teach the individual how to succeed, how to gain his own ends, under the law, and even to dodge the law by skillful argument.
Indeed, there were Sophists who argued that the laws were mere inventions of the weaker members of the group, of society, to enslave and hold down the stronger.
In Plato’s dialogue entitled Gorgias, a well-known Sophist argues that – The makers of the laws are the majority who are weak; and they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves and their own interests; and they terrify the stronger sort of men, and those who are able to get the better of them, in order that they may not get the better of them.*
He goes on to assert that the great men of history have been those who refused to obey the laws of the weak majority who have organized to hold them down.
If there were a man who had sufficient force, he would shake off and break through, and escape from all this; he would trample underfoot all our formulas and spells and charms and all our laws which are against nature.This was a challenge to the spirit of independence which was abroad in the land to assert itself and refuse longer to be repressed by the weak, the ignorant, and the fools.
It is obvious that this position might easily be interpreted as a call to anarchy, an incentive to rebellion against all authority. And many individuals took it for just that.Thus, much of the Sophist influence led to unreasoned refusal to be subject to the dictates of the group and thus threatened the solidarity of the Athenian state. But, there were many Sophists who did not intend that this should happen. They were not satisfied with the older traditional idea that man should be subject to the state wholly and unconditionally, and against this they rebelled.
But they did not want to go to the other extreme of complete anarchy (that is, lack of any form of government). The tragedy of their thinking was that although they saw the problem and the danger in the traditional philosophy of the state, they were unable to counter this tradition with something better. They were not able to offer a solution to the problem of society which would make for social unity and at the same time avoid blind subservience to the state.
However, in their efforts to solve this problem they etched clearly on the minds of their age the issues involved, and challenged better minds than theirs to attempt a solution. They made it impossible for those philosophers who followed them to dodge the problem of developing an adequate philosophy of the state. And the great minds who worked during the next two hundred years made many significant contributions to a solution of the problem
To be Continued…
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.