A Sovereign Nation?

NOW HERE was a strange and novel doctrine. America apparently had no right to defend herself without the approval of China, Russia, France, Belgium, and Cameroon. Whatever one thought of the war itself, it was hard to see how it either gained or lost moral legitimacy from a U.N. headcount. Yet such had become the case. Long before the Iraq war, the good old American doctrine of sovereignty had lost out in a below-the-radar war of ideas. How this great transformation from national sovereignty to global governance came about and what it portends for the future are the subjects of Jeremy Rabkin’s insightful new book The Case for Sovereignty: Why The World Should Welcome American Independence.

A professor at Cornell University, Rabkin has written a fiercely argued defense of sovereignty. The book is meticulously footnoted and scholarly in its discussion of the likes of Hugo Grotius, Jean Bodin, and the Federalist Papers, as well as contemporary trade agreements, treaties, and international jurisprudence. But the book is clearly meant to be read not so much by scholars as citizens–by Americans who want to understand the movements in intellectual plate tectonics that have of late put their country on the moral and political defensive. And if the book is written for citizens, it is also written by one. Rabkin does not write in scholarly detachment but as one who palpably fears for the future of his country.

Today, because the United States failed to win U.N. authorization for its use of force, the Iraq war is widely viewed among both European and American liberals as an illegal, immoral war. It’s tempting to chalk this up to mere politics or resentment against American power. Yes, France wants to serve as the great counterweight to the American “hyperpower,” and Democrats long for a Kerry victory in November. But, as Rabkin demonstrates, deeper forces are at play. A moral revolution has taken place over the last several decades, one that rejects the notion of national sovereignty. What’s needed, Rabkin believes, is not merely a political argument in favor of Bush’s foreign policy, but a moral defense of the idea of sovereignty, as such. Only then will America’s recent actions be seen in their proper context and thus become intellectually respectable and morally defensible.

This is the service Rabkin’s book performs. The Case for Sovereignty provides us with a historical and intellectual genealogy of the idea of sovereignty, as well as its would-be replacement, global governance. Today, as Rabkin concedes, national sovereignty is widely thought to be a selfish concept and, worse, the cause of conflict among nations. It is also thought to be antidemocratic and chauvinistic. Yet, by means of several forays into intellectual history, Rabkin shows this to be utterly mistaken. Sovereignty is the friend of democracy, human rights, and political pluralism, while global governance is the abettor of dictatorship, lost rights, and a worldwide political monoculture.

In the history of political thought, sovereignty is a relatively new idea. It emerged only with the Enlightenment. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe was wracked by unlimited wars. Crusading, transcendent faiths–religious and other–demanded universal allegiance. Borders were of no consequence. It was to impose order on this dire situation that the idea of sovereignty was first invented by such early thinkers as Grotius and Bodin, among others. They viewed it as a way of consolidating and confining political power and thereby limiting the reach and effects of war. Thus, in their treatises, these political philosophers attempted to identify what was essential to the proper exercise of sovereignty: the power to make laws, the power to tax, and the power to declare war as well as to terminate hostilities. The lists were long and varied, but as Rabkin recounts, the attributes of sovereignty were neatly summarized hundreds of years later by Abraham Lincoln when, in defense of the rights of the Union, he declared sovereignty must mean at the very least “a political community, without a political superior.”

THE ACCEPTANCE of the idea of sovereignty led over time to the formation and spread of nation-states–which are powerful political units indeed and not always to the good, as nationalism is a sword that a variety of dictators and adventurers would find useful. But sovereignty has worked, Rabkin argues, most of all as the handmaiden of many of our most cherished liberal democratic ideals. It encouraged the growth of democracy, particularly by enforcing the notion that consent of individuals is the ultimate source of political authority. It allowed political pluralism to flourish. It cultivated the ideal of religious toleration, with citizenship open to all consenting individuals regardless of faith. And it has been the friend of limited government, since sovereignty begins with the rights of individuals.

Rabkin calls this “the moral argument for sovereignty,” and the alternative mode of organizing political life, he argues, has always been a “crusading faith”–as demonstrated, most recently, in the liberal dream of global governance. Rabkin provides a useful service by showing just how similar the contemporary European left’s arguments in favor of international lawmaking and global rule sound to those of old Nazi propagandists. He dryly notes that Hitler too dreamed of a united Europe free of warring states.

Rabkin draws polemical advantage from these parallels, but as he also shows there is real substance to the charge. If the political community is not to be defined by national constitutional forms and structures, then other ties will inevitably compete for people’s allegiance. All too often, it seems, racial identity becomes the fulcrum of political identity, as in fact happened in the 1930s and 1940s. Similarly today, as Rabkin also notes, “with so much political authority delegated to supranational bureaucrats, national identity came increasingly [in Europe] to be conceived in cultural or ethnic terms.” Utopian universalism seems always to breed its opposite–the worst extremes in ethnic particularism.

The problem is not simply a European one, or a matter of pesky French diplomats trying to delegitimize American actions in the forums of the United Nations. Far more subversively, the global governance project is working to overcome sovereignty from within. Rabkin catalogs the many and varied ways American judges have begun to undermine America as a sovereign constitutional republic. Though the Constitution explicitly declares itself to be “the supreme Law of the Land,” and though judges are sworn to uphold it as such, they increasingly appeal to international understandings and foreign court decisions as determinative. Even the Supreme Court has done so.

The assaults on American sovereignty by Euro-diplomats and American law professors can seem to be, as Rabkin concedes, “simply a matter of legal technicalities.” But, as he is at pains to point out, much more is at stake, and the public needs to pay attention. “It is about preserving a structure under which Americans–in all their diversity, with all their rights, and all their differences of opinion–can live together in confidence and mutual respect, as fellow citizens of the same solid republic.”

To see what’s truly at issue try this thought experiment: What if the European left and global-governance zealots were to achieve their aims? How would our constitutional republic be transformed? Global governance means that we’ll no longer live under laws passed by our elected representatives, but under evolving standards set by international diplomats. How each of us makes a living will be subject to decisions by World Trade Organization appellate judges. National economic development and growth will be dictated by the likes of the draconian Kyoto Protocol. The moral standards by which we live–for example, the legality of the death penalty in America–will be forced into compliance with French sentiment. And finally, when and how to defend our country will be left up to Kofi Annan and other U.N. bureaucrats.

This is not self-government, but national suicide. Rabkin’s alarm bell should be heard and heeded.

Adam Wolfson is editor of the Public Interest.