"Because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber ...

... whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor."

Johann Hari, writing for The Independent, is referring to this passage from Augustine's City of God:

Justice taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed upon. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, "What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor."

Augustine provides what must be one of the earliest constructivist accounts of piracy, and, as Hari points out, context -- governmental collapse, nuclear and heavy metal waste disposal in the Gulf, and overfishing -- still matters in contemporary piracy. He is careful to state these factors do not excuse hostage-taking, but notes:

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won't act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem –but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world's oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.

Hari also alludes pirates' egalitarian political organization (discussed in some depth here), suggesting that this and their rebellion against authoritarianism contributed to their romanticization:

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively, without torture. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century". They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy." This is why they were romantic heroes, despite being unproductive thieves.

Hari's op-ed is juxtaposed with Daniel Henninger's in today's Wall Street Journal, which manages, in one fell swoop, to compare pirates to North Korea, Iran, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hugo Chavez. Henninger concludes:

We need to understand that these are not just security threats but a systemic threat. Each weakly answered pirate affront erodes the public's confidence in the West's promise of an ordered world. The erosion is persistent and cumulative. A crack sometimes falls apart. The world's foreign ministries and foreign policy intellectuals, secure in the calm sun that rises each morning where they live, try to make all this seem complex and very difficult. What we saw in the floodtide of jubilation over the rescue of Capt. Phillips is that eventually it's not complicated.

Desipte Hari and Henninger's wildly divergent perspectives, both of them, like Augustine, have identified the threat piracy poses to extant international orders (for good or ill). The negotiation of this shifting border between state and non-state, legitimate and illegitimate that, has shaped both the identity of pirate, and as Janice E. Thomson argues in Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, the identity of the modern state. We happen to find this idea very, very cool.

The Roguish Commonwealth thanks Fletcher for sending the Independent op-ed our way; I'd been waiting for a good opening to work City of God into the pirate blog!