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Comment by hyperbovine | Hacker News Reader

I notice that "internationalism" has acquired a pejorative connotation of late, particularly in the right-wing US media. I'd just like to put in a good word for internationalism, which has successfully staved off a land war in Europe for 70 years now, and is the best / only hope we have of preventing WWIII going forward...

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While I certainly hope we keep peace with each other, but I think what people want is for it to be easy to choose which sort of government they live under, but what we get is other governments "forcing" our government to do things our country doesn't want.

(I put "forcing" in quotes because quite often it's more of an excuse than a reason.)

Reminds me of the "Archipelago" idea Scott Alexander used to play with[0] - the concept that takes the assumption that people, given freedom of association, eventually form into groups they feel good in, and follows it to a logical extreme. You'd have a word formed into "countries" and a central body that basically enforces two rules: 1) no aggressive actions of one country against another, and 2) freedom of movement for all - so if you don't like your group, you can migrate freely to a different one. There are some caveats in that thought experiment, but it does strongly resemble what you said - that "what people want is for it to be easy to choose which sort of government they live under".

[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...

Are you sure it wasn't the development of nuclear weapons that has staved off another major war?

Given how close we were to launching them at each other during Cold War?

I guess we'll never[0] know. Human societies are a very complex system, so it's hard to pinpoint the real, exact cause of a particular geopolitical event - a cause that if it was hypothetically removed from the timestream, would change the outcome of that event or prevent it from happening.

[0] - for a practical, pre-singularity definition of "never"

Something about horseshoes and hand grenades.

I'm not sure what you mean. Could you elaborate? I could only find references to a song, a musical band and a videogame.

EDIT: I guess you mean the phrase "Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades"?

I think all the examples of times in which the situation demanded the launch of nuclear weapons but they were not launched demonstrates how far away humanity was from ending it all.

This is totally off-topic, but your point can't be emphasized enough: Both sides of that potential nuclear war went to great lengths not to fire their missiles. Up to and including insubordination by missileers in the silos. Having spent most of my adult life serving in the infantry in various warzones, I have a pet theory about why this happens. The reason we don't start a nuclear war is because that would bring the war from the front lines to grandma's house. War is a thing that plays to the male psyche of being a kind of exciting grand adventure. This may seem hard to believe for those of you that haven't been shot at or shot at other human beings. But after a while, when the urgency of mortal concerns begins to wear off, you can see things for what they really are. I think that war is a very male extension of childhood play. It's exciting until faced with one's own mortality, and indeed nobody thinks they'll be the ones getting blown to pieces. There's a great quote by Winston Churchill about being shot at. But I think nuclear war is such an existential thing that transcends conventional warfare to such a degree that no one wants to "play" with destroying the everything. As proof of my theory, I predict that the person that actually employs more than one-off nuclear weapons (and escalates a conventional war to a full-scale nuclear war) will be widely seen as being a total psychopath, legitimately insane.

Maybe, and I appreciate the argument 'fapjacks brought forward downthread, but then again - psychopaths exist too and if one's to believe recent reports, the US military kind doesn't pay as much attention as it should anymore to vetting and training people who are working with nuclear weapons. By extension, I doubt situation in Russia or other nuclear powers is any better.

Even ignoring psychopaths, I have my pet theory too. It goes like this: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to be separated from it by enough layers of abstraction". So for instance, the moment some military decides to automate away people in the silos I'll start being very scared.

Right. The presence of 400,000 U.S. troops during the Cold War might also have had something to do with it.

This.

Obviously having massive troop presence prevented war with the soviets, but it can't be overestimated what stuff like the European Coal and Steel Community, the EEC and other following integration steps did after WWII in terms of getting France and Germany to "need" each other, instead of wanting "revenge" and repayment.

Revenge is an excuse to get citizens whipped up for the wars the governments already want. The problem with Europe is the concentration of powerful and aggressive nations jockeying for advantage. The world wars were just the latest examples of cyclic major wars in Europe, exacerbated by the empires many of those countries still had.

The EEC and the EU haven't kept Europe from having another two or three major wars since the fall of Nazi Germany. (Whether they could have started more world wars after the end of their empires is less clear). Outside powers imposing alliances that prevented the usual suspects from going to war with each other kept this from happening. Today, NATO keeps this from happening.

I suggest you read up on stuff like the European Coal and Steel Community and the Schuman Declaration.

Some of their implicit goals were harmonising French and German interests so they wouldn't want to go to war again.

I suggest you read up on stuff like the League of Nations.

What are the two or three wars you speak of? There have of course been wars in Europe outside the EU (the former Yugoslavia and various wars in the former Soviet states), but within the EU or even involving a EU member?

The closest I know of is the Cyprus conflict in 1974, but Greece wasn't an EU member then.

You might reread the post you're responding to, more closely.

The EEC and the EU haven't kept Europe from having another two or three major wars since the fall of Nazi Germany.

What are the two of three major wars which they have had? (Quite puzzled, as I have studied this a little).

>> Outside powers imposing alliances that prevented the usual suspects from going to war with each other kept this from happening.

He isn't saying those wars happened. He is saying the preventive cause is other then the EEC and the EU.

Correct. He's asking me to defend a claim completely opposite from what I actually said.

There are different flavours.

There's the League of Nations / United Nations model, which tends to be fairly constructive.

There's the "citizen of the world" / cosmopolitan model, which has tended to have egalitarian and idealistic overtones.

There's the Mont Pelerin Society / Atlas Network "Free Trade / Invisible Hand" globalisation model, which seeks benefits for transnational corporations and the plutocracy, without any safety nets or provisions for the mass of the world's population. This viewpoint is strongly adopted among many who align as "right", contrasted with left. Generally, neoliberalism. See Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, George Monbiot, Naomi Oreskes, or Bill McKibben as among its critics.

The populist conservative mode of xenophobic / nonalignment / isolationist tendencies is another element, and among the few which are specifically opposed to international engagement. It's hardly specific to any one nation -- you'll find it expressed among the populist conservative factions of the UK, France, Germany, much of the Islam world, Japan, Russia, and the United States, just off the top of my head.

Are you trying to use the thought of world war to scare people into accepting absurd IP law bureaucracy?

Yes, that's the argument.

Absolutely. Neither you, nor I, nor anyone reading this has ever lived through anything even remotely approaching the sort of privations that were routinely experienced by people everywhere in every century up until the last. "IP law bureaucracy" pales in comparison. Again, I say this not as someone with any sort of firsthand knowledge, but simply as a student of history.

Absolutely disgusting.

The feeling is mutual.

You act like WWIII isn't inevitable but for other reasons. The fear of nationalism thanks to WWII has caused the pendulum to swing way too far in the other direction.

And it's okay to call it "globalism" like everyone else does.

It's a scary thought - one that I end up thinking more and more often. It seems that while memories of WWII were fresh in Europe, and the destruction still clearly visible, people were very much into peace and cooperation. But now, with new generations for which WWII is a story told by dying or dead grandparents, who were born into wealthy world and take it as a given - not realizing how much work of several past generations it took to build it anew after the World Wars - I fear we'll be facing another huge conflict here in Europe in the coming decades.

Liberal democracies can have political conflict, but never in history have they gone to war.

There's first time for everything. I don't see anything in liberal democracies that would make them unable to wage a war. Not to mention that regimes change, and their names even more often. Today it's a democracy, tomorrow it gets called fascist, day after tomorrow it goes to war.

But it's never happened - let's hope it never does

Odd that right now we're living in an era where the "liberals" have become intolerant and aggressive, criminal war hawks as well as enablers for criminal activity. It might be time we started qualifying what liberal really means anymore.

I said "liberal democracy" which has a specific meaning and identifies specific countries

so, the price for peace is to further the international 1% and give up democracy in exchange for plutocracy?

Internationalism has become the you cannot escape the state no matter where you reside. either because you pissed off some politician over tax or spying issues.

a land war hasn't occurred in Europe simply because the US and the USSR stalemated each other. Once the USSR ceased to be trade had a tendency to convince people having stuff was fun.

There's still war being waged, but it's being done using lawyers and banks rather than troops and tanks.

Completely depleted economies[1], a general anti-war movement, a cold war + nuclear weapons surely mean there is no credit left for "internationalism".

1) barring the US' selective rebuilding of the West German economy after the war.

This. Perspective is important, especially in light of recent events in Europe.

I'm pretty sure that the massive presence of American troops in Europe (which amazingly outnumber all European troops combined) and nuclear deterrents are what's keeping the peace.

Citation needed. Quite a limb to claim that internationalism is the lone reason that Europe hasn't imploded again.

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