Sovereignty or Submission

Will Americans Rule Themselves or be Ruled by Others?

John Fonte

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781594035296
• eBook ISBN: 9781594035463
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Twenty-First Century is witnessing an epic struggle between the forces of global governance and American constitutional democracy. Transnational progressives and pragmatists in the UN, EU, post-modern states of Europe, NGOs, corporations, prominent foundations, and most importantly, in America's leading elites, seek to establish "global governance." Further, they understand that in order to achieve global governance, American sovereignty must be subordinated to the "global rule of law." The U.S. Constitution must incorporate "evolving norms of international law." Sovereignty or Submission? examines this process with crystalline clarity and alerts the American public to the danger ahead. Global governance seeks legitimacy not in democracy, but in a partisan interpretation of human rights. It would shift power from democracies (U.S., Israel, India) to post-democratic authorities, such as the judges of the International Criminal Court. Global governance is a new political form (a rival to liberal democracy), that is already a significant actor on the world stage. America faces serious challenges from radical Islam and a rising China. Simultaneously, it faces a third challenge (global governance) that is internal to the democratic world; is non-violent; but nonetheless threatens constitutional self-government. Although it seems unlikely that the utopian goals of the globalists could be fully achieved, if they continue to obtain a wide spread influence over mainstream elite opinion, they could disable and disarm democratic self-government at home and abroad. The result would be the slow suicide of American liberal democracy. Whichever side prevails, the existential conflict of global governance versus American sovereignty (and democratic self-government in general) will be at the heart of world politics as far as the eye can see.

PART ONE

The Rise and Challenge of Global Governance

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CHAPTER ONE

Durban, 2001: A Microcosm of Transnational Politics

A news story from the beginning of the twenty-first century offered a glimpse of world politics in the future. On October 27, 2000, Reuters reported that forty-seven prominent American human rights and civil rights activists had sent a petition labeled “A Call to Action to the United Nations” to Mary Robinson, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, in preparation for the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, to be held in Durban, South Africa, the following year.¹

The “Call to Action” declared that “although segregation has ended, persons of color in the United States of America continue to face pervasive and persistent patterns of racial discrimination and bias that threaten their livelihood, their liberty, and even their lives.” It further stated that “racial discrimination in the United States is particularly pernicious” and “endemic within the US criminal justice system.” The document charged that “the Government of the United States of America has not upheld its obligations” to eliminate discrimination “in all its forms,” despite U.S. ratification of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in 1994.²

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Therefore, the signatories declared, “We urge the United Nations and member States to: Call upon the Government of the United States of America to honor its obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and other human rights treaties.” The “Call to Action”: (1) demanded that the United States “remove its restrictions” to the CERD treaty; (2) called upon the UN to send special rapporteurs to investigate “race bias in the US criminal justice system”; and (3) asked the UN to include the issue of “racial discrimination and race bias in the United States criminal justice system as an agenda item for the UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.”³

Among the representatives of major NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) who signed the petition were: Kenneth Roth (executive director of Human Rights Watch), Dr. Bob Edgar (general secretary, National Council of Churches), Ira Glasser (executive director, American Civil Liberties Union), James F. Fitzpatrick (chairman, International Human Rights Law Group), Raul Yzaguirre (president, National Council of La Raza), James Zogby (president, Arab American Institute), Antonia Hernandez (president, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund), Hala Maksoud (president, Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee), Wade Henderson (executive director, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights), Michael Posner (executive director, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights), Yolanda S. Wu (National Organization of Women, Legal Defense and Education Fund), Jesse Jackson Sr. (president, Rainbow PUSH Coalition), and Mary Frances Berry (chairman, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights).⁴

The spokesman for the NGO activists, Wade Henderson, presented Mary Robinson with the “Call to Action to the United Nations” at a press conference. Henderson explained that the NGOs had repeatedly but unsuccessfully pressed their issues with federal and state governments in the United States. “In our frustration, we now turn to the United Nations and have asked the high commissioner . . . to aid us in holding the United States accountable for the intractable and persistent problems of discrimination that we, as men and women of color, face at the hands of the United States criminal justice system.” Robinson responded by saying, “It is an honor for me, as high commissioner, to receive this call for action.”⁵

For several years before the Durban conference, American NGOs participated in various preliminary meetings that spelled out a clear agenda for the coming event. Besides the NGOs listed in the “Call to Action,” other groups including Amnesty International USA and the American Friends Service Committee were also involved. Major American foundations bankrolled the NGO initiatives related to Durban. Particularly generous financial support for the NGO activity came from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.⁶

For example, the Rockefeller Foundation convened a pre-Durban strategy session for NGOs at their plush conference center in Bellagio, Italy. In 1998, three years before the conference, the Ford Foundation awarded a $300,000 grant to the International Human Rights Law Group specifically to “encourage U.S. compliance” with the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. In the four years leading up to the conference, Human Rights Watch received over $8 million from the Ford Foundation, over $8.9 million from the MacArthur Foundation, around $350,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation, and $150,000 from the Mott Foundation.⁷

The NGO agenda was spelled out in a series of reports, two of them funded by the Ford Foundation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation: one from a meeting of the U.S. NGO Coordination Committee on the American Hemisphere, and another from the U.S. NGO leadership meeting. In these documents, the NGOs endorsed the following positions:

Reparations. “Support the inclusion of compensatory measures” as a major subtheme of the Durban conference. “Compensatory measures” in the language of the Durban conference meant financial payments or “reparations” from Western nations to people of African descent for the historical injustice of slavery. An NGO report on the conference’s regional meeting in Santiago, Chile, describes how American NGOs undermined the U.S. government’s position by providing research and advocacy (with funds from American Big Philanthropy) to African nations that were promoting reparations for slavery.

Racism is systemic. “It was the unanimous view among the [NGO] participants” that statistical disparities between the races were the result of racism and racial discrimination in the United States. “Racism,” the NGOs stated, “permeates every institution at every level.” Thus, policies such as welfare reform and minimum mandatory sentencing are “motivated” by racism. The idea of “color blindness” is a myth that “contributes directly” to the perpetuation of racism. In addition, the NGOs insisted that “rhetoric emphasizing the progress we have made” is a form of “denial” that “ignores . . . deeply imbedded racism.”

Affirmative action. The NGOs recommended that the UN conference condemn opposition to affirmative action and urge “the US government and state authorities [to] reaffirm and vigorously defend . . . affirmative action measures.”

Adequate standard of living. The NGOs attacked the “consistent failure of the US government to recognize that an adequate standard of living is a right not a privilege.” They asserted that the United States fails to protect the “economic rights” enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Multilingualism. The NGOs characterized U.S. domestic policies that emphasize English-language acquisition for non-English speakers as “discriminatory.” They recommended that “multilingualism should be encouraged and promoted, not impeded.”

Anti–free market. At the NGO meetings, free-market capitalism was repeatedly criticized as “a fundamentally flawed system,” and participants “expressed the conviction that it is possible to organize a more just, equitable and socially responsive system.”⁸

At one level, the agenda promoted by the NGOs and funded by some of the giants of the American nonprofit world could reasonably be described as left-progressive, somewhat redistributionist, even utopian. Obviously, as citizens of American democracy, the representatives of the NGOs and philanthropic institutions have the right to promote any views they want. They are members of the American constitutional order, in which democratic decisions are made and elected officials at both the national and state levels are accountable to fellow citizens. If elected officials from either the executive or the legislative branch of government violate the constitutional rights of American citizens, there are federal and state courts to restrain them. Moreover, unlike some Western democracies, the American political system maintains a robust tradition of free speech and vigorous debate.

If we look beyond the rhetoric of the “Call to Action” and the proposals of the NGOs, however, and examine the process of implementing those proposals, we see a distinct challenge to the American democratic system. Recall that Wade Henderson, spokesman for the NGOs, said emphatically that their policy recommendations “had been repeatedly raised with federal and state officials in the United States but to little effect.... In our frustration, we now turn to the United Nations.”⁹ They had tried but failed to enact their policy agenda through our democratic institutions: the state legislatures, the state courts, the governors’ offices, the U.S. Congress, the federal executive branch, or the federal courts. And so, because they didn’t like the results of the decision-making process within American democracy, they were resorting to a different process, outside of American democracy and the U.S. Constitution.

The postconstitutional agenda of the human rights activists was made clear by their strenuous opposition to the reservations and restrictions that all U.S. governments have placed on international treaties. The single most significant demand of the NGOs involved in the Durban conference was that the U.S. government “ratify all international human rights treaties” and “remove all reservations” to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and to other treaties.

For most of the past half century, the U.S. State Department has routinely qualified American ratification of international treaties with stipulations (in written “reservations, understandings, declarations,” or RUDs) that the United States will not accept anything in the treaty as valid if the treaty provisions violate the U.S. Constitution. If there is a point of dispute between an international treaty and the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution trumps the international convention.

In the case of CERD, the U.S. government—specifically, the Clinton administration and the Democratic-majority U.S. Senate—ratified the treaty, but with clear reservations. The State Department memorandum in 1994 specifically noted that “the provisions in CERD restricting so-called hate speech could violate the free speech and freedom of assembly guarantees of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The United States will not accept any treaty requirement incompatible with the Constitution of the United States of America.”

The NGOs and human rights activists bitterly opposed the U.S. reservations on the CERD treaty. The signatories of the “Call to Action” explicitly called on the United States to “remove its reservations” to CERD.¹⁰

In the days before the Durban conference, the NGOs charged that the United States was not fulfilling its obligations under the CERD treaty. On August 6, 2001, Reuters reported that the United States had presented its first explanation to a UN committee on how it was implementing the treaty; the American delegation “reiterated the US policy of condemning unequal treatment of racial and ethnic minorities.”¹¹ But neither the UN committee nor the American NGOs were interested in equal treatment for minorities; instead, they insisted on equal results—that is to say, statistical equality among the races in all areas of American society.

According to Nancy Chang, senior litigation attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, “almost every member of the [UN] committee raised the question of why there are vast disparities with respect to race in every aspect of American life, from education, housing, health, welfare, and criminal justice.”¹² An attorney representing Human Rights Watch, Erika George, said that the United States had “simply restated a position which already doesn’t comply with the CERD and which indicates no willingness to comply.”¹³

To comply with the NGO interpretation of the CERD treaty, however, the United States would have to turn its political and economic system upside down, abandoning the free speech guarantees of the Constitution, bypassing federalism, and ignoring the very concept of majority rule, since there is little in the NGO agenda that is supported by the American people.

The Durban controversy is a case study in the future of world politics. It signaled the beginning of a new transnational politics that is “postconstitutional.” Influential American interest groups appealed to transnational political institutions beyond the reach of the U.S. Constitution, and thus beyond our democratic system. Those interest groups were on the political left, but there are also groups and individuals on the center and the right of American politics that act transnationally and postconstitutionally. In so doing, they present an existential challenge to American democracy.

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CHAPTER TWO

A Perennial War of Ideas: Global Governance vs. Self-Government

The Durban controversy boiled down to issues that have been debated for thousands of years: Who governs? Who has authority to make decisions, and why? Broadly speaking, two “parties” have been locked in combat over these questions since ancient times. On one side is the “party of global governance.” Members of this party dream of a supranational political authority that ensures peace and solves global problems. On the other side is the “party of independent sovereignty.” Members of this party aspire to self-rule and aim to curb the power of multinational and supranational empires.

For positive historical examples, the party of global governance has looked to such institutions as the Roman Empire, the empires of Alexander the Great and Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire, the Hapsburg and Austro-Hungarian empires, and certain aspects of Napoleon’s empire and those of the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, and the British. Today this party looks favorably on the European Union, the United Nations, and supranational institutions such as the International Criminal Court.

On the other side, the party of independent self-government has identified with a competing set of historical institutions, including ancient Israel, the Athenian polis and other Greek city-states, the Roman Republic, the Italian city-states and the free cities of northern Europe in the medieval and Renaissance era, Elizabethan England, the Dutch Republic, and the American republic of the Founders. Today this group favors liberal democratic nation-states in general, and particularly those democratic nations that exhibit a robust independent sensibility, such as the United States, Israel, and India.

The Perennial Dream of Global Governance

Since the dawn of politics, humans have envisioned a global political authority that would bring peace and harmony to the world. In the Middle Ages, Dante’s De Monarchia advocated a world empire headed by the Holy Roman Emperor (the putative successor to the Roman emperors of the past) because he belie...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART ONE - The Rise and Challenge of Global Governance
• PART TWO - Struggle for a New World
• Appendix
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright Page