A World Eschew: National Sovereignty Eclipsing Climate Change

U.S. President Obama announced after he left the UN global climate conference at Copenhagen in 2009 that five major nations—the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa—had together forged a climate deal. He called it “an unprecedented breakthrough” but acknowledged that the agreement was merely a political statement and not a legally binding treaty and might not need ratification by the entire conference.  Essentially, it was merely a statement of the five countries’ respective goals, as if someone had announced, “I want to lose ten pounds.”   The political statement did not meet even the modest expectations that leaders set for this meeting, notably by failing to set a 2010 goal for reaching a binding international treaty to seal the provisions of the accord.  Nor does the plan firmly commit the industrialized nations or the developing nations to firm targets for midterm or long-term greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

Claiming that the conference was a success was not to stop the spin. Obama, for example, said, “For the first time in history, all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change.” To be sure, the accord does provide a system for monitoring and reporting progress toward those national pollution-reduction goals, a compromise on an issue over which China bargained hard, and it calls for hundreds of billions of dollars to flow from wealthy nations to those countries most vulnerable to a changing climate.  That is, the political statement is not a binding treaty, but the document does lay out a framework for verification of emissions commitments by developing countries and for establishing a “high-level panel” to assess financial contributions by rich nations to help poor countries adapt to climate change and limit their emissions. Lastly, it sets a goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2050, implying deep cuts in climate-altering emissions over the next four decades.

However, in a news conference, Obama said the accord was only a tentative start down a long road. The accord sets no goal for concluding a binding international treaty, which leaves the implementation of its provisions uncertain. In other words, any developing country can opt in or out of the monitored pot of money, and China may well still view the monitoring aspect as voluntary—meaning to be determined by the Chinese Government what can be examined.  The Chinese had been intransigent on the matter of verification by non-Chinese.  Citing national sovereignty, the Chinese had claimed that the rest of the world should take Chinese law as being a sufficient basis for verification.  This, I submit, is an extremely odd proposition—that people extrinsic to China should rely on Chinese law when the legitimacy of such law stops at the country’s borders.  The statement is telling because it demonstrates how antiquated the Bodinian notion of absolute national sovereignty is in the modern world.  The interdependence occasioned not only by global warming, but also nuclear proliferation and an increasingly global financial system, makes an insistence on the absoluteness of national sovereignty an extremely dangerous proposition.   The fecklessness of the Chinese approach to “verification” and the resulting diluted “political statement” (rather than a treaty) coming out of the conference suggest that we urgently need to thwart the historical insistence from our global vocabulary and institutions. 

The immediate implication is that the veto in the UN Security Council is no longer legitimate.  Further on, the binding nature of international law backed up by international governance structures that do not include vetoes needs to be developed and applied to the domains determined to be rightfully global.  Countries still insisting on the absoluteness of their national sovereignties, such as China on pollution-controls and the US on international criminal law, would have to bend or be boycotted by the rest of the world.   In other words, international relations and economic exchanges ought to be dependent on being subject to a governance structure beyond the nation-state.  If China is left as the only country insisting that nothing can supervene Chinese law, then no one in the world should have anything to do with that country.   In contrast, those subject to a governance structure that supervenes in particular enumerated powers (with sufficient safeguards against their encroachment…given the history of the US) should be able to enjoy benefits beyond the binding nature of such powers, such as privileged positions in trade and visas.   I would argue that governments that insist that their law is insurmountable deserve to be marginalized by the rest of the world.  I write this as an American knowing that the US may well be marginalized under this scenario unless there is some movement on international criminal law (i.e., being subject to the International Criminal Court, which in turn would be given the ability to go into any country and extract defendants).  

The technological development during the twentieth century means that political development is necessary in the twenty-first century.  We are so used to viewing change in terms of technology that we are perhaps unaccustomed to the sort of change that should ensue in order to obviate the new dangers from the technology.   In other words, we need to shift gears in terms of the domains wherein change is expected or thought to occur.   In some respects, we are still in the dark ages, and being in the dark when the planet could come to equilibrium unsuitable for human habitation—whether via carbon or radioactivity—represents a level of danger that ought to move us to action against the default of national sovereignty.  In some respects, we are so primitive; we tend not to see this because we identify change and development with technology.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/19/science/earth/19climate.html?_r=1&hp

Pope Francis: Possessing Nuclear Weapons is Indefensible

Pope Francis said late in 2017 that the nuclear arms race had become irrational and immoral. The irrationality itself rendered even just the possession of nuclear weapons as immoral, according to the pope. Whereas past popes had recognized deterrence as a legitimator, both irrationality and the extent and “upgrading” of such weapons were factors in Pope Francis’s admittedly personal view.  Yet was his basis merely moral, or religious in nature?

The full essay is at "The Pope on Nuclear Weapons."

The International System: Undermining a Ban on Nuclear Weapons

The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize went to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons for the group’s work on behalf of a global ban on nuclear weapons. Just a few months earlier, two-thirds of the U.N.’s General Assembly approved the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. “The risk of nuclear war has grown exceptionally in the last few years, and that’s why it makes this treaty and us receiving this award so important,” Beatrice Fihn of the group said.[1] Unfortunately, the stance to ban rather than merely limit nuclear weapons was already being marginalized as utopian and even potentially counter-productive even though ongoing efforts to limit the proliferation were falling short. I submit that the international system itself had become problematic, given the relatively new global threat of nuclear war.  

Even amid “rising global alarm about a potential nuclear conflagration” between the United States and North Korea, Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said that “we have to be realistic” about the spread of nuclear weapons—meaning that a total ban could actually increase the risk of nuclear war.[2] Yet with Pakistan having an estimated 140 nuclear warheads and India having 130, Israel having an estimated 80, and North Korea presumably working on developing warheads, the status-quo policy of the U.S. could be said to be insufficient to stave off the risk of nuclear war. Put another way, as proliferation was already underway, non-proliferation policies could be reckoned as faulty.

Why do human beings continue to hold onto a boat that is sinking while seeking to undercut an alternative that actually could work? The tyranny of even a deficient status quo is such that the answer may lie with human nature itself. The risk of nuclear war has such a gigantic downside (i.e., nuclear war) that drastic measures to eradicate the risk may be necessary, and yet none of the nuclear powers in the U.N. would be bound by the treaty. Why even ratify it then? The exercise could be said to evince the impotence of the world body even in the face of such a horrible risk. Given the propensity of human nature to ingratiate itself and the existence of grave global risks, the very survival of the species may have already come to depend on a reform of the nation-state system wherein nations hold a monopoly on governmental sovereignty such that some of it is moved to the global level. National governments face a conflict of interest in this regard, as they would be ceding some power. Even if the survival of the species depends on advancement from the nation-state hegemony, national governmental officials may demur out of sordid self-interest.

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1. Michael Birnhaum of the Washington Post, October 6, 2017.

2. Ibid.

For more on conflicts of interest that governments (and businesses) face, see Institutional Conflicts of Interest. 

The American-Iranian Agreement: Moving Mankind Past War

In an epoch of technological development, the relative dearth of political development as concerns international relations has been evident. In June 2015, Pope Francis advocated the establishment of a global institution having governmental sovereignty with which to combat the human contribution to climate change. Such a political development would be significant, given the long-standing default of sovereign nation-states and unions thereof. In July 2015, U.S. President Barak Obama announced an agreement with Iran that would keep that nation-state from develop nuclear weapons in exchange for the removal of economic sanctions. Just three years earlier, war had seemed unavoidable. I submit that Obama’s accomplishment can be thought of as a step toward rendering war itself as obsolete, or at least perceiving it as a primitive means of resolving disputes internationally. More subtly, the feat makes the sheer distance between the premises of war and those of diplomacy transparent. Paradoxically, this insight implies just how difficult a shift from a war-default to one that takes war as obsolete must be.

Even if diplomacy can deliver more than war, obviating the path toward war can require a lot of time and effort. “Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not—a comprehensive, long-term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Obama declared in announcing the deal.[1] With Iraq still a trouble-spot in spite of the U.S. invasion and occupation, costing more than $2 trillion, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s two years of arduous work with Iran can be viewed as superior to war as a means of satisfying U.S. interests—not to mention that of the international community.

As difficult as it was for Obama to persuade a militaristic people to have faith in diplomacy as being capable of delivering more than war—a thankless task to be sure—he found himself having to defend even his campaign promise that he would talk to America’s enemies. When he first declared he would negotiate with adversaries, it was by accident. During a 2007 presidential debate, when asked if he would negotiate with adversaries as president, he made the unprompted declaration and explained it by discrediting the antithetical, war-default premise. “(T)he notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them— which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this [George W. Bush] administration—is ridiculous.”[2] Obama's premise obviating war is clearly far removed from his predecessor's war-premise.

Tellingly for what it reveals about where the American people stood at the time, the declaration that initial communication should not be conditional “set his campaign into a minor tailspin. ‘We did not expect him to say that,’ former Obama spokesman Bill Burton told The Huffington Post of that debate moment. ‘We were like, 'Oh my God. How do we walk it back? [Former Secretary of State] Madeline Albright’s attacking us!'’"[3] That a former Secretary of State would criticize the very notion of talking to adversaries is itself remarkable. Did she believe that not talking is actually punishment? What is it in American society that undergirds such an uncompromising, even childish, attitude that is so presumptuous or “entitled”? Malignant narcissism, such as can be found in spoiled children, may be behind the primitive level of social skills (which, not coincidentally, is in turn consistent with the mindset of war as the default “problem-solver”). In other words, the hypertrophic conditional regard (e.g., conditional love) may have been acceptable in American society. This point is in itself worthy of investigation.

From the not-speaking-as-punishment assumption, Obama’s mere overtures to Iran must have seemed radical, even ludicrous. “After just two months in office, Obama took the unconventional step of sending Iranians a holiday message on Nowruz, the Iranian new year. ‘For nearly three decades, relations between our nations have been strained,’ he said. ‘But on this holiday, we are reminded of the common humanity that binds us together.’ Shifting his focus from the Iranian people to the Iranian leadership, Obama looked into the camera: ‘My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us.’ . . . it was the first time since the dissolution of U.S.-Iranian relations [in the late 1970s] that an American leader publicly extended the offer of rapprochement.”[4] The sheer amount of time spent under the war premise would make the greeting seem radical even though from the antithetical diplomacy premise the overture could only be counted as a first step.

In conclusion, the ideational and attitudinal distance between the default—that of war as the preferred problem-solving device—and Obama’s premise that war itself can be surmounted by replacing it’s premises with those conformable to direct communication—attests to just how much time and effort is needed in political (as distinct from technological) development. That is to say, political development in the realm of international relations is not apt to come about as easily as technological development has since the early twentieth-century. Moving humanity off war is clearly no easy feat, and Obama’s accomplishment may have to withstand several relapses before the American people have sufficiently shifted their mindset to treat Obama’s premises as the default.

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[1] Sam Stein and Jessica Schulberg, “How a 2007 Debate Gaffe Paved the Way for a Deal that Will Define Obama’s Legacy,” The Huffington Post, July 14, 2015.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

E.U. Federalism Enabling Russian Expansionism

The visuals alone in the closing news conference of the EU-US “summit” held in Brussels, which President Barroso denoted as “the capital of Europe,” on March 26, 2014, must have struck Europeans and Americans alike as novel, if not rather bizarre; we are not yet accustomed to seeing the EU and US presidents on the same stage, for we are mired in the paradigm of another epoch. The failure to "catch up" may tacitly enable the expansion of another empire-level federation.

Were the original 12-star US flag used, the similarity would be too striking to ignore. This is not to say that the EU and US are identical in basic law. Whereas the US has one federal president, the EU has two. A council of presidents in the US had been considered in 1787 and dropped in favor of the energy that only a "single executive" could have. (Image Source: Reuters)

The old mental framework may sense itself already out of place—that is to say, on borrowed time in the new century and millennium. Clutching tight to one word, country, as if the global system were exhausted by it (and reduces to it), may suggest just such a felt insecurity as a houseguest might feel once his or her relations have moved away and only strangers remain.

In the stage with EU Presidents Van Rompuy and Barroso, US President Obama probably had no sense of the ambiguity latent in his reference to “the countries represented here today.”[1] To the overstayed houseguest, Obama was referring to the EU’s states and to the US but not to its states. The mental staying-power of a framework firmly ensconced in the global (collective, which is to say, shared) consciousness rides headlong over the silent category mistake that inheres in thinking of the states in one empire-scale union as each corresponding to another such union rather than to its states. Both in terms of scale and governmental sovereignty (i.e., dual-sovereignty), the states are states and the unions are unions—the situs of foreign policy, whether at the state or federal level, not being decisive as to the ontological nature of the unions as federal empire-scale unions-of-semi-sovereign states.

President Van Rompuy, chairman of the European Council—which like the US Senate is based on intergovernmental principles as polities rather than citizens are represented—had only his chamber’s half of modern federalism in mind when he stated, “We have to coordinate [sanctions] among our member states; they are not all in the same position as far as trade, energy, financial services is concerned; so we have to coordinate among us and of course with the United States.”[2] By implication, the United States is on par with the “member states” in the European Union. 

President Obama had already laid the perfect groundwork for his counterpart by observing that there “has been excellent coordination between the United States and Europe.”[3] To be sure, Obama was on more solid ground in stating that Russia has not driven a wedge “between the United States and the European Union,” and that over the years, “we have been able to deepen the ties between the European Union and the United States.” [4] Yet he quickly reverted to treating the EU as if it were like NATO instead. “The twenty-eight members of the European Union are united; the twenty-eight members of NATO are united.”[5] Well, the fifty members of the United States were united too; hence the name, whose use in the singular rather than plural only became definitive nearly a century after the Declaration of Independence declared to the world thirteen sovereign states, or countries.

The American president’s uses of Europe and members are both logically problematic (especially at an EU-US Summit!). Furthermore, the rhetoric played into the European president’s institutional and prejudicial agenda in privileging the EU’s states at the expense of not only the US’s states but also the EU itself.

Put in terms of the development of federalism both historically (and relatedly) in terms of the theory, Van Rompuy was reducing modern federalism, which contains both national and intergovernmental governmental institutions at the federal level, to the much older confederal, alliance-based, sort of federalism that is entirely intergovernmental at the federal level.  Excluded from the mythic paradigm wherein the EU is like the ancient Athenian Alliance and Spartan League are EU institutions such as the European Parliament (which like the US House of Representatives is founded on national-government principles), the European Commission (also national rather than intergovernmental), and the European Court of Justice.

In practical terms, President Van Rompuy’s antiquated vantage-point reinforces a major weakness of the EU. En fait, Van Rompuy’s council of the EU state governments could not get past their commercial differences to arrive at a formidable array of sanctions “with sharp teeth” to impose on Russia in the wake of its invasion of the Crimea region of Ukraine, an independent state between two empire-scale federations. Whereas the governments of the republics and regions of the Russian Federation did have sufficient power to thwart Putin’s adventurism at the federal level, the EU’s states had enough power in the EU’s federal system to obstruct a united response with enough “teeth” to push Putin back into Russia and keep him from further incursions at the expense of neighboring independent states.  

As it stood, Ukrainian lawmakers could only lament Ukraine’s agreement with Russia and the US to give up the third-largest stock of nuclear weapons in exchange for the counterparties respecting Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. “We gave up nuclear weapons because of this agreement,” Pavlo Rizanenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, said in the wake of the Russian invasion. “Now there’s a strong sentiment in Ukraine that we made a big mistake.”[6] As if unable to part with his partial (intergovernmental) understanding of the EU as something akin to NATO or the Athenian Alliance rather than Russia, China, and the US, President Van Rompuy reflected in his remarks the institutional bias of his own chamber at the expense not only of the EU itself, but also the world. 

The failure of the whole (i.e., the EU) to relativize the particular state interests in the European Council (and the Council of Ministers) to the overarching interests of the EU (as represented in the Commission and the European Parliament as a body) informed Rizanenko’s reservations and thus tacitly sent the message that reducing nuclear proliferation does not pay. Add in the message to Putin that he could invade Ukraine with virtually no cost to Russia and we can conclude that the imbalance in the EU in favor of the state governments at the expense of the Union (and its foreign policy) has already made the world a much more dangerous place. The antiquated, and indeed mistaken view of the EU as comparable to NATO and thus of the EU’s member states though little united states of Europe (while the US states are somehow like European provinces) is not merely an ideologically convenient (i.e., self-serving) series of category mistakes; the resulting fecklessness in the EU had had a direct impact in weakening global security.

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[1] Closing News Conference, “EU-US Summit,” March 26, 2014.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Oren Dorell, “Ukraine Lawmaker Laments Giving Up Nuclear Arsenal,” USA Today, March 11, 2014.