September
25, 2002, 9:35 a.m. Transnational
Government
On the globalization
of terrorism; Part III.
By Roger Scruton
EDITOR'S
NOTE: This is Part III in a series of
excerpts from Roger Scruton's new book The
West and the Rest, published by the ISI
Books. The first installment of the Scruton series can be read
here.
The second here.
t
has been a ruling principle of Western politics that every extension of
human powers should be accompanied by an extension of the law, as a means
of controlling those powers and ensuring that they are not abused. Inevitably,
therefore, as the global impact of human decisions increases, so does
the demand for new legislative bodies with which to control that impact
and direct it to the common good. Until recently this kind of legal control
was exerted through international law, backed by treaties, of which the
charter forming the United Nations was the most important. It was assumed
that sovereignty remained with the individual states, and that the benefits
from international law were such that they would willingly uphold its
judgments, lest they be excluded from the club. As originally conceived,
therefore, the United Nations was exactly that — a union of nations,
each of which could one day be constituted as a nation-state, and each
of which meanwhile enjoyed the legal personality bestowed upon it by international
law.
Many commentators
still believe that the U.N. is the benign institution that its founders
intended it to be, and cause powerful countries like the United States
prefer to settle their disputes directly, on terms more favorable to themselves
than could be obtained from the court of international opinion. It seems
to me, however, that this optimistic view is no longer sustainable. For
it ignores the fact that, with the exception of delegates from personal
states, those who turn up to U.N. meetings literally have no business
being there. They are not the representatives of the people from whose
territory they come, and if they speak for anyone it is for the party,
faction, or tyrant who sent them. Moreover, as Rosemary Righter has shown,
the U.N. and its subordinate institutions are wholly prey to corruption,
consuming vast resources by the relentless extension of unaccountable
bureaucratic power. These institutions are less means of resolving disputes
than means of creating them, by dressing up the crimes of unaccountable
tyrants as though they were the corporate decisions of nation-states.
Matters have significantly
worsened in recent decades, as new forms of transnational legislation
threaten the sovereignty and the aspirations of the smaller countries
of the world. It would be a coherent response to globalization to encourage
the emergence of nation-states in all places where there is an embryonic
territorial jurisdiction. In this way each nation could make its own choices
for the future, and avoid being swept away by the global tide. And with
the emergence of territorial jurisdictions and genuinely accountable governments,
the terrorist threat would almost certainly dwindle, as people learn to
attach their loyalties to real fragments of earth rather than imaginary
vistas of heaven and thereby to see human life for what it is — namely,
a process of accommodation with one's neighbors. But this is not what
is happening. The embryonic states of Africa and Asia, for example, are
subject to WTO regulations that will unavoidably ruin their local food
economies by forcing them to compete on equal terms with massively subsidized
industrial food producers in the West. Genetically modified crops, whose
seeds are patented by Western multinationals, will very probably drive
the old crops from the market, compelling third-world farmers, through
the system of Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights, to buy their
seeds in the West. In other words, the agrarian economies of Africa will
be expropriated by transnational legislation that their people are powerless
to annul.
I mention the WTO
because it is so widely perceived as an instrument of "Western imperialism,"
and not only by those Westerners who fly around the world to demonstrate
against its meetings. In fact, almost every international institution,
however good its intentions, is attempting to pass laws, conventions,
and treaties — if only to justify its existence and to have something
for its overpaid bureaucrats to do. Repeated protests against the decisions
of global summits go unheeded, and a constant stream of unaccountable
regulations issues from the meetings of the Western powers as though the
rest had no choice but to accept them.
The global financial
institutions have acquired comparable sovereign powers. The World Bank
and the IMF, though founded with the purpose of securing global financial
stability, are now widely perceived as instruments of Western domination.
After all, they deal in dollars, and the money that they give or lend
can be spent only in an economy dominated by Western technology and Western
exports. By accepting this money a state is dragged unavoidably into the
global maelstrom.9 Moreover, being compelled in the nature of things to
negotiate with governments, the World Bank and the IMF subsidize the tyrants
and gangsters who have expropriated the political life of the countries
where they have come to power. Nor is there any real pressure on such
transnational institutions to account for their actions. A large number
of the enormous IMF loans made in recent years to the states of the former
Soviet Union have disappeared into the same Swiss bank accounts that have
been used to milk the Soviet people for fifty years. This has led to a
few vaguely reproachful noises, but to no penalties corresponding to the
enormity of the crime.
To some extent the
United States has remained unaffected by this growth in transnational
legislation. Its presidents have been reluctant to sign any treaty not
clearly in the nation's interest, and they react adversely to any proposals
that would diminish United States sovereignty or the ability of the country
to defend its territory. But, the critics say, this is because the United
States is able to dominate the crucial bodies, and to ensure that regulations
— such as those issued by the WTO — operate always in its national
interest.
A telling example
is the proposed treaty to establish an International Criminal Court —
a pie-eyed dream of Western liberals, designed to replace wars by judicial
processes, and to charge belligerents with war crimes. It seems clear
that the Senate will not ratify this treaty even though President Clinton
reluctantly added his signature to it. For the treaty will curtail the
freedoms to make sound military judgments and to make pre-emptive strikes
against a potential enemy. Hence, it will violate national sovereignty
in an area where sovereignty is the pre-condition of survival. The court
will be appointed by no accountable government, and its judges will include
many from impersonal states, who will act simply as tools in the hands
of unscrupulous factions or dictators. It is surely a welcome development
that the United States is rebelling against this particular piece of transnational
legislation. But it has yet to wake up to the principle that almost all
transnational legislation is a threat to someone's sovereignty.
Pertinent in the
present context is the U.N. Convention on Refugees and Asylum, ratified
in 1951, at a time when migration was not common and asylum rarely offered
or sought. This piece of legislation obliges our governments to offer
asylum to all who need it, and to give hospitality meanwhile to those
who claim it. As a result of global mobility, some two million people
arrive every year in Europe, ostensibly seeking asylum but in fact wishing
to profit from the black economy, and in any case enjoying the obligatory
hospitality required by the U.N. Convention. As a result, European states
have lost control of their borders, have unknown numbers of illegal residents,
and have black economies that grow larger by the week. Moreover, anyone
who suggests that the U.N. Convention is anachronistic, politically dangerous,
and socially destructive is subjected to intimidating criticism and risks
being denounced as a "racist" or worse.
The political and
economic advantages that lead people to seek asylum in the West are the
result of territorial jurisdiction. Yet territorial jurisdictions can
survive only if borders are controlled. Transnational legislation, acting
together with the culture of repudiation, is therefore rapidly undermining
the conditions that make Western freedoms durable. The effect of this
on the politics of France and Holland is now evident to everyone. And
when we find among the "asylum seekers" the vast majority of
those Islamist cells that have grown up in London, Paris, and Hamburg,
we begin to recognize just how much the political culture of the West
is bent on a path of self-destruction.
—
Roger Scruton
is among the most prominent contemporary English writers. A philosopher
who was a formerly a professor at Birkbeck College in London and at Boston
University, he is now a freelance writer living in Wiltshire.
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t
has been a ruling principle of Western politics that every extension of
human powers should be accompanied by an extension of the law, as a means
of controlling those powers and ensuring that they are not abused. Inevitably,
therefore, as the global impact of human decisions increases, so does
the demand for new legislative bodies with which to control that impact
and direct it to the common good. Until recently this kind of legal control
was exerted through international law, backed by treaties, of which the
charter forming the United Nations was the most important. It was assumed
that sovereignty remained with the individual states, and that the benefits
from international law were such that they would willingly uphold its
judgments, lest they be excluded from the club. As originally conceived,
therefore, the United Nations was exactly that — a union of nations,
each of which could one day be constituted as a nation-state, and each
of which meanwhile enjoyed the legal personality bestowed upon it by international
law.
