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A Fantastic Article defending Unilateralism-From the Wilson Quaterly!
(For Aris, of course)
Here is a selection from the article
The fundamental question is this: Which of two visions of world order will the United States use its vast power to advance? Since World War II, much of “old” Europe has been pursuing an antinational, antidemocratic world constitutionalism that, for all its idealism and achievements, is irreconcilable with America’s commitment to democratic self-government.

There is, among international lawyers, a hazy notion that the emergence of the international community in the world of law and politics is itself a democratic development. The unfortunate reality, however, is that international law is a threat to democracy and to the hopes of democratic politics all over the world. For some, that may be a reason to support internationalism; for others, a reason to oppose it. Either way, the fundamental conflicts between democracy and international law must be recognized.

The United Nations and the other institutions of international law take world government as their ideal. In theory, there’s no necessary conflict between democracy and the ideal of a world government. A world government could be perfectly democratic—if there were world democracy. But at present, there is no world democracy, and, as a consequence, international governance organizations are, at present, necessarily and irremediably antidemocratic.

The antidemocratic qualities of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and other international governance organizations—their centralization, their opacity, their remoteness from popular or representative politics, their elitism, their unaccountability—are well known. Internationalists counter this criticism by pointing to the growing influence of “nongovernmental organizations” (NGOs) in international law circles, as if these equally unaccountable, self-appointed, unrepresentative organizations somehow spoke for world public opinion. But the fundamentally antidemocratic nature of international governance is not merely a small hole that NGOs might plug. World government in the absence of world democracy is necessarily technocratic, bureaucratic, diplomatic—everything but democratic.

Nor are international organizations undemocratic only in themselves; they undermine the hopes and vitality of democratic politics elsewhere. The point is familiar to every nation in Latin America that has seen its internal policies dictated by IMF or World Bank directives. To an increasing extent, democratic politics throughout the developing world is being displaced by a relentless demand for competitiveness and growth, which are authoritatively interpreted by international organs to require the implementation of designated social, political, and economic policies (so far, these have had rather mixed success in delivering competitiveness and growth, though they have contributed to several national catastrophes, as in Argentina).

The irony is that the United States remains the world’s greatest champion of internationalism in economic affairs. Weaker countries correctly perceive U.S.-led marketization programs as deeply undercutting their own ability to decide for themselves what their social and economic policies should be. To be sure, the United States does not exactly force economic policy on other countries. Ruling elites agree to the emasculation of their countries’ politics in order to get their hands on the money. But the result is the same: Democracy is hollowed out.

So all the talk of U.S. unilateralism needs an important qualification. The United States plays utterly contradictory roles on the international stage: It champions multilateralism on the economic front, because worldwide free trade and marketization are perceived to serve U.S. interests, and resists it elsewhere. But if a commitment to democracy is what underlies America’s growing unilateralism today on matters of war, criminal law, human rights, and the environment, that commitment is violated wherever U.S.-led international economic organizations cripple the possibilities of democracy under the guise of free-trade principles and loan conditionality.

The American and French revolutions tied democracy to the ideal of a self-determining nation. (If the European Union should successfully forge itself into a democratic mega-nation, it would be another example of this linkage, not a counterexample.) Two hundred years later, there remains no realistic prospect of world democracy, and if there were such a prospect, the United States would resist it, because world decision making would very likely be unfriendly to America. But though the United States would be no friend of world democracy, it ought to be a friend to a world of democracies, of self-governing nation-states, each a democracy in its own politics. For now, the hopes of democratic politics are tied to the fortunes of the nation-state.

Europeans tend to neglect or minimize the damage that universal constitutionalism does to the prospects for variation, experimentation, and radical change opened up by national democracy. So long as democracy is allied with national self-government rather than with world governance, it remains an experimental ideal, dedicated to the possibility of variation, perhaps radical variation, among peoples with different values and different objectives. Democratic national constitutionalism may be parochial within a given nation, but it’s cosmopolitan across nations. Democratic peoples are permitted, even expected, to take different paths. They’re permitted, even expected, to go to hell in their own way.

That is what the ideology of international human rights and of a global market will not allow. Both press for uniformity among nations on some of the most basic questions of politics. Both, therefore, stand against democracy.

The response from the Right will be that a market economy is a precondition of a flourishing democracy, so international free trade and lending institutions cannot be called antidemocratic. Rejecting the Right’s claim to the transcendental democratic necessity of the IMF or the World Trade Organization, the Left will reply that the existence of a capitalist economy and the particular form it should take are matters for independent nations to decide for themselves. But the Left, for its part, will insist that international human rights, the abolition of the death penalty, and environmental protections are necessary preconditions of democracy. To which the Right will reply that these are matters for independent nations to decide for themselves.

Claims that any particular multilateral order, whether humanitarian or economic, is a necessary condition of democracy should be received with extreme skepticism. We all tend to sympathize with such claims when they’re made in behalf of policies we support, but to see through the same claims when they’re in behalf of policies we oppose. To be sure, in some cases of national crisis and political breakdown, international governance has brought about stability and democratization. And for the many nations incapable at present of sustaining a flourishing democratic politics, international law offers the hope of economic and political reforms these nations cannot achieve on their own. But every time a functioning, self-determining nation surrenders itself to the tender mercies of international economic or political regimes, it pays a price. The idea that men and women can be their own governors is sacrificed, and democracy suffers a loss.

The justification of unilateralism outlined here is not intended to condone American disdain for the views of other nations. On the contrary, America should always show a decent respect for the opinions of the rest of mankind, and America would be a far safer, healthier place if it could win back some of the support and affection it has lost. Unilateralism does not set its teeth against international cooperation or coalition building. What sets its teeth on edge is the shift that occurs when such cooperation takes the form of binding agreements administered, interpreted, and enforced by multilateral bodies—the shift, in other words, from international cooperation to international law. America’s commitment to democratic self-government gives the United States good reason to be skeptical about—indeed, to resist—international legal regimes structured, as they now are, around antinationalist and antidemocratic principles.

The unilateralism I am defending is not a license for aggressive U.S. militarism. It is commanded by the aspirations of democracy and would violate its own essential principles if it were to become an engine of empire. But the great and unsettling fact of 21st-century global governance is that America is doomed to become something like a world policeman. With the development of small, uncontainable nuclear technologies, and with the inability of the United Nations to do the job, the United States will be in the business of using force abroad against real or feared criminal activity to a far greater extent than ever before.

This new American role will be deeply dangerous, to other nations and to our own, not least because American presidents may be tempted to use the role of world’s law enforcer as a justification for a new American militarism that has the United States constantly waging or preparing for war. If the United States is going to act unilaterally abroad, it’s imperative that in our domestic politics we retain mechanisms for combating presidential overreaching.

Since September 11, 2001, the White House has flirted with a dangerous double unilateralism, joining the president’s willingness to act without international consent abroad to an effort to bypass Congress and the judiciary at home. In December 2001, without congressional approval, the president announced the withdrawal of the United States from an important missile treaty with Russia. In early 2002, the White House began claiming a presidential power to deem any individual, including an American citizen arrested on American soil, an “enemy combatant” and on that basis to imprison him indefinitely, with no judicial review. Later that year, the president came close to asserting a power to make war on Iraq without express congressional authorization.

This double unilateralism, which leaves presidential power altogether unchecked, is a great danger. If we are to be unilateralists abroad, we have a special responsibility—to ourselves and to the world—to maintain and reinvigorate the vital checks and balances of American constitutionalism at home.
This is just a fragment of the article in question, check it out
Posted by: Ernest Brown 2004-05-01
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=31919