U.N.'s shaky foundation
worldnetdaily.com
Republican Party elites who have worked so hard to nominate George W. Bush tend to be uncomfortable with the conservative agenda of defending American sovereignty. Is this charge unfair? Certainly it is the Democrats who are most eager to blur the line between the nation and the world. But Republican support for such internationalist briar patches as the Kosovo intervention and the World Trade Organization reveals a deep confusion about American sovereignty and why it matters. As Republican "strategists" plot their autumn "gotcha's" for Al Gore, they seem oblivious to the fact that an entire core Republican constituency may walk away from the Republican ticket, unless that ticket takes a clear stand on the sovereignty issue. The Republican leadership needs to understand why concern over the issue is so high, and I'd like to explain it to them.
The center of internationalism, of course, is the United Nations. So if we are to understand what is wrong with internationalism, we need to understand clearly what the United Nations represents. To be fair, we should begin by acknowledging that the U.N. arose from motives that, however misguided, were not altogether malicious. Despite the dangerous flaws in the conception and development of the United Nations' vision of global unity, it is important to remember that the effort itself began during the closing days and aftermath of the Second World War. At the end of such a period of exhausting war and wickedness it was natural that there would be a great desire to relieve the world of it happening again. The nations that originally formed the U.N. were those that had just heroically spent themselves in the struggle to defeat international evil. We should be slow to criticize their decent impulse to use that moment of great moral focus to lay a foundation of common action that would prevent the return of the unimaginable wickedness they had just seen.
The Charter of the United Nations states that one of the basic purposes of the organization is "promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion." On Dec. 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Much as the Declaration of Independence did in the American context, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has come to epitomize the effort of the United Nations to advance the cause of human dignity in the world.
So why are conservatives so worried about yielding some of our national sovereignty to an organization aiming at such high and noble goals? Should we not fall in line with the more general effort of people around the world to overcome the distinctions and divisions of nationhood and replace them with a global community -- particularly when it is so clear that communication technologies and other factors are rapidly producing a global community whether the governments of nations like it or not?
That sounds good, until you look at the actual record of the United Nations over the past half-century. For all the formal rhetoric about human rights, the United Nations has failed to advance that cause. This failure is particularly marked in precisely those areas that involve the attempt to translate the universal language of the Universal Declaration into concrete respect for human rights. On issue after issue we can tell the sorry story of the impotence and even the active complicity of the United Nations in the systematic suppression of both understanding of and respect for those rights. Like accumulating symptoms that point undeniably to some hidden cause of physical illness, so the record of the United Nations in advancing human rights is a list of the symptoms of a fundamental corruption in the effort itself.
We all need to ask the causes of this failure, because we need to learn from it. Republican leaders need to learn from it the reasons that many of their core supporters will withdraw that support if the Republican ticket is tone deaf on the sovereignty issue. But there is a more important reason to ask why the U.N. has failed. It is that whatever the eventual fate of the United Nations may be, or of the Republican ticket in this fall's election, the effort to advance the universal cause of justice will continue. It is particularly important that the United States and its citizens take an intelligent and effective part in this effort, and that means we must understand the root cause of what has gone wrong with the United Nations.
That cause of failure is actually quite clear. The founders of the United Nations neglected to take account of moral reality. It was never realistically to be expected that the institution could effectively respect principles of decency and right when it was, from the beginning, substantially composed of nations that do not base their own political order on principles of decency and right.
Consider, as only the most prominent example, the role of the Soviet Union in the United Nations. For much of the post-war era, the Soviet Union was the principal impediment to the effective defense of human rights around the world. The Soviets were wholly outside and opposed to the tradition of respect for human dignity to which the U.N. was supposedly devoted.
But the Soviets didn't act in bad faith simply because they were wicked, but because Marxism is materialist in principle and denies the distinct nature of man. The Marxist view is intrinsically opposed to the doctrine of human rights, and to the doctrine of eternal justice that underlies it. Man is just an extension of the material world, in the Marxist view, and so all professions of respect for human distinctness are in bad faith in principle, because ultimately the only thing a consistent Marxist will respect is the power of matter unfolding itself in history.
Soviet disrespect for moral truth was no secret to the founders of the United Nations. And the decision to form an organization that included such a nation is the clearest possible sign that right belief on moral matters was never a defining characteristic of the community being formed.
So the U.N. has failed with respect to human rights because it is based on a false practical principle -- it does not take seriously the requirement of moral principle in politics. This is not just an incidental failure. It is a failure that derives from a fundamentally wrong understanding of politics -- from the view that there can be a political whole that is not ultimately rooted in a community of moral belief. No procedural or organizational cleverness can bring tyrannical countries together with principled ones to form a group that respects human liberty.
The naïve expectation that this could be pulled off is not just a case of excessive optimism on the part of the founders of the United Nations. It also reveals a fundamental inclination to accept the social science vision of politics -- that politics is ultimately about the patterns of organization that will emerge from mankind's material and instinctive nature. From this perspective, moral principle and claims of truth and justice are simply manifestations of the deeper material basis of human nature.
Because the membership of the U.N. from the beginning included nations that denied the real foundations of respect for human dignity, it is not surprising that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would also betray ambiguity at critical moments. Although defenders of the document have worked hard to characterize it as a prudent expression of an implied doctrine of natural law with an ultimate foundation in the God of nature, the fact is that the document is an ungrounded moral façade -- moral injunctions floating free of any principled reason that would require assent, and thus moral words without a corresponding soul.
The first article of the Universal Declaration makes reference to the rational nature of all men, and this is indeed one of the paths to understanding that the God of nature has willed that human beings be accorded a special and equal dignity. But the document is strikingly silent on this implication, and the effect is that while it does cling to some concept of common humanity, it discards the ground of that concept. There must be a principle that distinguishes us from matter and justifies our claim to special dignity, and we cannot effectively assert that distinction without acknowledging its transcendent source -- a Being beyond physical experience.
Silence on this point might be prudent under certain circumstances -- we are not always obliged to speak fully of the deepest things. But when the community of nations summons its best effort to state before the people of the world the true nature and source of the particular rights that it exists to protect, the only explanation for silence regarding that source is the fact that the members of the community disagree about it. Omission in the Universal Declaration of any mention of the authority of God, which is the true source of all human rights, is a confession of the fundamental disagreement of moral vision in the signatories.
Without the clear statement that human rights come from God, and must be respected out of respect for the authority of God, the Universal Declaration permits the impression that the rights it contains are a laundry list agreed upon by human will. And precisely because the countries signing the document were in disagreement about the actual source of those rights, it has proven to be impossible to attain consistent support for the authentic rights in the list, coherent understanding of what the various rights are and require, or any rational basis for preserving the list from arbitrary, spurious or even harmful additions.
Which brings us back to the challenge of defending American sovereignty in an era of increasingly ambitious internationalism. American sovereignty matters because it marks out for us and for the world a human community that is not -- at least in principle, and in a great deal of its most important practice -- unclear about the reasons that human dignity must be respected. The authentic internationalism -- as our Founders understood -- aims not at one world government, but at the universal acknowledgment by the community of nations of the truth that human dignity comes irrevocably from God. Our Founders addressed the Declaration to the world precisely because they knew that this truth should be international, and might one day become so.
At the root of conservative discomfort about the emerging machinery of internationalism is the sense that the façades of transnational structures conceal at least a dangerous ambiguity, and often even the strongest disagreements about what human communities are for, and the limits they must respect. For all our doubts about the state of the American regime, we know that we have a deep tradition of national agreement on the most important things. There is nothing like such agreement in the halls of the WTO.
Do the people in the back rooms of the Republican victory strategy sessions understand this? And do they understand how important this question is to the grass roots Americans they are counting on to bring the Party to victory in November. I have my doubts.
Former Reagan administration official Alan Keyes, was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Social and Economic Council and 2000 Republican presidential candidate. |
