Democracy's Trojan horse

National Interest, The, Summer, 2004 by John Fonte

Global governance is implicitly a grand ideological project (and a utopian and coercive one, with universal aspirations). It is post-democratic in the sense that it originates from but transcends democracy just as the "postmodern" originates from but transcends modernity. Its success would mean that liberal democracy very well might be replaced with a new form of regime.

NOW LET us more closely examine post-democracy in practice. Understandings of human rights and international law have been transformed in the past several decades. New concepts of human rights and the "new" international law have been heavily influenced by the de facto post-democratic ideology and material interests of transnational elites. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, human rights were associated with the values of the Anglo-American democracies in the struggle against totalitarianism: the rights of free speech, free elections, the rule of law, freedom of religion, freedom of association and the like. Many Americans, in particular, wanted to qualify and narrow the concepts of social, cultural and economic rights that were incorporated into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

Today, the idea of what constitutes "human rights" has been vastly expanded. For example, an international agreement on "children's rights" ratified by most nations in the world (but not the United States) and enthusiastically supported by leading NGOs, declares that it is a basic human right that any child, "shall have ... freedom to seek, receive, and impart information of all kinds ... in print, in the form of art or through any other media of the child's choice;" and that "no child shall he subject to arbitrary ... interference with his or her privacy ... or correspondence."

The concept of international law has undergone considerable alteration as well. In an important article in The National Interest (Winter 2000/01), international lawyers David B. Rivkin and Lee A. Casey argue that instead of concerning itself with relations among nations (the traditional Law of Nations),

   This new international law purports to govern
   the relationship of citizens to their governments,
   affecting such domestic issues as environmental
   protection and the rights of children.

It also seeks the power to "promote the criminal prosecution of individual state officials by the courts of other states and international tribunals...." (2)

Two major NGOs, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA, are exemplars of the conflict between democracy and post-democracy. These two organizations have waged what could be characterized as "lawfare" against the exercise of democratic sovereignty by the American nation-state. They continuously pillory America's liberal democracy as an "oppressive" regime that routinely violates human rights. (3)

Immediately following the attacks of September 11, they objected to describing the conflict as a "war", preferring to characterize them as a "crime" that should be pursued under the auspices of international law. As American planes began bombing the Taliban in Afghanistan in October 2001, the NGOs sought ways to limit American military operations by complaining about possible collateral damage and the use of weapons of which they do not approve, such as cluster bombs.