With the ouster of Gaddafi and the installation of "democracy" in Libya, events on the world stage have taken a sinister turn indeed. Invasions of other countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq at least had a pretext of national security, however wafer thin, but Libya represents a new summit of shamelessness, as follows: we may invade a foreign country and overturn its government merely because we dislike how that government treats its own people. This is a full and unabashed repudiation of national sovereignty; even the Nuremberg Principles for ousting and punishing the Nazis were predicated on international aggression, not domestic abuse. If anything, the Libyan conquest embodies what the Nuremberg Principles were specifically designed to abolish.
Libya is a test case for a worldwide Fourteenth Amendment, that deus ex machina by which the federal government swoops down onto the stage and demolishes state sovereignty in the name of do-gooding. The federal government's internal war presaged the Shermanesque campaign against national sovereignty on the world stage today, which is precisely why I wrote two books titled Unlawful Government. My first one -- Preserving America In A Post-Constitutional Age -- documents our domestic tragedy. My second one -- The Gathering Threat Of Global Hegemony -- explores the extension of this tragedy into foreign affairs. Whatever happens next, at least I can say I told you so.
In
Unlawful Government: Preserving America In A Post-Constitutional Age, I explored some of the ways that the federal government has made itself the master of the law rather than the servant. Consistent with its self-appointed role as absolute lawgiver, today’s federal government casts a shadow over virtually every aspect of American society, leaving nothing of circumstance beyond the taxing, spending, and commandeering reach of politics. As a consequence, the once-rich tapestry of American life has faded into a spiritual and cultural wasteland characterized by stifling political correctness; larcenous wealth redistribution; a vanishing middle class; the mainstreaming of obscenity and profanity; the subsidizing of illegal-alien invaders; and the militarizing of civil authority. Our ability to elect the persons who perpetrate these outrages does nothing to make us free, but rather invites us to partake in our own ruin. Such is the result championed by the self-styled idealists occupying both major political parties, who fly opposing banners and sing competing slogans, but who all march to the same tune. Their ascendancy has heralded America’s decline.
What makes this state of affairs somewhat tolerable is that the American government counts as only one among many, and that no single government dictates terms for the entire human race. Competition among sovereignties, a noble pursuit once enshrined in our domestic Constitution among the States, now survives only by the grace of foreigners. So even though our American experiment had been hijacked, we could find some measure of comfort in that we now inhabit a global economy where we can move our money and ourselves with greater ease than ever. Americans can outsource, offshore, and expatriate away from the government’s machinations, a refreshing reality that thumbs its nose at the political class and its delusions of grandeur. Recent data indicate that approximately ten percent of households in the United States have already committed to moving abroad or are seriously considering doing so, while another eleven percent express a desire to reside abroad part-time – astonishingly high numbers that run the gamut across all professions and age groups. Better yet, the sheer number of countries is exploding, as bloated centers of political power such as the old Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia fracture and crumble. In today’s world of nearly two hundred competing sovereignties we find unprecedented variety and freedom from central control. And deep down we feel a sense of adventure, envisioning faraway lands and exotic peoples; knowing that some corner of creation remains free from the strangling grip of officialdom; and daring to hope that the errors of history can eventually be righted.
However, our cause for celebration strikes terror in our rulers, who see their influence on the wane as we grow more nimble-footed in an ungoverned world. Faced with this quickening flight from their tightening grip, the members of the political class have refused to admit the error of their ways or to accept their well-deserved irrelevance; instead, they have chosen to swim against the tide of history and strive for a universal control from which no one may escape. To advance this quest for global hegemony, they employ a spectrum of tactics ranging from transnational regulations to economic sanctions to outright military violence. But most important of all, they swaddle these tactics in idealistic verbiage such as “democracy,” “human rights,” and “free trade” in order to de-fuse popular suspicion or criticism, thus re-enacting the domestic saga of the United States whereby the federal government flattened all competing sources of power in the lofty names of “equality” and “civil rights.” Now, instead of murdering the sovereignty of mere component States, the political class aims to murder the sovereignty of
nation-states so as to erect a uniform, global authority in which political power is preserved against all external challenge. By accomplishing this, the political class will at last have a free hand to carry out massive wealth redistribution and its corresponding evils, ensuring that the remaining pockets of civilization yield to a worldwide ghetto presided over by oligarchs.
The only way that the political class can successfully destroy national sovereignty is to destroy international law, whose very name bespeaks an arrangement of affairs between independent actors. Similar to our Constitution and its deference to the several States, international law leaves each nation-state the master of its own destiny and with presumptive power to govern its own citizens in its own way. National sovereignty’s essential role in the international legal order is reflected by the fact that the very sources of international law have their roots in national consent, as outlined on the next page:
Sources Of International Law
Treaties -- Agreements binding only those nations that sign and ratify them.
Customary Law -- A widespread practice among nations based on the belief (
opinio juris) that such practice is legally required.
General Principles Of Law -- Principles appearing in the domestic legal systems of the vast majority of nations comprising the world community.
These benchmarks illustrate – contrary to prevailing opinion – that international law constitutes a purer form of law than what most modern governments offer their own people, since true law stems from the customs and wishes of the participants. For example, under the common law that America inherited from England, judges did not presume to
create law, but rather to
observe it and
uphold it as manifest in the people’s way of life. Likewise, international law follows the practices of the family of nation-states, seldom daring to divorce itself from the very community whence it springs.
This legal system – with its foundations in national consent and international consensus – poses a direct threat to the political class, which conceives of “law” as simply whatever those with the greatest power might decree on a given day. Resenting the persistence of a global arrangement whose rules are not arbitrarily handed down by a sovereign, the political class has made disturbing progress towards radically transforming international law from a limited system addressing
national rights and responsibilities to an all-encompassing system addressing
individual rights and responsibilities. By muscling aside the nation-state as the primary subject of international law, the political class hopes to melt down each nation’s independence into a homogenized political system that directly regulates us as individuals, crushing the very rights and freedoms that the political class claims to be protecting.
We constantly hear that the world is chaotic and needs the guiding hand of government to steer it; that international law is toothless against evil regimes; and that the better angels of our nature demand that we take steps to rein in the abuses of the nation-state system. It is undeniable that nation-states often behave in a callous and brutal fashion, but for all the abuses that nation-states commit – and which the political class incessantly invokes as justification for global governance – a world with a single and unrivaled sovereign represents a cure far worse than the disease. National sovereignty and international competition are essential to the survival of human civilization, for they limit the reach and strength of any single government, and they compel governments to face external enemies in a creative struggle whereby good ideas have a chance to outlast and defeat bad ones. If Weimar Germany of the 1920s and ’30s had been a global democracy rather than a merely national one, Hitler’s election to high office and subsequent seizure of absolute power would have spelled a worldwide Third Reich rather than a localized dictatorship that, fortunately, could be resisted with outside military force. In a uniformly governed world, any opponent of such tyranny would be merely internal; he would be labeled as an outlaw; and he would be imprisoned or executed. One can run this “thought experiment” to envision any number of nightmarish outcomes, such as a global Mao Tse-tung, a global Pol Pot, or a global Stalin.
We know for a fact that governments kill far more of their own people than each others’: during the twentieth century alone, governments murdered roughly 160 million of their own citizens in bloody orgies of “democide,” while killing only a fraction of that number through international warfare. So if the nation-state system seems lawless and vicious, it surely cannot match the potential brutality of a world under a single government. In light of this knowledge, it is folly to exchange a world of divided sovereignties, however imperfect, for a single worldwide sovereignty, however promising. One would be just as foolish to consolidate all of the world’s criminal organizations into a single unrivaled syndicate on the belief that this would reduce thievery and violence.
Yet the political class wishes to wrap us in the chains of global government on the slender inference that we can make such a government “good,” and on the even more slender inference that such a government will remain “good.” This assertion falls to pieces merely upon considering what these same people believe constitutes good government: the Leviathan state unbounded by the rule of law, whose power to legislate, regulate, tax, spend, and destroy continues to swell with no end in sight. A glimpse at history likewise disproves the political class’s rhetoric, for the precious few governments we can honestly rank as admirable did not remain so for very long. Mankind is far from perfect and will remain as such, and any government he constructs will eventually regress to the mean and indulge in the affronts to life, liberty, and property that typify the story of civilization. We would be much wiser to evolve by allowing for the birth and death of diverse governments, just as nature evolves by allowing for the birth and death of diverse individuals. In short, better to have several hundred bites at the apple than just one.
Sadly, the “mainstream” debate concerning international affairs ignores asking
whether a global centralization of power should occur and concerns itself solely with
how it should occur, much the same way that political discourse degenerated within the United States. “Conservatives” call for global rule under American influence, pursuing their vision of “democracy” by way of mass murder and violations of bedrock norms governing the initiation of military force. On the other side of the coin, “liberals” pursue a softer, more systemized version of hegemony by promoting international bureaucracies that will impose “human rights” and “environmentalist” principles that, when viewed up close, amount to little more than warmed-over Marxist schemes for micromanaging our lives and depriving us of any choices or dignity. Both the “conservative” and “liberal” sides of this loaded debate discard the wisdom that
all governments are a menace unless offset by other competing governments. Forgotten is the lesson that the best way to curtail abuses of power is to disperse power far and wide, depositing it into so many hands that large-scale transgressions lack the raw material to take shape. As shown by the tragic experience of the United States – a nation conceived in liberty but increasingly bereft of it now – internal legal restraints do not prevent the accumulation and abuse of political power, no matter how ingeniously those restraints may be devised. Only
external restraints suffice, and only in a world of multiple sovereignties do we have any hope of continuing the march of human progress.
One may wonder how to avert global hegemony, especially since the awesome forces of modern government constantly portray it as necessary and pursue it with unrelenting vigor. A good start is to take care of matters close to home, as discussed in my previous book with regard to undoing the disproportionate and unconstitutional power concentrated in Washington, D.C. Achieving that objective alone would spark an explosion of competition and creativity worldwide, as the current network of bribery, corruption, and coercion emanating from the federal government would dissipate. Apart from that, the truth of the matter is we don’t really have to stop the process at all, for it contains the seeds of its own destruction. Societies thrive on a unique sense of shared history, as well as on a sense of differentiation from one another; “global society,” however, has no cultural ethos with which to define itself, and no alien culture from which to differentiate itself. The absence of known, hostile societies beyond the sphere of our world frustrates the cohesive spirit that might otherwise give birth to a worldwide identity or corresponding political order. For example, certain members of the swelling European Union have refused to surrender their political sovereignty to the growing mega-bureaucracy in Brussels, Belgium, thereby rejecting one of the most notable attempts in recent history to ratchet political power upwards beyond the nation-state. Even the voices pushing for a more centralized European Union have stressed the need to counterbalance the United States, demonstrating that a perceived external threat is the best way persuade people to submit themselves to the indignities of modern governmental rule.
Modern nations consolidated from the sixteenth through the early twentieth century, but now the opposite trend prevails: communities are increasingly asserting their independence from large centers of power. Pan-governmental schemes run contrary to this trend and will collapse under their own weight, as technology continues to push power over the dams built by the few and into the hands of the many. Political globalization and the dream of global government lack any shared sense of purpose to support them; instead, the gathering threat of global hegemony rests on the modern quicksand of narcissism, anti-culture, and power-worship – the effluvia of a dying civilization rather than a prospering one. But the political class can inflict incredible harm on us by stubbornly refusing to diminish or relinquish its outdated influence, so at the very least we should become acquainted with their designs lest we offer them unwitting support.
What follows is not an exhaustive analysis of international law or worldwide events, but rather a summary of the most prominent menaces creeping across the global landscape. My hope is that with the added benefit of this perspective, individuals and communities can orient themselves in a time when battle lines are being drawn between the centralizing powers of yesterday and the de-centralizing powers of tomorrow.
