Who cares if China gets angry?

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It's not our business, it will never be our business. Would you think it would be okay for China to get involved in our internal affairs? Absolutely not. We have done things and continue to do things just as bad as the Chinese, we have no place to tell them what to do.

I've never understood the love affair hippies had for Tibet seeing as they're probably better off now than they were before the Chinese took over. It certainly wasn't a liberal utopia before they came, more like theocratic serfdom.

Tibet is none of our business. Iran, NK, Palestine, Libya, Egypt are though.

Nonsense. Nothing but special pleading. Tibetans and Taiwanese have every right to exercise self determination if they so wish.



It is China inasmuch as Ireland was part of Britain after its subordination in 1784. No one asked them; they don't want it, China would let them starve and is actively attempting to colonize the area.



Moral equivalence at its finest.

I don't believe in meddling in any of those countries, I wish our government felt the same.

I think you ought to feel glad the French did not feel the same. The Westphalian system of absolute individual sovereignty does not exist anymore.

Neoconservatives/Wilsonians certainly wish that was true.

In a world where threat travels quickly across boarders... Where a plot in the mountains of Afghanistan can kill people in New York. In a world where leaders butcher their own people to stay in power. Where ideologies kill entire cultures and finacial shocks can ricochet across a planet. An absolute border just does not make sense. In fact most of the worlds states agree. The international norms of the contemporary world do not recognize an absolute right to sovereignty. The new norm is the result of international consensus just like the old westphalian system.

The Westphalian system was contradictory, an insistance on absolute soverignty but dependant on mutual recognition of the other's right to rule. The moment the latter was bought into question the system exploded, as it did during the French revolution. The system was mistakenly reintroduced by the victors of the napoleonic wars but it exploded again when new ideologies that did not recognize other state's right to exist came to power. Absolute soverignty meant nothing to the people who saw themselves as the children of a global revolution in which everyone else had no right to govern in their eyes.

The Chinese system too, was bas on an absolute recognition of soverignty. A system of tribute prefaced an a recognition of the middle kingdom's supremacy. Rather than being enforced by mutual recognition it was based on central recognition. This system exploded when it's incompatibility with the Westphalian conception was revealed during the lead up to the opium wars. Westphalia required mutual recognition, something absolutely incompatible with the Chinese conception of sovereignty. This reality made war basically inevitable.

Returning to an absolute conception of sovereignty invites the same problem and solves none of the open questions. A looser definition based on some level of mutual recognition of each other's rights and responsibilty towards one another is the only viable alternative. One that will be experimented with to varying degrees before settling into a state of stability enforced through international consensus.

Edited spelling and punctuation.

Last edited by 91 on 09 Nov 2011, 1:01 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Inspiring post, I feel like marching into Tehran now. We'll free the **** out of them!

The new international consensus huh? How did we get there? Under the threat of economic ruin and violence?

We got there because the international system required a new more practical definition of soverignty.

and world policing is, if anything,practical.

you are assuming we could. what do you expect we could do? they hold the cards at this point the interest on our loans is paying for their entire military establishment.

we got there because the US got careless. you are only king of the hill as long as you are on top. we got comfortable and took a nap and now the Chinese are grabbing us by the ankles and dragging us down it. in order to get back on top we need to recognize our own mortality and start fighting like it is our livelihoods on the line because it is.
also please quote this because i want to see this thing get massive for some unexplainable reason.

The question is not whether or not the internal affair of the People's Republic are our concern or not. Of course it's our concern. We live in a society of communities and we have had it demonstrated to us time and again that we isolate ourselves from the hardships of other communities at our peril. The question is, rather, whether there is anything that we can practically hope to achieve through the exercise of our concern. And the answer to that question depends very much on the speaker.

For an individual, much can be achieved. We can make consumer decisions. We can influence our friends and neighbors to make consumer decisions. We can join together and express our concern.

But for a government, greater constraints exist. The United States could, of course, stand up and go toe to toe with China over Tibet. But at what cost? Meanwhile, when agenda at summits are measured in minutes, what has to be left off the agenda for a full and frank discussion of Tibet? Allowing the Renminbi to float freely? Six Party talks? Intellectual property protections? Corpoate espionage? Tibet is important, to be sure. But there are a host of other topics where the interests of the United States government are directly involved, and others where the impact on US citizens and businesses is greater. Government is about making choices, and one of those choices is deciding what the most important topics of conversation are in your bilateral relations with other governments.

Concerned individuals should never let the heat die down on the Tibet discussion (nor Palestine, nor South Ossetia, nor any of the other equally important cases around the globe). But concerned individuals should never deceive themselves that the national priorities must be congruent with theirs.

^^^^

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