The United Nations, as its name implies, is founded on the
assumption that the world divides into nations, that political
decisions are made by and on behalf of those nations, and that it
is possible to bring the nations of the world together in a
common forum in order to settle their disputes by negotiation.
Yet, in the minds of many people--including the architects of the
European Union--the division of the world into nations is
precisely what caused those disputes in the first place, and a
true global order will not be international but transnational,
discarding the nation-state as a relic of atavistic ways of
thinking that have no place in the universal society of the
future.
This attitude, which has its roots in the Enlightenment and in
Kant's original project for a "league of nations" as the way to
"perpetual peace," was reinforced, for many people of my parents'
generation, by the experience of the Second World War. And it
persists as a refrain in all official pronouncements of the
European Commission, which identifies no evil in the modern world
greater than the "racism and xenophobia" that it perceives on
every side.
In fact, the division of the nations of the world into would-be
nation-states, and the assembling of those states in a common
forum, is a product of Western ways of thinking and Enlightenment
values which have little authority in many parts of the world.
Africa was divided into states by colonization, and the
boundaries between many of the African states represent the
limits of rival European claims rather than historically
vindicated lines of settlement.
Because the U.N. was formed in the wake of colonization, and as
part of an attempt to decolonize in a peaceful manner, we are
forced to treat Nigeria, for example, as a single state and
therefore as one among the many "united nations." Yet the country
of Nigeria has been settled for centuries by three distinct
peoples: the Yoruba, who inhabit the coastline; the Ibo of the
internal regions; and the Hausa, who border the desert trade
routes. These three groups are divided by territory, by language,
and also by religion, the Hausa having been Islamized for a
thousand years, acquiring with the religion the language,
literature, and civilized ways that divided them starkly from the
pagans to the south of them.
Some try to understand this situation by contrasting nations with
tribes, arguing that the nation is really a European idea,
derived from patterns of settlement that are special to our
continent and its diaspora, while elsewhere the tribe, conceived
as an extended kinship group, is the natural form of social
order. There is truth in this suggestion, but it is not the whole
truth, as the example of Nigeria illustrates. Neither the Ibo nor
the Yoruba see themselves as single tribes, even though there are
tribal entities comprised within both groups. The two peoples are
distinguished by territory, language, and inherited institutions,
just like the nations of Europe. And although they are both now
Christian, this is the result of colonization, which has imposed
a common jurisdiction, common political institutions, and a
single religious faith on people who, until the arrival of the
Europeans, regarded each other as aliens.
Equally instructive is the case of Rwanda, which existed for
centuries as an independent kingdom. The people of Rwanda were
divided not according to tribe, but according to function, the
dominant minority--the Tutsi--raising cattle while the
majority--the Hutu--tilled the land. These people have shared
language, institutions, and political allegiance for long enough
to constitute a territorial and political unity; but the effect
of Belgian rule was to divide the Tutsi from the Hutu and elevate
them into an administrative elite while undermining the authority
of the Rwandan king and eventually engineering the coup that
deposed him. Subsequent massacres of the Tutsi are perceived in
the West as the result of tribal antagonisms too deeply rooted to
yield to political solutions. In fact, they are the result of
importing Western ideologies and class divisions into a society
that had long ago risen above any merely tribal idea of
membership.
Of course, it would be wrong to attribute the chaos of modern
Africa entirely to the grid that colonialism drew across the
continent. The picture drawn by Joseph Conrad in Heart of
Darkness has more than a grain of truth, and there is no reason
to think that the artificial boundaries would not have become
natural boundaries in time had the colonial powers continued to
maintain them. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the new
political elites of Africa possess territories and systems of
government that often engage with no historical loyalties and no
prepolitical conception of social membership. The African states
are by no stretch of the imagination nation-states on the
European model, and even when they have stable governments, it is
implausible to suppose that those governments represent the
people over whom they rule.
Matters are more complex in the Middle East, but no more
reassuring. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire led to the creation
of modern Turkey as a genuine nation-state. While Kemal
Atatürk was necessary for this achievement, he was not
sufficient. Turkey could emerge as a nation-state only because it
already existed as a nation, with a common language, a vestigial
territory, and a prepolitical loyalty founded on the long
experience of empire. Nationalities had begun to emerge in other
areas of the empire through the monarchical claims of local emirs
and khedives, and through the slow emergence of territorial
boundaries along historic lines of force.
Thus, Lebanon--the mountainous region shared by Maronite and
Druze in a continuing history of defiance towards the Sultan--had
considerable claim to independence long before this was granted
by the Western powers in their breakup of the region. Egypt too,
since the days of Muhammad Ali, had taken advantage of French and
British competition to shape its identity as a nation, ready for
independence as soon as the empire should withdraw. And Morocco
was already an independent kingdom when the French took charge of
it in the early years of the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, those embryonic nations have failed to achieve what
Turkey has achieved, which is enduring legal order and democratic
government. And without the vigilant presence of the Turkish
army, and the continuing efforts against Kurdish irredentism, the
democratic order in Turkey would probably not endure for long. In
particular, it has depended until now on an enforced
secularization, which has involved not merely excluding the
'ulema from power and denying them a place in state institutions
and schools, but also outlawing Islamic dress and Islamic marital
customs. Turkish law is itself a European import, and in this it
established a pattern that has been followed throughout the
region, with new civil and criminal codes being adopted and
adapted from French, German, and Belgian sources in the hope of
achieving the kind of jurisdiction that puts secular above
religious authority as the source of legal order.
And here begins the trouble that culminated in the war against
Iraq, which was not a war against Iraq at all. Indeed, the Bush
Administration tried to represent it as a war for Iraq, on behalf
of the Iraqi people, and against the tyrant who had usurped their
national rights. Both descriptions are wrong. It was a war
neither for nor against Iraq, since in a very real sense Iraq
does not exist.
Iraq is a purely legal entity created by the division of the
Ottoman Empire--a division carried out by two adventurous
diplomats, one French and one British, in the wake of the First
World War. Lines drawn across the map in the interests of the two
Western powers grouped together, under an imported Hashemite
grandee, who was henceforth to be known as king of Iraq, the
Kurdish-speaking and sectarian peoples from the Eastern borders
of Turkey with the peoples of the Tigris and Euphrates basin, who
were Arabic speakers, the majority being Shi'ites who had been
neither recognized by the Ottomans as a legitimate religious sect
nor granted any share in the traditional forms of
government.
Like other artificial states generated under the Sykes-Picot
accords, Iraq contained substantial Christian and Jewish
minorities, Kurdish Sufis, and survivals of the various Islamic
sects such as the Druze who had buried their heresies in
mumbo-jumbo, the better to protect them. None of the people thus
grouped together had any conception of allegiance to a single
nation-state, still less to a single monarch who, in the nature
of the case, was bound to give precedence to his own tribe, his
own sect, and his own circle of cronies in enjoying the
unexpected gift of a vast and oil-rich region.
Well, we all know what happened. These extraordinary assets,
which were supposed to be the shared inheritance of a
nation-state, were treated as private property by the ruler, who
was soon deposed by his own military. With the help of the Ba'ath
Party--shaped on Leninist principles and perfected as an
instrument of social control--the new despots of Iraq and Syria
were able to hold on to power more effectively than the feeble
monarchs who preceded them, and the territories under their sway
retained their principal character as private property,
distributed to an elite of loyal (or at any rate elaborately
well-treated) followers.
In Syria, this elite has been chosen from the Alawite minority,
with the majority Sunni population virtually excluded from power.
In Iraq, the elite has tended to be chosen from the Sunnis,
Saddam Hussein's secular vision notwithstanding, with the
Shi'ites having no part of the spoils. In both places, Jews have
been persecuted and driven into exile, the Ba'athists promoting
their philosophy of "Arab nationalism" through racist propaganda
of a kind that has to be read and seen in order to be
credited.
All in all, the idea that Iraq or Syria are nation-states, whose
people share a common national loyalty and recognize a common
territory as the source of their jurisdiction and their
collective home, has been shown by recent events to be the
fiction that historians have always known it to be.
We could move around the world, taking stock in this way of the
various fragments of defunct empires and the muddled hinterlands
where tribal and religious loyalties still take precedence over
any political process, and come quickly to the conclusion that
the United Nations, as currently constituted, has no real claim
to represent the people of our planet.
Ambassadors sent to the U.N. are sent by the people who have
obtained power, by whatever means, in the territories recognized
by that body as sovereign. But the processes that raised these
territories to sovereignty often made little or no reference to
the historical loyalties of the people who lived there and
usually did nothing to guarantee that the rulers of those
territories would have any real claim to represent those people
or any real interest in doing so. In effect, the U.N. simply
legitimizes whatever elites and tyrants have gained power over
the particular "nations" named in its list.
This doesn't mean that the U.N. has no useful function and cannot
serve as a peace-keeping institution. But it does mean that it
can also help to perpetuate unpeaceful forms of social order, and
therefore in the long run contribute to local and regional
conflicts.
There is no doubt in my mind that the U.N. granted to the Soviet
Union the kind of legitimacy that it could never have acquired
through the conduct of its leadership, and enabled it to play a
role on the world stage that it could not have played on the
strength of its own miserable achievements. The Soviet Union used
the U.N. and its ancillary institutions as a front. It supported
the capture of the United Nations Association (an independent
nonprofit organization which was founded to rally support for the
international idea) by the peaceniks and encouraged the
transformation of UNESCO into an instrument of leftist and
anti-Western propaganda. It did not value the U.N. for its
peace-keeping function but, on the contrary, recognized it only
as a way to neutralize Western defenses and confer retrospective
legitimacy on its own colonial ventures in Ethiopia, Angola,
Yemen, and Afghanistan.
In short, the U.N. was an integral component, in the Soviet view,
of diplomacy as--to invert Clausewitz's famous dictum--war by
other means.
Likewise, the U.N. has helped the Arab despots to stay in power
long after they could have been overthrown in a world that
refused to recognize their legitimacy. When Syria can be a member
of the Security Council, and when the U.N. Commissioner on Human
Rights can be appointed by Colonel Ghaddhafi, even the most
resolute defender of the U.N. institutions might begin to wonder
whether everything has gone according to plan.
Add to such anomalies the well-documented corruption of the U.N.
bureaucracy (1 - see below) and the seeming ineffectiveness or
counterproductivity of U.N. resolutions in settling the conflicts
of recent decades, and it is understandable that people should
have begun to question whether we should go along with an
institution whose claim to our respect is founded in so much
wishful thinking and so few seeming achievements.
But there is another--and, in the new situation, more
serious--defect of the United Nations.
The institution emerged in the wake of a world war in which the
victor powers were anxious to ratify their victory and to ensure
that the balance of forces then achieved would not be disturbed.
Although one of those powers--the Soviet Union--had shown scant
respect for such niceties as law, negotiation, compromise,
territorial sovereignty, and human rights, the illusion prevailed
that the Soviet Union would simmer down in time to become a
normal member of the community of nations. The fact that it was
not a nation, and had even managed to elevate one of its
constituent nations--the Ukraine--to independent membership of
the U.N. General Assembly, was overlooked in the interests of
diplomacy.
Most urgent at the time was the need to secure the peace by
putting the victorious powers in charge of it. And threats to the
peace came from sovereign bodies who claimed legal and political
monopolies over the territories where they exercised power.
Granting the Soviet Union a permanent place on the Security
Council was simply a realistic way of acknowledging the fact that
the Soviet Union was capable of undermining the peace. That it
was neither a nation-state nor a constitutional government was a
regrettable but irremediable fact; the U.N. was therefore
compelled to accept Soviet membership on terms that to some
extent undermined the declarations made in its Charter--a
Charter, incidentally, which was drafted by American and British
diplomats, and which promises freedoms and rights that have
seldom endured for long outside the English-speaking world.
Since that time, things have changed in two very radical
respects. First, the Soviet Union has collapsed, leaving the
Russian Federation in possession of its ill-gotten corner of the
Security Council. Second, new powers have emerged in the world,
which claim neither legal authority nor territorial sovereignty
but which simply exert their force wherever they can and in
defiance of all who would oppose them. Major threats to peace and
stability in the modern world come from terrorist organizations
which, by their very nature, can play no part in the dialogue of
nations that the U.N. is supposed to represent.
Of course, the sovereign powers could do much to control such
organizations by refusing them any kind of recognition, attacking
their sources of funds, and outlawing them within their
respective territories. But it is only since September 11 that
even the U.S. has thought of doing such a thing, and U.N.
conventions on asylum and refugees operate in any case to
guarantee protection to terrorists in just about every country
where they do not commit their crimes. Indeed, it is thanks
largely to U.N. conventions that terrorist networks have been
able so easily to internationalize themselves.
Hence, it is no longer important for terrorists to gain control
of a sovereign territory. Power can be achieved and deployed more
effectively without assuming the burdens of the nation-state.
Terrorists used to aim at obtaining sovereignty, as Lenin and
Hitler did. Even the IRA (in its original form) was aiming for
such an outcome.
Increasingly, however, terrorists use sovereignty purely as a
mask, either by imposing themselves as guests on sovereign states
to whose future they are more or less indifferent--like al-Qa'eda
in Afghanistan--or by establishing global networks that can evade
all national jurisdictions while freely operating anywhere. In
this they are little different from the multinational
corporations which, thanks partly to the World Trade
Organization, can ignore or dissolve national sovereignty in
their relentless pursuit of markets.
Institutions like the U.N. and the WTO arose from the need of
nation-states to live together peacefully, respecting each
other's sovereignty, and allowing each to pursue its own path to
"self-determination." But these very institutions have put
national sovereignty at risk, either by conferring legitimacy, in
the manner of the U.N., on the usurpers or by construing
sovereignty itself, in the manner of the WTO, as a barrier to
trade.
In the Middle East, terrorism has been a fact of life since the
Middle Ages, with terrorist organizations--from the original
"assassins" (hashishin) to the Muslim Brotherhood--exploiting the
fact that sovereignty has never been properly defined or properly
maintained in the region, and therefore can never defend itself
for long. American protests against states like Syria are hardly
likely to be effective against regimes which look on their
terrorist guests and think, "There, but for the grace of the
U.N., go I."
Little distinguishes the Ba'ath party from Hamas, other than the
successful strategy of its original leadership in aligning
terrorist power with political legality. Grant sovereignty to
Hamas and it would use it as the Ba'ath party has used it, as one
more addition to the terrorist armory. Meanwhile, however, the
terrorists have discovered that sovereignty is not
necessary--indeed, is a positive disadvantage in the prosecution
of their kind of war.
For these reasons, it is impossible to believe now, even if it
was possible to believe before, that the U.N. contains the
institutions and procedures that can guarantee world peace. The
principal terrorist factions are not represented in the U.N., and
those states that harbor terrorists cannot be effectively coerced
by the sanctions that the U.N. is able to apply to them. As the
experience of Iraq demonstrates, U.N. sanctions hurt populations
but increase the power of elites, who can always evade their
impact on their own lives, and who can use them to widen the gap
between the power that they enjoy and the enfeebled masses over
whom they wield it.
Furthermore, the end of the Cold War has not abolished the
distinction between those powers who wish to use the U.N. to
establish legal order and human rights and those who see law and
rights as a threat to their power. One may be skeptical of the
Utopian ambitions of those who drafted the Charter; one may even
acknowledge the dangers to stability in a declaration of "human
rights" that claims precedence over all local jurisdictions and
all inherited ideas of legal order. Nevertheless, the fact
remains that conventions upholding human rights can be
incorporated without pain into Western legal systems, since those
systems are instruments for defining and protecting rights. That,
however, is the legacy of Roman law, Christianity, and the common
law jurisdictions of Medieval Europe. Elsewhere, no such legacy
exists, and the continuing insistence on human rights falls on
deaf ears.
This means that, while U.N. resolutions and sanctions will guide
the conduct of Western states, they will be ineffective against
those states which in fact pose the most serious threat to peace.
For they will be demanding a change of political order that
cannot be effected without removing from power those who are
supposed to be bringing it about.
Whether the U.N. could be reformed so as to become a genuine
peace-keeping institution, respected as such by all its members,
I do not know. But Rosemary Righter has powerfully argued that
the Utopian outlook enshrined in its Charter is precisely what
most impedes the U.N. from having any real effect, other than to
create lucrative gravy trains for the bureaucrats who work in
it.
The U.N., to put it bluntly, shows the error of optimism when
addressing the real conflicts of human beings. The experience of
world war notwithstanding, those who drafted the Charter were
inspired by an abstract liberal philosophy which sees the end of
government as the maintenance of human rights. They refused to
countenance the possibility that government is more a device for
controlling base instincts than a means to foster noble freedoms.
The necessary gloom and misanthropy, without which no serious
government is possible, failed to visit those who were planning
the "world after fascism," and the result, to put it bluntly, was
a set of "mind-forged manacles" which tied the hands of
peace-loving people while leaving the villains scot-free.
What this has meant in practice can be seen from the effect of
European decolonizations in Africa and elsewhere. The U.N.
Charter guarantees a "right of self-determination" for the
peoples of the world. The intention is evident: to create a
worldwide system of nation-states, represented by sovereigns who
really are regarded as the legitimate rulers over the people
whose territory they claim.
Many of the Western powers, anxious in any case to shed the
burden of colonial administration, accepted that their colonies
should be granted the right of self-determination. They therefore
established institutions and jurisdictions which would, they
hoped, ensure that representative government emerged after their
departure.
The Soviet Union encouraged this attitude, and sought to hasten
decolonization by every possible means. But the Soviet intention
was not to encourage self-determination by the new fledgling
nations. It was to replace the old, open, and largely benign
forms of colonial administration with one-party states obedient
to Soviet strategy.
This is what happened, for example, following the British grant
of independence to Aden in 1967. Within five years, Aden was a
Soviet base, annexed by the new "People's Democratic Republic of
Yemen." Soviet agents operating from Yemen were busy engineering
a coup in neighboring Ethiopia, which placed the Russian-trained
Haile Mengistu in power, and by 1974, the horn of Africa was
effectively a Soviet colony, with legal order extinguished,
famine rife, and human rights nonexistent. The same happened in
neighboring Somalia. And for the past three decades the region
has endured unspeakable suffering and a gradual crumbling of all
local forms of sovereignty.
The U.N. acted only to encourage decolonization by the civilized
nations. It did nothing to prevent recolonization by their
uncivilized rivals and merely conferred legitimacy on whatever
offered itself as a "government" over territories which were
effectively without one.
Where does this leave us today? It is worth recalling that the
League of Nations, the predecessor of the U.N., proved entirely
powerless to stop war from breaking out in Europe, or to prevent
that war from spreading around the world.
True, those who drafted the U.N. Charter believed that they had
learned the lesson taught by the League of Nations' failure. But
they worked in unusual circumstances, after a world war which
left only a few competitors still standing. Since that time, many
new states have emerged or achieved prosperity and military
power, many new dangers have begun to make themselves manifest,
and animosities have nowhere really dwindled. Furthermore, the
long-standing alliance between Europe and the United States is
beginning to show signs of strain, and recent attempts by the
U.S. to take effective action against terrorist states have been
impeded by the U.N., often with the encouragement of America's
European allies.
In addition to conferring legitimacy on despots, the U.N. has
acquired the habit of substituting liberal pieties for
hard-headed judgements when faced by the serious threat of war.
Its institutions and bureaucracies give sanctimonious
Scandinavians of the Blix and Bruntland variety their longed-for
opportunity to put us all in our place, and its secretaries
general are usually more anxious to preserve their reputation as
moral figureheads than to dirty their hands by violent actions,
however necessary they may be.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest danger now presented by the U.N. is
its ability to confer the status of Realpolitik on the dangerous
illusions of the European elites. Without exception, the European
opponents of the Iraq war invoked the U.N. as the authority for
their claims that British and American intervention was
"illegal." This spurious invocation of a legality recognized by
no member of the U.N. apart from the few who are intrinsically
obedient to it has been used to solidify an anti-American posture
towards the world and an exaltation of the "European" way, as the
way of law, as opposed to the American way, which is the way of
force.
As Robert Kagan has pertinently argued in Of Paradise and Power (2 - see below),
the rhetorical dichotomy between virtuous Europe, pursuing
solutions through international law, and vicious America,
imposing solutions by force of arms, is fast becoming
internalized by the European elites as a way of painting their
inability to act as an exalted refusal to act. Without the U.N.,
this posture would be seen for the priggish nonsense that it is.
The fact is that U.N. resolutions concerning the real threats to
world peace have been ineffective, or effective only when they
have coincided with American resolve to do something, as in
Bosnia.
All that is painfully apparent to Americans in the wake of the
Iraq war. Saddam Hussein represented an undeniable threat to
world peace; he was in breach of U.N. resolutions and violated
every item of the U.N. Charter, not least in his persecutions of
the people over whom he ruled. He had murdered his opponents or
driven them into exile. And yet--despite the determination of the
U.S. to unseat him--the U.N. merely prevaricated while offering
the French and the Germans the opportunity to display their
newfound moral virtue.
It took a nation-state, acting in pursuit of its own perceived
interests, to achieve what the U.N. refused to undertake on its
own behalf. And the U.S. had only one secure ally in this
process, which was the U.K., acting spontaneously to affirm the
obligations of our long-standing alliance. Despite being a member
of that alliance, France offered comfort and even military
information to Iraq.
Now, there is nothing inherently surprising in the behavior of
France and Germany. The leaders of those countries were acting in
response to popular feeling among their citizens, and also in
accordance with perceived national interests. The U.N. acted as
it did because French and German voices prevailed in the forum of
diplomacy. But they did not prevail in the field of battle, and
the battle was quickly won.
Now that the smoke has cleared, we can see that the U.S. acted
rightly to secure its interests in the region and that those
interests really are different from the interests of France and
Germany. The alliance that held our four countries together was
an alliance forged by a common threat--which was the military
might and ideological frenzy of the Soviet Union. That threat has
gone and, unsurprisingly, the alliance has begun to fall apart.
The ambition of France and Germany to build a European military
force and a common foreign policy will hasten its disintegration,
and within a few years NATO will have ceased to exist as an
effective voice in the world.
All these momentous changes are coming about without any real
input from the U.N. And that is because they result from the
shifting interests, alliances, and alignments of genuine
nation-states--the states of Europe and its diaspora. There is no
real need for such states to consult the U.N. when their vital
interests are at stake, and if they do consult it nevertheless,
it is because bien-pensant orthodoxy still requires lip service
to be paid to "world opinion," a commodity supposedly on sale at
the General Assembly.
But, as the French and the Germans know as well as we, the
General Assembly does not offer world opinion at all: The voices
that sound in it include many that have effectively silenced the
people for whom they claim to speak, and, indeed, only the
nation-states can be said to send to the Assembly people who
represent the interests of their nation and not the interests of
some faction within it. For it is only in nation-states that any
kind of representative government has taken root.
Here, someone might take exception to what I have said, drawing
attention to the seemingly inexorable spread of democracy through
the world since the founding of the U.N. and identifying the U.N.
itself as the catalyst. Surely, it might be said, when "emerging"
nations have to vindicate themselves in a forum where the
democracies have the dominating voice, they feel a pressure to
emulate those democracies in the matter that confers such
ungainsayable legitimacy on their representatives. The message is
relayed to the rulers back home: Democratize and enjoy the favor
of the world.
There may be some truth in that. But it is by no means the whole
truth. As Fareed Zakaria has argued to great effect in Illiberal
Democracy (3 - see below), democratization comes about only when liberties are
in place, and these liberties depend on an upwardly mobile middle
class for their protection. Moreover, it is not democracy that
causes people to live side-by-side in peace, but the mutual
respect for liberty, something that might be as much threatened
as protected by the franchise--as we have seen throughout the
Middle East in recent years. The U.N.'s commitment to
democratization as the title to political maturity is as likely
to generate conflicts as to solve them.
Here, it seems to me, is the real lesson to be drawn from recent
events, and it is a lesson that I try to spell out at greater
length in The West and the Rest. We in the West are heirs to a
political culture that has placed individual liberty at the
center of things and which has perpetuated the Roman idea of
citizenship as the primary form of political loyalty. This has
enabled us to take effective collective action in the face of
threats and to form governments that are genuinely representative
of those whose interests they claim to serve.
For all their faults, the Western democracies act on behalf of
their people, through states which have genuine corporate
personality--both in the legal sense and in the moral sense of
being answerable for their faults and bound by a relation of
trust to their members. They have been able to separate political
loyalty from religious conformity, from tribal allegiance, and
from family affection, and by this means have given reality to
the idea of citizenship as a reciprocal web of rights and duties
which confers freedom on the individual in return for obedience
to secular law.
Imperfectly though this ideal has been realized in many Western
states, it has been scarcely realized at all elsewhere, save in
places where Western imperial powers have implanted the vestiges
of representative institutions and territorial law. It is held in
place by the fact that Western states do not merely occupy
territories: They define their fundamental loyalties and
political duties in terms of those territories. It is to France
that the Frenchman's loyalty is owed, just as mine is owed to
England and yours to this land of America.
Land has been exalted by our political process into the
repository of our hopes and values, the place in which we can be
at home with strangers, the place which is the seat of our
jurisdiction and the object of our common concern. Our law is
territorial law, applying to all who reside in a certain
territory and to every act committed there. It makes no reference
to the religion or clan of the citizen, but on the contrary
detaches him or her from those more personal loyalties and
discounts them in all its procedures.
Needless to say, a long history led to the emergence of this kind
of jurisdiction, and it is a history that has not taken place
everywhere. Although it is normal to refer in this context to the
European Enlightenment and the retreat of religion that then
occurred, my own view is that this simplifies the historical
record and also places an obstacle before our attempts to
understand the sources of current conflicts.
The rise of the personal state, the rule of law, and the
separation of political from religious authority are all
connected. Their emergence was facilitated by the Christian
religion and its situation under the Roman Empire, when the
newfound religion could survive only by conceding legislative
authority to those who did not believe in it. The enduring
territorial jurisdictions of Europe were built on the twin
foundations of Christian renunciation and Roman law, and held in
place in modern times by national loyalties in which territory,
language, customs, and religion all played cementing roles. The
emergence of the nation-state has been a natural consequence of
this and has occurred everywhere in the world where the European
communities have settled.
Here and there, nation-states have emerged from conflicts in
which the European idea has been forcibly exported--notably in
modern Japan. But in Africa and the Middle East, in much of
Southeast Asia and Indonesia, there is little hope that national
loyalties will ever replace the ties of kinship, tribe, clan, and
religion as the foundation of civil order, and little hope that
genuine rules of law and representative governments will come
into being.
For it is my view that national loyalty and representative
government are mutually dependent. Until national loyalty
replaces its competitors, there is no hope of a shared obedience
to a common rule of law. In the U.S., it took a civil war before
national loyalty emerged as the dominant prepolitical source of
social unity. And the European countries have experienced similar
upheavals. Nevertheless, once national loyalty is in place, there
is hope for a durable rule of law and representative
institutions.
The U.N. was invented by people steeped in the ethos of the
nation-state, and it is designed to resolve conflicts between
such states. It erects into a transnational goal the notion of a
rule of law as this has developed under the impetus of
territorial sovereignty. And there is no doubt that nation-states
which subscribe to its Charter are, on the whole, eager for legal
solutions to conflicts and for a shared obedience to an "empire
of laws." That is why the U.S. and Canada can exist peacefully
side-by-side, despite their disputed border.
Elsewhere the search for legal solutions may often be little more
than a sham. Syria's occupation of the Lebanon certainly shows
how a conflict may be resolved; but it was a conflict caused by
the party that solved it, and the solution was conquest, in which
the sovereignty of Lebanon was effectively extinguished by an
occupying army. This is the way conflicts in the Middle East tend
to be settled. For how can a state be trusted to seek legal
solutions when it is not itself governed by law, but only by
factional interests under a resolute dictatorship?
Hence, to grant equal status in the U.N. to dictatorships like
Syria, Libya, and Sudan, and personal states on the Western
model, is to put an obstacle in the way of negotiated solutions
of a kind that it is increasingly difficult to overcome. The
democracies of Europe and its diaspora do not normally fight one
another, since they recognize the binding nature of legal
agreements. If they have fought in modern times, it is largely
because they have passed through periods of dictatorial
government, such as that imposed on France by Bonaparte and on
Germany by Hitler. Were dictatorships to re-emerge in Europe,
then they would no doubt lead to renewed belligerence, and the
U.N. would cease to be effective as a conflict-resolving medium
on our continent, just as it has been ineffective in Africa and
the Middle East.
But that leads naturally to the question whether we need the U.N.
at all? And, if so, in what form? When we ask such a question, it
is interesting to note that "we" denotes the Western powers. We
are not asking whether the world needs this institution, or even
whether the Third World needs it; we are asking whether it adds
anything to the peace-keeping efforts that we, the nation-states
of the world, are engaged in.
As for those other states--the dictatorships, totalitarian
states, religious states, and failed states--we have little
confidence in their commitment to peace, and certainly little
concern to advance their interests. The question in our mind is
always whether the U.N. is a useful means of dealing with them,
not whether it gives them any means of dealing between
themselves.
And the example of Iraq suggests that it is no longer useful.
U.N. sanctions proved ineffective, and the Security Council and
General Assembly combined to delay the necessary military action
to the point where it was far more costly than it should have
been. By impeding George Bush Senior from pursuing the Gulf War
to its logical conclusion, the U.N. ensured the repression and
massacre of those involved in the uprisings at Basra and
elsewhere. By failing to endorse George Bush's pressing decision
of Realpolitik, it has made the task of reconstructing Iraq and
winning the confidence of its people so much the more difficult.
Its effect on the whole decision-making process, in short, has
been negative.
Moreover, the resulting quarrel among nation-states is not one
that the U.N. can do anything to resolve, or even one that it can
affect. It will be played out in NATO, in the EU, in the revision
or repudiation of long-standing deals and treaties which depend
upon the fact that the parties to them are fully responsible
nation-states, able to decide on their future for
themselves.
Of course, the fact that the U.N. continues to exist as a forum
of argument and discussion may be valued, if only because it
informs us of the character of the various governments that wield
the power of the state in the various territories of the globe.
But there is another--and, in my view, more dangerous--effect of
the U.N. institutions, and one that is insufficiently pondered by
our politicians.
Both the U.N. and many of its ancillary and subordinate
institutions have legislative powers. They can use the original
force of the Charter to bind national legislatures to measures
that may be profoundly against the national interest. These
measures will often be a huge burden to law-abiding states but no
burden at all to dictatorships. Yet the dictatorships have as
much right to press for them as the law-abiding states. In
effect, the lawless have acquired, through the U.N., the power to
bind the law-abiding in chains that they themselves escape.
One pertinent example is the U.N. Convention on refugees and
asylum, ratified in 1951, which obliges every signatory to offer
asylum to those fleeing from persecution. This means that Western
states, which are bound by their own laws, are forced to admit
hundreds of thousands of unwanted immigrants every year, simply
because well-briefed lawyers invoke the convention on asylum on
their behalf. Most of these immigrants stay even when their
claims to asylum are exposed as bogus. The result, in Europe, is
a demographic crisis that threatens to rock the foundations of
domestic policy.
Now, of course, the dictatorships don't have any problem in
accommodating asylum seekers: They have never had any. On the
contrary, the convention on asylum enables dictators to export
their opponents without earning the bad name that would come from
massacring them. The entire cost of the convention is borne by
the law-abiding states, whose legal systems, moreover, are
jeopardized by the increasing number of people who settle within
the jurisdiction while acknowledging no loyalty to the
nation-state that is founded on it. The worst of our Islamist
agitators in Europe are also people who have been granted asylum
from the regimes whose violence they import.
The example is of vital concern to all of us in Europe, and it
shows the way in which the grant of legislative powers to a
transnational body poses a serious danger to the nation-state.
Delicate matters, over which our legislators and judiciary have
expended decades of careful reflection and decision-making, are
thrown into instant disarray by a measure imposed on us by fiat.
Like the EU, the U.N. confronts its members at every juncture
with an absolute choice: Accept the edicts or leave the club. And
few politicians have the courage to take the second of those
options.
But has the time come to do so? Should we now extricate ourselves
from the U.N. and its subordinate institutions, and begin the
task of peace-keeping from some other starting point? What other
starting point is there?
History suggests an answer to that last question. Peace-keeping
has been effective in the past when carried out under the
imperial aegis.
The United States came into being as a kind of
protest against imperial government by people who found
themselves too far from the source of imperial power to be
adequately represented there. For this reason, Americans have
always been reluctant to pursue imperial ambitions, despite
Kipling's appeal to them to "take up the white man's
burden."
It seems, though, that the failure of the U.N. to deal with the
threat posed by Iraq has prompted a genuinely imperial response
from the U.S.--a unilateral imposition of order on people who
have shown no capacity to impose it on themselves. But this is
imperialism with a difference. The desire is to impose order and
then, having achieved it, to withdraw, leaving the country to
govern itself.
But what if order is not achieved, or collapses immediately as
soon as the Americans withdraw? This is a real possibility for
the very reason that there is so little evidence to suggest that
Iraqis have a common loyalty or a shared interest in democratic
government--government, that is, which offers equal participation
to those of another religious sect, another tribe, or another
family. Clearly, the imperial path is fraught with difficulties
and dangers, and the temptation will be to eliminate the
dictators and their weapons but to do nothing thereafter to
provide new forms of government or to ensure that the dictators
remain things of the past.
What should we conclude concerning the future of the U.N.? It has
probably outlasted what usefulness it had as a peace-keeping
institution. Moreover, it has begun to impose intolerable burdens
as old decisions, hardened into law, impact on new problems that
they were not designed to solve. Its bureaucracies and
subordinate networks are rife with corruption. And the major
disputes between nation-states proceed outside its reach.
A strong case could therefore be made for its abolition.
Multilateral treaties agreed between individual states, securing
areas of the globe against war, and guaranteeing mutual aid in
times of crisis might be far more effective at doing the work for
which the U.N. was designed.
It is certainly true that nothing has more effectively kept the
peace in Europe than NATO; and even if NATO is now destined for
destruction, it is probably a healthier state of affairs when
alliances and treaties can both live and die in response to the
shifting interests of the nations than when a treaty is
immortalized and inoculated against change, like the Charter and
Conventions of the U.N.
References:
1. Well-documented by Rosemary Righter in Utopia
Lost: The United Nations and World Order (New York: Twentieth
Century Fund, 1995).
2. See Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in
the New World Order (New York: Random House, 2003).
3. See Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy
at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
4. See Jan Morris, Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire (New
York: Harcourt Trade Publishers, paper, 2002, and the lively
recent survey of the Empire and its alternatives by Niall
Fergusson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order
and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books,
2003).
This article comes from the Heritage Foundation website.
We would like to thank Roger Scruton for giving us permission to
put his lecture on UK Apologetics. Roger's own site is
HERE.
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