Conference slams nationalists, separatists,
world gov't fans
By John Crouch, Attorney at Law,
Crouch & Crouch, Arlington, Virginia; (703)
528-6700;
Amicus Curiae, College of William and Mary
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While international law's importance grows, the idea of nationhood that
gives it authority is falling apart, said diplomats and scholars at a conference
here Sept. 24-25. The reigning notion that the world consists of organic
nation-states with "one people, one realm, one leader," as Germans
used to say, faces internal and international attack.
World Court Judge Mohammed Bedjaoui hoped international law, "transcending
its interstatal base," would become "universal law" of humanity.
However, most of the 20 panelists said no comprehensive system is likely
to replace the nation-state.
Titled "Beyond the Nation-State: Transforming Visions of Human Society,"
the "Global Symposium" culminated a lecture series at the Wendy
and Emery Reeves Center for International Studies. The Reeveses advocated
world government.
Panelists said governments have more social responsibilities than ever,
while their national rationales grow less clear. Only Iceland fits the description
of a nation-state, said one participant.
Persian Gulf states, said Alan Tonelson of the Economic Strategy Institute,
"aren't real countries. They have armies and postage stamps, they kill
their political opponents before their opponents kill them," but they
have no concept of government as a public service imposing the rule of law.
One reason, said UVA professor Abdulaziz Sachedina, is that historically
"Islam _is_ international law." It began as a coherent, cosmopolitan
movement to impose orderly social life through discoverable, universal laws.
There is no Arabic word for "nation" or "state," and
governments are not seen as sources of moral authority separate from religion.
For traditionalists, the Gulf War was a moral crisis where Islamic unity
and national integrity were irreconcilable.
The nation-state idea fares even worse in Africa, where "many states
cannot cope" and are run by the IMF, said UN official James Jonah of
Sierra Leone. He said African countries formally reject the ethnic-state
concept as "a Pandora's box" that would cause war at every national
border. To a Somali, he said, "Somalia is a geographical expression.
Loyalty is to the sub-sub-clan."
However, older states are not equally weak, said Tonelson. He said the power
of the UN, the IMF etc. is overblown, as they are actually creatures of
the US and other strong nation-states that used them to fight the Cold War.
They are powerless when strong nations lack the will to act.
As a case in point, Judge Bedjaoui mentioned a frustrating case in which
Bosnia asked his court to overturn the arms embargo because its effects
violated the Geneva Convention on genocide and the UN charter principle
of self-determination. The court's hands were tied, said Bedjaoui, because
the UN created it without judicial review power.
While international government bodies are tied to nations, private global
networks are not, said USC professor Stephen Toulmin. Most international
activity is not set in motion by any kind of government, he noted, citing
a financier who recently opened a university in Prague. He said private
individuals in networks, accountable to each other, need not be accountable
to state power.
Panelists debated whether any paradigm could put the world in order. Princeton
professor Manfred Halpern called ethnic "self-determination" an
Orwellian fiction masking the raw exercise of power, the essence of all
government. A group is not a "self," just as Europe is not a community,
he said, proposing "individual self-determination." John Stremlau
of the State Department concurred that "states do not have any inherent,
inalienable rights. Only individuals and the family" do.
Judge Bedjaoui said balancing national security and minority rights within
each state was a continual problem and would never be "solved."
He preferred using international law to protect minorities, not a "cast-iron
logic" of endless ethnic separation. He believed a state could not
survive unless its people shared "a common life [in] democracy and
freedom." For example, the multiethnic Swiss have such experience,
but the ethnically indistinguishable Serbs, Croats and Slavic Muslims never
did.
Stremlau said today's diplomats must set up fair processes to tame inevitable
evils of factionalism, as described in The Federalist Papers. Plans
to uproot selfish causes of discord all end in totalitarian stagnation,
he added.
When Tonelson called national self-interest the proper theme of foreign
policy, Stremlau responded that freedom abroad is in America's interest,
since free-market democracies are more accountable and do not make war on
each other. He called this "democratic realism." Tonelson countered
that since the U.S. has limited resources for repairing itself, Russia,
and the Mideast, it may decide self-reform is its "crucial moral test."
Another fact about democracies, said Tonelson, is that "societies based
on consent will never permit" unaccountable world bodies to assume
"raw power over our lives. Everything else we value would be trampled."
He said world-government boosters were a detached utopian establishment,
not brave "mavericks." Besotted with interdependence, they forget
that reasonable people naturally differ. Tonelson predicted that the nation-state
may survive for the same reason it was invented: to defend against outside
force.
- John Crouch
Copyright John Crouch 1993
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