The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side

I am sitting in the cafeteria thinking about what I should do in my class. I can't seem to remember through the mist of catatonic boredom that this job has filled me with. However, that catatonia may be mis-remembered as something I enjoyed when I am instead pushed into productive eudaimonia, re-energised under the atmospheric pressure of a six day week.

The Odakyu Line

The shiny metal snake slithers smoothly along its metal path, inhaling and exhaling the productive lifeblood of this great megalopolis, drawing in cells from the conurbation's outer veins, passing in an endless cram along a tangled mass of capilleries, such complexity should exude an air of confusion, of chaos, yet somehow all I can see is an eerie order to it all.

Fat Tax

I'm watching the Channel 4 news and the question of what to do about our current obesity problem is being discussed. The question is how to discourage people from eating too much of the wrong things. One idea seems to be to tax sugary and fatty foods in order to drive prices up and discourage people from buying it. There is the discouragement factor to this but there is a further logic that I can detect, a logic that is present in the taxing of alcohol and tobacco. Alcohol and cigarettes cause harm to health, people choose to smoke and drink, they go the NHS for treatment, they cost the state and taxpayers money. The taxing of these products is not just a discouragement but also a way of charging smokers and drinkers for the costs they will incur on the state and taxpayers. Perhaps we need to ask whether alcohol and cigarettes and food can be treated in the same way.

The EU: just for cash?

I got quite concerned following David Cameron's recent speech about the EU, he seemed to be saying that perhaps we might leave one day. I wasn't really concerned about actually leaving the EU because I believe this to be very unlikely and David Cameron's plans to be so vague and directionless as to be laughable. No, what concerns me is that people only seem to look at the EU in terms of economics: bailing out countries, labyrinths of fiscal regulations and all the other pejorative views of the EU. Of course many positives are mentioned too: the free trade, free movement of skills and standardisation of regulations to create one of the largest currency blocks in the world. My concern is more to do with those parts of the EU that seem to be forgotten, the parts that exist to guard humanity against the excesses of nations. After the Second World War there was an very reasonable fear drummed up by the abhorrent acts that were carried out by various nations. Although the concept of the need for international justice runs back far through history, even during the times of the Conquistadors there were people who claimed the injustice of destroying races in the name of land grabs, it had actually been virtually non-existent before the Second World War. This was mainly because of the primacy of nations as the wielders of international power and their unwillingness to give up sovereignty to a law across borders. What happened after the war was the founding of international justice organisations like the UN and aspirational documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), mainly as a reaction to the scale of human destruction that took place. The UDHR is a list of rights that are considered by signatories to be inalienable rights of all mankind. This was a great start, but the question is what does something like this mean if you have no equivalent of a court? Well, this did make the document largely nothing more than aspirational for some time.

In the 1990s we saw the Balkan wars and the Rwandan genocide that renewed the moral thirst for some kind of international code. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was introduced in 1998 and eventually came into force in 2002 and is, at long last, a treaty to provide a comprehensive legal system by which the worst offenses against humanity could be judged on an international stage. This exists to judge the worst crimes, such as genocide, war crimes, etc. It was so difficult to form this because it takes a member of a sovereign nation to either give up its sovereignty or a group thereof to force another country to give up its sovereignty in order to give up a fugitive. This is very difficult in a global system where laws are bounded by reach of states' sovereignty (sovereignty here means the right of a state to have control over its own affairs-a key assumption in international politics). It starts to become clear why it has taken such a long time to deal with international crimes and punish perpetrators of crimes against humanity. It remains very difficult as it still requires security council members of the UN not to veto actions (stop them) by the ICC. Unfortunately this is a very current problem as China and Russia have recently vetoed the ICC judging upon the actions of Assad and his troops in Syria.

I only point all of this out as an introductory example of the problems experienced in international justice. In essence it's very difficult to do anything legal internationally because it will interfere with the sovereignty of a nation if we try to apply laws across their borders. What does this have to do with the EU? The EU started mostly as an economic union but it eventually became a lot more than that. It became apparent quite quickly that if the EU's regulations were to have any real power they would need laws, and laws require enforcement, which in turn requires a court. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) was born. The ECJ was first formed to reside over the European Coal and Steel Community, which admittedly sounds pretty unexciting. However, it became apparent that as a transnational legal entity it had enormous potential and was reformed many times to increase its remit, perhaps most notably by the Lisbon treaty of 2007 in order to even cover matters of justice and home affairs. This is where the situation got rather sticky since the ECJ started to gain the ability to "interfere" in other states' affairs. Of course if you had a less cynical view of it you could see it as the ability for us to have a court that allows us to stop nations just doing exactly what they want within their own borders and sticking to a mutually agreed legal code within a bounded area. This brings nations closer together and could allow for protection of people rather than national sovereignty. What we have here is international justice in the most effective guise ever seen in the world.

The ECJ doesn't remove our sovereignty within borders, it merely checks it. It also allows countries to work together in a world where this is more and more necessary. There are tensions, but nothing is ever perfect and that's why we need politics-to peacefully work through these tensions. The ECJ is just one small way in which the EU has helped bring us closer together, there are many other examples, such as freedom of trade, movement and work. It has challenged the primacy of national sovereignty and I believe works in parallel to national interest and is able to give us a route by which we can start to effectively instantiate international justice. The Rome Statute is a great achievement, but it's scope is very wide and its remit often ineffectively carried out. By using a smaller group of nations with closer interests we can see a much more effective example of international justice with a much greater scope for effectiveness being carried out by the ECJ, this I hope can start to curb some of the worst excesses of sovereign injustice and also manage to create a longer lasting peace between nations. I'd ask Mr. Cameron whether one of the most effective examples of international justice seen in history is really worth undermining so much. Surely an attempt to create a just international community is something we need to hear applauded more by politicians, perhaps it's time for Eurosceptics to stop using ill informed posturing in order to gain political capital and mention some of the great positives of international justice. I imagine this will continue to be a long and drawn out process, but I do feel that even with the EU's problems we continue to head in the right direction. Consider this: Romania is now joining the EU, a country that up until 1989 had vicious totalitarian dictator Caeusescu as head of state is now signing up to a treaty that eventually will fully involve it in a code of international justice that will hopefully prevent anything like that happening again. Of course this says a lot about how far Romania has come, but it also shows some of the incredible benefits that the EU allows us, benefits that go far past the economic. I'd ask again whether this is something Eurosceptics feel is really such a bad thing. Do they really feel that rights of absolute sovereignty outstrip the needs of a global community to step towards a future where we can live in a stable union?