Black helicopter watch

I read the NT Wright lecture I linked to yesterday and I tend to agree with Jonathan that Wright is too optimistic about a global army (or “police force” as he calls it) as a viable alternative to our present situation.

Wright says:

First, we must work from every angle either to enable the United Nations and the International Courts of Justice to function as they should, or to replace them with something else that can do the same job better. The only way we could have done something wise in Iraq would have been for a force, with the energy of the whole international community behind it, composed equally of Norwegians and Nigerians, of Australians and Pakistanis, of Chileans and Japanese and, yes, British and Americans. To continue to resist the making real of such an internationally credible police force, as many on the right in America have done, is more and more obviously a way of saying that now that we’re in power we will use that power utterly for our own advantage, and rule out the possibility that anyone might call us in turn to account. Of course, when China or India becomes the next superpower, we can expect the present superpower to go running for help to any international court that might then exist. But the point is this: it is time to make the transition globally that we in this country made in the 1830s when we moved from local militias to a credible national police force. Of course with any such move there are all the same dangers of the abuse of power. But we already have abuse of power; it is part of the task of the church, in calling present abuse to account, to work for a better structure which could actually deal, with visible credibility, with all kinds of problems around the world. I wish I thought that such a refreshed United Nations was likely to emerge soon. But we must work and pray for something like this to happen. In such work, and in such prayer, God is present to call both the War on Terror, and the Terror itself, to account.

I think there are a few problems with this. One is the implication that abuse of power won’t be more pronounced at a global level than at a national level. While it’s certainly dangerous for any nation to act as judge in its own case, any kind of world government or army would have the added danger of being the only game in town. A world government, for instance, would presumably have no “right of exit” acting as a check on its pretensions. There is the added problem that the more removed any governing body is from the people it governs, the more problems there are with accountability.

In addition to problems of monopoly and accountability, I think the empirical claim that a multinational invasion of Iraq would have had significantly more credibility and that that credibility would’ve made a significant difference to the success of the mission is dubious. The thing is that most people in the world would resent outsiders coming into their country and bossing them around. Maybe the invasion of Iraq would’ve engendered less resentment if it was the kind of multinational force Wright envisions, but the attendant bomb-dropping that would’ve still been necessary (and which Wright rightly deplores) would no doubt have created the same kind of enmity toward any invading force. I don’t think the dynamic of occupation changes just because it has a UN (or whatever) imprimatur on it.

It’s interesting to me that Wright uses the analogy of England moving from local militias to a national police force, because an American would read that totally differently. If any politician in Washington proposed replacing all local law enforcement with a federal police force, people of every political persuasion would roundly denounce it. Suspicion of centralized power is part of our political DNA.

Not to say that better international institutions aren’t desirable, but I can’t help but think that any kind of global UN army would be a standing invitation to more meddling and intervention by the powerful nations of the world (who would almost certainly dominate it like they do the UN in its present form) or it would result in a deadlock when powerful nations’ interests clashed (just as the US and the USSR essentially prevented the UN from functioning as intended during the Cold War).

If anything, my inclination is to go in the opposite direction and make political institutions more participatory by devolving important functions to regional and local levels, with less centralization, more federalism, more local autonomy, and with decisions made among the people who are most affected by them. That may sound utopian, but no less so, I’d argue, than what Bishop Wright is proposing.

All that said, there are a number of good and important points made in the lecture, and I think Wright’s account of how Jesus inagurates God’s kingdom and Christians participate in it is very good.