Nearly a year before the September 11
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, wire service stories gave us
a preview of the transnational politics of the future. It was reported on
October 24, 2000, that in preparation for the UN Conference Against Racism,
about 50 American nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) sent a formal letter to
UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson calling on the UN “to hold the United
States accountable for the intractable and persistent problem of discrimination”
that “men and women of color face at the hands of the US criminal justice
system” (Goodman, 2000).1
The spokesman for the NGOs, Wade Henderson,
of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, stated that their demands “had
been repeatedly raised with federal and state officials [in the United States]
but to little effect. ...In frustration we now turn to the United Nations”
(Goodman, 2000). In other words, the NGOs, unable to enact the policies they
favored through the normal processes of American constitutional democracy – the
Congress, state governments, state courts, the federal executive branch, or even
the federal courts – felt it necessary to appeal to authority outside of
American democracy and beyond its Constitution.
From August 31, to September 7, 2001, the
UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and
Related Intolerance was held in Durban, South Africa. The American NGOs attended
the conference with financial support from the Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur, and
Charles Stewart Mott Foundations. At the conference the NGOs worked with
delegates from African states that supported “reparations” from Western nations
as compensation for the transatlantic slave trade of the 17th to 19th centuries.
American NGOs provided research assistance and helped develop reparations
resolutions that condemned only the West, without mentioning the larger traffic
in African slaves that were sent to the Islamic lands of the Middle East and
conducted, in large part, by Arabs. In addition, the NGOs endorsed a series of
demands, including:
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US acknowledgment of “the breadth and
pervasiveness of institutional racism” that “permeates every institution
at every level”.
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A declaration that “racial bias
corrupts every stage of the [US] criminal justice process, from suspicion
to investigation, arrest, prosecution, trial, and sentencing.”
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Support and expansion of federal and
state hate crimes legislation.
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Condemnation of opposition to
affirmative action measures.
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US recognition of an adequate
standard of living as a “right, not privilege”.
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A statement deploring “denial of
economic rights” in the United States.
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Promotion of multilingualism instead
of “discriminatory” English language acquisition emphasis in US schools.
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Denunciation of free market
capitalism as a fundamentally flawed system” (International Human Rights
Group, 2001).
Most importantly, the NGOs insisted that
the United States ratify all major UN human rights treaties and drop legal
reservations to treaties already ratified. For example, in 1994 the United
States ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
(CERD), but attached reservations declaring that it did not accept treaty
requirements “incompatible with the Constitution”. The official State Department
reservations memorandum specifically notes that the CERD’s restrictions on free
speech and freedom of assembly are incompatible with the First Amendment. Yet
leading NGOs including the HRW and Amnesty International USA (AI-USA) demanded
that the United States drop all reservations and “comply” with the CERD treaty
(Iley, 2001).
An NGO representative from the Center for
Constitutional Rights reportedly said that “Almost every member of the UN
committee raised the question of why there are vast racial disparities ...in
every aspect of American life – education, housing, health, welfare, criminal
justice.” A representative from HRW declared that the United States offered “no
remedies” for these disparities, but “simply restated” its position by
supporting equality of opportunity and indicating “no willingness to comply”
with CERD (Iley, 2001). This would presumably mean the enactment of policies
resulting in statistical equality of condition for racial and ethnic minorities
in education, housing, health, welfare, criminal justice and the like. Indeed,
to comply with the NGO interpretation of the CERD treaty, the United States
would have to turn its political and economic system, together with their
underlying principles, upside down-abandoning the free speech guarantees of the
Constitution, bypassing federalism, and ignoring the very concept of majority
rule, since practically nothing in the NGO agenda is supported by the American
electorate.
The NGOs at the Durban conference exemplify
a new challenge to liberal democracy and its traditional home, the liberal
democratic nationstate. These have always been self-governing representative
systems comprised of individual citizens who enjoy freedom and equality under
law and together form a people within a democratic nation-state. Thus, liberal
democracy means individual rights, democratic representation (with some form of
majority rule) and national citizenship. Yet, as the Durban conference
demonstrated, all of these principles, along with the very idea of the liberal
democratic nation-state, are contested today in the West. Obviously, we are far
from the ideological “end of history” delineated by Francis Fukuyama (1989).
Post-September 11
Three weeks after the September 11 attacks,
Fukuyama stated that his “end of history” thesis remained valid twelve years
after he first presented it, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall
(Fukuyama, 2001). Fukuyama’s core argument was that after the defeat of
communism and national socialism, no serious ideological competitor to
Western-style liberal democracy was likely to emerge in the future. Thus, in
terms of political philosophy, liberal democracy is the end of the evolutionary
process. To be sure, there will be wars and terrorism, but no alternative
ideology with a universal appeal will seriously challenge the ideas and values
of Western liberal democracy as the “dominant organizing principles” around the
world.
Fukuyama correctly points out that
non-democratic rival ideologies such as radical Islam and “Asian values” have
little appeal outside their own cultural areas, but these areas are themselves
vulnerable to penetration by Western democratic ideas. The September 11 attacks
notwithstanding, “we remain at the end of history”, Fukuyama insists, “because
there is only one system that will continue to dominate world politics, that of
the liberal-democratic West.” There is nothing beyond liberal democracy “towards
which we could expect to evolve”. Fukuyama concludes by stating that there will
be challenges from those who resist progress, “but time and resources are on the
side of modernity” (Fukuyama, 2001).
Indeed, but is “modernity” on the side of
liberal democracy? Fukuyama is probably right that the current crisis with the
forces of radical Islam will be overcome, and that, at the end of the day, there
will be no serious ideological challenge originating outside of Western
civilization. However, the activities of the NGOs suggest that there already is
an alternative ideology to liberal democracy within the West that for decades
has been steadily, and almost imperceptibly, evolving. Thus, it is entirely
possible that modernity – 30 or 40 years hence – will witness not the final
triumph of liberal democracy, but a new challenge to it in the form of a new
transnational hybrid regime that is post-liberal democratic, and in the context
of the American republic, post-Constitutional and post-American. I will call
this alternative ideology “transnational progressivism”. This ideology
constitutes a universal and modern worldview that challenges in theory and
practice both the liberal democratic nation-state in general and the American
regime in particular.
Transnational Progressivism
The key concepts of transnational
progressivism could be described as follows:
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The ascribed group takes
precedence over the individual citizen. The key political unit is not
the individual citizen, who forms voluntary associations and works with
fellow citizens regardless of race, sex, or national origin, but the
ascriptive group (racial, ethnic, or gender) into which one is born. This
emphasis on race, ethnicity, and gender leads to group consciousness and a
deemphasis of the individual’s capacity for choice and for transcendence
of ascriptive categories, joining with others beyond the confines of
social class, tribe, and gender to create a cohesive nation.
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A dichotomy of groups: Oppressor
vs. victim groups, with immigrant groups designated as victims.
Influenced (however indirectly) by the Hegelian Marxist thinking
associated with the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and the
Central European theorists known as the Frankfurt School, global
progressives posit that throughout human history there are essentially two
types of groups: the oppressor and the oppressed, the privileged and the
marginalized. In the United States, oppressor groups would variously
include white males, heterosexuals, and Anglos, whereas victim groups
would include blacks, gays, Latinos (including obviously many immigrants),
and women. Multicultural ideologists have incorporated this essentially
Hegelian Marxist “privileged vs. marginalized” dichotomy into their
theoretical framework. As political philosopher James Ceaser puts it,
multiculturalism is not “multi” or concerned with many groups, but
“binary”, concerned with two groups, the hegemon (bad) and “the Other”
(good) or the oppressor and the oppressed. Thus, in global progressive
ideology, “equity” and “social justice” mean strengthening the position of
the victim groups and weakening the position of oppressors-hence
preferences for certain groups are justified. Accordingly, equality under
law is replaced by legal preferences for traditionally victimized groups.
In 1999, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission extended
anti-discrimination protection under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights
Act to illegal immigrants.
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Group proportionalism as the goal
of “fairness”. Transnational progressivism assumes that “victim”
groups should be represented in all professions roughly proportionate to
their percentage of the population or, at least, of the local work force.
Thus, if women make up 52% and Latinos make up 10% of the population, then
52% of all corporate executives, physicians, and insurance salesmen should
be women and 10% should be Latinos. If not, there is a problem of
“underrepresentation” or imbalance that must be rectified by government
and civil society. Thomas Sowell has repeatedly emphasized that many
Western intellectuals perpetually promote some version of “cosmic justice”
or form of equality of result (Sowell, 1999).
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The values of all dominant
institutions to be changed to reflect the perspectives of the victim
groups. Transnational progressives insist that it is not enough to
have proportional representation of minorities (including immigrants,
legal and illegal) at all levels in major institutions of society
(corporations, places of worship, universities, armed forces) if these
institutions continue to reflect a “white Anglo male culture and world
view”. Ethnic and linguistic minorities have different ways of viewing the
world, they say, and these minorities’ values and cultures must be
respected and represented within these institutions. At a 1998 US
Department of Education conference promoting bilingual education, SUNY
professor Joel Spring declared, “We must use multiculturalism and
multilingualism to change the dominant culture of the United States.”
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The demographic imperative.
The demographic imperative tells us that major demographic changes
are occurring in the United States as millions of new immigrants from
non-Western cultures and their children enter the United States. At the
same time, the global interdependence of the world’s peoples and the
transnational connections among them will increase. All of these changes
render the traditional paradigm of American nationhood obsolete. That
traditional paradigm based on individual rights, majority rule, national
sovereignty, citizenship, and the assimilation of immigrants into an
existing American civic culture is too narrow and must be changed into a
system that promotes “diversity”, defined as group proportionalism.
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The redefinition of democracy and
“democratic ideals”. Since Fukayama’s treatise, transnational
progressives have been altering the definition of “democracy”, from that
of a system of majority rule among equal citizens to one of power sharing
among ethnic groups composed of both citizens and non-citizens. Former
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) general counsel Alexander
Aleinikoff, declared that “[we] live in a post-assimilationist age.” He
asserted that majority preferences simply “reflect the norms and cultures
of dominant groups”, as opposed to the norms and cultures of “feminists
and people of color”(Aleinikoff, 1990). James Banks, one of American
education’s leading textbook writers noted that “to create an authentic
democratic Unum with moral authority and perceived legitimacy, the
Pluribus (diverse peoples) must negotiate and share power” (Banks, 1994).
In effect, Banks said, existing American liberal democracy is not quite
authentic; real democracy is yet to be created. It will come when the
different “peoples” or groups that live within America “share power” as
groups.
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Deconstruction of national
narratives and national symbols. Transnational progressives have
focused on traditional narratives and national symbols of Western
democratic nation-states, questioning union and nationhood itself. In
October 2000, the British government-sponsored Commission on the Future of
Multi-Ethnic Britain issued a report that denounced the concept of
“Britishness” as having “systemic...racist connotations”. The Commission,
chaired by Labour life peer Lord Parekh, declared that instead of defining
itself as a nation, the UK should be considered a “community of
communities”. One member of the Commission explained that the members
found the concepts of “Britain” and “nation” troubling. The purpose of the
Commission’s report, according to the chairman Professor Parekh, was to
“shape and restructure the consciousness of our citizens”. The report
declared that Britain should be formally “recognized as a multi-cultural
society” whose history needed to be “revised, rethought, or jettisoned”
(Johnston, 2000). In the United States in the mid-1990s, the proposed
“National History Standards”, reflecting the marked influence of
multiculturalism among historians in the nation’s universities,
recommended altering the traditional narrative of the United States.
Instead of emphasizing the story of European settlers, American
civilization would be redefined as a “convergence” of three civilizations:
Amer-indian, West African, and European that formed the bases of a hybrid
American multiculture. The National History Standards were ultimately
rejected, but this core multicultural concept that the United States is
not primarily the creation of Western civilization but the result of a
“Great Convergence” of “three worlds” has become the dominant paradigm in
American public schools.
In Israel, adversary intellectuals have attacked the Zionist narrative. A
“post-Zionist” intelligentsia (Hazony, 1996, 1997) has proposed that
Israel consider itself multicultural and deconstruct its identity as a
Jewish state. Tom Bethell (1997) has pointed out that in the mid-1990s the
official appointed to revise Israel’s history curriculum used media
interviews to compare the Israeli armed forces to the SS and Orthodox
Jewish youth to the Hitler Youth. A new code of ethics for the Israel
Defense Forces prepared by a professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv
University eliminated all references to the “land of Israel”, the “Jewish
state”, and the “Jewish people”, and, instead, referred only to
“democracy”. Even Israeli foreign minister from the opposition Labor party
Simon Peres sounded the post-Zionist trumpet in his book,
The New Middle East
(Peres, 1993) where he wrote that “we do not need to reinforce
sovereignty, but rather to strengthen the position of humankind.” He
called for an “ultranational identity”, saying that “particularist
nationalism is fading and the idea of a ‘citizen of the world’ is taking
hold.... Our ultimate goal is the creation of a regional community of
nations, with a common market and elected centralized bodies,” a type of
Middle Eastern EU.
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Promotion of the concept of
postnational citizenship.
“Can advocates of postnational citizenship ultimately succeed in
decoupling the concept of citizenship from the nation-state in prevailing
political thought?” asks Rutgers Law Professor Linda Bosniak (2000). An
increasing number of international law professors throughout the West are
arguing that citizenship should be denationalized. Invoking concepts such
as inclusion, social justice, democratic engagement, and human rights,
they argue for transnational citizenship, postnational citizenship, or
sometimes global citizenship embedded in international human rights
accords and “evolving” forms of transnational arrangements. These
theorists insist that national citizenship should not be “privileged” at
the expense of postnational, multiple, and pluralized forms of citizenship
identities. For example, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
under the leadership of its president, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, has
published a series of books in the past few years “challenging traditional
understandings of belonging and membership” in nation-states and
“rethinking the meaning of citizenship” (Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer, 2000,
2001). Although couched in the ostensibly neutral language of social
science, these essays by scholars from Germany, Britain, Canada, and
France, as well as the United States, argue for new, transnational forms
of citizenship as a normative good.
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The idea of transnationalism as a
major conceptual tool.
The theory of transnationalism promises to be for the first decade of the
twenty-first century what multiculturalism was for the last decade of the
20th century. In a certain sense, transnationalism is the next stage of
multicultural ideology – It is multiculturalism with a global face. Like
multiculturalism, transnationalism is a concept that provides elites with
both an empirical tool (a plausible analysis of what is) and an
ideological framework (a vision of what should be). Transnational
advocates argue that globalization requires some form of transnational
“global governance” because they believe that the nation-state and the
idea of national citizenship are ill suited to deal with the global
problems of the future. Academic and public policy conferences today are
filled with discussions of “transnational organizations”, “transnational
actors”, “transnational migrants”, “transnational jurisprudence”, and
“transnational citizenship”, just as in the 1990s they were replete with
references to multiculturalism in education, citizenship, literature, and
law.
Many of the same scholars who touted
multiculturalism now herald the coming transnational age. Thus, at its August
1999 annual conference, “Transitions in World Societies”, the American
Sociological Association (ASA) that promoted multiculturalism from the late
1980s to the mid-1990s featured transnationalism. Indeed, the ASA’s
then-president, Professor Alejandro Portes of Princeton University, argued that
transnationalism is the wave of the future. He insisted that transnationalism,
combined with large-scale immigration, would redefine the meaning of American
citizenship. University of Chicago anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has suggested
that the United States is in transition from being a “land of immigrants” to
“one node in a postnational network of diasporas”(quoted in Kerber, 1997).
The promotion of transnationalism as both
an empirical and normative concept is an attempt to shape this crucial
intellectual struggle over globalization. The adherents of transnationalism
create a dichotomy. They imply that one is either in step with globalization,
and thus with transnationalism and forward-looking thinking, or one is a
backward antiglobalist. Liberal democrats (who are internationalists and support
free trade and market economics) must reply that this is a false dichotomy, that
the critical argument is not between globalists and antiglobalists, but instead
over the form Western global engagement should take in the coming decades: will
it be transnationalist or internationalist?
Transnational Progressivism’s Social Base: A Post-National
Intelligentsia
The social base of transnational
progressivism could be labeled a rising postnational intelligentsia, the leaders
of which include many international law professors at prestigious Western
universities, NGO activists, foundation officers, UN bureaucrats, EU
administrators, corporation executives, and practicing politicians throughout
the West.
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British “third way”
theorist Anthony Giddens declared that he is “in favor of pioneering some
quasi-utopian transnational forms of democracy” and “is strongly opposed
to the idea that social justice is just equality of opportunity” (Giddens,
1991). Giddens wrote that “the shortcomings of liberal democracy suggest
the need to further more radical forms of democratization.” Instead of
liberal democracy, Giddens, using the language of Jürgen Habermas, posits
a “dialogic democracy” with an emphasis on “life politics”, especially
“new social movements, such as those concerned with feminism, ecology,
peace, or human rights”.
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Italian Marxist theorist
Toni Negri (a jailed former associate of the terrorist Italian Red
Brigades) and Duke University Literature Professor Michael Hardt, use
Marxist concepts such as the “multitudes” i.e., “the masses” vs. the
Empire, to attack the power of global corporations and, without being
overly specific, call for a new form of “global” or transnational
democracy (Negri and Hardt, ).
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University of Chicago
philosophy professor Martha Nussbaum, who called for reinvigorating the
concept of “global citizenship” and denounced patriotism as
“indistinguishable from jingoism” in a debate several years back that set
off a wide ranging discussion among American academics on the meaning of
patriotism, citizenship, and the nation-state (Nussbaum, 1994).
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Strobe Talbot, former
Undersecretary of State, who wrote when he was an editor of
Time magazine
in the early 1990s that he was optimistic that by the end of the 21st
century “nationhood as we know it will be obsolete: all states will
recognize a single global authority...All countries are basically social
arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how
permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are
all artificial and temporary” (Talbot, 1992). He characterizes the
devolution of national sovereignty “upward toward supranational bodies”
and “downward toward” autonomous units is a “basically positive
phenomenon”.
Complementary to this general (and diffuse)
sentiment for new transnational forms of governance is the concrete day-to-day
practical work of the NGOs that seek to bring the transnational vision to
fruition. When social movements such as the ideologies of “transnationalism” and
“global governance” are depicted as the result of “social forces” or the
“movement of history”, a certain impersonal inevitability is implied. However,
in the twentieth century the Bolshevik Revolution, the National Socialist
Revolution, the New Deal, the Reagan Revolution, the Gaullist national
reconstruction in France, and the creation of the EU and its predecessor
organizations were not inevitable, but were the result of the exercise of
political will by elites who mobilized their strength and defeated opponents.
Similarly, “transnationalism”,
“multiculturalism”, and “global governance”, like “diversity”, are ideological
tools championed by activist elites, not “forces of history”. The success or
failure of these values-loaded concepts will ultimately depend upon the
political will and effectiveness of these elites.
Facing popular resistance on issue after
issue, a wide range of American NGOs seek to bypass the normal democratic
process to achieve their political ends by extra- or post-constitutional means,
demanding that the United States:
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join the International Criminal Court;
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ratify the UN Convention on Women’s Rights;
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drop reservations to the UN treaty against racial
discrimination;
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reduce border policing;
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implement affirmative action legislation;
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follow international norms on capital punishment;
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accept the Kyoto Treaty on global warming;
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expand the legal rights of non-citizens in
constitutional regimes.
Human Rights Activists
The main legal conflict between traditional
American liberal democrats and transnational progressives is ultimately the
question of whether the US Constitution trumps international law or vice versa.
“International law” here refers to what experts including John Bolton, Jeremy
Rabkin, Jack Goldsmith, Lee Casey, and David Rivkin have called the “new
international law”, which differs from traditional concepts of the “Law of
Nations” (Chicago Journal of
International Law, 2000).
Before the mid-20th century, traditional
international law usually referred to relations among nation-states as
“international” in the real sense of the term. Since that time the “new
international law” has increasingly penetrated the sovereignty of democratic
nation-states. It is, therefore, in reality, “transnational law”. Human rights
activists work to establish norms for this “new international (i.e.
transnational) law”, and then attempt to bring the United States into conformity
with a legal regime whose reach often extends beyond democratic politics and the
guarantees of the US Constitution. Transnational progressives (including
American and non-American NGOs and UN officials) excoriate American political,
legal, and administrative practices in virulent language, as if the American
liberal democratic nation-state was an illegitimate authoritarian regime. Thus,
AI-USA charged the United States in a 1998 report with “a persistent and
widespread pattern of human rights violations”, stating that “racism and
discrimination contribute to the denial of the fundamental rights of countless
men, women, and children” in the United States. Moreover, police brutality is
“entrenched and nation-wide”; the United States is the “world leader in high
tech repression”; and it is time for the United States to face up to its
“hypocrisy”. The report discussed “a national background of
economic and racial injustice, a rising tide of
anti-immigrant sentiments” and stated that “human rights violations in the US
occur in rural communities and urban communities from coast to coast.” The
United States had long “abdicated its duty” to lead the world in promoting human
rights (Amnesty International, 1998). Therefore, avowed William Schultz, the
executive director of AI-USA, “it was no wonder the United States was ousted
from the [UN] Human Rights Commission” (Schultz, 2001).
Overall, HRW affirmed that the United
States was guilty of “serious human rights violations” including “rampant”
police brutality and “harassment of gay adults in the military paralleled by the
harassment of students perceived to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, and
transgendered” in public schools. These students “experienced” school “as a
place that accepted intolerance, hatred, ostracization, and violence against
youth who were perceived as different”.
UN special investigators examined US “human
rights violations” in 1990s. The first thing these investigators did was meet
with an array of American NGOs. In their reports, the UN officials quoted freely
from American NGO documents. UN investigator Maurice Glélé of Benin wrote that,
“racism existed in the US with sociological inertia, structural obstacles, and
individual resistance”. Glélé visited the US State Department and found that
discrimination complaints by African American State Department employees “had
dragged on since 1986”.
Meanwhile, the report stated, the “State
Department remains a very white institution.” The UN investigator further wrote
that “the fate of the majority of
Blacks is one of poverty, sickness, illiteracy, drugs, and crime in response to
the social cul-de-sac in which they find themselves.” Rahhika Coomaraswamy of
Sri Lanka, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women found that the
United States is “criminalizing” a large segment of its population, a group that
is “composed of poor persons of color and increasingly female” (Maran, 1999).
Bacre Waly Ndiaye, UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-judical, Summary, or Arbitrary
Executions, “a significant degree of unfairness and arbitrariness in the
application of the death penalty”, based on racial data showing that 41% of
death penalty inmates in the US are African-American, 47% White, 7% Hispanic,
and 1.5% American Indian (Maran, 1999).
Anti-Assimilation on the Home Front
The Durban conference in 2001 on Racism and
Xenophobia represents a classic case of how American NGOs promote transnational
progressivism. It is revealing that the language of almost all the UN treaties
that ignore the guarantees of the US Constitution (including the International
Criminal Court (ICC), the Convention on Women’s Rights, the Convention on
Children’s Rights) were written by American and other Western NGOs. In other
words, the documents were written by a Western postnational intelligentsia aided
by a “Westernized” coterie of Third World intellectuals, including Kofi Annan.
Hardly noticed is the fact that many of the same NGOs (HRW, AI-USA.) and
international law professors who have advocated transnational legal concepts at
UN meetings and in international forums, are active in US immigration and
naturalization law. On this front the transnational progressives have pursued
two objectives: (1) eliminating all distinctions between citizens and
non-citizens and (2) vigorously opposing attempts to assimilate immigrants into
the “dominant” Anglo culture. When discussing immigration/assimilation issues,
Louis Henkin, one of the most prominent scholars of international law, attacks
“archaic notions of sovereignty” and calls for largely eliminating “the
difference between a citizen and a non-citizen permanent resident” in all
federal laws (Henkin, 1994). Stephen Legomsky argues that dual nationals who are
American citizens should not be required to give “greater weight to US
interests, in the event of a conflict” between the United States and the other
country in which the American citizen is also a national (quoted in Schuck,
1998).
Two leading law professors questioned the
requirement that immigrants seeking American citizenship “renounce ‘all
allegiance and fidelity’ to their old nations”. In an op-ed in the
Wall Street Journal
(Schuck and Spiro, 1998) they suggested dropping this “renunciation
clause” from the Oath of Renunciation and Allegiance. They also question the
concept of the hyphenated American, offering the model of “ampersand” American.
They do not object to immigrants (or migrants) who retain “loyalties” to their
“original homeland” and vote in both countries. Robert Bach authored a major
Ford Foundation report on new and “established residents” (the word “citizen”
was assiduously avoided) that advocated the “maintenance” of ethnic immigrant
identities, supported “non-citizen voting”, and attacked assimilation suggesting
that homogeneity, not diversity, “may” be the “problem in America” (Bach, 1993).
Bach later became deputy director for policy at the INS in the Clinton
administration, where he joined forces with then INS general counsel Alexander
Alienikoff to promote a pro-multicultural, anti-assimilation federal policy.
Alienikoff, an immigration law professor, has openly and vigorously advocated a
“politics” that “moves us beyond assimilation” (Alienikoff, 1998).
Congressional investigations and
investigative reporting established conclusively that the financial backing for
this anti-assimilationist campaign has come primarily from the Ford Foundation,
which in the 1970s made a conscious decision to fund a Latino rights movement
based on advocacy-litigation and group rights (Geyer, 1996). The global
progressives have been aided by a “transnational right”. It was a determined
group of transnational and libertarian-leaning conservative senators and
congressmen that prevented the Immigration Reform legislation of 1996 from
limiting unskilled immigration. The same group worked with progressives in the
late 1990s to successfully block the implementation of a computerized plan to
track the movement of foreign nationals in and out of the United States,
thereby, in George Will’s apt phrase putting “commerce over country”.
The EU as a Stronghold of Transnational Progressivism
Whereas ideologically driven NGOs represent
a subnational challenge to the values and policies of the liberal-democratic
nation-state, the EU is a large supranational macro-organization that to a
considerable extent embodies transnational progressivism, both in governmental
form and in substantive policies. The governmental structure of the EU is
post-democratic. Power in the EU principally resides in the European Commission
(EC) and to a lesser extent the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The EC is the
EU’s executive body. It also initiates legislative action, implements common
policy, and controls a large bureaucracy. The EC is composed of a rotating
presidency and nineteen commissioners chosen by the member-states and approved
by the European Parliament. It is unelected and, for the most part,
unaccountable. A white paper issued by the EC suggests that this
unaccountability is one of the reasons for its success: “The original and
essential source of the success of European Integration is that the EU’s
executive body, the Commission, is supranational and independent from national,
sectoral, or other influences.” This “democracy deficit” is constantly lamented,
particularly by the Germans, who have proposed greater power to the European
Parliament, but, at this stage, the issue remains and represents a moral
challenge to EU legitimacy (Casey and Rivkin, 2001).
The substantive polices advanced by EU
leaders both in the Commission and the ECJ are based on the global progressive
ideology of group rights discussed earlier that promotes victim groups over
“privileged” groups and eschews the liberal principle of treating citizens
equally as individuals. Thus, statutes on “hate speech”, “hate crimes”,
“comparable worth” for women’s pay, and group preferences are considerably more
“progressive” in the EU than in the United States. At the same time, European
courts have overruled national parliaments and public opinion in nation-states
by compelling the British to incorporate gays and the Germans to incorporate
women in combat units in their respective military services. The ECJ even struck
down a British law on corporal punishment, declaring that parental spanking is
internationally recognized as an abuse of human rights A group of what
Undersecretary of State John Bolton has referred to as “Americanist” (as opposed
to “Globalist”) thinkers has emphasized the divergence of America’s liberal
philosophy from the EU’s. Lee Casey and David Rivkin (2001) argued this position
forcefully:
From the perspective of US philosophical and constitutional
traditions, the key question in determining whether any particular model of
government is a democracy is whether the governed choose their governors...
Unfortunately, the reemergence [in Europe] of a pre-Enlightenment
pan-European ideology that denies the ultimate authority of the nation-state, as
well as the transfer of policymaking authority from the governed and their
elected representatives to a professional bureaucracy, as is evident in the EU’s
leading institutions, suggests a dramatic divergence from the basic principle of
popular sovereignty once shared both by Europe’s democracies and the United
States.
In the world of practical international
politics, in the period immediately prior to the events of September 11, the EU
clearly stood in opposition to the United States on some of the most important
strategic global issues, including the ICC, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,
the Land Mine Treaty, the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty, and policy towards
missile defense, Iran, Iraq, Israel, China, Cuba, North Korea, and the death
penalty. On most of these issues, transnational progressives in the United
States, including many practicing politicians, supported the EU position and
attempted to leverage this transnational influence in the domestic debate. At
the same time, the position of the Bush administration on many of these issues
has support from elements in Europe, certainly from members of the British
political class and public, and undoubtedly from some segments of the
Continental European populace as well (on the death penalty, for example).
Even since the September 11 attacks, many
Europeans have continued to snipe at American policies and place themselves in
opposition to American interests in the war on terrorism. Within a month of
September 11, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon called the planned military
tribunals “simply illegal” (Taranto, 2001). In December 2001, the European
Parliament condemned the US Patriot Act (the bipartisan antiterrorist
legislation that passed the US Congress overwhelmingly) as “contrary to the
principles” of human rights because the legislation “discriminates” against
noncitizens (Opinion Journal, 2001). Time and again, leading European
politicians have made a point of insisting that they oppose extraditing
terrorist suspects to the United States if those terrorists would be subjected
to the death penalty.
Interestingly, both conservative realists
and neoconservative prodemocracy advocates have argued that some EU, UN, and NGO
thinking threatens to limit both American democracy
at home and American power overseas. As Jeanne Kirkpatrick put
it, “foreign governments and their leaders, and more than a few activists here
at home, seek to constrain and control American power by means of elaborate
multilateral processes, global arrangements, and UN treaties that limit both our
capacity to govern ourselves and act abroad.” (Commentary, 2000).
Conclusion
Scholars, publicists, and many others in
the Western world-and especially in the United States, original home of
constitutional democracy-have for the past several decades been arguing
furiously over the most fundamental political ideas. Talk of a “culture war”,
however, is somewhat misleading, because the arguments over transnational vs.
national citizenship, multiculturalism vs. assimilation, and global governance
vs. national sovereignty are not simply cultural, but ideological and
philosophical, in that they pose such Aristotelian questions as “What kind of
government is best?” and “What is citizenship?”
In America, there is an elemental argument
about whether to preserve, improve, and transmit the American regime to future
generations or to transform it into a new and different type of polity. In the
terms of contemporary political science we are arguing about “regime
maintenance” vs. “regime transformation”.
In the final analysis, the challenge from
transnational progressivism to traditional American concepts of citizenship,
patriotism, assimilation, and at the most basic level, to the meaning of
democracy itself, is fundamental.
It is a challenge to American liberal
democracy. If our system is based not on individual rights, but on group
consciousness; not on equality of citizenship, but on group preferences for
non-citizens (including illegal immigrants) and for certain categories of
citizens; not on majority rule within constitutional limits, but on
power-sharing by different ethnic, racial, gender, and linguistic groups; not on
constitutional law, but on transnational law; not on immigrants becoming
Americans, but on migrants linked between transnational communities; then the
regime will cease to be “constitutional”, “liberal”, “democratic”, and
“American”, in the understood sense of those terms, but will become in reality a
new hybrid system that is “post-constitutional”, “postliberal”,
“post-democratic”, and “post-American”.
This intracivilizational Western conflict
between liberal democracy and transnational progressivism began in the mid to
late twentieth century; it accelerated after the Cold War and should continue
well into the 21st century. Indeed, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November
1989 until the attacks on the heart of the American republic on September 11,
2001, the transnational progressives were on the offensive.
Since September 11, however, the forces
supporting the liberal-democratic nation state have rallied. Clearly, in the
post-September 11 milieu there is a window of opportunity for those who favor a
reaffirmation of the traditional norms of liberal-democratic patriotism. The
political will to seize this opportunity is unclear. Key areas to watch include
official government policy statements for the use of force and the conduct of
war; the use and non-use of international law; assimilation-immigration policy;
border control; civic education in the public schools; and the state of the
patriotic narrative in popular culture.
Fourth Dimension?
I suggest that we add a fourth dimension to
a conceptual framework of international politics. Three dimensions are currently
recognizable. First, there is traditional realpolitik, the competition and
conflict among nationstates (and supranational states such as the EU). Second is
the competition of civilizations conceptualized by Samuel Huntington (1998).
Third, there is the conflict between the democratic world and the non-democratic
world. I am suggesting a fourth dimension, the conflict within the democratic
zone (and particularly within the West) between the forces of liberal democracy
and the forces of transnational progressivism, between democrats and
post-democrats.
At one level, the fourth dimension amounts
to a struggle between the American/Anglo-American and the continental European
models of governance about what Western civilization ought to be. The latter
travels the road to a form of bureaucratic collectivism, the former emphasizes
the sometimes conflicting values of civic republicanism and the liberal values
of openness and individuality within a market-driven milieu. But not to be
overlooked is the fact that there are Europeans who support an entrepreneurial,
liberal, Anglo-American style regime, and there are many Americans (particularly
among elites) who favor a more collectivist continental European approach.
The conflicts and tensions within each of
these four dimensions of international politics are unfolding simultaneously and
affected by each other, and so they all belong in a comprehensive understanding
of the world of the 21st century. In hindsight, Fukuyama may have been wrong to
suggest that liberal democracy is inevitably the final form of political
governance, the evolutionary endpoint of political philosophy, because it has
become unclear that liberal democracy can withstand its present internal
challenges. Despite military and ideological triumphs over national socialism
and communism, powerful antidemocratic forces that were in a sense Western
ideological heresies remain. Western liberal democracy will continue to face an
ideological-metaphysical challenge from powerful post-liberal democratic forces,
whose origins are Western, but, which could, in James Kurth’s word, be described
as “post-Western” (Kurth and Petras, 1993).
Endnote
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1 |
The NGOs included the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights,
Amnesty International–USA (AI–USA.), Human Rights Watch (HRW), the
Arab-American Institute, National Council of Churches, American Friends
Service Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Mexican-American Legal
Defense and Educational Fund, the International Human Rights Law Group, the
Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, and others.
|
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