National Sovereignty in the New World Order

Matt Tiscareno (a.k.a. "Tisco")
has this to say "... about the 'competent authority' issue [in just war
theory]":

The founding concept of American
democracy was that people should be able to govern their own affairs
without outside (specifically, European) interference. Nowadays, the
trendy position seems to be that we should surrender that right to the
U.N. If the day ever comes that Americans cannot do what they believe is
right without permission from the French, that will be the day that the
freedom of our nation has died.

Especially given recent events, I don't think we have to worry about
that prospect. But questions regarding national sovereignty are
important to address nonetheless. For as the "old world order" fades, we
will have to address the role of national sovereignty in the new world
order.

At a
meeting of some old members of past peace movements in 1995, href="http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0812794.html">William Sloane
Coffin, former head of SANE, said, "Religious people particularly are
called on to moderate national sovereignty and to increase global loyalty
and so help the United Nations." Religious people are indeed called on to
do that, by folk such as Mr. Coffin. But it is doubtful that there is any
religious reason to reduce national sovereignty in favor of the political
apparatus of the UN. It is far from self-evident that "global loyalty" is
morally superior to national loyalty or, for that matter, local loyalty.

Richard John Neuhaus replies, "I'm not sure what is meant by 'global
loyalty' -- perhaps it would become a virtue in the event of href="http://armageddononline.tripod.com/aliens.htm">invasion from
other planets -- but I am sure that such jargon contributes little to
understanding why so many thoughtful Americans are coming to a jaundiced
view of the UN and other institutions created in support of an
internationalism that is now unsupported by clear doctrine, or any
doctrine at all."

If "global loyalty" isn't sacred, is national sovereignty? Neuhaus doesn't believe so.
"The sacralized nation-state is one of the great idols of modern history."

While perhaps not canonized as sacred, for nineteenth-century American href="http://my.execpc.com/~berrestr/brownson.html">Orestes A.
Brownson, philosopher, minister, essayist, and reviewer, national
sovereignty accords with the real but limited human powers of knowing
and loving one another. Brownson even asserts that "he who dies on the
battlefield fighting for his country ranks with him who dies at the stake
for his faith." More precisely, "Civic virtues are themselves religious
virtues, or at least virtues without which there are no religious virtues,
since no man who does not love his brother does or can love God." Human
beings approach the universal through the particular, and love of the
personal Creator cannot be separated from other particular human beings.
Human love is never for human beings in general. All men are brothers, but
men come to know brotherly love only when they experience political
solidarity with their fellow citizens.

Pierre Manent, a
French Catholic political thinker, is one of the most accomplished
defenders of the nation in general, and his own French nation in
particular. This is remarkable given that France, like most
of the rest of Europe, is in the process of enthusiastically
dissolving its own sovereignty in favor of the transpolitical entity of
the European Union. Manent notes
that modern democracy needs to be instantiated in a "body." It needs
limits, a "territorial framework," that may seem arbitrary from a
theological perspective but is indispensable for the existence
of political life. Manent concludes that republican government -- like
all
government -- must be territorial, and loyalty, more than consent, must be
the foundation of good government and political life.

The Fate of the United Nations

Regarding the fate of the UN, many in America have been talking for
years about the its increasing irrelevance in world affairs. President
Bush has warned that if the UN does not show more "backbone," it risks
going the way of the League of Nations, ending up as an international
"debating society."

Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent defense analyst, recently wrote of the
UN's failure in an article of the Moscow Times:

As the United States this week finally
and firmly assumed its role as undisputed world hegemon, the old world
order created in 1945 began to fold. It was France and Russia that gave
the existing system the kiss of death by exposing its emptiness and
fundamental immorality.

. . .

[T]he balance between East and West, reflected in the Security Council,
together with the principle of absolute sovereignty, helped keep an array
of bloody dictatorships in power for decades.
The recent fracas in the Security Council over Iraq was mostly about the
limits of sovereignty. France, Russia, Germany and China fully agreed that
Iraq should get rid of its weapons of mass destruction but argued that
this goal could be accomplished by international inspections. At the same
time, it was stressed that any attempt to change the regime was illegal
and unacceptable.

Felgenhauer sees the old world order collapsing "as a result of our own
[Russia's]
-- together with France's -- diplomatic insanity."

"The Old European model for international affairs is dying," says
Janet Daley in a recent column.
"This is the first week of the future. . . [T]he 21st century will be about
the New World: which is to say, America, with a small accompaniment from
other Anglophone countries. . . .
The unquestioning reverence for democracy and personal liberty with which
Americans are raised is the precise antidote to the credo of the new
enemy. And so they will fight this fight now in the only way that it can
be fought: with the unflinching dedication of true believers, while the
Old Europeans cringe on the sidelines."

Welcome to the New World Order

As a sovereign nation, America has chosen to defend itself by the pre-emptive attack of a nation, or at least a "bloody dictatorship" regime, whose sovereignty it did not recognize. We are clearly "interfering" with the affairs of Iraq, the rationale being that a tyrranical regime has held the people of Iraq captive through lethal force and may try to extend the use of that lethal force to any nation which interferes -- using weapons of mass murder which it has used in the past, and which it has been allegedly developing. Thus the need in the minds of the Bush Administration for the much bruited "regime change." And in this case, regime change requires action, not words, and the use of lethal force, not endless bureaucratic wrangling.

France and Russia tried to contain America's "aggression," but couldn't, having failed to offer an effective and acceptable alternative to the use of force. What the future world order may look like is now largely up to US (and to speculation). My guess is that America won't be consulting France and Russia in this regard any time soon.

One thing is for sure: tyrrants beware! Maybe Bush is a "cowboy," an idealistic cowboy in the Wild West of contemporary geopolitics. He's tired of cynics, moral relativists, and impotent councils who let evil men enslave their own countrymen and threaten civilization.