Mutually Restraining World Government

* Book: Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village. By Daniel H. Deudney. Princeton University Press, 2006.

URL = https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691138305/bounding-power

mutually restraining world government is now necessary for security and that political liberty cannot survive without new types of global unions

Description

""Realism, the dominant theory of international relations, particularly regarding security, seems compelling in part because of its claim to embody so much of Western political thought from the ancient Greeks to the present. Its main challenger, liberalism, looks to Kant and nineteenth-century economists. Despite their many insights, neither realism nor liberalism gives us adequate tools to grapple with security globalization, the liberal ascent, and the American role in their development. In reality, both realism and liberalism and their main insights were largely invented by republicans writing about republics. The main ideas of realism and liberalism are but fragments of republican security theory, whose primary claim is that security entails the simultaneous avoidance of the extremes of anarchy and hierarchy, and that the size of the space within which this is necessary has expanded due to technological change. In Daniel Deudney’s reading, there is one main security tradition and its fragmentary descendants. This theory began in classical antiquity, and its pivotal early modern and Enlightenment culmination was the founding of the United States. Moving into the industrial and nuclear eras, this line of thinking becomes the basis for the claim that mutually restraining world government is now necessary for security and that political liberty cannot survive without new types of global unions."

(https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691138305/bounding-power)

Excerpts

• P14:

“Security from political violence is the first freedom, the minimum vital task of all primary political associations, and achieving security requires restraint of the application of violent power upon individual bodies. Insecurity results from extremes of both anarchy and hierarchy, because both are characterized by the absence of restraints on the application of violent power. The material context composed of geography and technology defines which powers must be restrained and which security practices and structures are appropriate for doing so. Thus security problems and solutions are not fixed and immutable, but spatially and temporally variable.”

• P27: the security-political question: what kinds of political arrangements are necessary for security?

“Insecurity results from the absence of restraint on violent power, and security results from the presence of restraints on violent power. There are logically only two possible sources of restraints – either in the limits imposed by the material context or in socially constructed limits provided by political practices and structures.”

• P:41

“The formation of authoritative world government, now cast by contemporary Realist international theorists as utopian and unprecedented, would not be novel in a fundamental way: where anarchies are combined with intense violence interdependence, authoritative government is needed for security, and the establishment of an authoritative world government would be simply doing again what has been done many times before…. Barring an invasion by extraterrestrials or substantial colonization in outer space, a world government would be unlike all previous governments because it would not need to cope simultaneously with the threats emerging from both internal and external anarchy, and therefore would not need to have a foreign policy…address only the problems of internal anarchy and hierarchy…”