Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (11792)	10/11/2003 7:33:17 AM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793681

George Will gets on track with his latest column. I've been considering the issue of nationalism for a while now, and have been unable to put my finger on what I wanted to say about it. Nationalism as viewed by most Americans, is linked to patriotism and pride in our country. In Europe, nationalism appears to be a sinister concept, especially among the continents elite writers. The area I've been struggling to write about is how nationalism ties in with citizen trust and tends to break down the factional causes of feudalism in America. When I get my thoughts straight on this I'll write more about it. Maybe that fertile mind of yours has some ideas Bill? _________________________________________________________ Paris Versus Philadelphia America has a cheerful understanding of nationalism expressed through democracy. Europe has a horror of popular nationalism msnbc.com Oct. 13 issue — America’s thinking about its engagement with the world is being bedeviled by the insistent asking of the wrong question, which is: how can we close the rift with Europe caused by the Bush administration’s “unilateralism,” which betokens wariness about international institutions and international law? The right question is: do we really want to close this rift? IT REFLECTS fundamental differences between American and European understandings of constitutional democracy. So argues Jed Rubenfeld in a mind-opening essay forthcoming in the Wilson Quarterly. Rubenfeld, a Yale Law School professor, wonders why America—which after 1945 was the principal progenitor of today’s system of international organizations and law, including the United Nations—has come to be regarded as hostile to that project. His answer is that Cold-War unity between America and Europe disguised what is now patent: diametrically opposed American and European views of the objectives of international law and organizations. The American objective is to spread the American understanding of constitutionalism. It is democratic constitutions arising from the particularities of each nation’s politics, and construed by national judiciaries informed by their nation’s political and legal cultures. The American understanding, exemplified by the Philadelphia convention of 1787 and the ratifying conventions, was that constitutions are political, subject to some evolution via construing—and also, of course, to amendment. We lose sight of how remarkable the amendment provision is: the men in Philadelphia knew that theirs was not necessarily the final word. A corollary of this philosophical tentativeness is that other democratic nations might come to different conclusions about fundamental rights. The European embrace of international arrangements in the second half of the 20th century has been a recoil from the savagery of European history in the first half. Whereas America has a cheerful understanding of nationalism expressed through democracy, Europe has a horror of popular nationalism. Having witnessed democratic enthusiasm for the march into the 1914-1918 abyss, and having seen democratic processes produce Mussolini and Hitler, Europe sought an international constitutionalism in the spirit of the Enlightenment philosophers of 18th-century Paris. American constitutionalism speaks, as it were, with a Philadelphia accent, in what Rubenfeld calls the language of popular sovereignty: “We the people of the United States ... do ordain and establish ...” American constitutionalism does indeed check democracy, but remains accountable to democracy—to elected representatives and legislatures that can amend it, and to presidents and senators who nominate and confirm the judges who construe it. European constitutionalism speaks with a Paris accent, using the language of universal truths defined by intellectual elites and presented to publics which are expected to be deferential. Because Europeans accept some trickle-down constitutionalism, they thought nothing amiss when the European committee that drafted a constitution for Kosovo—after a three-day visit there—had no Kosovar members. America saw the Second World War as a fight for the emancipation of nations—for their self-determination. Europeans, says Rubenfeld, saw the war as “a victory against nationalism, against popular sovereignty, against democratic excess.” The much-discussed “democracy deficit” in the European Union—so much power wielded by unelected and unaccountable agencies—is not really an ancillary defect of “progress” toward a European superstate. Rather, that is the point of the enterprise: to place supposedly timeless truths and closed questions beyond the reach of popular sovereignty. Europeans’ flight from democracy into international law and organizations is a scathing self-assessment: they have failed to reconcile democracy and nationalism. Hence, Europeans are blase about what Rubenfeld calls the damage that “universal constitutionalism” could do to the prospects for variation and experimentation among nations. But, then, variation and experimentation is pointless if European elites are, as they fancy themselves, modern-day philosophers who have been led by abstract speculation to timeless truths that can only be tarnished by contact with popular sovereignty, meaning popular nationalism. International law supposedly is the consensus in action of “the international community.” But the problem is not merely that profound differences of political culture between the democratic and undemocratic nations make that “community” a fiction. Rather, the problem, as Rubenfeld recasts it, is actually more dismaying: between America and the European democracies there are irreconcilable differences concerning constitutional democracy. Europe likes to think of itself as ancient Athens, supplying wisdom to muscular America, the modern Sparta. But it is more illuminating to think of today’s tensions as arising from differences between two 18th-century cities, Philadelphia and Paris.