SELF DETERMINIATION

(quotes from “Shield of Achilles” by Phillip Bobbitt)

“This paradox of self-determination bedevils the nation-state. It is the original sin of this constitutional order, present at the creation of the American nation-state in 1861 and the German nation-state in 1871, the two first models of this archetypal form.”

What is he talking about? I thought the America was conceived in 1776 and born in 1787 with the ratification of the United State Constitution. What Mr. Bobbitt means is this: The America originally created was a State-nation, that is, a State (with a legal and strategic structure) which build a Nation (a cultural and ethnic group-the melting pot of the tired, hungry, poor, tempest-tossed, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, to paraphrase Emma Lazarus’ famous poem on the Statue of Liberty—this melting pot of colors, sights, sounds, and tastes that is quintessentially American). The War Between the States redefined this by disallowing a state of the voluntary Union of the States could not be allowed to secede from that Union because it would disrupt the Nation. The paradox of this is that the Federal Nation did not exist before the Constitution formed the Federal State, but South Carolina (and all the other states) did. President Lincoln’s great accomplishment lay not in freeing the slaves but in forcing the preservation of the Union, thereby changing the relationship of State and Nation. Freeing the slaves should have been done as soon as the Constitution was ratified, but compromises to nourish the creation of a Federal Union with the blood of slaves could only be accomplished by the spilling of the blood of those men representing the compromises. At the point at which the freedom of We the People of any given state to chose their own destiny was denied, that is the point at which the State-Nation died, the seeds of which death were planted by compromising its noble principles within the structure of the Constitution itself.
Today we see this Nation-State reaching is logical conclusion. Instead of the Union that Lincoln thought he was forging, we are descending into the chaos of multiculturalism. Under the State-Nation, all are to be equal in the eyes of the Law of the Land, under the Nation-State all are clamoring for supremacy. Instead of melding into a people who subscribe to basic and common principles of interrelationships between individuals , between individuals and their respective states, and between states and the Federal government, we are descending into the chaos of people clamoring for their own State within a State, irregardless of borders or the claims of other people. This spills over into international conflicts because religious and/or cultural nations, such as the Jewish nation (as opposed to the Jewish State of Israel), the Kurds (a nation but not a State, residing in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq), the Muslim world, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, all exist as self-governing nations (cultural and ethnic) without a State (legal and strategic) interspersed throughout many States globally.

Phillip Bobbitt says, “The society of nation-states has no more significant responsibility that to manage this paradox. If every nation gets its own state, then who decides the territorial extent of the state when a national group is unevenly spread over many countries, dwelling with in other national groups and encompassing other groups that dwell within it? Each nation-state develops its form of the State for strategic purposes—that is, it selects a legitimate form of the State that will serve as an effective military instrument to resist coercion; but if ever nation gets its own state, then the strategic imperative of the State turns inward, to civil war, as each ethnic and cultural group attempts to assert itself, and the State endlessly divides and redivides along smaller and smaller sociological lines—or the strategic imperative of the State turns outward, to conquest, as each State collects its nationals and those territories important to their welfare, adding new members, subsuming them and then asserting their right to exist within a single state. This is more that a problem, it is a paradox because every nation-state also defines its ”nation” for constitutional purposes—that is, it determines which cultural group on behalf of whose welfare the resources of the state will be deployed. But how can every nation get its own state when every state must choose its nation? Because of this paradox, the society of nation-states rather than the single nation-state itself, sets limits on how a state may define its nation (representative democracy and human rights) and how the nation may define its state (the inviolability of borders).”

Think Israel and the Palestinians to see how untenable this situation is. Yet the solution is held up to the world in the State-Nation of the United States of America as originally embodied in the 1787 Constitution, had not the founding principles stated in the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble been compromised by certain men more focused on the self-interest of certain factions than on the nobility of the principles they espoused. There is a way to balance all competing voices. It lies in the restoration of the American State-Nation in which all nations, kindreds, tongues, and peoples, of all ethnicities and creeds can have a voice through their individual vote and participation in a non-partisan political system in which greed, graft, and corruption are quickly and swiftly punished, in which every vote counts, and in which the rule of common law supersedes sectarian law in all civil matters between individuals , not groups. That is my dream, for what it is worth.