The New Totalitarian Temptation. Todd Huizinga
powers would address the difficult problems of a global domestic politics,” such as “global economic and ecological problems.”14 In order to negotiate policy on a level playing field with the United States in such a scenario, “nation-states in the various world regions would have to unite to form continental regimes on the model of an EU equipped with sufficient power to conduct an effective foreign policy of its own.” Thus, there would still be “foreign policy” between nations (or “continental regimes”), but the distinction between domestic and foreign policy would be blurred; a “modified form” of international relations would basically become a “global domestic politics” among the United States and various continental regimes such as the EU.
Nations would continue to exist. There would be no one-world government. But Habermas does not waver from the utopian goals he has for global governance: world peace and worldwide respect for universal human rights. And in order to achieve these goals, there would be a world organization – the UN – that, while purportedly not a world government, would be endowed with formidable power on a global scale, the power to decide questions of war and peace and to enforce those decisions, and to impose globally a particular vision of human rights. This is a level of power that would dwarf that of any nation-state, including the United States, the most powerful nation-state in the history of the world. As Habermas puts it, this would be “a global domestic politics without a world government . . . embedded within the framework of a world organization with the power to impose peace and implement human rights.”15
What does this all mean? Could the democratic nation-state, directly accountable to its citizens, survive in such a system? Are global governance and liberal democracy compatible, or are they mutually exclusive? John Fonte gets to the heart of the matter in his masterful analysis of global governance, Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others? Here, Fonte strips the “postdemocratic and postliberal” agenda of the global governance movement down to the essence of what it would mean for those who cherish self-government: it would “shift power from democracies to supranational institutions and rules, and thus severely restrict democratic decision making in independent states.”16 Although the advocates of global governance may think of themselves as supporters of democracy, “the effect of their policies would be fundamentally at odds with the basic principles and practices of democratic self-government.”17 Ultimately, says Fonte, this is a “moral conflict” revolving around the question: “Do Americans, or other peoples, have the moral right to rule themselves or must they share sovereignty with others?”18
The global governancers, whether they openly admit it or not – whether they consciously realize it or not – believe that people do not have a right to self-government. They subscribe to what they consider a nobler ideal, in which “global norms and universal human rights” constitute the highest authority. As Fonte explains, “They regard the ‘new’ international law, embodying the latest (and most progressive) concepts of global human rights and universal norms, as superior to any national law or the constitution of any democratic nation-state.”19 Accordingly, global governancers aim to establish a “global rule of law” to which all national law would be subordinate.20
This is not about one-world-government conspiracy theories or the black helicopters of the UN. As Fonte explains, the advocates of global governance do not aim to create “a single global government, or any form of tyranny, but rather ‘governance’ through a hybrid of national, transnational, and supranational legal and regulatory regimes.”21 Nevertheless, if a “global rule of law” is to be established under some kind of global authority, “liberal democracy will be replaced by postdemocratic governance.”22 When all is said and done, the global governance ideology is engaging the Western democracies in a zero-sum conflict between two irreconcilable visions for political life, a conflict centering on the most basic question of politics: “Who determines the laws under which we shall live?” Again, this is “a moral struggle over the first principles of government and politics.”23
Regardless of the opposing currents represented by sovereigntists such as Margaret Thatcher, nationalists such as Charles de Gaulle and pragmatists such as Tony Blair, the European project has always been motivated by a vision of supranational governance for Europe and global governance for the world, such as has been articulated by people like Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, Alcide De Gasperi and Helmut Kohl. It is a grand and attractive and ambitious vision of a better world – a vision that many good people are espousing. John Fonte acknowledges that “the advocates of global governance hope for a better world – more humane, just, and democratic.”24 Indeed, after the bloody conflicts and totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, writes Habermas, “The historical success of the European Union has confirmed Europeans in the conviction that the domestication of the state’s use of violence also calls for a reciprocal restriction of the scope of sovereignty at the global level.”25
Like the desire for peace that underlay the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in the aftermath of World War II, the intentions of today’s global governancers may be good, even noble. But, as Fonte so conclusively demonstrates, “their proposed policies would, in fact, shrink and usurp democratic self-government.”26 Even as committed an advocate of global governance as Pascal Lamy admits that there is a democratic deficit in the European experiment: “We are witnessing a growing distance between European public opinions and the European project. . . . In spite of constantly striking institutional flints over the past 50 years, there has been no resulting democratic spark.”27
That is what global governance comes down to: the usurpation of democratic self-government by a democratically unaccountable group of globalist elites. In the next section we will step back and examine how this postdemocratic, postliberal project began. An overview of the history of postwar European integration will reinforce how the noble illusion of supranational governance runs like a red thread through the story of the EU.
INTENDED AND UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Five years and a day after World War II had ended in Europe with Germany’s unconditional surrender, the Schuman Declaration was presented, on May 9, 1950. The French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, was proposing the establishment of what would become the European Coal and Steel Community. The Schuman Declaration was a powerful symbol of a new Europe emerging from the ashes of the most destructive war the world had ever known.
The immediate purpose of the ECSC was to eliminate the perpetual rivalry between France and Germany, which had led to repeated conflicts and untold suffering for so many generations. By placing French and German coal and steel production under a common High Authority, which would administer both countries’ coal and steel industries independently of their respective governments, the ECSC would bind together the economic interests of the two nations. Thereby, war between France and Germany was to be relegated to the past. According to the Schuman Declaration, “The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.”1
AN END TO WAR
The idea of making war between France and Germany impossible was a powerful and noble idea indeed. In World War II, approximately 5 million German soldiers, 1 million German civilians, 400,000 French soldiers and 400,000 French civilians had died, to say nothing of the millions of wounded and the war’s estimated economic costs of 4 trillion dollars. And this is to say nothing of World War I, which had ended only twenty-one years before the beginning of World War II.
But of course, World War II and Nazism did not affect only France and Germany. On the continent of Europe, it claimed the lives of approximately