For a Union of Democracies

 

Background: No Union With Dictatorships

G. John Ikenberry, Uniting the Democracies: The G-7 Process and Beyond

Ivo H. Daadler, James M. Lindsay, An Alliance of Democracies: Our Way or the Highway

Adam Garfinkle, Toward a Democratic Union

Todd Linton, Expanding the Nucleus of Democracies:An illustration

Ira Straus, Why Jamestown Matters

 

 

Background: No Union With Dictatorships

Excerpt from: Owen J. Roberts, Clarence Streit and J. Schmidt, The New Federalist, 1950, with an Introduction by John Foster Dulles.

To continue the discussion of membership in the proposed international federal union: It is often said that a world government must permit the people of each member nation to live under a government of their own choosing, even under a dictatorship if they so desire. That assertion should be challenged whenever and wherever it appears. If a union is to maintain peace among its members, no nation in the union can have a dictatorship form of government.

It is the essence of a federal union that it maintains peace by operating on the individual person, according to general laws applied to each case by courts-by justice, in short. The alternative is to operate on nations as units - as does the United Nations and diplomacy. But to coerce a state by force is tantamount to war. Wars waged to execute the verdicts of international tribunals are undoubtedly superior morally to the jungle-law type of wars the world now suffers. But they remain wars - the opposite of peace.

To keep the peace, a world union composed of both dictatorships and democracies must operate on the citizen in both alike, through its courts. But how can it operate justly on the individuals under a dictatorship without undermining the dictator's position? If the union's laws are to be respected, they must apply fairly equally to all persons in it, to the dictator and his secret police as much as to the people they oppress. Would any dictator accept this? Could any democrat accept less? Dictators stay in power by suppressing opposition. They mislead public opinion by spreading lies among their subjects. They divert attention from domestic evils by calling attention to pretended dangers abroad. No dictatorship can be depended on for peace.

Where only the dictator's subjects are concerned, only they suffer. But in matters concerning the world as a whole, the whole world suffers when the dictator errs. Therefore, a world union is very much concerned with the kind of government that prevails in its member nations. Although no nation should interfere in the domestic affairs of other nations, every free people has a sufficient interest in those internal affairs to be entitled to insist, before they federate with another nation, that its internal affairs shall be decided in accordance with the opinions of most of its citizens. It is pertinent here to refer to Article IV, Section 4, of the U.S. Constitution:

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.

In the Convention which drafted the Constitution, Randolph said this provision aimed: "1. To secure Republican [i.e., free representative] Government; 2. To suppress domestic commotions."

There was considerable discussion over the exact wording. Inasmuch as the delegates wanted to avoid perpetuating those state constitutions which were considered bad, there was some sentiment for omitting the provision entirely. But an observation by Ghorum dispelled the belief that the matter could be ignored. As Madison noted:

Mr. Ghorum thought it strange that a Rebellion should be known to exist in the Empire, and the General Government should be restrained from interposing to subdue it. At this rate an enterprising citizen might erect the standard of Monarchy in a particular State, might gather together partisans from all quarters, might extend his views from State to State, and threaten to establish a tyranny over the whole and the General Government be compelled to remain an active witness of its own destruction. With regard to different parties in a State; as long as they confine their disputes to words, they will be harmless to the General Government and to each other. If they appeal to the sword, it will then be necessary for the General Government, however difficult it may be to decide on the merits of their contest, to interpose and put an end to it.  

Supporters of universal union, embracing both the free and the unfree, sometimes argue for this on the ground that the United States itself includes examples of "dictatorial" local governments. The analogy is unsound. About all the examples they can mention are corrupt municipal governments or city "bosses." The only dictatorial state government cited is the short-lived regime of the late Huey Long in Louisiana . No one who has lived under European dictatorships would call by that name the worst of these American departures from democracy. All the American bosses put together do not have, and never have had, the power that even a Peron exercises in Argentina . It is essential to note that though one may dominate the local courts and press in a city in the United States , one cannot keep newspapers and magazines and speakers from other cities from entering that area, and reporting freely to its people and to all the union conditions in it.

For a sound analogy between conditions in a world union today and the United States , one must imagine that at least as powerful a state as New York is governed as absolutely by a dictator as Russia is by Stalin. One must imagine rigid control of the New York press and radio, with rigid censor- ship of news from and to the rest of the United States . One must imagine also a ruthless, omnipresent secret police, spying on and clapping into its numerous concentration. camps all New Yorkers who oppose the dictatorship. The same police would, of course, be spying on the few people from the rest of the United States whom it allowed to enter New York , and tightly limiting their movements.

New Yorkers-except for a few trusties of the dictator- would not be allowed to travel in Pennsylvania , Massachusetts , or other states. New Yorkers could vote only for the dictator's nominees for U .S. President, Congress, and all other offices; and all of New York 's votes in Congress would be cast as the dictator directed. This paints only a feeble picture of what an attempt to federate real dictatorship with the Atlantic democracies would mean. But it should suffice to show the absurdity of the plans for a union of such conflicting systems.

For the same reasons that the Philadelphia Convention thought a guarantee of free representative government necessary, so must we consider free representative government necessary in each member nation of any international union we enter. It is, in fact, even more imperative that a world union insist on free representative government in its members. For if tyranny should ever spread from one member nation to cover all the world union, then freedom would probably be lost to the world for many generations, and perhaps even for all time. 

Publius II, (J.F.S)

G. John Ikenberry, Uniting the Democracies: The G-7 Process and Beyond, The Group of Seven Countries: New Institutions for the West, Report of a Meeting Convened by the Next Century Initiative, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, April 24, 1994, pp. 11-22 The Next Century Initiative was a project founded by the Association to Unite the Democracies.

Ivo H. Daadler, James M. Lindsay An Alliance of Democracies: Our Way or the Highway, Financial Times, November 06, 2004
For the first time in a generation, foreign policy dominated the US presidential election campaign. Even as the candidates battled over who could better wage the war on terror and whether the Iraq war was wise and well-executed, the real issue dividing the candidates was more fundamental - namely, how America should engage the world. While both men recognised that America's interests would be best served if the US worked with others, they differed profoundly on how to achieve that co-operation.
[...] Institutional forms of co- operation are often more efficient and more legitimate than coalitions forged for the moment and only for specific missions. But many existing institutions have failed to deal effectively with today's many challenges. The unilateralism vs. multilateralism argument that has dominated the American and transatlantic debate in recent years has failed to grapple with this essential dilemma. Rather than perpetuating a stale debate, the president has a major opportunity to move us beyond it. He needs to forge a renewed consensus within America and across the Atlantic that our interests are best served by creating an international institution that encourages co-operation in ways that are both effective and legitimate. An Alliance of Democracies is just such an institution.... Read More

 

Adam Garfinkle Toward a Democratic Union, The National Interest, April 2, 2003

 

Ira Straus, Why Jamestown Matters, TheGlobalist.com, May 10, 2007

"Why would Americans want to believe they were founded by what is largely viewed nowadays as an oppressive sect of Puritan fanatics, when they could simply opt for the truth and say they were founded by sensible mainstream people at Jamestown? On that question hangs a tale, and one of considerable importance for European-American relations. (…) Few of us ever draw the logical conclusion - that separatism was a secondary factor in our freedom, and often a pernicious one at that. (…) The Puritan mentality of schism is something that continues to be of service to those who would divide the Atlantic Alliance, the cornerstone of U.S. leadership in the world. How often do we hear, from both anti-Americans in Europe and from Europhobes in the United States, that the United States is unique and fundamentally different from Europe? The true history of the growth of America's freedom tells the opposite tale. It was a transatlantic growth, emerging from intertwined developments and currents of thought that bounced back and forth across the ocean. This is evidenced by the Magna Carta and the growth of parliament, the Renaissance explorations and scientific revolution, the Jamestown Assembly, the Glorious Revolution, the Enlightenment, the United States pulling ahead of Europe after 1776 with democracy and its Federal Union - but with western Europeans catching up in the 1800s and southern and eastern Europeans in the 1900s. The true history was remembered by some Americans in the 1890s when - no longer nervous about their independence - they undertook an Anglo-American rapprochement. Despite resistance from an isolationist rear guard, an Atlantic Alliance was built in the coming decades. The alliance began informally with the United Kingdom and United States, then added France, endured a baptism by fire in two world wars, became institutionalized in 1949 with more countries joining, and has grown gradually wider and deeper ever since, becoming the central power structure in the world with the collapse of its last European enemy in 1991 and taking on a larger global role. It has been further supplemented politically and economically by the G8 and OECD, and in late April a U.S.-EU agreement to establish a kind of transatlantic common market. This alliance, the core of the global economic and security system, needs a solid, honest Atlantic identity at the base of its American pillar. The Jamestown history supports this. The myth of Pilgrim-uniqueness undercuts it. (…)"

 

Todd Linton, Expanding the Nucleus of Democracies:An illustration