"The other two adjustments made by the state in order to overcome its lowest point of popularity and rise to its present size have to do with interstate relations. For one thing, as explained earlier and just mentioned again by de Jouvenel, states qua monopolistic exploiters tend to get involved in interstate warfare. With their internal exploitative power weak, the desire to compensate for these losses by external expansion rises. However, this desire is frustrated by a lack of internal support. The support is created through a policy of redistribution, industrial regulation, and democratization. (In fact, states that do not adopt these measures are bound to lose in any long-lasting warfare!) It is this support that is used as a springboard for a realization of the state’s expansionist desires. This newfound support takes advantage of the fact that redistribution, regulation, and democratization imply a greater tangible identification of the population with a specific state and thus almost automatically lead to an increase in protectionist if not open antagonistic attitudes toward “outsiders” and that in particular state-privileged producers are by nature hostile to “foreign” competition. This support is transformed by the state and its intellectual bodyguards into a frenzy of nationalism and provides the intellectual framework for the integration of socialist-egalitarian, conservative, and democratic sentiments. 45 Backed by such nationalism, states begin on their expansionist course. For more than a century an almost uninterrupted series of wars and imperialist expeditions set in, each one more brutal and destructive than the previous one, with always greater involvement of the noncombative population, culminating in World War I and II but not ending with this. In the name of the socialist, conservative, or democratic nation, and by means of warfare, states have expanded their territories to sizes compared to which even the Roman Empire appears insignificant, and have actually wiped out or brought under foreign rule a steadily increasing number of culturally distinct nations. 46 However, not only external expansion of state power is brought about by the ideology of nationalism. War as the natural outgrowth of nationalism is also the means of strengthening the state’s internal powers of exploitation and expropriation. Each war is also an internal emergency situation, and an emergency requires and seems to justify the acceptance of the state’s increasing its control over its own population. Such increased control gained through the creation of emergencies is reduced during peacetime, but it never sinks back to its pre-war levels. Rather, each successfully ended war (and only successful governments can survive) is used by the government and its intellectuals to propagate the idea that it was only because of nationalistic vigilance and expanded governmental powers that the “foreign aggressors” were crushed and one’s own country saved, and that this successful recipe must then be retained in order to be prepared for the next emergency. Led by the just proven “dominant” nationalism, each successful war ends with the attainment of a new peacetime high of governmental controls and thereby further strengthens a government’s appetite for implementing the next winnable international emergency. " Hanns Herman Hoppe.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Jul 2013 14:43:43 +0000
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