INTERNATIONAL “ORDER”

It used to be, “You stay out of my business and I’ll stay out of yours.”

By agreement, the nations of the world have set up strong high opaque insulated fences between them that allow their rulers and the power elites that control them to exercise their power unmolested by any other nation’s intervention. The fences consist of the laws or absence of laws of each nation and between and among nations. The fences, also known as borders, have developed and are maintained by a variety of agreements, treaties, pacts, and rules of behavior between individual nations and communities of nations and by international agreements that delineate acceptable and unacceptable means and methods of intercourse among them.

The key to understanding these webs of agreements lies in examining the needs of power elites to protect their positions. The key to understanding when and why the agreements are broken lies in examining the desires of power elites to enhance their power or to protect their power from encroachment by powers outside the national borders.

Because of the variety of forms of internal governance among the nations of the world, a set of generally accepted conventions has been established and developed, and for the most part also observed, over centuries that allow for brutal dictatorships to live comfortably side by side with the most quiescent of democratic nations. The prime example is Switzerland that has in the past had Hitler’s Nazi Germany on one of its borders and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy on another, with hedonistic France on the third border and horrendous wars and holocausts exploding all around it. By international agreement, Switzerland was “neutral.” The Swiss, in peace, could milk their cows and make their cheese and chocolate, manufacture fine watches, and sell their products to all comers. This is called, “International Order.”

Other events took place by international agreement at Switzerland’s borders that were less bucolic. Turning over to the Nazis of Jewish refugees constituted abiding by such an agreement by the “neutral” Swiss. Serving as Nazi Germany’s money launderer also constituted abiding by international agreements, thus enabling that murderous regime access to needed supplies for its war machine that were not available for purchase with Reich Marks.

This cozy international arrangement is in process of Darwinian mutation. Brutality and savagery are returning to an earlier mode. Internal factions within nations are rising to power, driven by religious sectarianism, by minority ethnicities within nations rather than nationalism, by local warlord competition for control of resources valuable on world markets, and by uncontrolled political dissension within weak national structures, are changing the nature of power elites and as a result, the nature of “international order.”

A reasonable assumption can be made that existing power elites will not easily relinquish their power. Multi-national oil companies will not allow their wealth to be "stolen" by the people in whose lands they perform their theft of natural resources by agreements with local strongmen who benefit themselves from such rape. We should see ever greater exercise of savagery and brutality to regain fiefdoms. But, mutation is in the offing.