Ecology of Sovereignty

The concept of "nation", is an ecological concept still under development. As we now define "nations," they are areas characterized by definite borders and some form of government, but more especially by sovereignty—that is, by the fact that they possess the capability and status of exercising supreme power both within the national boundaries and in representing themselves in international affairs. A few city states exist, notable among them is Singapore.

In today's world, the United Kingdom is representative of a national state in which the sovereignty is still embodied in a single person, although the actual exercise of authority is in the hands of an elected parliament which acts on behalf of the sovereign. On the other hand, the United States is representative of a nation where the people are the sovereign with an elected government which acts upon their behalf. Russia is in transit. It has moved along the track of sovereign types from autokrator (a Caesar (Tsar)), through that of having an appointed oligarchy with theatrical elections (the Communist Party), to its current volatile station as a part of the Confederation of Independent States, hopefully, will lead to an elected republican form of government.

Centuries ago, under the Roman Empire and the many monarchies it spawned, the sovereign was a single person who did not share power with the people. From the time of Caesar Augustus, the Roman Senate and the vox populi were functional but powerless adornments of the Imperial Government. The Roman Army and the people had only one right: They could elevate a rival emperor. If they failed, those involved were executed; if successful, the successor was legitimate and the "electors" were rewarded. Constantine the Great assumed the Purple under these conditions. Still he had to vanquish his rivals before replacing Constantius, who had died a mere 15 months after Diocletian had made him Augustus of the West and then retired to Illyria (Yugoslavia).

In the Roman Empire of the West four hundred years later, Pepin the Short, the Mayor of the Palace (prime minister) of the Frankish King Childric III, deposed King Childric and sent him to a monastery. Seeking legitimacy, he asked Pope Stephen II whether the man with the title or the man with the power should be king. Pope Stephen II replied, "The man with the power." Pepin became king of the Franks and in him Pope Stephen II found a protector. The Pope conferred the title under the powers he held from the Donation of Constantine. King Pepin returned the favor by conferring upon Pope Stephen the Donation of Pepin—the Papal States—which, incidently, he had recently conquered from the Roman Emperor in Constantinople. Everyone was happy except the deposed King and the impotent Emperor, but nothing could be done. (The relationship between Pepin and Childric before the coup have their modern counterparts, it would seem, in John Majors and Queen Elizabeth II, respectively.)

The Donation of Constantine, which the Pope used as his authority, is probably the most infamous and potent forgery in history. It gave the Pope (Patriarch) in Rome the authority of the Emperor Constantine the Great and set precedence. Because of it the Pope could wear the purple, call himself Supreme Pontiff, and assign sovereignty. Gibbon wrote that this document was a forgery by the notorious Isidore. Unfortunately, he didn't explain who Isidore was except a monk. Historically, Charlemagne was crowned Emperor by Pope Leo III under this same authority on Christmas Day in the year 800. Charlemagne never used the title "emperor," but the Popes continued to name Holy Roman emperors and kings (assigning sovereignty). In the 16th century, Pope Alexander VI (the Borgia pope) gave, the New World to Spain and most of the Orient to Portugal through assigned sovereignty under this same authority. It was not until 1870 (a mere 123 years ago!), that the authority was specifically removed from the popes, when the British and French did so through the Lateran Treaty of that year.

Winning the American Revolutionary War established the United States. We gained our sovereignty by right of conquest from Great Britain which, in its turn earlier, had received the sovereignty for its New World possessions from the Pope. The Declaration of Independence was our founding document; the United States Constitution (which superseded the Articles of the Confederation) established our operating system (OS-2). These two documents declare that We The People are the sovereign—the citizens sovereign. Our certificate of sovereignty is the Treaty of Paris (1786).

That date, 1786, was a whole decade and a revolution after our Declaration of Independence. King George III took his time before he decided to deal with us. But finally, in 1786 the king had his ministers sit down and recognize his former colonies as a national entity in the Treaty of Paris. (In the case of King George himself, his sovereignty went back in a line some 700 years to William the Conqueror, who had obtained England by conquest (as his name suggests) at Hastings Hill in 1076. The Doomsday Book catalogs all that he won that day.)

The Russian Revolution of 1917 toppled the last stronghold of the Roman Empire. Tzar Nicholas II, Autokrater of all Russians, was the legitimate successor of the Caesars, as the seat of empire had moved to Moscow after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. (Along with it went the Roman Greek Church (Orthodox)). Scores of decades later, a legitimate Roman emperor was replaced by a Communist dictator in Russia, and life went on as oppressively—probably, even more oppressively, than before. The policies of glasnost and perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev brought the first semblance of democracy to the Russian people in all their history. Now, President Boris Yeltsin is trying to forge a workable government out of the rubble of 70 years of communism and the Communist Party's "non-government."

It is instructive to regard that, while the Communists were in control of Russia and the rest of the Soviet Republics for 70 years, they never really inherited the authority of the Tzar. The Communist Party ran the Soviet Union as a political party. The legitimate nations of the world recognized the Soviet Union for what it was, but it had a quasi-government, not one rooted in real authority such as that of the Tzar, or that of the people. The Communist Party controlled all the peoples and infrastructures within Soviet borders and, much like Pepin the Short, allocated to itself the sovereignty by virtue of having the power to do so.

Communist control led to more and more economic chaos and other kinds of devastation in the land, and the Russian people suffered more and more hardships. Finally, Russia has assumed the task of inventing a new government for itself, one based upon democratic/republican principles. Unfortunately, the country is still encumbered with governing mechanisms left over from communism, and these are neither democratic nor republican.

After the Communist Revolution one of the first governments to recognize the new regime was the United States. President Franklin D. Roosevelt offered diplomatic relations to the Communist Government, paying the way for recognition by many other nations. In today's world of the nation state, it is international recognition or acquiescence that establishes sovereignty—the absolute and supreme authority of a sovereign to have his/her/their nation act within its borders, or representationally, outside its borders.

Many nations and sovereign entities have lost their sovereignty by being conquered by their neighbors or others. In a hotly contested part of the globe today, the problems of a nation's sovereignty that go back to the Ottoman conquest of the Roman Empire are being agonized over. Illyria, the Roman province on the Adriatic we now know as Yugoslavia, supplied many soldiers for the Roman army as well as several emperors, among them Diocletian. When the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, this part of the Empire that is now Yugoslavia adopted the Roman Greek (Orthodox) form. After the Ottoman takeover of Constantinople, however, much of this area became Moslem. Then, with the intervention of the Papacy of Rome, which was ascendent when the Roman Greek Church (Orthodox) lost its home and had to move to Russia, much of Yugoslavia became the Roman Latin Church (Catholic, schismatic). Today, Croatia is mostly Catholic; Serbia mostly Orthodox; and Bosnia-Herzegovina mostly Moslem. Together these three areas formed Yugoslavia; over the years, the enmities between the three, never very deep beneath the surface, festered.

In the early days of the Roman Empire (that is, before 400 A.D.), tolerance existed for all religions and all gods and goddesses, as long as none of these was considered by their followers higher than the Emperor of the Empire. Trouble—deep trouble—began when the followers of the Jewish-Christian-Moslem God (YAHWEH) insisted that this God, through the writings of his emissaries on earth, had let it be known that he was the only god, and that he was jealous of his position. The close alliance that had developed between the church (Roman Catholic) and state (Roman Empire) began a program of violent coercion against those who did not subscribe to the new state religion, and all three of the named religious groups, at some point(s) in their history, whipped up of their fervor, of devotion sufficiently to war with those who, while claiming to worship this same God, did so in a in a different manner, with different rituals, rites, holy days, etc., or with varying beliefs.

In today's world, one might wonder whether the overwhelming desire of a largely isolated and highly provincial people for its own type of religious structure and substance to prevail may indicate that this people's identity, for many decades, has been so closely allied with its religion that the religion (especially, its structure) became the very core of the people's culture. To such a people, to tolerate a rival religion could be understood as denying one's own validity. If such were the case, it would not be too difficult to understand how that people could not tolerate differences in religious or cultural beliefs, values, or structures without a high degree of national discomfiture. This might result in ALL differences being seen as means for a rival to undermine what is held most dear, and in all differences being magnified out of proportion rather than evaluated rationally. "Our way" to some peoples actually may be seen by them as the only road to physical and/or psychological survival, with any road marked "Be Tolerant" seen by them as the road to personal and national annihilation.

Conjectural as the above may be, we can say with fair certainty that, in removing Tito's overlord Communist Government from Yugoslavia, the suppressed, deadly hostilities between the three groups were released.

The pressing question now is what becomes of the nation of Bosnia Herzegovina? The war has cause much of the land to fall away from the control of the government. Is Bosnia-Herzegovina capable 'of self-government with regard to any matter in the present situation, without involving genocide (ethnic cleansing).

The major problem seems to be that the Bosnian Serbs are not content to live in a country with a Moslem majority. The rest of the world has witnessed the gore as, well armed and supplied by their neighbors, as well as permitted the use of their neighbors' air bases, the Bosnian Serbs have set themselves to the task of killing off the Moslems and taking their land. The Bosnian Moslems are not armed in the sense that the Bosnian Serbs are, and the latter seem intent on genocide. Inch-by-inch the Bosnian Serbs are ridding the countryside of Bosnian Moslems. Meanwhile, the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, is surrounded by hills filled with Serbian gunners and snipers who fire at the undefended city: They shoot at will and shoot to kill. They also rape Moslem women and children, presumably to intimidate them, so they will go away, or perhaps, as some have alleged, to impregnate them so their offspring will not be "pure." The peace talks have failed and there is little doubt that they will continue to fail until the Bosnian Serbs obtain all the land they want. It seems safe to predict that once they have achieved their objective in this time honored way by conquest—the Bosnian Serbs will declare themselves a sovereign nation.

The world should be asking itself whether the Bosnian Serbs should be allowed to establish their own sovereignty in Bosnia by right of conquest. They have rebelled against their government, are ethnically cleansing the area they want, and are settling down to run it. They have an "assembly." They held a plebescite to see if "the people" would accept the United Nations' peace plan (they didn't) and, in general, are in command of their own affairs. They have not been recognized as a nation as yet. Should they be?

The United Nations Security Council has asked the Bosnian Serbs if they would like to participate in the war crimes trials the former plans to hold. Those asked, the villains of the piece, have politely declined saying that, when they are in control of Bosnia, they will hold their own war crimes trials; furthermore, they said that they will punish the offenders, no matter who they are.

The United Nations, the European Community and NATO have declined to intervene militarily in the Bosnian civil war, instead offering only humanatarian relief. The United States has declared it's desire to intervene militarily, at least with air strikes, but its European Allies have declined to support the action. Absent a consensus, President Clinton is hesitant to do anything. If the Europeans are fearful of causing the war in Bosnia to spread and they are interested in settling questions of sovereignty without arms or war then at least they should have a non-violent strategy, with teeth or not, based upon human rights, fairness and the question of sovereignty. The United States has refused to recognize sovereignty by right of conquest since the mid eighteenth century. It's time the United Nations spoke out on the matter in Bosnia.

Moving to another sector of the world, Panama, we note that this small, narrow strip of land obtained its sovereignty when the United States, seeking a route for the Panama Canal, took the land from Colombia, called it Panama, installed a friendly government, and built the Canal. Panama was never a real nation in any ecological sense of the word. The U.S. made it into a country for its own convenience and that was that. When President Bush got fed up with President Manual Noriega's actions as President of Panama, he sent in the U.S. Army, kidnapped its President, brought him to the United States, tried him on drug charges, and sent him to jail. Not much sovereignty in Panama.

Haiti has been a military dictatorship for a long time. When Papa Doc Duvalier died he was replaced by his son Baby Doc. Baby Doc was ousted as so many petty dictators are, and went into exile a very wealthy man. The present contention between Jean-Bentrande Aristide, a popularly elected but exiled President, and the military is over, who is going to run Haiti, the Haitian magnates through the military or Aristide through a popularly elected government. In Haiti as elsewhere the eternal questions are, "Who gets the money? Who gets to do the work?"

Colombia is barely a nation today. It acts much more like Algiers during the days of the Barbary Pirates. The drug lords with impunity have shot members of the Supreme Court there, killing many of the justices. They regularly execute their enemies whenever in the world they happen to be, even in the United States. So much for justice, or the exercise of supreme power within and outside national boundaries by a legitimate government.

One anecdote illustrates the state of affairs in Colombia. A primary Colombian drug lord announced to his government that he would surrender. First, however, he announced his qualifiers: He would go to a prison of his own choosing, he would furnish his quarters with the comforts of life as he saw them, and he would have visitors as he pleased. The government went along and he settled in. Then he ran his drug empire from the prison. When he got tired of the theatrical gesture of espousing prison life, he simply left. The government made a show of searching diligently for him but, as to be expected, it did not find him.

We sent massive forces to Colombia to eradicate and interdict the production of cocaine, but these did not seriously affect the industry in any way, especially not financially. Can one say that the Colombian government is in control of Colombia? Does it exert sovereign authority in the country?

The United States Government was created to defend, guard, and protect the unalienable rights that the people—the citizens sovereign—possess by right of their Creator-endowed humanity. If the unalienable rights are not protected by the Government, the people, as the sovereign, have the right to replace the Government with one more suitable to their needs and happiness. That is what the Declaration of Independence says: Sovereignty proceeds from the sovereign, in the case of the United States, from the people, the citizens sovereign. In the United Kingdom, sovereignty flows.from the Queen.

Governments are not sovereign; people, either citizens sovereign or rulers are. Governments are agencies established to secure, protect, and defend the rights (foreign and domestic) of the sovereign, In the case of the United States, these rights are the people's unalienable rights. In a constitutional monarchy such as the United Kingdom, the rights are the sovereign's rights. The extent to which the Queen wishes to share these rights with her subjects is a matter of negotiation, as they are hers to bestow or retain.

We, therefore, can ecologically define sovereignty as the supreme power of nationhood as derived from the sovereign, in our case the citizens sovereign. Government is an agent of the sovereign, designated to secure the unalienable rights to its citizenry and to represent its interests in the international world. Is it enough to determine that a government is in control and is the supreme authority, without asking on whose behalf the authority is being used and for what purpose? Are we of the United States willing to let a body such as the United Nations, august as it may be, decide which areas of the world are truly nations? If so, what should the criteria be?

The United States, while an enlightened nation with the best of intentions, has yet to solve the problem of its destitute, homeless, and deprived. It has yet to deliver on its obligation to secure the unalienable rights to all its citizens sovereign because, so far in its history, it has refused to deal with the aftermath problems of slavery in any appreciable way, civil rights acts notwithstanding. The United States is still struggling with the problem of the allocation of its wealth and the allocation of its labor, almost as if it were a Third World nation.

This problem goes back to the founding of the nation and is exemplified by the conflicting visions of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton as to the structure of our Federal Government. Jefferson wanted States Rights and a weak Federal Government. He wanted the State legislatures in the hands of farmers, which they were until 1964. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence with its all-important concept of unalienable rights. Hamilton wanted a strong Federal Government, with a strong central bank, national currency, and a strong emphasis on business, industry, manufacturing, and trade. Hamilton's vision could be stated in three concepts: Happiness, prosperity for all, and national security. This Federalist—Anti-federalist conflict produced the Civil War. We see this division of opinion today in Senator Phil Gramm's (R, TX) statement that our present controversy is not over the budget, but over two very different visions of the government, one with more spending (read Federalist), the other with more opportunity (read States' Rights). (At this point one is forced to ask where the States will get the funding to provide the opportunities they foresee.)

The Confederacy was never a sovereign nation. Neither Lincoln nor the Federal establishment ever treated the secessionist States as anything but integral parts of the United States. Lincoln's Gettysburg address once and for all set the definition of the United States.

... our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal...and that (that) government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

...A. Lincoln...
Gettysburg, PA
November 19, 1863

There was some conventional wisdom a few years ago that justified, at least, for the time being, our trafficking with fascist dictators. The wisdom said that communist countries never become democratic, but that there is always the possibility that a fascist nation could become democratic. Since communism is based upon the leveling of wealth and fascist dictatorships are based on allocating it to the wealthiest, one might have thought that some day the communist nations would become democratic while many if not all the fascist nations might remain dictatorships. In reality, I guess we have a mixed bag that throws out this wisdom, since fascist Spain and Argentina did become democratic, but so did communist Russia, Poland, Czech and Slovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Ukraine, Moldavia, Beloruss, Azerbaijan, etc. So much for conventional wisdom. It appears that Cuba might also follow its Eastern European, compatriots into democracy if the United States would only get over its pique and make some friendly overtures. I suggested offering Cuba (and Mexico City) a major league-baseball franchise. (We The People May 1989, Vol. 4 No. 5: p. 7)

There are several criteria by which we can gauge the humaneness of nations and by which, consequently, we can fairly determine what our relations with each should be. These defining characteristics are possible to identify because, in international relations, we recognize that reciprocity is the rule of the day, i.e., we behave under the edict of "Do unto others what you would have them do unto you."

The first and foremost standard to which a nation should be held should be that it honors the ecological equity of women, and the second should be that it holds free elections. The third should be that the nation has adopted standards of human rights, such as the United Nations protocol for human rights. Lastly should be the standard that the nation has met some predetermined extent to which the people are sovereign and do, in fact, enjoy their unalienable rights.

No nation I am aware of meets all of these criteria, not even the United States, although it has come a long way in its fairly brief history. The magnates of our nation are too busy using racial tensions to introduce chaos into the labor allocation process for the United States to reach an equilibrium where the unalienable rights would be attainable by ordinary citizens of any description. However, if we take the time to understand the ecology of sovereignty and its relationship to the citizens and their exercise of self-determination and self-government (a self-generating decision system), we will beg able to determine what it is we have to do to make the decision system humane.

I think it is safe to say that Panama, Haiti, and Colombia are not capable f providing their citizens with safe, reliable, or benevolent government. In Panama and Haiti, the Colombian drug lords have bought off the ruling class whose members are enriching themselves at the expense of their citizens. In Colombia, while the government has the best of intentions, it cannot come close to controlling the international drug trade that plagues the world.

In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Bosnian Serbs have taken advantage of the break up of Yugoslavia to assert claims by right of conquest, with the assistance of Serbia which, as a product of the same splitting, became an independent nation with the control of the Yugoslavian Army. The Bosnian Serbs are rebelling against the elected Moslem rulers of their country, but rather than just attempting to control the government, they want to remove the Bosnian Moslems from Moslem land and expropriate it. They are using "ethnic cleansing"—genocide to do it. Against all humanitarian 'codes of conduct, they are attacking defenseless civilians, killing everyone they can get into the sights of their cannon, mortar, and sniper's rifles.

The United Nations should declare Bosnia's sovereignty intact and that no claim of sovereignty by conquest will be recognized in Bosnia. The United Nations should simply announce that Bosnia is not in play and no independent sovereignty will be granted over and above what the nation already has and that no matters will be settled until the fighting stops and the claims and counterclaims of all the combatants and victims can be heard. It is only by declaring Bosnian sovereignty inviolate and not subject to change by right of conquest that the Security Council can reasonably expect to exert its authority to conduct a war crimes trial. This would be the first step in a diplomatic solution to the Bosnian question. Others could follow such as the imposition of arms embargos and economic sanctions. If Serbia-recognized the sovereignty of the Bosnian Serbs, the Serbian sovereignty should be called into question and arms and economic sanctions directed against it.

Under what authority could the UN Security Council possibly act if the Bosnian Serbs are successful in conquering Bosnia? It would be a fait accompli. To complicate matters further, consider a business-as-usual world. The Bosnian Serbs would probably follow this scenario: They would set up an independent Bosnian Serbia; thumb their nose at the rest of the world; go on rooting the last Moslems out of and off the land; be recognized by Serbia; and then, some time later, in a move to bolster their security, become a part of Serbia.

The Security Council should be able to issue a Statement of Intent to declare Bosnian sovereignty in full force declaring that the Serbs and the Croats will not be recognized as sovereign in Bosnia no matter what they do until all matters come to the table. At this stage all relevant issues would be dealt with by the Security Council. If the combatants do not comply and come to the table at this point, the question of Bosnian sovereignty should be put to the General Assembly. If the Assembly decided that full diplomatic intervention were needed, the Assembly could issue a declaration, of Bosnian sovereignty with the proviso that matter should come to the negotiating table. If the fighting continued and the Bosnian Serbs and Croats persisted in their war of conquest, Bosnia Herzegovina would become a United Nations Protectorate and would remain in this status until a permanent solution of its status was determined over time. When United Nations Security forces became able to secure the country, the Security Council could proceed with its war trials.

Bosnia is an ideal candidate for this procedure. Nothing inherent in the nation itself, in the manners or customs of the Bosnian Serbs will admit to a peaceful solution if left to play out the law of the talon.

The United States could go a long way to improve matters in the drug nations of Haiti, Panama, and Colombia by setting its own house in order. As it is the principal market for the drugs (in terms of number of sales and dollars spent), the U.S.A. supplies most of the money with which the drug lords throw their weight around. We need to recognize the fact that the Justices of the Colombian Supreme Court were killed with American dollars. We also have to stop using drugs as a class war and take the money out of the drug trade. Brute force, interdiction, and jail are not working; as a matter of fact, they are failing miserably and insuring high prices (great profit) for the drug lords. Removing the money from drugs is the only reasonable ecological answer.

Removing the money from the illicit alcohol in the U.S.A. trade shifted the problem of alcohol from being a crime problem to being a health problem. The same can be true for drugs. I am not proposing a specific answer; I am stating an ecological principle. Citizens of the United States supply 150 billion dollars a year, a sum greater than the combined profits of the Fortune 500, to the drug lords to use in their fight to keep the free market in drugs. Our drug fighters have 6 or 7 billion dollars to counter this ecological force. Right now it's not even a contest. If the United States were to allocate sufficient assets to win the drug war with the methods it is now using, the United States, as a free nation, would be destroyed.

After we solve the drug problem of the United States with benign ecology, we should determine whether this action affected the governments of Panama, Haiti, and Colombia. If it did not, then we might consider using the solution suggested for use in the case of Bosnia. They should become United Nations protectorates.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1993
Institute for domestic Tranquility