How sovereign is any one state?

By Michael Breen

When the Nobel Organization gave this year’s Peace Prize to the dissident Liu Xiaobao, who is in jail in China, were they interfering in the internal affairs of the sovereign state that considers him a criminal?

That is the question raised by a cartoon in this newspaper this week which carried the caption, ``White man’s big nose.” It depicted the famous protest from 1989 in Beijing when a young man, a shopping bag in each hand, stood in front of a line of tanks and refused to let them pass.

In this version, though, a foreign bystander, Alfred Nobel, has climbed up a ladder on the other side of a wall to watch and his nose has stretched absurdly to the spot between the protestor and the lead tank. Even the protestor seems surprised.

The suggestion is that indeed the foreigner is interfering ― sticking his nose in, as the expression goes ― where he is not wanted. In this regard, the cartoon captures the view of Chinese leaders who are furious and embarrassed that an award they have yearned for themselves be given to an internal opponent.

``We oppose anyone using this matter to stir up a fuss and oppose anyone interfering in China’s internal affairs,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu, when asked for his reaction to an expression of support for Liu by U.S. President Barack Obama. By encouraging dissent, the decision to award Liu itself may be interpreted as a form of meddling in the state’s business.

The Chinese have a point. The world is administratively structured around the concept of the nation-state. There is no global government. If aliens landed tomorrow and asked to be taken to our leader, we would have to say in all honesty that we don’t have one. The nearest thing is the United Nations but it is founded on the notion of the supremacy of the sovereign state. Nor is there international law, except that which is agreed upon between nation states. Militaries belong to nation-states, with the loose exception of U.N. peacekeepers.

No one has yet seriously proposed a world body with representation based on the entirely reasonable notion of population. If such a parliament allotted one seat for every 5 million people, it would have 1,340 seats. Norway, the UAE, Singapore, Ireland, and New Zealand would have one each, while the people of Bangladesh would have 33, Pakistan 34, the United States 62, India 238 and China 268.

Such an idea is off-putting precisely because we conceive of ourselves politically in terms of national allegiance. We imagine that lone Norwegian delegate with 268 Chinese shaking their fists at her.

For now, we live in a nationalistic world, nationalistic in the sense that people accept that this ordering of the world by nations is good. A majority thinks this is how things should be, even though the nation-state is a recent invention in history, and even though our non-interference permits savagery and incompetence to reign in many places.

This acceptance allows for the obvious fact that not all countries are equal. Some are poor, some are rich, some are big, some small. Some, like the United States, dominate, while others, like Vanuatu, don’t get heard. (On the other hand, some small countries, like Britain, get to field four teams in the World Cup, while other massive states, like China, can only have one).

But we also inhabit a parallel world, one in which all people aspire to similar goals of happiness and comfort. This is a relatively new world, one born after the World War Two and the defeat of Nazism. Since then, the idea, in the developed world at least, that some people are biologically inferior or mentally or morally second-rate in some way, has been both proven false and outlawed from civil discourse.

Thus, we do not believe that North Koreans feel any different from, say, Australians, about being tortured and sent to the gulag for thought crimes. Nor do we believe that Zimbabweans are suited to poverty. We know that the best states are politically democratic, economically free market, and secular, leaving religion unmolested as a matter of personal choice. Countries that are not like this will be. Why? Because their citizens are human.

And in this world of global human values, in which the family of humankind is concerned for its own, national borders have only administrative significance. They do not mark the boundaries of a person’s soul. Thus the Nobel people in Oslo and Stockholm have as much right as anyone else to care about the oppressed wherever they are, to recognize greatness wherever it manifests, and award prizes to people who they consider worthy.

And so, with that thought in mind, to the people of China, congratulations. The prize is well deserved and the government there would do well to take the moral high ground and recognize it.

Michael Breen is an author, former foreign correspondent and the chairman of Insight Communications, a public relations consulting company. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.