Table of Contents
F OR SEVERAL DECADES, Americans have slept while their national sovereignty has been threatened, chipped away, and eroded by a series of innocuous-sounding and nearly imperceptible decisions. Building on years of writing, conference-going, resolution-passing, and networking, opponents of unfettered U.S. sovereignty have been fashioning constraints on the exercise of our fundamental democratic rights, national power, and legitimacy. We have been locked in a struggle between sovereignty and global governance that most Americans didnt even know was happening. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Americanists have been losing to the globalists, and the general public does not yet appreciate the chasm between these two worldviews. In fact, there hasnt been much of a battle elsewhere in the world either; we can have a truly robust debate only in America because of the basic faith we have in our own institutions and freedoms.
The important point is to get the discussion started. It is time for a fire bell in the night, a little contemporary common sense about what has been going on all around us. This is not a confrontation over that favorite buzz-word, globalization, and its implications for commerce, culture, and travel, but a debate about power and government - our power and our government.
We can have a truly robust debate only in America because of the basic faith we have in our own institutions and freedoms.
KEY ISSUES IN THE SOVEREIGNTY DEBATE DURING THE OBAMA ERA
What Is Sovereignty, and Why Is It Especially Important for the United States?
Sovereignty may seem like an enormous abstraction, gauzy and hard to understand.
Indeed, it has a huge range of definitions, complicated and often contradictory, thus ironically making it easier for some people to believe that sovereignty is less important than it actually is. Coined originally in Europe to describe the authority of kings and queens - the sovereigns - the concept evolved rapidly after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia to refer to nation-states. National sovereignty now generally encompasses the fullest range of state power: dealing with other international actors (foreign and defense policy); control over borders (immigration and customs); and exercising authority domestically (economic and social policy). Whatever the intricacies and complexities of measuring and exercising legitimate governmental authority, these powers are basic.
Despite the raging academic debates over the precise definition and measurement of sovereignty, for Americans, the idea is actually quite straightforward. The Founding Fathers understood it implicitly, and they took care in the Declaration of Independence to explain why they were ready to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of natures God entitle them. On July 4, 1776, our sovereignty moved from George III to us, We the People of the United States, as the Constitution later described it.
This is fundamental. For Americans, sovereignty is not simply an academic abstraction. For us, sovereignty is our control over our own government. Thus, advocates of sharing or pooling U.S. sovereignty with international organizations to address global problems are really saying we should cede some of our sovereignty to institutions that other nations will also influence or even control. That is unquestionably a formula for reducing U.S. autonomy and reducing our control over government. Since most Americans believe they do not have adequate control over the federal government now , it is no wonder they are reluctant to cede even more of that control to distant bodies where our influence is reduced or uncertain. Indeed, wasnt that what our Revolution was about in the first place?
What Is Global Governance, and Why Is It a Threat to U.S. Sovereignty?
Opponents of U.S. sovereignty used to applaud world government, thus providing an easy target, since there has never been more than a shred of sympathy here for such an idea. Over time, academics and activists alike have therefore adopted the phrase global governance to describe a more piecemeal, less rhetorically threatening approach, reflecting also that not all global governance advocates themselves feel comfortable that their final objective is world government. The soothingly entitled 1995 blueprint, Our Global Neighborhood , argues that global governance is part of the evolution of human efforts to organize life on the planet, and the process will always be going on. This underlines the debates between Americanists, who want to preserve our sovereignty, and globalists, who want to see it, in whole or part, constrained or transferred to international organizations.
Most Americans, busy with their daily lives, have paid scant attention to the global governance debate in places like the United Nations, the European Union, and the universities. Nonetheless, academics and the international Left, despite their differences, can be heard repeating endlessly, like a Greek chorus, that national sovereignty is diminishing inexorably because of the press of global problems. They emphasize the EU example, where the drift of national authority toward EU headquarters in Brussels and away from London, Berlin, and other capitals has indeed seemed inevitable and irreversible. Global governance advocates frequently minimize the importance of re - duced sovereignty, citing, for example, the treaty-making authority. Although normally understood as an elemental example of exercising national sovereignty, treaties, say the globalists, actually limit sovereignty by reducing the scope for unilateral action. Since treaties have been around from time immemorial, what is the problem today with more ambitious treaties that diminish sovereignty somewhat more visibly? Isnt the whole argument just one of degree rather than basic philosophy? Why be so uncomfortable?
This verbal and conceptual bait and switch has, for its proponents, the further advantage of obscuring what is happening at any particular point in the seemingly endless process of negotiation that facilitates diminutions in U.S. sovereignty. Unquestionably, most threats to sovereignty grow like a coral reef rather than manifesting themselves in a particular crisis or a made-for-TV decisive moment. Moreover, the debate over sovereignty and global governance is diffuse and opaque because the battlefront stretches over a vast territory, and the scope of activity along that front varies dramatically.
The field of combat is neither well-understood nor well-watched by politicians or the media. There is nothing mysterious or sinister about the process of international negotiations, including those with profound sovereignty implications. Indeed, it is precisely the ordinariness and depressingly unremarkable nature and pace of such negotiations that guarantee they do not cause red flags to pop up until each negotiation is essentially complete and the final agreement available for public and legislative review. Even then, the final texts are likely to be obscure, technical, and jargon-filled.
The key lies in seeing the big picture. In fact, global governance advocates have crossed a clear line of demarcation. The millennia-old notion of treaties, whether political, military, or economic, expanded after World War II into a completely different realm, a conceptual breakout distinguishing what has been afoot for the past half-century from the historical treaty process. The EU led the way with its regional experiment, and EU diplomats and their worldwide allies sympathetic to their transnational aspirations have been spreading the gospel.
