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PDF FormatThe CGG’s proposals have formed the basis for reforms now under way at the world body. Security Council expansion is progressing, with strong pressure for an end to the veto. Rather than push for global taxation just yet, Secretary General Kofi Annan has proposed a $1 billion revolving credit fund to enable the UN to continue operating even if the U.S. holds back its contributions. Meanwhile, UN environmental regulation took a major step forward with the 1997 Kyoto conference on global warming, when nations for the first time committed themselves to binding reductions of emissions of so-called “greenhouse gases.” This follows earlier protocols on such topics as the limitation of gases alleged to deplete the atmosphere’s ozone layer, and the “protection of biodiversity.”
A less-known project, international gun control, is moving quickly as well, shepherded along by the same disarmament groups responsible for the Chemical Weapons Convention—perhaps the most intrusive disarmament treaty to date—and the ban on land mines. Having already established the international supervision of heavy conventional weaponry such as missiles and tanks, the UN has moved on to “small arms and light weapons”—everything from shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles to handguns and grenades. In October 1997 Mitsuro Donawaki of Japan (where private gun ownership is almost unheard of), chairman of a UN panel of experts on small arms, recommended that the UN look into developing systems for marking and identifying weapons, establishing a database of authorized manufacturers and dealers, and controlling the sophisticated machine tools needed to manufacture some ammunition and explosives.31 If these proposals are implemented, the United Nations will be responsible for supervision of all forms of weaponry. As this project is under the auspices of UN disarmament bodies, attempts at actual disarmament of small arms would not be far behind, with the aim of granting the UN a monopoly on the use of force—since, after all, “military force is not a legitimate political instrument, except in self-defense or under UN auspices.” And the UN decides what constitutes self-defense.
Not all the calls for more global governance come from the CGG or the UN. Just about every international problem these days provokes proposals for the creation of additional transnational institutions to “solve” it. A case in point is the recent economic crisis in east Asia, which unleashed a wave of proposals for new international agencies in response. Investor George Soros, known supporter of European integration and avowed skeptic towards capitalism, suggested an International Credit Insurance Corporation to guarantee international loans.32 International financial consultant Henry Kaufman reiterated his support for a Board of Overseers of Major International Institutions and Markets, essentially a worldwide bank regulator.33 Others have called for the creation of a global central bank and for restrictions on international capital flows. What these suggestions have in common is an assumption, gaining in acceptance every day, that the relative failures of some economies undermine the right and wisdom of self-governance, that the rules of the international game have somehow changed, and that the appropriate response to these changes is the creation of additional multilateral regimes, where decisions critical to the economic fate of nations will be kept at a safe distance from the nuisance of democratic oversight.
IV
Isn’t “globalism” just a new word for “socialism”? Stripped of its Eurojargon and hi-tech perfumery, is not the call for sovereignty to be “exercised collectively” by giving basic decisionmaking over to unaccountable bureaucrats really just an update of the same heavy-handed, collectivist utopianism that threatened the basic liberties of citizens and peoples for most of the twentieth century? A brief look at the intellectual and political roots of today’s internationalist movement reveals that it is really nothing new at all; that the ideas and institutions of today’s internationalism are the direct progeny of the world’s socialist-internationalist heritage; and that even as the collectivist economic vision has been discredited, its adherents have reemerged and grown powerful under the banner of the collectivist political vision, known today as “globalism.”34
Since the eighteenth century, revolutionary thinkers have envisioned a Europe united in peace, transcending national identities for a European one, drawn together by a claimed common religion, culture and history—and by a collectivist ideal. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it in 1771, “There are no longer French, Germans, Spaniards or even English... but only Europeans.”35 Rousseau, as well, offered the seeds of modern socialism by casting doubt upon the basic notion of private property, as expressed famously in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality:
The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: “Do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”36
Rousseau’s writings, which sired so many aspects of the emergence of socialism in Europe, offered the basic political outlook in which nations and individuals consistently defer to the larger collective—an outlook that would resound in socialist internationalist writings for centuries to come. Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the intellectual forebears of Christian Socialism in France, advocated the scientific organization of industry and society, and called for the unification of Europe under a single, supreme parliament, through which “the European peoples will be united by the essential bonds in any political association; uniformity of institutions, union of interests, conformity of principles, a common ethic and a common education.” Expressing a sentiment that will no doubt ring familiar, Saint-Simon wrote:
There will come a time, without doubt, when all the peoples of Europe will feel that questions of common interest must be dealt with before coming down to national interests; then evils will begin to lessen, troubles abate, war die out. That is the ultimate direction in which we are steadily progressing; it is there that the progress of the human mind will carry us. But which is more worthy of man’s prudence—to hasten towards it, or to let ourselves be dragged there?37
While Saint-Simon was laying the groundwork for generations of socialist preeminence in France, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were establishing a secular variety of socialist internationalism in Germany. In 1848, their Communist Manifesto argued, in addition to its well-known economic claims, that the working classes of all nationalities had more in common with their brother proletarians than with their bourgeois compatriots: “National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.”38
As the decades passed, belief in the imminence of a new global order based on organization and reason intensified, and the work of collectivist philosophers began to bear political and institutional fruit. In the years prior to World War I, French socialists came to believe that an era of European, collectivist brotherhood was close at hand, and organized politically to help bring it about. In 1903, Jean Jaurés, cofounder of the newspaper L’Humanité and head of the French Socialist Party, told France’s Chamber of Deputies that in short order, the Allies and Central Powers would merge into a “European Alliance of Labor and Peace,” whose principal task would be “protecting the workers of all countries throughout Europe, and creating a sort of European social Fatherland for the whole of the proletariat.”39 Jaurés’ words were echoed two years later by Gustave Hervé, a French radical who facilitated the merger of France’s two socialist parties:
Our compatriots are not the capitalists of this country, who would massacre us if they could, as they massacred the father of the Commune; they are the class-conscious proletarians, the Socialists, the revolutionists of the earth, who are everywhere waging the same battle as we for the inauguration of a new society... We shall establish the free European federation, the first step towards that grand federation of humanity, in which the principalities of today will lose themselves, as the petty provinces of old lost themselves in the formation of the France, the England, the Germany of modern times.40
