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Daniel_Burfoot comments on Open thread, 9-15 June 2014 - Less Wrong
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The Gulf is impoverished?
Besides, isn't Dubai just a better version of Singapore?
I was thinking of Yemen, Oman and Somalia, though now that I look at a map I see they're not technically on the Persian Gulf.
I've heard good things about Dubai, but not enough to do a serious comparison between it and other countries.
Ideally, Dubai and Singapore would both set up thalassocracies, competing in a friendly way for trade and citizens. Their cities could be adjacent to one another, kind of like Burger King and McDonalds.
Interestingly, one of your proposed colonial sites, Oman, already followed your plan, several centuries ago. They set up thalassocracies all down the coast of East Africa, and even moved their capital to Zanzibar, out-competing the incumbent Dutch and Portuguese thalassocracies. Those cities were indeed linked by trade routes, naval (but not air) power, and a common legal and administrative framework. Consider the career of Ibn Battuta, or indeed the entire Hadramawt.
What's to stop your proposed thalassocracies being displaced in exactly the same way, by other, less capitalist, imperialists, or by violent nativist sentiment?
Well, in practical terms "setting up" a thalassocracy in such places would have to start with landing a pretty sizeable army on the shore and fighting it out with the locals. Kinda like the US experience in Afghanistan (and the Russian experience there before, and the British experience there before that...).
"Nation-building" in the Middle East and environs has been a pretty miserable failure so far.
To be clear, I am definitely not advocating large scale military invasion and occupation. The external power would take over a tiny bit of land - say 1000 km2 - to set up a city.
Let's do a quick comparison between Yemen and Singapore:
The point is that Singaporean institutions are vastly more efficient at turning land area (an intrinsically scarce commodity) into liveable and economically viable polity.
One way to formulate the goal of political development is to attempt to maximize the number of people living under good, efficient, non-corrupt governments. The thalassocracy concept is a way of implementing that goal without major political upheaval (e.g. revolution, war, massive immigration, etc).
So, a small-scale military invasion and occupation??
The issue isn't land you will be taking over, the issue is people. Some of them (probably a lot) will not want your thalassocracy. Some of them (and in Yemen, pretty much all of them) will be adept with weapons.
You want to come into the Middle East, set up an enclave completely different (politically, culturally, etc.) from anything around it and you don't expect war? Um, may I suggest you ask the Israelis about how well it works X-/
The difference is that the US attempted to establish democracy, i.e., hand over power to the locals as quickly as possible, I believe Daniel's plan would avoid this.
The problem both the Russians and British had was interference by rival powers, the US and Russia respectively. The Russians also had the problem that the economic system they wanted to impose being dysfunctional.
I don't think it mattered what the US attempted to establish and, actually, I don't think it tried any such thing anyway.
In any case, you seem to be arguing for old-style colonialism based on crushing military superiority. Even leaving aside whether it will work in our times, I am pretty sure that's not what OP has in mind.
They held elections and put the people who got majority into positions of power.
Old-style colonialism wasn't based on crushing military superiority, during the British Raj the number of British born troops in India was a tiny fraction the the native troops. Thus the British relied on the cooperation of large numbers of Indians and Indian troops.
What do you mean by this? Are you saying that the laws of nature somehow changed over the past century?
Elections are no big deal. Mugabe holds elections, Putin holds elections, hey, even Assad recently held elections.
Yes, it was. Certainly, it wasn't just military superiority, especially once the colonies were established, and the British, for example, became masters of control through political and financial means as well. However the military strength was the underlying bedrock.
Which particular laws of nature do you have in mind?
Well, the US forces actually attempted not to rig them.
Disagree. Military strength was based on a bedrock of competent management.
Whichever laws you invoked when you said implied that "old-style colonialism won't work in our time" is a reasonable hypothesis.
No need to, the locals can do everything necessary. The US forces just provided the money and prevented the "undesirables" from playing.
I did not invoke any laws of nature. I think that in the current social, political, informational, military, etc. global environment the old-style colonialism is highly unlikely to work. No laws of nature are involved in this assertion.
Can you be specific about what you think is the relevant change?
(To do so would be a category error, because Dubai is in fact a city -- and, unlike Singapore, not an independent one. The country it's in is called the United Arab Emirates.)
As your own link says, Dubai is something equivalent to a principality. It seems to empirically cluster closer to Singapore than to, I don't know, Istanbul.
You seem to be missing the point, which is about its political subordination to a larger entity. What I was attempting to correct was (possible) ignorance of the existence of the UAE.
Here are the first two sentences of my link (emphasis added):
For all that an "emirate" may be similar to a "principality" (or, dare I say, a "count-y"), the fact remains that the political status of Dubai is different from that of e.g. the principality of Monaco, in the sense that Monaco is an independent country, and Dubai isn't.
Dimensions along which Dubai is more similar to Singapore than Istanbul aren't relevant to this point. (If someone pointed out that California was part of the United States, you wouldn't argue with them by saying that it's the seventh largest economy in the world [or whatever] and therefore "empirically clusters" with countries rather than states.)
In some legalistic sense Monaco may be more independent than Dubai. But in practical terms like "how different are its laws from France/UAE" I'd say it's the opposite. My point about empirical differences wasn't about economy, it's that Dubai is much more like a sovereign city than like an ordinary city in a country, even in purely governmental terms like taxes and courts and so on.
Let's pause for a moment for a meta-level reflection. You're engaging in metacontrarianism, with the relevant uneducated/contrarian/metacontrarian triad being:
Dubai is a country / No, Dubai is part of the UAE / Dubai has a lot of power and autonomy within the UAE.
The trouble with metacontrarianism is that metacontrarians often seem to forget that even if they're right -- that is, even if the third level of the triad is true -- the first level is still wrong. In some sense, you have to pass through the second level in order to legitimately claim the mantle of the third. (Here, "pass through the second level" means not "go through a stage of being at the second level" so much as "understand why, and in particular that, the second level is an improvement over the first".)
I submit to you that if Alice thinks Dubai is a country because she's never heard of the UAE, and Bob thinks that Dubai is the UAE's version of Istanbul, Bob's model of the political geography of the Arabian peninsula is still better than Alice's, even if Carol, who thinks that Dubai is so different from the rest of the UAE that it "might as well" be a country in its own right, has a better model than Bob.
Now, to return to the object level, I don't actually see why Carol's model is better than Bob's. I don't know that much about the internal politics of Turkey, but I assume that Istanbul, being a major city, is culturally and demographically different from most of the rest of the country, wields a lot of influence in the country's politics, and has governmental policies that most other parts of the country don't have. For that matter, the same is true of New York City, whether regarded as a part of New York State or of the United States. In neither of these cases do I see any need to give up the model that has these cities being politically subordinate to the nation-states (or states) that contain them, and I don't see how the case of Dubai within the UAE is any different (or, anyway, different enough). And, conversely, even if Monaco is heavily influenced in its policies by neighboring France, I don't see that as sufficient reason to remove from my model the notion that Monaco is an independent state, because otherwise we might as well say that Canada is part of the U.S., et cetera.
At this point in a discussion one would have to dissolve the word "country" and ask what properties of Dubai are important to the discussion. A glance at a few Wikipedia articles indicates that the UAE is a federation of kingdoms, in which all powers not explicitly granted to the federation are retained by the members, each of which has absolute sovereignty within its borders under a hereditary king. Before the UAE was created, the emirates were absolute sovereign entities (i.e. "countries"). After it was created what were they? Well, "are" the members of the EU "countries"? Yes. "Are" the states of the US? No. "Is" Dubai? Doesn't matter, look instead at the question of substance, which was:
Dubai might want to first informally square things with the other members of the UAE (or at least, the one other member that matters, Abu Dhabi), but establishing overseas colonies, er, charter cities, would not necessarily be an activity that would officially concern the UAE federal entity.
I never intended to enter the discussion in the first place; my original comment was parenthetical. I was simply pointing out a verifiable, objective, yet quite possibly tangential matter of fact that some participants (or readers) may have been unaware of.
Whether Dubai is a country or a part of a country is not a question that there's any ambiguity about. It's not a subject of dispute, as in the case of e.g. Taiwan. It's a simple matter of looking the answer up in Wikipedia. If you want to question the answer you find there, fine, but then you have to question the notion of "country" in general, and acknowledge that you're doing so, otherwise you're not being intellectually honest.
The difference is that the various Emirates of the UAE (including Dubai) have far more internal autonomy then even US states to say nothing of Istanbul.
That is not a response to the paragraph quoted. (It is arguably a response to the paragraph following the one quoted.)
I'm not trying to be metacontrarian. I disagree with this point. I think Bob's model is less good than Alice's in that it will make less accurate predictions of empirical facts (and potentially dangerous ones, given that e.g. alcohol is legal in some but not all of the emirates).
Forgive me, but this is preposterous. Neither model makes predictions about policy differences among the emirates, except insofar as Alice's model predicts that the other emirates don't exist. Different parts of a single country can have different policies, on alcohol or anything else, and do all the time. U.S. states have all kinds of differing laws. In California it's illegal to have a pet gerbil; in other states it isn't. You wouldn't for one moment cite this as an argument that California is a country. Or would you?
On the other hand, here is an empirical question where the models do in fact differ: Alice's model predicts that Dubai is a member of the UN and that the UAE (being nonexistent) isn't, while Bob's model predicts that the UAE is a member and that Dubai (being part of the UAE) isn't. Which model's prediction is more accurate?
Or how about this: which entity has embassies in other countries? Also an empirical fact. Which model predicts it correctly?
I suspect you know the answer as well as I do. I therefore don't believe you when you say
Whether we ultimately consider California a country or not is just an argument about the meaning of words (and the practical answer is that we have the word "state", which usually means a country but also means California). But I'd certainly say that the US is a very noncentral example of a country, and I'd warn people travelling there that the states of the US have some of the properties of countries and therefore it's important to e.g. check state laws in a way that you wouldn't do for subdivisions of more typical countries.
Well of course the model that contains the correct the international-law technicalities is the model you'd want to use if you wanted to predict international-law technicalities. Just like if you want to predict where to find a tomato in a biology textbook, you should model it as a fruit. But if you want to know what to cook with it, you're better off modelling it as a vegetable.
Same applies to (say) Hong Kong and yet I can't recall anyone calling Hong Kong a country.
Well ICANN for starters.
Having a top-level domain doesn't make an entity a country. Lots of indisputably non-countries have top-level domains. Nobody thinks the Bailiwick of Guernsey is a country, and yet .gg exists.
Well, it's sufficiently independent of the UK to function as a tax haven. It's definitely one of those entities that's on the fuzzy boundary between country and non-country, along with Hong Kong and (in a slightly different way) Dubai.
A couple days ago I did see an article somewhere calling Jersey a country, though.
Belgium is more subordinate to the EU than Dubai is to the UAE.
So what? Dubai is still more subordinate to the UAE than you would have thought if you didn't know the UAE existed.
If you follow your definition, rather than intellectually dishonestly changing definitions in every comment, you should stop calling Belgium a country. Or start calling Dubai one. If your point is merely to point out the existence of UAE and its small effect on the relative country-ness of Dubai, your original statement should not have been absolute.
You appear to be using as your definition of country "member of the UN." If you want a canonical list of countries, that's about all you can do. But I don't trust authority to list countries just as I don't trust authority to list poisons.
We differ on that point, then. The concept of "country" as I intend it here is more or less entirely a matter of what authorities list (in contrast to the concept of "poison", which involves the question of whether something kills you). The authorities here aren't epistemic ones pointing to empirical facts, but are rather political ones making declarations that they intend to enforce.
"Member of the UN" is at least a sufficient condition for countryhood, and the sense of my original comment is approximately the same as if it read: