Fukiyama writes well today on the differing US and European views on international law:
The first thing that must be said about this rift over the role of international law and institutions is that we should not necessarily take for granted the conventional wisdom that Americans are unilateralist and Europeans multilateralist. If we look at economic issues, the United States has played a key role in the creation of a series of overlapping international organizations, from the World Trade Organization to a host of bodies promoting standards, aviation safety, banking, telecommunications, drug enforcement and the like. In this realm the Europeans have arguably been more unilateralist than the United States, resisting verdicts by international arbitration panels on trade issues and unilaterally imposing on American corporations their policies toward genetically modified food, data privacy and antitrust. With the exception of environmental agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol, most instances in which Americans are more consistently unilateralist concern security.
While it is tempting to say that this is simply a matter of the Bush administration's often sharp-elbowed approach to issues such as the International Criminal Court, a much deeper matter of principle is involved. To put it rather schematically, Americans tend not to see any source of democratic legitimacy higher than the nation-state. To the extent that international organizations have legitimacy, it is because duly constituted democratic majorities have handed that legitimacy up to them in a negotiated, contractual process, which they can take back at any time. Europeans, by contrast, tend to believe that democratic legitimacy flows from the will of an international community much larger than any individual nation-state. This international community is not embodied concretely in a single, global democratic constitutional order. Yet it hands down legitimacy to existing international institutions, which are seen as partially embodying it, with a moral authority greater than that of any nation-state.
Between these two views of the sources of legitimacy, the Europeans are theoretically right but wrong in practice. It is impossible to assert as a matter of principle that legitimately constituted liberal democracies can't make grave mistakes or indeed commit crimes against humanity. But the European idea that legitimacy is handed downward from a disembodied international community rather than handed upward from existing democratic institutions reflecting the public will on a nation-state level invites abuse on the part of elites, who are then free to interpret the will of the international community to suit their own preferences. This is the problem with the International Criminal Court. Instead of strengthening democracy on an international level, it tends to undermine democracy where it concretely lives, in nation-states.
washingtonpost.com |
