Dissense

If York’s proposal merited a “why,” McArthur’s response leads me to “why not?”

Rather than engage McArthur’s appeal to sovereignty directly, I’ll counter this oblique attack with a similar, but more devastating enfilading fire. To wit, in no particular order, McArthur’s mistakes.

First, McArthur assumes that the obliteration of a democracy by a dictator is necessarily ethically wrong. While democracies on balance tend to be more rights-protective regimes, there is nothing that logically compels us to sneer at a benevolent monarch from overthrowing a tyrannical majoritarian regime.

Second, York’s proposal deliberately eschews a discussion of representativeness, relying instead on constitutional consistency as a means of identifying whether a government may be held accountable for its debts. Recall again York’s central query: “when, as an ethical matter, is a government liable for the debts of its predecessors?” Notice the conspicuous absence of the inclusion of a nation’s citizens or even a People.

Third, McArthur’s appeal to the People raises serious definitional questions. Regime changes, particularly the violent ones he mentioned, do more than just put a different person on the throne. They alter boundaries of nations, expanding and contracting them, sometimes fracturing nations altogether, splitting empires into constellations of independent satellites. This is hardly a rare occurrence. We’re a quarter century removed from the dissolution of the USSR, less from the crackup of the Balkans, and since my childhood a country named Zaire no longer exists, to name a few that come to mind. While the international community may recognize North Korea’s borders, one suspects it has less to do with the starving masses trapped within them and more to do with the pair of crackpots who have kept the Communist country together.

Fourth, McArthur seems oblivious to the relatively recent rise of the nation-state, as well as the increasing threats to its continued existence. Pan-nationalistic forms of government as well as stateless groups, subject to alternative forms of governance: these still need to answer York’s question, but they need not bother with McArthur’s inapt challenge, since they aren’t nations at all.

Fifth, and finally, what separates the transition from the Articles of Confederation to the United States, from a dictatorship to a democracy? The People, as McArthur likes to note, were substantially the same and had just won a war of independence from England, and clearly existed and identified themselves as something. How does this merit McArthur’s begrudging approval.

While I remain unconvinced of the effects of York’s proposal, I see no substantive threat to in McArthur’s rebuttal to the original theory of governmental obligation as an ethical matter.