Comment by TFYS
2 days ago
Security competition is about securing resources. Markets are a mechanism for deciding who owns and how to use those resources. They are very closely related. If one country gets competitive advantage in the global market for owning a piece of land with some resource, that creates an incentive for conflict over that piece of land. If instead the two countries were a part of the same planned economic system that distributes resources in a fair way towards a plan that both countries have agreed upon, there would be no such incentive. There wouldn't even be a need for separate nations to exist, as the primary purpose of those is to secure resources in a competitive environment to your group of people.
You're right that conflict did exist before capitalism and even markets, but the systems before capitalism were also based on competition. Tribes competed for hunting grounds, kings competed for land, etc. They didn't come together and agree upon a plan that would best provide for all people equally. They had no means to do so. With modern technology we now do. Even the conflict within communist countries I would say was due to competition over positions of power and competition against countries trying to fight communism. A working planned economy would need to prevent such positions of power from existing to prevent that from happening. We'd need to design ways to make good decisions using direct democracy to avoid centralizing power and the competition over that power.
There might be a biological drive behind greed and competition, but I don't think that's a reason to use them as the base of our economic and political systems. We also have a biological drive to co-operate with each other, we should try create more systems based on that.
> If instead the two countries were a part of the same planned economic system
What you are proposing is a unipolar world order. That would create peace, but not due to its economic system. The shared security architecture is what causes peace. Any unipolar order is good enough for this task; see American capitalist hegemony in the 1990s. You can even have world peace with a mix of capitalist and communist states, as long as there is a unipolar security architecture that they're all part of.
Ask yourself, why is there no security competition between Texas and California? They are both capitalist entities, they could have been separate nation states had history run its course differently. The reason is the shared security architecture of the federal state that sits on top of them both. Their economic system is not relevant, but the power structure they exist in is. Why is there no security competition between the UK and France? It's because NATO sits on top of them both as the dominant polar security architecture. Why was there security competition between communist China and communist Russia during the Sino-Soviet split? It wasn't because of their economic system, it was the lack of a security architecture sitting on top of them both as China grew in power to the point it became a challenge to Russia.
> Security competition is about securing resources.
I would slightly deemphasize the role of resource competition. Competition over resources does happen, but it's often instrumental in nature. Hitler invaded the USSR to secure oil, but the oil wasn't the point, being able to continue the war economy on the Western front while having little access to indigenous oil was the point. Japan did a blitz through South East Asia in pursuit of oil in response to the US oil embargo, but again the oil wasn't the point, securing oil was instrumental to sustaining the imperial war machine. Even conflicts seemingly over land ownership often have a security component that is not well appreciated. You need land to ensure strategic depth, to preempt future belligerency, to ensure hydrosecurity, or to deny key staging points or radar locations. All of these zero-sum motivations for conflict disappear with a unipolar security architecture that subsumes all peoples.
But why is there a need for a security architecture in the first place? Because if you don't have it, some competing entity will come and take the resources that you cannot protect. In the absence of such a competing entity, there'd be no need for a security architecture. No one would come take your resources if everyone was equally a part of managing those resources. So yes, a security force strong enough to enforce peace among competing countries and businesses is one way to achieve peace, but another is to remove the need for such architectures altogether by getting rid of competition.
Of course if we did manage to create a global planned economy with no need for security, there's still a chance that some group of people would establish some entity that would try to take a bigger share for itself than what the planned system would provide them. That would mean there'd have to be some form of security even without competition to prevent us from "devolving" into a competitive state again. You might be right. We would not be able to get rid of conflict just by getting rid of competition, we'd need a security architecture to enforce it, and it could do that for any system. Maybe there'd be less need for enforcement in a system without competition, but you are right.
So a planned economy might not be a way to achieve lasting peace, but it'd still be a way to avoid the other issues caused by a competition based economy.
> Hitler invaded the USSR to secure oil, but the oil wasn't the point, being able to continue the war economy on the Western front while having little access to indigenous oil was the point.
Sure, but what was the point of expanding German land to begin with? Was it not to secure more resources for the German people and its leadership? Would they have attacked if there was no resources to be gained from it? If the reward for victory was that Hitler gets to see a bigger country on a map, bigger numbers under statistics of the population of Germany, some respect or whatever, but nothing in terms of resources, would the war have started? Wasn't one of the triggers the anger caused by the reparations that Germany was forced to pay for ww1?