I vaguely remember a BuzzFeed series “inside the secret international court that …” or something. One of the things I picked up from it is that this is a problem democratic regimes can face when taking over from horrifying dictators. The sequence (according to my memory of what the articles said) is something like:
Horrifying dictator signs agreement with Western company to build him a ridiculous vanity project costing significant amount of country’s GDP.
Gets overthrown.
New regime decides that the vanity project won’t be needed after all.
Company is like, but you (as a country) made a deal with us. We’ve committed funds to this vanity project. (I don’t remember but wouldn’t be surprised at: if you rescind now you’ll trigger a bunch of break clauses, that no sane regime would have agreed to in the first place but horrifying dictators maybe don’t even bother to read.)
There’s a court that gets to enforce things like this, at penalty of exclusion from significant parts of the international monetary system, or something.
Court treats new regime as continuous with old regime, enforces agreements signed by horrifying dictator.
You don’t even need a horrifying dictator. Suppose that Trump decides to build a huge wall on the border with Mexico, and signs (in the name of the government) a 20 years project with some construction company to build that wall. Then Biden wins… but he is still required to keep paying the money to the construction company. Hypothetically, imagine that the contract is so expensive that it does not leave Biden enough money to pay for his programs—the things that people who elected him want.
In some sense, a “long-term contract” and “democracy” are in contradiction. Democracy assumes that every 4 years you can change the government. Long-term contracts mean that despite doing that, in certain aspects you remain de facto governed by the old government (or pay the penalties specified in the contract, which may be insanely big).
Not sure what this all means… You can’t have democracy without breaking promises?
Or maybe we need a new mechanism for long-term promises? For example, you can create a fund, as a legal entity separate from the government, put some amount of money there, and provide an algorithm such as “every year, if the condition X is met, send Y of this fund’s money to South Korea, otherwise return all the money to US government and disband this fund”. But you cannot contractually make the future governments put more money into this fund. So it is clear to everyone that the fund operates with a limited budget. (And maybe, if the future governments decide so, they can put more money into the fund. But they are in no way required to do so.)
I vaguely remember a BuzzFeed series “inside the secret international court that …” or something. One of the things I picked up from it is that this is a problem democratic regimes can face when taking over from horrifying dictators. The sequence (according to my memory of what the articles said) is something like:
Horrifying dictator signs agreement with Western company to build him a ridiculous vanity project costing significant amount of country’s GDP.
Gets overthrown.
New regime decides that the vanity project won’t be needed after all.
Company is like, but you (as a country) made a deal with us. We’ve committed funds to this vanity project. (I don’t remember but wouldn’t be surprised at: if you rescind now you’ll trigger a bunch of break clauses, that no sane regime would have agreed to in the first place but horrifying dictators maybe don’t even bother to read.)
There’s a court that gets to enforce things like this, at penalty of exclusion from significant parts of the international monetary system, or something.
Court treats new regime as continuous with old regime, enforces agreements signed by horrifying dictator.
You don’t even need a horrifying dictator. Suppose that Trump decides to build a huge wall on the border with Mexico, and signs (in the name of the government) a 20 years project with some construction company to build that wall. Then Biden wins… but he is still required to keep paying the money to the construction company. Hypothetically, imagine that the contract is so expensive that it does not leave Biden enough money to pay for his programs—the things that people who elected him want.
In some sense, a “long-term contract” and “democracy” are in contradiction. Democracy assumes that every 4 years you can change the government. Long-term contracts mean that despite doing that, in certain aspects you remain de facto governed by the old government (or pay the penalties specified in the contract, which may be insanely big).
Not sure what this all means… You can’t have democracy without breaking promises?
Or maybe we need a new mechanism for long-term promises? For example, you can create a fund, as a legal entity separate from the government, put some amount of money there, and provide an algorithm such as “every year, if the condition X is met, send Y of this fund’s money to South Korea, otherwise return all the money to US government and disband this fund”. But you cannot contractually make the future governments put more money into this fund. So it is clear to everyone that the fund operates with a limited budget. (And maybe, if the future governments decide so, they can put more money into the fund. But they are in no way required to do so.)