NationStates Jolt Archive

A little short of two years ago (728 days to be exact) – all UN members received the following telegram:

Compliance Ministry
Received: 728 days ago

Laws have been enacted to bring the Free Republic of Wolfish into compliance with the United Nations "Wolfish Convention on POW" resolution.

It has now been two years since the campaign for a proposal, titled The Wolfish Convention of POW (NS-UN #31)

It was a time when the NS-US was, for all intents, in the first stage of maturation. The resolutions were quickly becoming more astute, and the authors and detractors more inclined to fully debate the merits of the resolution at vote.

I recall the extensive debate around the Wolfish Convention – arguing over what was, and wasn’t included. It was a time when the delegates and members debated about ideas and concepts. It was, in short, a time of ideas.

Today the NS-UN has changed. Debates now centre not on ideas. They centre on legalities. Too often debates focus on the ability or inability to find and exploit loopholes.

When the debate does get around to the ideal – it is typically on the ground of national sovereignty…an argument as old as the NS-UN.

Many delegates here no doubt remember those early debates – and perhaps, like me, miss the higher level of discourse that once filled this forum.

On the second anniversary of my resolution, I’d like to plead with all those who voice their opinions in these halls to look to those earlier days – to reflect on their views, and the views of their region – and to make every attempt to improve the level of discourse.

This is not a forum for lawyers…nor for bureaucrats. It is a place of ideas. A place where thoughts and dreams can be explored – with a common goal…creating a better nation…a better world…for all who follow.

I have to disagree.

The NSUN is intended as an international political union. This means that it is a place of diplomats, which usually means politicians. And politicians are usually either lawyers or bureaucrats.

I do see merit with the discussion of ideals. But, I must recognize this is no longer the same UN you knew. This one has rules, regulations, etc. to control it and keep it from going insane, unlike the one from the early days. It has evolved to be this way in part because it was necessary for it to do so. Discussing ideas is fine, but now legality is everything.

Is it truly unfortunate that ideas are no longer the central focus of the debates in these halls? Perhaps. I suspect that ideas are not enough to debate when it comes to international policy that has to account for the complexities of hundreds of governmental forms, thousands of nations, and quite possibly millions of individual and cultural beliefs. I think that a certain amount of practical thought is required to refine the ideas into that which can be appropriately implemented as policy.

As the honorable delegate from Wolfish pointed out, the ideas--he spoke particularly of national sovereignty--have been around from the early stages of the UN's development. Many of us, expecially those of us who have been in these halls for a year or longer, already have a solid grasp of the ideas behind the policies, and feel little need to re-hash those ideas among ourselves (though we may be content to discuss them with newer delegates). Consequently, we are left to discuss that which is somewhat more novel: legality.

I would agree that the focus on legality has been taken a bit too far. Determing the legality is of course a necessity for those who wish to write legislation, but as the delegate from Wolfish noted, there is more to legislation than its legality. He mentioned ideas; I mentioned practicality. These two are just as important as legalism. I admit to having been disappointed at the suggestion by certain persons that an entirely idea-based resolution was acceptable because you could use loopholes to make it practical. I was further disappointed to see my own recent resolution critiqued almost entirely on the basis of legality, with some more conceptual arguments presented too little and too late and a few ad hominem attacks thrown in the mix.

Those examples are only a small part of the increasing legalism in the United Nations. This begs the question: why is the legalism in the UN increasing? Much of the cause can be attributed to two factors that operate in combination; the fact that we now have a large body of legislation and the proposal rule against contradicting past legislation. As each new resolution is passed, proposals have an increasing burden on them because they have more items to avoid contradicting. Unfortunately for the less industrious proposal writers, it may take a panel of experts critiquing the legislation to free it of all illegality, and even then some illegality may be missed. This is simply the result of a reasonable rule and this body's penchant for legislating on anything. If we were to limit the topics the UN could address to...say...international issues, we would not have such a large problem.

Some of you may be tempted to simply dismiss this as my usual opportunism with regard to promoting my own vision of what the UN should be, but consider that I am telling the truth. I have discussed only facts and reasoned conjecture. I have attempted to explain the situation in a way that reflects its reality rather than what I would like to see that reality become.

Minister of UN Affairs
Edward Jones

If I were to place blame anywhere, it would be the actual design of the UN from the start. The design was built around mandatory compliance. It was built around the entire concept of an International Government, not an international organization. While I note that many have tried to move it so it becomes an International Organization, as that is their vision of what it should be (nor do I claim it is invalid as a vision), 120 resolutions that have been put into mandatory compliance and over 100 of them that act as a government piece of legislation makes this become a legal realm, rather than an ideas realm. As with all governments, we have a set of principles that we must follow - recently reincarnated into the Hackian Laws/Most Glorious Protocols/Hacked Protocols, we have a complex set of previous legislation to think about, we have to consider the consequences of legislation, and the methods to get out of them. Because of the focus on legislation, we are worried about laws, and because of the belief of many members (including myself) that prefer an International Government, the focus continues to be on legislation, and proposals that fully respect national sovereignty are not respected as much as they would be in a International Organization. In many ways, this situation was an inevibility. We have become politicians and bureaucrats. We have become an International Government. We have become disrespectful of National Sovereignty, and indifferent to those that want a International Organization.

We have become everything that those from the old era dislike about it today. And if you look back through the history of the resolutions, Wolfish Convention was, ironically, one of the first pieces of true legislation.

I agree to a point, though I would point out that ideas are still central to some debates. Themes of universal rights and liberties, for example - these have been essential components of recent discussions. I almost hesitate to mention Freedom of Conscience, but at the heart of this resolution was the notion that certain rights should transcend concepts of boundaries and large scale sovereignty. It was very much an idealistic resolution (though tempered by pragmatism in its treatment of freedom of speech).

Don't yet mourn the passing of ideas; while the current situation is by no means ideal, it is far from lost. Well, in this regard.

Varia Yefremova
Speaker to the UN

We have wondered whether the present design of the UN as a "world government" makes sense. It could be argued, for example, that Our government is in non-compliance with at least a half-dozen resolutions on the books. However, are We suffering any penalties because of that? Nations cannot be "voted out of the NSUN" for non-compliance, and there is no mechanism other than the gnomes to enforce this compliance. And when one considers it mechanisticly, the result of the gnomes' enforcement is not substantial. A minor change to a nation's stats, that can be reversed by judicious decision-making on one's daily issues.

We fear that this renders the NSUN a pointless endevor. It is a good thing to fight for one's ideals, but the result of losing that battle is:

(A) the destruction of one's national culture through enforcing UN-mandated legislation that undermines it, or

(B) the "game over" solution of having to leave the NSUN in self-defense, or

(C) the subversion of NSUN resolutions through non-compliance.

Given these possible outcomes and no others, what incentive is there to fight at all? NSUN membership is literally a battle to the death, either of one's culture, of one's existence in the NSUN, or of the integrity of the game.

OOC:
I'm going to disagree with some of Wolfish's opinion. I've been extremely active (almost all of my NS forum posts have been in the UN forum) both onsite and *off* site in the campaign of about a half dozen resolutions. I've found that for those resolutions, that players both on this forum and in the game in general were more than happy to talk about the concepts of the resolutions and not focus on "legal" issues.

Examples:
Ballast Water brought up numerous talks about international shipping, invasive species, and what the economic impact to both shipping and the environment that the resolution would have. The questions were by no means focused on the status of international law, but rather the heart of the matter: does cycling ballast tanks protect the environment with little impact to shipping. (I was the co-author on that resolution.)

Jumping ahead to a more recent example, aside from bitter comments from one player that has made it clear he doesn't like me, the Mitigation of Large Reservoirs resolution actually focused on the issue of renewable energy and the mitigation measures themselves. The only "legal" like complaints came from a very small handful of rather uneducated (on this topic in real life) individuals that were honest that they wanted NationStates to only deal with simple issues -- note these same players have attacked simple resolutions for not being detailed enough (which I find frustrating).

That said, there are more "legal" debates brought up in issues related to repeals. That is what a repeal is. It is a legal motion to strike something from the books ... it isn't a debate on an issue at all, but a technical book-keeping motion. Now I'm not a fan of repeals. I think it is easy to attack a resolution by claiming that it is too detailed or not detailed enough. Too many people do this, without ever trying to champion their own ideas. But at the same time, there have been a few cases where I've voted in favour of a resolution based on its basic "idea" even if it was something I didn't like, knowing that we could put into practice the repeal-replace process which a number of players (like Reformentia and Groot Gouda) have done with great success. The irony here is that we probably do get into more legal debates around repeals, but at the same time, there are plenty of players that will focus on "the big picture" now because of these legal arguments / motions are always available.

It is a pitty that most of the pre-Jolt material is lost, because I'd rather read the 2003 material and compare it myself. I *know* what 2004 and 2005 are like, and a few of us have archived much of the important threads. I think there are plenty of substanstive questions that have been batted about.

The design was built around mandatory compliance. It was built around the entire concept of an International Government, not an international organization.

Perhaps. It is difficult to say for certain what the almighty Maxbarry, mythical creator of the United Nations, truly had in mind when constructing the UN. We can certainly operate on such conjecture if we so choose, but I for one have always preferred to stick with more solid knowledge.

While I do not agree that mandatory compliance suggests any desire for a world government rather than a much more likely desire for efficacy; at the very least, we see in the proposal categories that the UN has the capacity to become a world government rather than an international organization. Thus the membership has always had the option to move towards a world government or restrict itself to being an international organization. It has always been up to the General Assembly to decide whether or not making universal domestic policies is how they would like to use this body's awesome power.

Minister of UN Affairs
Edward Jones

Perhaps. It is difficult to say for certain what the almighty Maxbarry, mythical creator of the United Nations, truly had in mind when constructing the UN. We can certainly operate on such conjecture if we so choose, but I for one have always preferred to stick with more solid knowledge.

I agree that the intention may not have been for the UN to become a world government, but it was designed with that ability and became one. Certainly, there are some very good arguments from, if nothing else, psychology that a world government would (at least initially) be preferable to most members. Further, we could debate the actual intentions and the psyche of Max Berry in his description, but the less apt members will take his words at face value. Basically, it doesn't matter what the intention was, it is what it had the power to do.

Maybe it's because all the important stuff has been *done*. We have our Universal Libraries, our Organ Donor projects, our anti-terror legislation, and various education and healthcare resolutions. After a while, debate will tend to bog down in the less important minutia, such as protecting dolphins, or deciding whether nuclear weapons really are needed for national defense. There's nothing inherently wrong with those debates, but they're far from the sweeping statements of thirty resolutions ago.

The way I see it, the NSUN is shifting from idealism to pragmatism, even though the resolutions still tend to be so much fluff. People are thinking of the issues in such a way as to enforce the compliance aspect of the game - they're tired of people like DLE coming along and poking holes in an otherwise decent resolution. Excessive legalism tends to follow a period of excess exploitation of loopholes. It's one of the subtler examples of a predator-prey relationship.

It'd be really nice if resolutions came up for renewal periodically (say, every year) or simply expired after a certain length of time. While I don't particularly relish the idea of debating same-sex marriage or abortion every year (if only it were that infrequent!), it would give a different mix of nations incentive to participate in the UN. It wouldn't hurt that crappy resolutions that resist repeals (the DVD region resolution comes to mind) would simply lapse, or, if people really liked the idea, they'd remain (yow!). This would also have the benefit of altering national stats to reflect the UN over time, rather than only having an impact after a nation joins. But these are my particular idealistic thoughts on this matter, and they can't be made into resolutions.

If we are talking about making legislation lapse after a year. I would hope we be talking RL not RP(!) Then we would need to avoid a situation where it takes 5 days to vote on each lapsed legislation putting all the ones that have reached quoram back. I would suggest that in these situations, we should have two votes. One for the debate on the floor and one on a piece of lapsed legislation.
Anyway, isnt this an issue for the gameplay forum?