It may sound overwrought, but an Obama presidency would bring an end to American sovereignty as it has been understood since the Founding of the nation. Do not be lulled by the anodyne descriptions of an Obama administration’s planned multilateralism, like burnishing friendships and building bridges. The outcome will be a revolutionary centralization of power around a single global authority, the United Nations.
Like all revolutions, this one must start with a bit of ground clearing, in this case the demolition of the current form of political organization, the sovereign nation state. Nation states have become suspect to international elites for a host of reasons. To the political class in Europe — by far the greatest force for the new internationalism — nations breed nationalism, nationalism results in world wars. Also, these elites have little trouble finding dire international crises that require international — understood as cross-national or even post-national — solutions. Whether it is a purported population bomb, AIDS, pollution, global warming, or, now, world credit and financial problems, there is always a new threat that, we are told, extends beyond the scope of nation states.
But, even more importantly, after decades of the West teetering on the edge of the abyss of moral relativism, almost the entire developed world has coalesced around a new conception of the common good. Confidence is so high in this view of the common good, that individual norms and values that constitute it do not apply solely to Welshmen or Dutchmen or New Zealanders, they are in fact universal, and therefore require an international institution to propagate them as universal rights, and to protect and to promote their worldwide enjoyment.
Many of these rights are good, and have been recognized as such for centuries, others are new and controversial and, their adherents hope, in the process of being recognized, such as broad homosexual rights to marriage, abortion on demand, and adolescents’ rights to full reproductive freedom. In general, they are the beliefs of the average northern European country.
But to get to the global Eden of expansive personal autonomy, two pesky components of nation states stand in the way: the idea of territorial jurisdiction — laws stopping at borders — and representative democracy, the notion that specific lawmakers are entrusted with limited authority by specific groups of citizens, and are therefore accountable to those citizens as their constituents. Such things must be eliminated, in order to destroy any potential safe-havens for the unenlightened.
There have been hints of this project amongst the sophisticated sectors of the American population, even during the dark days of the “unilateral” Bush administration. According to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for instance, the American courts need “to learn what we can from the experience and good thinking foreign sources may convey,” in order to rise above domestic “imperfections.”
The rest of the developed world has already fallen into line with the project. If there is any doubt, here is an experiment: ask a European, an educated European, how a bill becomes a law in his country, and he will shortly collapse under the complexity of all it: national parliament, European parliament, European commission, European Court of Justice, and on and on.
And many of the pieces are already in place for the European enterprise to go international. Currently, nations that ratify U.N. treaties must endure examinations by “compliance committees,” unelected, unaccountable officials who sit as quasi-Supreme Courts, rendering what is considered the authoritative interpretations of the treaty documents. In the last two weeks, alone, two separate compliance committees told nations to accept abortion on demand, even though neither treaty even mentions the word abortion.
But Bush has kept the internationalists from the ultimate prize, by his dogged determination to protect American sovereignty. So the United Nations are its allies are poised to make up for lost time. Compliance committees will grow in stature until there is one super committee, reining down judgments on individual nations like Zeus hurling lighting bolts from Olympus.
On the US side, we will begin to sign and ratify all of the major U.N. treaties. Joe Biden, who has been the Senate’s strongest advocate for ratifying the U.N.’s most controversial treaty, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), we help to make sure of that.
Poor countries will be forced to accept the pronouncements of the compliance committees, in order to keep the aid money to which they have become addicted flowing. But what about the United States, how would the U.N. be able to enforce U.S. compliance? The clever part will be that it won’t have to; the U.S. will police itself.
One or two more Ginsburgs on the court (Obama uses her as model of what his appointments will be like), there to “learn” from the international laws that they favor, and a few dozen foreigners will gain more influence over American law on issues such as abortion and the definition of the family, then the entire America electorate. Think it cannot happen? Just remember, Barack Obama is a proud “citizen of the world.”
– Douglas A. Sylva is a senior fellow at the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute.