Gulliver’s travails: The U.S. in the post-Cold-War world

Towards the close of the twentieth century a metaphor entered circulation that compared the United States to Lemuel Gulliver at the start of his visit to Lilliput. Gulliver in Swift’s satire was, you recall, an English sea doctor who, having sunk exhausted on a foreign beach after his ship was wrecked, woke up to discover miniscule Lilliputians had tied him down with slender threads and tiny pegs. In this telling, the international community—that comfortable euphemism for the U.N., the WTO, the ICC, other U.N. agencies, and the massed ranks of NGOs—sought to constrain America’s freedom of action in a web of international laws, regulations, and treaties, such as the Kyoto accords.

It is a passably accurate account of the international status quo a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That status quo looks somewhat different five years later. But the history of the intervening period is the story of how the United States and the international community continued to grapple with each other in the process of seeking to contain or defeat Islamist terrorism. It is the story of “Gulliver’s Travails.”

The first episode is the globalizing decade that ran from the final collapse of the Soviet Union to September 11th. This was a period in which trade walls were reduced, barriers to capital movements liberalized, and the factors of production loosened up to move around the world more freely than at any time since 1914. These economic changes brought political ones in their train. Governments had to introduce such reforms as market transparency and the rule of law in order to attract and keep the foreign investment they needed for sustained prosperity.

All this is well known. But two other global developments passed unnoticed under the radar of conventional politics.

The first was the spread of Islamist terrorism. In retrospect it is astounding that we failed to react more strongly to the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole. Maybe Americans were insulated from a sensible anxiety by their victory in the Cold War, their status as the sole remaining superpower, and the sedative effects of the long Reagan-Clinton prosperity. Whatever the reason, Islamist terrorism grew throughout the 1990s partly because it was ignored.

The second global development was the quiet revolution of transnationalism. Its exact lineaments are open to debate, but I would suggest that it consists of five overlapping developments:

First, the growing power and authority of international, transnational, and supranational organizations such as the U.N. and its various agencies, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization.

Second, the transformation of international law from the arbitration of disputes between sovereign states into laws that have a direct impact on individual citizens and private bodies through treaties and conventions that override domestic legislation.

Third, the dramatic increase in the number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs in the jargon) and their increasing influence on international politics both as pressure groups and as providers of services to governments and international agencies.

Fourth, the spread of economic, environmental, and social regulation from the national to the international level through laws, treaties, and “standards” by, among other bodies, U.N. conferences on such topics as women’s rights and racism.

Finally, the emergence of common values, a common outlook, and even a class consciousness among the diplomats, lawyers, and bureaucrats in international organizations, NGOs, multinational corporations, and those academic centers that serve them.

Kenneth Minogue calls this structure of governance “Acronymia” after the UNOs and NGOs that constitute it. He credits the present author with giving the name “Olympians,” after the gods of Antiquity, to those who administer it. Ancient gods used to “kill us for their sport,” but modern Olympians are content to regulate and preach at us. John Fonte has defined the common ideology they preach as “transnational progressivism”: national sovereignty and the nation-state are disappearing in favor of a new structure of international organizations and rules that goes by the slippery name of “global governance.” In domestic politics, it argues that liberal democracy—built upon majority rule, individual rights, and a common culture—is being replaced by “post-democracy” that emphasizes group rights, multiculturalism, and politics as endless negotiations between ethnic groups. But the theory hardly distinguishes international from domestic politics and policy. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas coined the term “global domestic policy” that erases a distinction hitherto important outside Germany.

As a term for those holding this ideology, “transnational progressives” is too big a mouthful. Olympians is, well, too Olympian. A London lawyer, David Carr, of the libertarian blog Samizdata, compressed the former into “the Tranzis,” now in common circulation.

The Tranzis had (and have) a very complicated relationship with Gulliver. Because of America’s overwhelming power, they hoped that the United States could be conscripted to serve the purposes of “the international community” (i.e. themselves) in a series of humanitarian interventions. But they recognized dimly that the United States, as a constitutional liberal democracy, would never fit comfortably into the post-democratic structures of global governance they were constructing. Thus Jeremy Rabkin points out in Sovereignty that America stands out from almost all other advanced states in this regard:

Every state in the European Union now acknowledges that its constitution can be overturned by mere bureaucratic directives from the European Commission in Brussels; there is nothing like a fixed constitution to constrain the Commission itself. The arrangement is unthinkable in America but taken for granted in Europe. Because the United States has a strong constitutional tradition, it regularly attaches a rider to treaties and U.N. conventions that forbids the overriding of the U.S. Constitution. These riders come under occasional attack from international lawyers and activist NGOs that would like, for instance, to override the First Amendment in order to outlaw “hate speech.” These pressures are growing and, as Judge Robert Bork points out in his recent book Coercing Virtue, American judges have begun to cite foreign precedents in their legal reasoning. Even so, the United States will always be an awkward irritant in post-democratic structures—just as the British, with their similar liberal tradition, are the awkward squad inside the E.U. And if the United States is going to be an irritant, then its superpower status would make it a very serious irritant indeed. Tranzis were busily wrapping it around with as many legal and regulatory threads as possible when Al Qaeda struck at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—and Gulliver woke up.

Tranzi

noun. Derived from 'Transnational Progressive', a term popularised by John Fonte. Transnational Socialists. Not a term of endearment.

(coined by David Carr)

http://www.samizdata.net

There's a mouthful for you. It meant nothing to me either, until recently when I came across a rather lengthy article by John Fonte, written in 2001, and entitled "The Future of the Ideological War Within the West."(1) To make a very long story short, Fonte claims that elite institutions ranging in size and influence from the National Council of Churches to the United Nations are pushing the notion that "the nation-state and the idea of national citizenship are ill suited to deal with the global problems of the future." They propose abolishing nations and replacing them with a single, global government. Fonte says that, for reasons that are still not completely clear, practically every government in the world appears to have embraced Transnational Progressivism and is working around the clock to make global government a reality.

Fonte is quick to forewarn us that this coming global administration will be no respecter of our freedoms and suggests that some form of racialist police state will be imposed. A state where the elites will encourage the historically oppressed to get even with their former oppressors. He claims that "dominant" groups will be obliged to yield power to "oppressed" groups, with the former being displaced from their jobs in the economic sphere until each category of task reflects the proportion of "oppressed" people in the population. Fonte believes that this will not be the end of it either. The proportion of "oppressed" people in the population will grow constantly. That's because another tenet of this Tranzi-ism holds that "dominant" countries must welcome immigrants from "oppressed" countries in unlimited numbers. Furthermore, if any "dominant" people protest, they will be jailed for "hate speech."

http://www.quebecoislibre.org/021221-6.htm

Kennedy, Soros, Gore, Kerry- "Tranzi ping!

Nuance is the essence of relativist interpretation. Manichean notions of barbarity and civilization, Western culture juxtaposed to eighth-century Islamic fascism, good versus evil—these “reductionist” and “simplistic” notions of the present Bushworld simply cannot stand. If such clear polarities were to be valid, the entire foundation of postmodern thinking would collapse under the weight of reason’s ability to gather data, make informed decisions, and pass judgments that cut across culture, race, and sex—and thus to conclude that a Taliban Afghanistan or Saddam’s Iraq was a uniquely evil example of self-induced misery.- Victor David Hansen

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