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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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Your view of a sovereign state is antiquated, it seems to stem from the days of Lois XIV.

Modern states are very much limited in what they can do. Internally by these pesky little things called constitutions (some of which give rights even to non-citizens!), and externally by international laws and treaties.

If Poland wants to exit the EU and renounce the 1951 refugee convention along with all other international laws, there is a process for that.

The reason modern states are so limited is that they aren't sovereign, they are clients of an empire.

There is no such thing as international law, because law can only exist with a monopoly on force that grants the monopolist sovereignty. Sovereign states are in anarchy, and if they have normalized processes of interacting with each other there is an ultimate authority in those matters who actually is sovereign over them and itself lives in anarchy.

In practice, the British Empire (who invented the concept of "international law") routinely broke its own norms when convenient, and so does its successor in the United States. This should tell you that they aren't confederal norms formed by spontaneous consensus, but imperial commandments that aren't opposable.

The process doesn't matter, sovereign is he who can decide the exception to that process. Just because Western propagandists have decided to rebrand the concept of sovereignty with something that isn't it doesn't make the concept spontaneously vanish.

I honestly don't even see how it's in America's interest to enforce this current status quo on Europe. Would America have blinked if Merkel never changed her mind on Syrian refugees? My impression is that most Americans don't really care and even the atlanticists have other concerns.

It doesn't seem that different from the same tangle of laws and ideology that makes solving the homeless problem in the US so intractable, which certainly can't be blamed on America's hegemon.

Imo it's more correct to say that we have an empire with an international elite that has already mostly supplanted the US, but which still has the strongest overlap with the american elite. For this elite, any and all immigration restrictions are a hassle - they want the freedom to both travel and live anywhere, at the drop of the hat - and they have minimal personal contact with any of the negative repercussions of open borders, either. Due to this, they think that most negative stories are at the very least greatly exaggerated, if not outright fabricated. And they have a whole moral system build up that makes it easier for them to believe this! As well as the money to actively insulate themselves if need be.