Comment by smoll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoll | Hacker News Reader

This paragraph makes no sense to me:

> First, some context. Before 1928, countries had the legal right to wage war. If one state claimed to be victimized by another, international law permitted it to use force to right the wrong. International law also gave countries the right of conquest, meaning they could benefit from war by keeping its spoils, territory and, in some cases, people. The right of conquest did not depend on whether the conqueror was in the right. As long as it claimed to have been a victim, no matter how flimsy its argument, the conqueror became the new legal sovereign. It’s easy to see how the right to wage war could be, and was, abused.

First, it's saying prior to 1928, war was OK if the initiator was victimized or it simply wanted to annex a new place. Then it says the victors needed to make up a "flimsy" pretense of victimization in order to keep its winnings. They used to make up flimsy arguments for why they were doing the right thing before 1928, and still do after 1928 (cf. Russia "protecting" its people in Crimea). What part of the "law" actually changed?

The part that legitimized territorial acquisition--the right of conquest. Flimsy excuses are still accepted for waging war, but not for acquiring territory.

It's an interesting notion. However, I suspect the cause+effect is much murkier. Colonialism had all but ended by 1928. Rising powers like the U.S. never had much interest in territorial acquisition. In fact, my naive understanding of world history is that territorial conquest (distinct from cultural/political/economic conquest) was largely a modern European thing, perhaps a consequence of the Treaty of Westphalia which forced European powers to think of conquest in very black & white terms.

The US never had much interest in territorial acquisition? Ever heard of "manifest destiny"?

This whole chain of ideas is ridiculous. Conquest is inherently and naturally legitimate; because you can not enforce laws when the prevailing power doesn't respect them.

Sure, it sucks, and yeah there has been a coincidental reduction in wars of conquest after these treaty signings, but one does not make a peanut butter sandwich simply by owning bread and peanut butter.

Conquest is down because of a) alliances b) the nuclear deterrent and c) market liberalization, causing an increase in the ability of people to make a living where they are, lessening the relative value of conquest.

But the prevailing power has less incentive to skirt laws if nobody else recognizes the legitimacy of their conquests. No country is so powerful that they can simply ignore how the rest of the world responds.

Might makes right is a truism, yes, but only under the presumption that somebody is so mighty that everybody else has no choice but to fall into line and internalize the new order. Things are never that cut-and-dry. Vietnam, Afghanistan (now and then), and Iraq should have made it abundantly clear that might makes right is not a concept that has real world application.

What really matters is whether and how everybody will internalize a new political order. Power is a big part of that equation--and relative power is perhaps one benchmark by which many people will choose whether to internalize things--but it's nowhere near sufficient alone.

Fair enough. That's an _extremely_ important and obvious exception. But it's not unlike China. Few scholars would classify China as a nation interested in conquest (now or ever), even after considering Tibet and the slow, multimillennial political expansion of the Han people.

The U.S. relinquished the Philippines and other significant acquisitions after the Spanish War. The Monroe Doctrine shows that the U.S. was never much interested in territorial acquisition, per se.

If anything, I'd argue that our concept of territorial conquest is derived from the peculiar historical evolution of European powers. And it's decline is more a reflection of the world moving on from that peculiar history. The further you get from Western Europe--geographically and temporally--the more difficult it is to characterize and analyze conquest in terms of the nation-state--which was, as a distinct and categorical "thing", a European invention solidified by the Treaty of Westphalia.

Thus, I think it's fair to say that neither the U.S. nor China are conquesting nations, but only using the European definition of conquest. The European definition is usually what we use in discourse because it's well-defined and has very specific meanings. If we loosen the term then, yes, I think it's clear that the U.S. especially is a conquesting nation; and to a lesser extent (at least in modern times), China. But loose definitions makes for poor discourse. I think it's enough to recognize the limits of our definitions.

In fact, my naive understanding of world history is that territorial conquest (distinct from cultural/political/economic conquest) was largely a modern European thing

What about Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, Genghis Khan? Not to mention the various empires of the Ancient world, from 2000 BC, which had plenty of conquering; the Achaemenid reached 5.5 million km².

AFAIU, none of those were territorial acquisitions in the modern sense. Neither Alexander the Great nor Genghis Khan expanded the territory of the Greek or Mongolian nations, respectively. The modern notion of the nation-state doesn't really have an historical analog. It's a distinction that matters when critiquing this new paper, because its argument is fundamentally premised on (and constrained by) the notion of a modern nation-state. Indeed, without the concept of a modern nation-state we may not have seen European-style territorial acquisition, because it's only within a system of nation-states do you need territorial acquisition to legitimize complete political sovereignty. The "nation-state" is an historical novelty in the way that it makes absolute legal, economic, and social power co-extensive.

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