Most of my friends (including, and probably especially, coblogger Ryan) become very frustrated by my tendency to take arguments to their logical extreme.  Ryan would argue that I have too high of a preference for consistency at the expen…

Ah yes, I see. And I definetly wouldn’t add the word “only” to what I said.

To rephrase in a way that still may be relevant: “You could argue (and I would argue) that the current UN has caused a reduction in paternalism in the world” (though it has caused paternalism increase in some areas and paternalism decrease in others). So I still don’t feel the argument is symmetric (mainly because the `victims’ of UN paternalism are generally nation-states or governments, that I don’t feel deserve anything like the freedom accorded to individuals).

A better way of phrasing the question would be: “Would you grant the UN (or something similar) powers to be directly paternalistic on you, as do national govenments?”

Most people prefer to feel autonomous (a couple of studies on this are described in “Stumbling on Happiness”). Pushing decision making power one level further from themselves (to a world government instead of a national one) will reduce their perceived autonomy. In order to be willing to give up a portion of that autonomy, they will need to feel that they are getting an equally valuable benefit.

National governments provide obvious advantages which can not as easily be provided by much smaller organizations, including military security against classes of threats (with the exact amount of security varying by nation) and enough economic diversity to create a pool of incomes large enough to self insure against types of small scale problems (depending on political philosophy, this insurance function may vary in extent and design, but the structure of a nation makes it possible to eliminate the option of free riding if one wants to).

National governments also facilitate trade by creating a common currency and shared economic rules. This function (as well as network functions like maintaining roads and telecommunications) is not as clearly related to scale, because there is evidence that smaller states have been able to organize groups for these functions.

To make accepting a world government with coercive powers over national governments attractive, there would need to be some similar benefit which arises as a direct result of scale. Paternalism is unlikely to be it, since that would only strongly appeal to those whose national governments are outliers likely to be intervened against.

However this naive analysis doesn’t seem to align too well with reality. There seems to be substantial divergence in policy opinions among even groups much larger than a few hundred people. This is probably due to cultural inhomogeneity. Groups composed of people with shared values and viewpoints are more likely to be biased.

A better approach would be to select paternalistic guidance groups randomly. Select 100 random people from all over the world, ask their opinions on some issue, and then combine the results, maybe by averaging or voting. My guess is that you wouldn’t see much variation as you repeat this process.

Well, a “super-UN” isn’t here yet, but some of the early signs are promising. Concerning war, they’ve often intervened to try and end civil wars or broker/help enforce peace deals that normally end up granting greater autonomy to particular peoples. The military interventions they’ve allowed have normally been against repressive states, and whenever they’ve had the choice, they’ve promoted democratic elections/regimes.

From other points of views, they’ve promoted education problems (and whatever issues and debates we might have over education in the west, in third world countries they are liberating) and health programs (the link with freedom is less obvious, but unhealthy people tend to be far less worried about political freedom, and dying is a definite loss of freedom).

Various repressed peoples periodically pop up within UN meetings, garnering publicity, and the guilty governments often then pay at least lip service to the problem, than sometimes does improve the situation.

The main flaw of the UN (and it has many flaws) is more a lack of doing things – if the big democracies aren’t keen on interventions, or if the big dictatorships want to veto it, nothing gets done (which explains why the social programs often get more done – they are not seen as important, and happen under the radar).

Also you could argue that they often prefer stability over true solutions (such as ending a civil war rather than letting it fight itself out to the end – but not intervening would be a callous and very tricky calculation), and that their economic interventions are debatable (though people argue this either way). Finally, they may offer poor value for money.

But to the total proposition – has the UN been a force for freedom in the world – I’d answer, on balance, yes.