The War on Sovereignty
by William F. Jasper
When the New World Order architects at the Council on Foreign Relations prattle about sovereignty, they mean something entirely different from independent nation-states.
I will merely repeat that we are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands....
— Arnold J. Toynbee Historian, Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1931
‘‘The people of our country are united behind our men and women in uniform, and this government will do all that is necessary to assure the success of their historic mission." So declared President George W. Bush in his April 13 press conference on Iraq. "One central commitment of that mission," the president continued, "is the transfer of sovereignty back to the Iraqi people. We have set a deadline of June 30th. It is important that we meet that deadline."
Sovereignty. The president invoked the term 12 times in his press conference, three times in one sentence: "Once we transfer sovereignty, we’ll enter into a security agreement with the government to which we pass sovereignty, the entity to which we pass sovereignty." It should be of more than passing interest that sovereignty-talk is once again in vogue, at least where Iraq is concerned. Not only the president, but other politicians, legal experts, academicians and journalists have weighed in on the urgent necessity of transferring sovereignty from the occupational forces to the Iraqis. But it is nothing more than deceptive lip service.
For most of the past century, national sovereignty has been in retreat, steadily eroded by a profusion of treaties and international organizations. All the while, it has been anathematized and scorned by the intelligentsia and the one-world lobby as a stumbling block to world order and world peace.
So why is it suddenly not just acceptable but apparently obligatory for even dedicated globalists to get worked up over Iraq’s "sovereignty"? The inveterate internationalists at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Council on Foreign Relations have been producing task force reports, press conferences, articles and op-ed columns on the subject for months. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, in a radio interview last August, pressed the U.S. to speed up the transfer, asserting that "a logic of occupation must be rapidly replaced by a logic of sovereignty." French President Jacques Chirac delivered the same message last September in a New York Times interview: "There will be no concrete solution unless sovereignty is transferred to Iraq as quickly as possible."
This double talk is from two of the most militant Eurocrats who have been pushing relentlessly for years to destroy the national sovereignty not only of France but of all the countries of the European Union and to subject all to the growing EU central government based in Brussels. Why the concern over sovereignty for Iraq, but not for France, Italy, Germany, and the other (former) nation states of Europe?
Verbicide and Sovereignty
When internationalists speak positively of national sovereignty, they mean something entirely different from the commonly understood, traditional meaning of the term. In short, they are committing verbicide — that is, deliberately butchering the true definition of the word. In the case of Iraq, for instance, they speak of a "transfer of sovereignty" that entails continued military occupation for years to come and administration of many of the functions of the nation-state by the United Nations. Recall that in his demand for "sovereignty" for Iraq, Monsieur Chirac also demanded a "key role" for the UN. The supposedly anti-UN Bush administration agrees. "Nobody wants the U.N. in there more than we do," an unnamed "senior State Department official" told the Washington Post. "We’re going to do everything we can to get them there," the official was quoted as saying in the Post’s February 18 story.
The April 23 New York Times reported on the Bush administration’s "plans for a new caretaker government in Iraq" that "would place severe limits on its sovereignty, including only partial command over its armed forces and no authority to enact new laws." And Secretary of State Colin Powell stated on April 8: "They will be sovereign, but I think as a result of agreements, as a result of … [UN] resolutions that are passed, there will be some constraints on the power of this sovereignty."
UN-imposed constraints on sovereignty? Severe limits? What kind of "sovereignty" is that? Answer: The same kind of "sovereignty" that is being fastened upon every other nation of the world, including the U.S., by an ever-expanding and constantly tightening net of UN treaties, conventions and resolutions that claim the fictional authority of "international law." This newly defined sovereignty is being fastened upon us knowingly and willfully by U.S. officials who have embraced the subversive ideology of internationalism, in blatant violation of the solemn oath of office to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Sovereignty is like pregnancy; you’re either sovereign or you’re not. If an external authority dictates certain constraints upon your actions and powers, then you are not sovereign; the external authority doing the dictating is the real sovereign. Hugo Grotius, the eminent Dutch legal theorist of the 17th century, whose writings many of the Founding Fathers greatly admired, put it this way: "That power is called sovereign whose actions are not subject to the legal control of another, so that they cannot be rendered void by the operation of another human will."
Professor Jeremy Rabkin of Cornell University has addressed this fundamental issue more recently (1998, Why Sovereignty Matters), noting: "Sovereignty denotes independence. A sovereign state is one that acknowledges no superior over its own government — or as the Declaration of Independence put it, with proper piety, no superior ‘among the powers of the Earth.’"
This kind of "unenlightened" fidelity to the traditional meaning of things sends the internationalists at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) into near epileptic convulsions. The CFR journal Foreign Affairs went after Professor Rabkin and other defenders of national sovereignty in its November/December 2000 issue. In a diatribe entitled, "The New Sovereigntists: American Exceptionalism and Its False Prophets," Peter J. Spiro expressed alarm that "anti-internationalism claims a growing intellectual following" that actually has become a "movement." And this movement is making ratification of UN treaties and U.S. participation in a "broad array of international regimes" increasingly difficult. In short, laments Spiro, the "new sovereigntists" are botching up the drive for global government:
At the center of their thinking stands the edifice of sovereignty. Sovereignty, in this conception, calls for America to resist the incorporation of international norms and drapes the power to do so in the mantle of constitutional legitimacy. "Because the United States is fully sovereign," claims Jeremy Rabkin, a professor of political science at Cornell University, "it can determine for itself what its Constitution will require. And the Constitution necessarily requires that sovereignty be safeguarded so that the Constitution itself can be secure."
If Rabkin’s argument makes sense to you, insists Spiro, a professor of law at Hofstra University, it is only because you have a totally antiquated view of sovereignty and the Constitution. The "new sovereigntists" forget, says Spiro, that the Constitution "has always adapted itself successfully to new exigencies of the international system."
"Indeed," he declares, "the Constitution will have to adapt to global requirements sooner or later." Spiro appears dismayed that "the international community cannot yet force formal participation in international regimes." "But," says this CFR propagandist, on a triumphant note, "economic globalization will inevitably bring the United States in line."
Professor Spiro and his one-world cohorts at the CFR are doing all in their power to "bring the United States in line" with the evolving UN-defined notion of sovereignty. In 1999, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan approvingly declared: "State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined." Mr. Annan went on to describe "traditional notions of sovereignty" as an "obstacle" to the UN’s goals. In this, he was absolutely correct; sovereignty, as understood by America’s Founding Fathers, is indeed an obstacle to the UN’s goals of ever-expanding power, and its ultimate goal of unrestrained world government.
Kofi Annan is not the first to push this subversion through verbicide; he is, in fact, merely echoing what a long train of globalists have been advocating for many decades. Walt Whitman Rostow, in his 1960 book entitled The United States in the World Arena, declared that it was "an American interest to see an end to nationhood as it has been historically defined." As head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council under President John F. Kennedy (and later as national security advisor to President Johnson), Rostow helped launch policies aimed at destroying U.S. sovereignty, or U.S. "nationhood as it has been historically defined." Rostow, a longtime CFR member (and a security risk who failed several security clearance checks), left no doubt as to what this really meant. Returning from a trip to Moscow in 1960, he declared that the ultimate goal of U.S. policy is "the creation of a world order which really can’t stop very short of world law and some form of world government."
The Gospel of Globalism
Admissions like those by Walt Rostow cited above are not made for broad public consumption; they are usually made in publications and forums for dedicated one-worlders and their fellow travelers. As Michael Hirsh (CFR) explained in a special issue of the international edition of Newsweek (edited by CFR member Fareed Zakaria):
[T]he internationalists were always hard at work in quiet places making plans for a more perfect global community. In the end the internationalists have always dominated national policy. Even so, they haven’t bragged about their globe-building for fear of reawakening the other half of the American psyche, our berserker nativism. And so they have always done it in the most out-of-the-way places and with little ado.
continued in next post......... |
