A Clash of Internationalisms
The isolationist rap against Bush.

August 2, 2001 11:10 a.m.

n the last few weeks, the Bush administration has refused to sign or ratify a number of international agreements. The Kyoto accord on global warming is the best-known case. But the U.S. has also withdrawn its support for the treaty on germ warfare, warning the U.N. that it would not accept international regulation of the small-arms trade if it impinged on the rights of American gun-owners, and threatened not to attend the U.N. Conference on Racism if its agenda included reparations for slavery and condemnation of Zionism as a form of racism.

These refusals have been denounced as "U.S. unilateralism" by European politicians. And their criticism was echoed in Sunday's Washington Post by its distinguished foreign-affairs columnist, Jim Hoagland, in an article that described Bush's policy as "isolationism lite" but worried that it could have very un-lite consequences:

"Other nations fear the effect of Bush's rejectionism on the overall system of international agreements and negotiations that has grown up since World War II.

This fear is most pronounced in Germany, where postwar independence and reunification are widely seen as being based on the international treaty system. Bush foreign policy risks becoming deeply unpopular among centrist voters who decide elections in Germany, and not only in Germany."

And seeing a similar political opportunity to brand his opponents as isolationist know-nothings, Sen. Tom Daschle, the Majority Leader of the newly Democrat-controlled Senate, had earlier worried publicly that this policy of abstentionism was "minimizing" and "isolating" the U.S. in world affairs.

Of course, the senator must be dimly aware that such abstentionism long pre-dates the Bush administration. Mr. Daschle himself was one of the 95 Senators who voted for the 1997 Senate resolution opposing the carbon emission limits in Kyoto. The Senate itself decisively rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty last year prior to the election. And President Clinton refused to endorse the international ban on landmines and signed onto the Rome Treaty establishing an International Criminal Court only as part of his last-minute presidential giveaway of pardons and liberal desiderata. Even then, in a wonderfully Clintonesque touch, he explained that he was signing on to the "aims" of the treaty only and would oppose ratification unless the ICC Statute were "reformed."

On the other side of the ledger, however, both the Clinton and Bush administrations have accepted significant new international obligations. For instance, they backed NAFTA and NATO expansion — the latter obliging the U.S. to go to war to defend the territory of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. It is hard to imagine a more solemn commitment to internationalism.

In short, both major parties have endorsed some international obligations and backed away from others. Could it possibly be that American interests were advanced on both sets of occasions — that some treaties furthered U.S. aims and were endorsed while others retarded them and were blocked?

That is exactly what Colin Powell, U.S. Secretary of State, argued last week at the meeting of Asian foreign ministers. He pointed out that the U.N. germ treaty was generally known to be unenforceable because of the vast expansion of biotechnological facilities in recent years. And the treaty would put the U.S. — both the leader in biotechnological research and a nation that takes its obligations seriously — at a commercial and strategic disadvantage. The Pentagon similarly persuaded Mr. Clinton that assenting to an International Criminal Court would risk the arrest and conviction of U.S. troops for following his orders — until his last days in office when he suddenly became more worried about the fate of liberal troops in think tanks and NGOs.

That does not mean, however, that the choice to be made is solely one between international obligations and American interests. As the U.S. support for NAFTA and NATO suggests, there is a more subtle choice facing us — namely a choice between two very different sorts of internationalism — internationalism which rests on cooperation between independent nation-states and supra-nationalism which seeks to subordinate sovereign states to new forms of international agency.

Traditional internationalism is very specific about the obligations it imposes. Where possible, it defines these obligations clearly in advance even though they may be of the highest kind, for instance, Article Five of NATO which commits member-states to defend an ally under attack. When a new obligation is under discussion, it employs the unanimity principle which allows just one member to exercise a veto on collective decisions — the old General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade had such a rule. It acknowledges that nations can exercise their sovereignty (and second thoughts) by leaving an organization or abrogating a treaty. And in general it is subordinate to national sovereignty — indeed it makes international organizations the agents of nation-states to achieve certain specific endeavors.

In marked contrast, supra-nationalism is hostile to national sovereignty in principle. It seeks to bind member-states to accept majority decisions on issues that cannot be known in advance. It is hostile to rules such as the unanimity principle — the European Union, for instance, has "qualified majority voting" on most policy areas. It will generally accept "opt-outs" from collective majority decisions only on a temporary basis. It allows no mechanism for withdrawal from treaties or the bodies they establish. It even claims the right to exercise powers over states which have not accepted its legitimacy — thus the Rome Treaty establishing the International Criminal Court claims jurisdiction over the citizens of states which have not ratified it in cases where their alleged victims belong to a state that has done so. And in general supra-nationalism makes nation-states the agents of its collective decisions, thereby depriving them of a portion of their sovereignty.

This distinction between supra-nationalism and internationalism is, of course, an abstraction. No actual organization or treaty embodies either principle in a pure and unadulterated way. Probably the EU is the nearest thing to a purely supra-national body — just as GATT is perhaps the best example of traditional internationalism (and, doubtless not coincidentally, one of the most successful of the international institutions established at the end of the Second World War.) Abstract though it may be, however, the distinction is vital to both democracy and the U.S. Constitution.

Nation-states are the building blocks of a democratic internationalism. The powers exercised by international bodies can help nations to reach diplomatic agreements, but they cannot compel nations to agree when they disagree. And they cannot exercise powers that have not been specifically granted by national parliaments without violating democratic accountability. Self-directed powers like those of the independent prosecutor of the proposed International Criminal Court are a dangerous innovation. The Kyoto Protocol seems to envision another kind of self-directed international regulatory agency. These innovations, and the supranationalism they embody, are incompatible with parliamentary democracy — and in America's case, with the U.S. Constitution.

When the Bush administration resists making unlimited, open-ended and unknowable commitments, it is not resisting internationalism — it is objecting to rule by unaccountable international elites. The shrieking you hear is their complaining about it.

This originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times.