To take the most obvious example, the Netherlands has a uranium enrichment plant that would be capable of producing enough uranium for a Hiroshima-style bomb in a few days, should the need arise. Design and construction of a primitive nuclear weapon can be done in a matter of months (possibly faster), given access to HEU.

Alternatively, any nation with a nuclear power reactor could simply make a crude, but perfectly effective device out of the reactor-grade plutonium in their existing spent fuel. Nothing like as powerful as the nukes built by the existing powers, but sufficient to kill everything within at least a 500 metre radius of the bomb going off.

Given the ease with which Europe’s nations could construct an effective deterrent, a conventional military threat to Europe, now or into the future, is pretty hard to envisiage.

what I was arguing isn’t about hypothetical versus actual publicity tests. It’s about what it would take to pass a publicity test full-stop. All hypothetical tests must be relative to some fixed points, presumably – for example, if in the version you posited, we stipulated that everyone forgot everything they’d known about the political arrangements they lived under immediately after they’d been told it, or didn’t mind being systematically lied to, then ‘noble lie’ type rationales could be made public. The version that Morgan is using appeals to reasons that a citizen accepting some minimal moral principles could accept. That’s his fixed point. What I’m saying is, it seems to me like a reasonable stipulation on a publicity test that citizens don’t have to have complex knowledge the average citizen lacks to make sense of the claims that are being made to them. I’m suggesting another fixed point.

This doesn’t seem to me like a significant departure from Morgan’s version: what appears to motivate his is the thought that you have to make some compromise with the moral beliefs people happen to have, while what motivates the additional requirement that I’m suggesting is that you have to make some compromise with the fact that we’re not all university-educated, let alone university-educated in particular subjects. Although I can see why you might think this is about hypothetical versus actual publicity tests, it’s not: you don’t have to run the test to know that most people don’t understand advanced particle physics, for example.

It also seems to me impeccably Rawlsian. After all, Rawls sees public reason as one of the driving forces behind the need to accept that “politics in a democratic society can never be guided by what we see as the whole truth” and that we have to live in accordance with the “principle of legitimacy… with others in the light of reasons all might reasonably be expected to endorse”. It strikes me as markedly unreasonable to expect that everyone learn advanced particle physics.

There I argue that citizens of a democratic community are required to advance arguments to one another that they can reasonably expect to be accessible to their fellow citizens in circumstances where the division of labour means that there are necessarily limits placed on the technical capacity even of well-informed and willing members of a polity. You can’t just chuck a highly abstruse game theoretical argument at your fellow citizens and claim to have satisfied the burdens of justification.

(I run a parallel with some of Sylvain Bromberger’s work on “to explain” as a success verb: it is perfectly possible to present a person with a scientifically correct explanation of some phenomenon and, at the same time, utterly fail to explain that phenomenon to them, because they are not equipped to receive the “explanation”.)

The SEP article on the concept begins with

Kant’s hypothetical publicity test …”All actions relating to the right of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is incompatible with publicity.”

I think something like that is the customary meaning. The publicity principle rules out reasons that could not in principle be made public, because they rely on some share of the relevant actors believing something to the contrary. The streeotypical Straussian “God doesn’t exist and everything is permitted but whatever you do don’t tell the masses” [bracketing the question of whether that stereotype is accurate], Plato’s noble lie, and a utilitarianism that rests on the usefulness of the masses believing in deontology are the paradigmatic violations of the principle. There might be more exacting versions of the principle, where, e.g., actual rather than hypothetical publicity is required. But insisting on at least hypothetical publicity really does rule out a lot and set serious moral bounds on politics. I think that the standard version of the PP just insists that the maxim not be incompatible with publicity, not that there be evidence of real publicity; I think I’m using the concept a la Kant and Rawls and not in some strange way. The more excting version would require a diffeen,t and non-Kantian, defense.

On another question, I think we’ve seen that decentralized (guerilla) forces at quite effective at undermining occupations and other unpopular governments. Aggressive warfare, probably not so much. But should capacity for aggression be a requirement?

Germans Leave in Record Numbers, Fleeing Unemployment
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aaiYvU1EuM2A&refer=news

“Thomas Koerber, an engineering technician from Viernheim, Germany, was looking for a new job. He found it—4,700 miles away, in Canada.”

Bet you the numbers will have doubled by this time next year. Wonder will Habermas be joining them? He’d love Canada. Lots of Europeans, bears, forests, maple syrup… and the chance to slip over the border now and then and see free markets in action.

Are there in fact any examples where Morgan’s hermeneutics of the “real reasons” why states work have aligned with public opinion on the same question? Economies of geo-political scale hasn’t been a leading current in European populist nationalism, I can assert with some confidence. (It may have motivated Bismarck, but it surely didn’t Herder, for example.)

(Disclaimer: I am currently a student on the Open University’s excellent course State, Economy and Nation, and I did notice you didn’t have space for nationalisme, but I can’t see the project of widespread legimisation of political institutions in any other light.)

but that seems like a strange version of the publicity requirement. Usually, the publicity requirement isn’t just thought to rule out deliberate mass deception, but to require engagement with the public in question. I’d always thought that the motivating thought behind a publicity requirement was that arguments needed to be public to be something the relevant public (or enough members of it, or whatever) could consent to. But I can’t consent to something I don’t understand, and furthermore, it doesn’t seem to be public, at least so far as I am concerned: it’s certainly not something I and anyone else can have in common, since I don’t know what it is. Obviously, engagement is required on both sides, but deliberately phrasing arguments in terms which are not comprehensible to a well-intentioned and reasonably diligent citizen does seem to me like a violation of publicity.