The world appears to be in a state of chaos—that is, as the Bible says, without form and void. Such a state is profoundly disturbing and disorienting. Since 1991, when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union dissolved, entropy and anomie have steadily increased. Familiar structures have disappeared or become meaningless and leadership, which operates best within a structured and understandable context, has become next to impossible.

Background

The 350-reign of the nation-state system is over. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty-Years War, also ended the millennial domination of the ideal of universal empire and creed, embodied in the priest-kig, god-king or divine emperor. The unvarying political ideal of mankind for the vast sweep of history had been unification under one political and religious banner. However far the world was from achieving that ideal in practice, it was always the goal, the holy grail of political and social systems. In the West, the ideal was embodied for a millennium and a half in the Roman Empire in all its transformations over time, and since the fourth century AD in the Christian religion, embodied by the Papacy. Darkness spread across Western Europe for centuries after the western portion of the empire was overrun by barbarian tribes, a process that culminated in 476 AD, but until the year 800 greater or lesser fealty was sworn to the eastern emperor in Constantinople as suzerain over all the peoples, the church and the emerging political entities. Then the unthinkable happened—there was a reigning empress in Constantinople for the very first time in the history of the empire, and the Pope, in horror, offered the imperial crown to Charles, King of the Franks. From that time on there were again two empires, the one that came to be called The Byzantine Empire, centered in Constantinople and the “Holy” Roman Empire of the West, and in 1054 the church also split in two. Meanwhile, from the early seventh century on the whole Roman/Christian world was challenged by a competing world-view, that of Islam, which from that time to the present has never ceased to challenge the Western version.

In the meantime, in 1204, a group of Western European marauders, claiming to be going to Palestine to reclaim Jerusalem from the Moslem infidels, took and sacked Constantinople instead (Pope John Paul II has just apologized, exactly 800 years later, to the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople, for this act of vandalism) —the riches thus gained fueling a revival of trade in the West and enabling the development of what became investment banking, which among other enterprises financed the conquest of the Western Hemisphere by the principal European powers beginning in 1492, ironically the same year the last Muslim foothold in Western Europe was overrun by the Spanish monarchs. Although the Byzantines recovered their ruined capital in 1261, the Eastern empire was a shadow of its former self and finally succumbed to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, soon after which most of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa were under Ottoman/Islamic rule.

Then in the sixteenth century the religious domination of the Papacy in the West was challenged by a group of heretical reformers, and Western Europe into bitterly competing warlord fiefdoms, those who continued to acknowledge the supremacy of the Papacy and those who saw a heaven-sent opportunity to become entirely independent of any superior tutelage, political or religious. The two sides fought wars and signed truces until in 1618 all Western Europe erupted in war, centered in the territory of the Holy Roman Empire – now Germany and adjacent regions. The Thirty-Years War was the last time the empire was able to field armies. By 1648 the millennial tradition of imperial arms came to an end in stalemate, and the negotiators of the Treaty of Westphalia adopted the principle of cuius regio eius religio, “The religion of the ruler is the religion of the state.” The Holy Roman Empire faded into irrelevancy and in 1683 the Ottoman Empire challenged the West for the last time, turning back from the gates of Vienna in a defeat not avenged until September 11, 2001..

As of the mid-seventeenth century, then, the ideal of one empire, one creed, was dead, and was replaced by what came to be known as the nation-state system, whose god was sovereignty, the unchallenged and undivided dominance of the sovereign, theoretically immune from challenge from inside or out. In fact, of course, dissidents always existed and always created problems for the sovereigns, who were also subject to challenge by other sovereigns within what was in effect a semi-anarchic society, hierarchically if informally organized in the same way all such societies are organized, from feudal Europe to the Mafia—the more powerful units provide protection and assistance to the less powerful, which in turn provide support to the overlord in war and peace.

The new system was challenged by some of the nation-states themselves, led by men who called themselves emperor, Kaiser or Czar, in conscious imitation of the Roman tradition. For the Czars, Moscow was the third Rome, and they tried to wrest Constantinople from the Turks on various occasions. Napoleon and Wilhelm II tried to recreate a European empire and failed, as did Hitler and the Soviets. The Napoleonic wars, the first and second World Wars and the Cold War occupied much of the period of the dominance of the nation-state system from 1806 to 1991. But it is over. And it is not clear what will take its place.

This entire historical drama has been over the question of who possesses ultimate legal power over which there is no possible appeal, i.e., who is the ultimate source of law. In the imperial system, that ultimate source was the will of the emperor or religious leader or a combination of both. In the Westphalian system, it was the ruler of the nation-state, regardless of whether he or she was a monarch, a military dictator, a dear leader,or embodied in an oligarchy, an aristocracy, or a parliament.

The chaos confronting us today derives from the fact that, given technological and economic developments originating mostly in the United States, a critical number of mankind’s productive activities are of a scale and scope such that they transcend national borders within whose confines sovereign states exercise their sway. The phenomenon has been dubbed “globalization,” a term that conceals more that it reveals. As the scope of human activities occurring outside the writ of nation-states increases, the legal and regulatory reach of the latter shrinks. New players have emerged to challenge their governance monopoly: Multinational corporations, global financial markets, non-governmental organizations, organized criminal enterprises, terrorist organizations, etc.
And the activities of these new players are not covered by international law, which is based on formal agreements among nation-states, because nation-states have so far been unable to find enough common ground for agreements that address problems of “globalization.” Hence the apparent chaos.

The Great Subversive

Diplomatic niceties aside, the United States of America is the cause of the breakdown of the Westphalian nation-state system. And if this breakdown has the appearance of chaos, the author of this chaos is the United States of America, a country that was launched as a political experiment dedicated at birth to the subversion of pre-established order, both imperial and Westphalian.

This appearance of chaos is due not so much to the collapse of the Westphalian system itself, but to the disappearance of the underlying certitudes that held the system together. The most important of these discredited certitudes is the legal piety of equal sovereignty of states. Lip service may be still paid to this bromide by diplomats, but the fact is that no important country acts on the assumption that all states enjoy equal sovereignty. Sovereignty of states is made up of a combination of legitimacy and power, and the American definition of legitimacy has always been the consent of the governed.

The United States of America was born on July 4, 1776 as the most subversive and revolutionary country in the history of the world. True, there had always been defiant mercantile statelets that maintained forms of quasi-republican government and operated in a kind of market economy, encysted in vast surrounding empires and kingdoms and tolerated because they were useful, in the way Hong Kong is useful today to the Peoples’ Republic of China.

But for the first time, in July of 1776 a large country was formed which expressly rejected both the imperial paradigm which had dominated the world until 1648, and the Westphalian system which succeeded it. According to the constitution adopted by the new country, legitimacy was derived from the people, and not from the sovereign. North America had been populated by groups of men and women who were specifically driven to emigrate by their rejection of the Westphalian cuius regio, eius religio doctrine. Although nominally subject to the British Crown, in reality they tamed and conquered the natural and human wilderness they found in the New World by themselves and proceeded to govern themselves through institutions only partially adopted from British practice and mostly invented de novo. When after a century and three-quarters of self-government the colonists were faced with a (rather mild) attempt by the British to tax them without their consent, the colonists did not hesitate to rebel.

From that rebellion, a unique legal arrangement was produced, the US Constitution, which outlined for the first time, how legitimate state power might be exercised. Legitimacy gave birth to American sovereignty, and to this day, in the American system, sovereignty answers to legitimacy. If the legal definition of sovereignty is “supreme power against which there is no possible appeal,” then in the case of the United States, that supreme power is legitimacy itself, i.e., constitutional law expressing the consent of the governed.

With this, the American subversion of the Westphalian system commenced – passively and by distant example for the first century, somewhat more actively towards the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, and beginning to mobilize for more energetic subversion now. All the while, traditional state powers never tired of berating American “primitivism,” “lawlessness,” “cultural backwardness,” “crass materialism,” “stupidity,” and, worst of all, “unilateralism,” coupled with “naïve lack of understanding of their unique cultures.”

Apart for self-defense the only reason for international intervention acceptable to the American people has been the defense of the twin pillars of American exceptionalism, political democracy and free markets. This has been especially so in more modern times, when her economic and (often potential rather than) military might has made it impossible for The United States to remain behind its oceanic barriers. Americans were convinced to free the Cubans from Spanish oppression, to fight a war in Europe to “make the world safe for democracy”, to fight and win a forty-four year struggle to overcome Soviet imperialist tyranny, and eventually to undertake the democratization of the Middle East. That much of this was and is quixotic is debatable, but the idea that these struggles were undertaken for material gain is patently ridiculous and entertained only by academics and defenders of the old paradigms.

As the guardians of the only great revolution that did not end in tyranny or chaos, and of a constitutional tradition unmatched anywhere else, the United States stands as a perpetual challenge to the enforcers of oppressive religious, political and class systems. From their standpoint, the United States is the most dangerously successful society in history. It is a society whose guiding principle of self-government has always been a challenge to theirs. Precisely because of its guiding principle is the materially the wealthiest, militarily the most powerful and culturally the most irresistible and perplexing in the world – totally dominating without wanting to dominate. Since the collapse of the Soviet Empire, America’s guiding principle is the most profoundly dangerous challenge the petty ayatollahs, dictators and bureaucrats have ever faced.

And in this struggle they will lose, unless the United States and its allies themselves fail to stay their course. The U.S. can fail in two ways: by becoming truly imperialistic and thus adopting the ancient millennial paradigm, or by accepting the Westphalian system of its tormentors and playing by their rules, rather than its own. There are plenty of Americans, in both parties and of all extreme tendencies, who are working to undermine this revolutionary and subversive society. They may certainly succeed. If they do, it will be to the hypocritical applause of some of the world and the open hatred and contempt of the rest. Our allies will despair and our enemies will rejoice, and the world will be the worse.

The Situation Going Forward

September 11, 2001 and the 2003 War in Iraq have conferred new urgency to the need to address the chaos that resulted from the progressive collapse of the Westphalian system of nation-states. But the need was there before 9/11. Throughout the 1990s, rapid US-centered advances in the information and communications infrastructure of the world economy had brought about a vast acceleration of worldwide movement of physical and financial capital that continues unabated today. This, together with an unprecedented wave of privatizations of formerly government owned productive assets, had diminished dramatically the power of nation-states as players on the world stage.

Self-regulated global financial markets and transnational corporations operate in part in a global space not covered by existing laws and regulations of nation-states. While the whole world economy has benefited from these economic activities that have spun out of nation-state control, the biggest beneficiary has been the USA, because (a) it has the highest productivity growth and hence the highest risk-adjusted rate of return in the world, and (b) it has the world’s largest and deepest market for consumer and investment goods and thus acts as the world’s importer of last resort.

Beyond the reach of nation-state control, the global financial markets deploy into the US net foreign capital inflows to the tune of $0.5 trillion per year. This makes the United States the destination of choice from the worldwide pool of savings. Also beyond the reach of nation-state control, the world’s transnational corporations are US-centered in two ways: (1) about 25% of the world’s transnationals are US-based but they account for more than half or all transnationals’ assets and global sales; (2) most of the non-US-based transnationals depend on domestic US markets for about half their of sales and more than half of their profits – they are attracted to the US because of the relatively greater freedom from government interference and because of the enormous size and wealth of US markets.

The obsolescence of the Westphalian system of nation-states becomes obvious when one considers that the transnationals account more that 35% of world GDP, more than 75% of world trade and almost the entire world FDI (Foreign Direct Investment). This, together with the rise of self-regulated global financial markets commands the worldwide flow of investment capital and dictates the fiscal and monetary policies of governments that wish to attract such investment capital.

Economically, the Westphalian era had favored a large and ever growing role of the “public sector” within the nation-state – economic statism. The emergence of private-sector economic superpowers beyond the reach of nation-states has now made this scheme untenable. Of all the economically major countries today, it is primarily the United States, the epicenter of “globalization,” that has the smallest-sized “public sector,” at 20% of its GDP, and is riding on a political movement of “smaller government.” Nations like France, Germany and the other members of the eurozone have public sectors at 50%-55% of their stagnating GDP.

It is worth noting in passing that all the technologies that make up the physical infrastructure of “globalization,” originated in The United States – electricity, the telephone, the airplane, television, the computer, information technology and the Internet. Their economically irresistible appeal, over time, wrought havoc on the physical infrastructure of the Westphalian nation-state, which was territory and its legal and political control.

Early on in the 1990s, the marginalized power elites of various countries proposed a broad program, usually associated with France and the European Union, for recapturing their lost power and influence: the construction of a system of “global governance” based on a series of treaties by means of which sovereign nation-states would transfer growing chunks of their sovereignty to global bureaucracies administering those treaties. The idea is to promote the supremacy of “international law,” (treaties signed by sovereign states), over and above sovereignty of states. Early attempts to put this strategy into practice were the Kyoto Treaty, the International Criminal Court, proposals to agree to universal tax rates to prevent “tax competition,” other proposals to enforce a global “transaction tax” on global financial flows, including proposals to counter market-based decisions (one dollar – one vote) with inter-state decisions (one country – one vote).

All of these proposals amount to a “reverse Westphalia” (surrender of sovereignty to supranational entities) and aim for the protection against the menace of US-centered “globalization” of the same elite interests that were once protected by Westphalian sovereignty. The best example is the French, “super state” version of European integration – transfer of sovereignty out of national parliaments and executives to a supranational, unaccountable and unelected decision-making center organized by treaties rather than by legislation. Characteristically, EU treaties are all irreversible. From the founding Treaty of Rome onward, they are irreversible in character, in the sense that they do not contain clauses that provide for future withdrawal of members from the treaty. Union law (created by treaty and not by democratic legislation) is legally superior to the law of member nations, and member nations do not have the right to secede.

This is the Westphalian proposal for a post-Westphalian response to the American challenge of constitutionalism: subordinate national constitutions to international treaty law. Not surprisingly, the United States has opposed vigorously every one of these proposals – hence the accusations of “unilateralism.” But the United States is a political system that has no choice but continue to reject these proposals of “global governance” by international treaty. According to the US Constitution, international treaties have the force of the ordinary law of the land, i.e., they are subject to judicial review and tests of constitutionality. Just as the US Constitution trumps “law of the land,” in exactly the same way it trumps international treaties. The US system of checks and balanced, and the separation of powers among Executive, Legislative and Judiciary make it absolutely impossible for the “global governance” proposals to ever be accepted by The United States. Nothing short of the revolutionary destruction of the American system would secure American adherence to these proposals.

The 2003 United Nations debate over the war in Iraq had as its true subject not Iraq but the future of the post-Westphalian world. The attempt by France and her allies to subordinate the US constitution to a vacuous notion of UN-conferred legitimacy was made not on behalf of Iraq or Saddam Hussein, but on behalf of a treaty-based “global governance” vision of the post-Westphalian world which, if accepted, would have trumped the US Constitution and would have subordinated US democratic law-making to global anti-democratic elite treaty-making. The ultimate object of this “global governance” by international treaties is to restore the power of bureaucratic governing elites that has been lost to the globalized private sector of the world economy. It is the attempt to reassert “big government” in the age of free market “globalization.”

Middle East Democratization as the Test Case for Future US Policy

Democratization of the Greater Middle East (“Greater” because it includes Afghanistan and Pakistan) is now a national, bipartisan US policy that is likely to last one or two generations before it achieves its aims. It is a broad policy concept akin to the concept of “containment” that guided the Cold War, and its details will be filled out on the basis of practical developments on the ground, just as it was in the case of the Cold War. It will require long-term commitments in treasure, blood and intellectual effort, just as in the case of the Cold War. It will influence domestic politics, just as the Cold War did. It will give rise to passionate debate, divisions, dissension, and pro and con popular movements and home and abroad, just as in the time of the Cold War. And its outcome will be similarly uncertain until the end.

This policy was forced on the United States by urgent national security concerns, and it evolved gradually between September 11, 2001 and November 6, 2003. The 9/11 attack led to the inevitable decision to “take the fight to the enemy” rather than wait and fight on US soil. Almost immediately, it became apparent that “taking the fight to the enemy” meant, in the phrase of a former CIA director, “draining the swamp of the Middle East,” i.e., destroying the political culture that aids and abets the rise of terrorist organizations and provides them with financial, technical, political and moral support, and protection by powerful patrons and their secret services.

The strategy of “draining the swamp” was elaborated somewhat in a September 17, 2002 presidential document titled The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, which pledged to promote “moderate and modern government, especially in the Muslim world.” Rejecting the facile theories that terrorism is somehow the natural reaction to “root cause” real or perceived injustices such as the plight of the Palestinians, poverty, etc., the new US doctrine asserted the following:

Therefore,

A little more than a year later, On November 6, 2003, President Bush in a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy announced that this global drive for freedom and democracy would have the Middle East as its most important focus. With this, the US proclaimed its long-term policy of Middle East democratization:

A future Democratic administration would not alter the substance of this policy, despite skepticism among Democratic-leaning academics about the possibility of transplanting democracy onto Arab societies. After all, there are just as many Republican-leaning skeptics of the idea who were nonetheless equally unable to prevent a Republican administration from adopting this policy.

The policy of Middle East democratization was forced upon the United States by an existential national security threat. In varying degrees, it has the support of the majority of the post-9/11 electorate across party lines. The partisan differences that do exist are over ways and methods of implementation, and they are akin to the partisan differences over how to implement “containment” during the Cold War.

When Howard Dean’s candidacy collapsed during the primaries of 2003, mainstream Democratic voters delivered a crushing defeat to an attempted insurgency of the party’s extreme Left wing, producing instead a candidate who pledges to “stay the course” until Iraq has a stable, functioning democracy, and calls for the commitment of more troops in the region.

At the same time, the Democratic Leadership Council, the premier policy-shaping think-tank of the Democratic party, presented its national security blueprint, “Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy.” In a chapter titled “Advance Democracy Abroad – Including in the Islamic World,” the document proposes:

The non-Leftist heavyweights of the Democratic party establishment fully endorse President Bush’s Middle East democratization policy and go on to argue that Democrats are better qualified to carry it out than Republicans. As former National Security Advisor Samuel R. Berger, a Democrat, put it:

The Democratic argument is that the national policy formulated and announced by President Bush is the right one, but President Bush himself is the wrong man to carry it out – because his alleged unilateralism has alienated foreign leaders. They propose a new national leadership that will uphold multilateralism, ingratiate foreign leaders and in this way advance the US agenda abroad.

In one sense, the merits of this election-year partisan argument are not relevant to the overriding fact that Middle East democratization is now the national, bipartisan policy of the United States that will continue to be pursued regardless of who is elected President next November.

Given, therefore, that Middle East democratization is the bipartisan national policy of the United States, the question is whether this policy is realistically feasible.

No a priori answer to this question exists.

Was George F. Kennan’s “containment” of Soviet communism realistically feasible when it was first proposed in 1946?

Was the democratization of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan realistically feasible in 1945?

Was the complete annihilation of the world’s four greatest empires (Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanoff and Ottoman) realistically feasible when the US entered World War I in 1917?

Indeed, was the 1776 American experiment in popular self-government realistically feasible at the time it was undertaken?

The democratization of the Middle East is a project of similar historic import whose outcome cannot be pre-determined.

What is known at this early stage of the struggle is that at least two elements will be indispensable for its success. First, the dissolution of violence-based tyrannies and movements in the countries of the Middle East is a precondition preceding the establishment of functioning representative governments; second, broad-based international alliances, and primarily a US-European alliance, will play as instrumental a role as NATO did in destroying the Soviet Union.

What many critics and skeptics view as insuperable traditional, cultural barriers to democracy in the Arab/Muslim world are simply the populations’ deeply, historically ingrained fear of the brutal violence that ruling families, military conspirators, political factions and theocratic cults routinely employ to highjack the state. It is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition that these networks of political violence and fear be destroyed or otherwise neutralized before democratization can take hold. The sufficient condition will be the parallel introduction over time of economic opportunities and institutions and habits of representative self government suitable to the history and needs of each country.

International allies, especially European allies, of the essentially American project of Middle East democratization will be torn between their strategic security need to see the project succeed, and their fear of the sacrifices that such success will demand.

Europe finds itself more threatened even than the US by the absence of democracy and economic prosperity in the Middle East. The European Union, in secular economic stagnation and in long-term demographic decline, has for some time now faced the destabilizing twin challenge of rapidly growing, restless Muslim populations and proximity to the chaotic social, economic and political disintegration of its Arab neighbors. Nothing is more self-evident than the fact that a politically democratic, economically prosperous Greater Middle East would be the most logical solution to Europe’s problems. It would stem the massive inflow of legal and illegal immigration, it would kill the message of shrill radicalization reverberating in Europe’s Muslim slums, and it would bring forth prosperous economic partners open to trade and investment. It is a damning testimonial to the blindness of the European political elites that the project of Middle East democratization – the solution par excellence to Europe’s economic and security problems – had to be developed and proposed by Americans.

But Europe, despite its short-sighted political class, and despite frequent differences over tactics, will continue to gravitate in favor of Middle East democratization because it is in its vital interests to do so.

Conclusion

As the twenty-first century proceeds on its way, there are only three possible developments: either chaos will continue and deepen, and with it insecurity and disintegration of society, or the United States will become tryly imperialistic or alternatively will abandon its exceptionalism and give in to the most recent form of Westphalianism – supra-national bureaucratic rules trumping the organs of democratic governance, or the American vision will eventually triumph, leading to a true new world order, the outlines of which are now only in embryo form.

The continuance of chaos is not inevitable. Neither is a reactionary return to the international paradigms of the dim or recent past. To move beyond them requires only the will to do so – and the resources to make it happen. Only the United States has those resources. Does it have the will?

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