Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
UK pays Mauritius to take administrative ownership of strategic Indian Ocean base: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-set-sign-deal-ceding-sovereignty-chagos-islands-mauritius-2025-05-22/
Legalism gone mad, nobody is capable of taking Diego Garcia off the UK/US. Mauritius is a very poor and weak country and can be safely ignored. A quick glimpse at a map also reveals that Mauritius is thousands of kilometres away from Diego Garcia and the rest of the Chagos islands, there's really no reason to pay them to take over the area just so the base can be kept just because they were once classified as part of the same British Indian Ocean Territory.
Some element of the British decisionmaking process seems to be based on a need for international legitimacy, that paying Mauritius makes them more holy and virtuous: https://x.com/echetus/status/1841815818700492945
Someone needs to tell these Brits that they're a P5 power. They cannot, by definition, be isolated in the UN and have anything bad happen to them other than condemnation. If you don't like an ICJ order, you can just ignore it. No such ICJ order actually happened, so Britain doesn't even need to ignore them. The US told the ICJ to get stuffed when they said 'don't go in on Nicaragua'. Israel couldn't care less what the ICJ says, they're not suddenly going to give the Palestinians East Jerusalem, let alone pay reparations. The Security Council are the ultimate court in the UN and the UK enjoys a veto there.
Soft power like the British state seems to yearn for is nothing without real power, it's a pure longhouse concept. Real power is concrete: boots on the ground, bridges built or bombs dropped. Unfortunately, the longhouse is very real if you believe in it.
Some have alleged that there's some kind of corruption behind the deal, Starmer is known to associate with all kinds of subversive elements like human rights lawyers, some of whom are associated with Mauritius. But then he is a human rights lawyer, so that's to be expected. Who can tell the difference between corruption and treachery? Showing weakness here also opens up other problems for the UK in Gibraltar and the Falklands.
https://x.com/G0ADM/status/1925609246101807510
Sending billions to a foreign country is also perverse given that the UK is in a poor fiscal position and must impose painful cuts or tax hikes to stabilize the situation. One can observe a hierarchy of needs in modern British governance:
Very far down the list is anything associated with economic growth or military power.
https://x.com/echetus/status/1841815818700492945
There seems to be a weird phenomena among formally powerful people and nations where once they no longer actually have the power they once had, they fall back on formality, legalism, and ceremonial trappings. It’s really funny once you actually see it, or at least when it’s not happening to your side of the argument. Countries that once had a military presence that the world feared now politely go about hat in hand to beg their former subjects to do something and paying them to do it. Political entities that once reshaped nations now reduced to issuing letters or rulings and impotently asking the people with actual power to listen to them.
When you start seeing groups become formal, you know they lack either the power or the will to be powerful. The UK hasn’t been much of a power since the Second World War. It’s unlikely they will hold such power this century.
This has to be viewed generationally, though. It wasn't simply the nations that were in power, but it was the people and society of that generation that gained and wielded the power. However, people individually are not very powerful, so the institutions are established that convey the justification for the power held by various monarchs, emperors, aristocrats and increasingly, representative Heads of State. The law was established to keep power in place and in the right hands as well as impart and protect the rights of the "citizens" (i.e. people whose worth is recognized by the State) over outsiders. It has always felt a bit like a Mafia hierarchy and protection racket only on a massive omni-social scale.
Over time, though, the inheritors of the power come to equate the laws and rules with the power itself. In the modern era, where the government ideally represents and acts as stewards of the democratic, collective power of the citizen's consent, the formality of rules and laws grows to byzantine proportions and most often, it is used by internal factions of the government to stymie the use (or what some consider abuse) of executive power by their opponents. People that never really had to obtain or use real power are more concerned that it may used against them and the formal systems of a "rules-based" society are emphasized to prevent any quick or decisive action or overt use of overwhelming power on anyone's part.
It may not necessarily be so much that formerly powerful nations or empires become more concerned with legality, propriety and formal procedure, but instead, maybe that by becoming more diplomatic and bureaucratic, a nation also loses power as they are bound more by their own rules than supported by them.
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