I’ve been thinking a lot about how much other countries are having to act in their own interests in other countries. Things like:
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One-quarter of California’s pollution comes from China
- failed states are hotbeds for terrorism
- the internet has blurred borders: people can act financially, malitiously, etc. in a country, without actually being there
- people are so much more mobile than ever (it seems to me) so it’s getting harder and harder to keep people from moving from country to country.
I’m curious if this is an evolutionary moment for what we see as a country defined by a set of borders. It just seems to me that there is a big change going on, or should be going on. Problems like pollution, epidemics, war crimes, economic crisis even can’t be handled on a country by country basis.
A part of this question concerns some sort of international government (UN, okay, but also participation in an international court) and how we (especially America) can continue consider that their problems and their actions are their own, and not intertwined with the rest of the world.
This is a really complicated question (for me to try to ask), so I’ll leave it at that, and see where it goes. I’m not saying that countries (especially the US) always work on their own, or that they are constantly trying to exert their force upon another.
I’ll just see what happens…
To give as simple an answer as possible: most people in the country would probably think that we paper-pushers in Washington DC are way too far removed from the concerns of ordinary people. The idea that people are ready to shift resposibility for the work currently done in Washington to somewhere even more foreign – like Geneva (gasp!) – is a helluva long way off, if it is ever feasible.
There are a lot of issues that are too big to be handled in a country-by-country basis. But from where I sit, the problem isn’t states’ sovereignty, it is that policymakers in various countries sometimes do not really care to tackle tough problems like those mentioned. In other words, it is a failure of leadership, not of the system.
The single all-or-nothing shift of national sovereignty somewhere else is a non-starter, pragatically speaking. The way it has happened in the EU is by treaties which gradually cede sovereignty in specific areas (economic, foreign policy etc.) - that’s all international law is, really: the treaties, protocols or other agreements signed by national governments.
Of course, one important document signed by almost all national governments was this one (heck, the US practically wrote it). This document effectively makes the UN a world government insofar as it comprises a bunch of authorities meeting to discuss What Gets Done. Of course, it’s an extremely poor excuse for a government right now: it’s rather like the American states in the 18th century, with some arriving at the assembly with no democratic mandate whatsoever and some bigger states having disproportionately more power. (Think most of the southern states sending senators or representatives who hadn’t been elected, and the whole meeting being bullied by California.)
So, like any other government, the UN must become more democratic and more representative. If its most powerful member ignores the Charter it signed, the irrelevance of the UN becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think this is a flat-out impossible idea that only a small fraction of the world’s population would ever go for. The U.S. would oppose it because we have no good reason to give up power and we don’t want more open borders. You can follow the list of countries down the list and come up with obvious reasons why everyone from Iceland to France to China would be completely against it. I think it is a non-starter as well and will be for our entire lifetimes at the very least.
Yeah, we need a world government. That doesn’t mean we’re gonna get one. At present, there is no significant internationalist movement of any kind in any country on Earth that I can think of. Not among the people, and certainly not among those running the national governments. (Communism is internationalist in principle, but when Communists get into power they always act like the leaders of self-interested nation-states.)
We covered a lot of this ground in this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=355770
To be more clear, I’m not saying that governments should, in most cases, cede their sovereignty.
However, I am saying that perhaps there should be a movement towards understanding that, by and large, the problems of one country are the problems of all and that the resolution is impeded by the idea that across some borders the strife belongs to someone else. Somalia’s civil war isn’t Somalian, it’s a threat to the Western world to have a failed state like that where terrorists could hide.
Immigration is a good example. Sometimes I think we’re fighting the enevitable. As long as conditions in other countries are horrible, people are going to find ways to get in to the US.
Shouldn’t the US take an active role in improving other countries (I know that’s badly put, because “improving” has a lot of connotations, like the way we’re “improving” Iraq). If we help countries in Latin America improve their conditions, we’ll see a drop in the amount of illegal immigrants, right? The same is true in Europe. It seems to me that Europe has huge incentives to improve the state of life in Africa, because they can’t stop the flow of poor Africans seeking asylum in their countries.
Isn’t that more feasible than trying to block millions of people from slipping through poreous (sp?) borders?
It’s sort of like the drug war’s effect on Columbia. Wouldn’t we be better off stopping the demand for cocaine in the states, rather than dusting crops in Columbia with agent orange (or whatever it is they’re covered with)?