#coercive-power — Public Fediverse posts

Goddard and Newman On Resource-Hoarding Hyper-Elites

Stacie E. Goddard and Abraham Newman urge us to take off our “Westphalian blinders” if we are to make sense of the bullying, extortion, and belligerence that now passes for US foreign policy.

Their paper on “neo-royalist cliques” addresses a theme I’ve discussed from time to time on this blog: “a return to the ‘patrimonial’ state, with rational-legal bureaucracies displaced by personalized rule and ‘extra-legal’ sovereignty.”

Goddard and Newman see patrimonial or personalist rule not only dominating US domestic politics but also extending to international affairs — to the re-ordering of “the whole world.”

I’m not crazy about the term “neo-royalist,” and even Goddard and Newman are careful to qualify:

We use “neo”-royalism to describe this order because, while it recalls pre-sixteenth-century European dynastic systems, this is not necessarily the return of kings and divine right. Instead, it is an international system structured by a small group of hyper-elites who use modern economic and military interdependencies to extract material and status resources for themselves.

What’s more convincing is their focus on “networks”:

neo-royalism…centers on ruling cliques, networks of political, capital, and military elites devoted to individual sovereigns [or personalist rulers], seeking to generate durable material and status hierarchies based on the extraction of financial and cultural tributes.

Where they say “cliques” we could just as well say “gangs.” It’s a world re-ordered by lawless bands of resource-hoarding hyper-elites and their hangers on, marauders and plunderers, serving and being served by the personalist ruler. Should they prevail, the state will be corrupted beyond redemption, serving only to give them cover, distribute favors to friends, and punish enemies — which is anyone who doesn’t pay tribute when demanded.

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