TRANSNATIONALISM « Sovereignty Blog

THE NGO AT THE END OF HISTORY:

April 24, 2006

A Million Paths to Peace (Michael Strong, 24 Apr 2006, Tech Central Station)

Something extraordinary is happening in global development circles. For the first time since the 19th century, progressive activists are embracing trade as positive tool for change. The global NGO Oxfam is the latest progressive interest group to change its tune. It has launched a campaign to end agricultural subsidies in the developed world.

This could represent a fundamental turning of the tide from a world based on nationalism and violence to a world based on commerce and peace.

Oxfam has a new section on its website devoted to “the private sector’s role in development,” where they acknowledge that “Oxfam GB believes that the private sector plays a central role in development, impacting on or contributing to poverty reduction in many different ways.” The awkward “impacting on,” rather than simply “contributing to,” poverty reduction rings of compromise language, perhaps included to satisfy lingering “old Left” market resentments among certain Oxfam stakeholders, but we should be strictly grateful for the core thesis: “The private sector plays a central role in development.”

In a recent paper, Columbia University political science professor Erik Gartzke shows that economic freedom (as measured by the Fraser Economic Freedom Index) is about fifty times more effective than democracy in diminishing violent conflict. Although it is not literally true that two nations with McDonald’s do not go to war with each other, nations with high levels of economic freedom are far less likely to be engaged in violent conflict than are nations without economic freedom. The democratic peace turns out to be the free market peace.

Evangelizing for democracy and capitalism is the transnationalism of the Right.

Comments Off | END OF HISTORY, NGOs | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

IF YOU EVER DOUBT HIS SPECIAL PROVIDENCE, RECALL WE SURVIVED THIS CLOWN (via Pepys):

April 23, 2006

Been there, done that: Talk of a U.S. strike on Iran is eerily reminiscent of the run-up to the Iraq war. (Zbigniew Brzezinski, April 23, 2006, LA Times)

IRAN’S ANNOUNCEMENT that it has enriched a minute amount of uranium has unleashed urgent calls for a preventive U.S. airstrike from the same sources that earlier urged war on Iraq. If there is another terrorist attack in the United States, you can bet your bottom dollar that there also will be immediate charges that Iran was responsible in order to generate public hysteria in favor of military action.

But there are four compelling reasons against a preventive air attack on Iranian nuclear facilities:

First, in the absence of an imminent threat (and the Iranians are at least several years away from having a nuclear arsenal), the attack would be a unilateral act of war. If undertaken without a formal congressional declaration of war, an attack would be unconstitutional and merit the impeachment of the president. Similarly, if undertaken without the sanction of the United Nations Security Council, either alone by the United States or in complicity with Israel, it would stamp the perpetrator(s) as an international outlaw(s).

It’s nonsense, of course, but were it really the case that a Democrat wouldn’t attack Iranian nuclear facilities, or any other suchh enemy, without the UN okay they’d never win another election. Giving France, China, and Russia veto over our national interest would be an act of political suicide. The reality is that a President Gore or Kerry would be likewise preparing an attack and the only difference is that they’d have the full support of the other party.

Comments Off | CRUSADER STATE/JACKSONIANISM, REALISTS, UNITED NATIONS | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

TRANSCENDING TRANSNATIONALISM:

April 4, 2006

International laws hinder UK troops – Reid: Defence secretary calls for Geneva conventions to be redrawn (Richard Norton-Taylor and Clare Dyer, April 4, 2006, The Guardian)

John Reid demanded sweeping changes to international law yesterday to free British soldiers from the restraints of the Geneva conventions and make it easier for the west to mount military actions against other states.

In his speech, the defence secretary addressed three key issues: the treatment of prisoners, when to mount a pre-emptive strikes, and when to intervene to stop a humanitarian crisis. In all these areas, he indicated that the UK and west was being hamstrung by existing inadequate law.

Mr Reid indicated he believed existing rules, including some of the conventions – a bedrock of international law – were out of date and inadequate to deal with the threat of international terrorists.

“We are finding an enemy which obeys no rules whatsoever”, he said, referring to what he called “barbaric terrorism”.

Unless the rules of war could be guaranteed to bind our enemies–which they never have and never will–they’re not just useless but intolerable.

Comments Off | ANGLOSPHERE, CRUSADER STATE/JACKSONIANISM, INTERNATIONAL LAW | Permalink
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JOHN KERRY WOULD HAVE GIVEN THEM A VETO (via Gene Brown):

April 3, 2006

Did Russia Help Saddam During the War? (Mark Kramer, April 2, 2006, Washington Post)

Reports in the Russian and Western press in March 2003 indicated that Gen. Vladislav Achalov, the former commander of Soviet airborne forces who supported the attempted coup in Moscow in August 1991, visited Baghdad shortly before the March 2003 invasion, accompanied by another retired Russian general. Photographs taken at the time confirm that the two generals were awarded medals by the Iraqi defense minister on behalf of Saddam Hussein. Achalov has since acknowledged that he traveled to Iraq at least 15 to 20 times in the years leading up to the war.

Press reports from March 2003 and afterward also indicated that other GRU officers were working with the Iraqi regime on a daily basis before and during the war, often through Abbas Khalaf, the former Iraqi ambassador to Moscow who sent numerous reports to Iraqi leaders citing GRU and diplomatic sources. In addition, a GRU “working group” known as Ramzaj, which posted daily assessments on a Russian military Web site, was widely described in the Russian press as aiding the Iraqi government. Although Ramzaj’s forecasts and some of its information proved to be wildly off the mark, the reports in major Russian dailies and respected trade publications lend strong credence to the assertions in the Iraqi documents that Titorenko and some Russian military intelligence officers aided the Iraqi efforts to withstand the U.S. invasion.

If Titorenko did provide illicit assistance, his motive may have been largely financial. When the Volcker commission issued its final report on fraud and corruption in the United Nations oil-for-food program last October, it listed the ambassador and his son as having received allocations of some 23.7 million barrels of oil worth well over $1 million in total.

The commission’s report listed numerous other Russian politicians and political entities, including Russian President Vladimir Putin’s then-chief of staff Alexander Voloshin, the speaker of the upper house of the Russian parliament, Yegor Stroyev, the Russian Communist Party, and the pro-Moscow government in Chechnya, as recipients of large oil allocations worth many millions.

However, it is unlikely that Titorenko’s apparent actions and the GRU cooperation were authorized at high levels. Russian opposition to the war — motivated mostly by the enormous profits Russian companies and elites had been reaping from the oil-for-food program — was much stronger than many U.S. experts had anticipated. But this opposition does not necessarily mean that Putin or then-Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov would have condoned transferring information that might cost American lives and would stand a high chance of eventually being detected.

We’ll never get all the facts straight, but it nicely demonstrates the utter insanity of the Democrats’ transnationalist argument that the UN should be allowed to determine when we go to war.

Comments Off | IRAQ, UNITED NATIONS | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

NOT AS MUCH AS THEY DESERVE FOR ADOPTING TRANSNATIONALISM:

March 29, 2006

Judicial activism or restraint? (Walter E. Williams, March 29, 2006, Creators Syndicate, Inc.)

Are federal, state and local justices appointed to office to impose their personal views on society or to interpret law? Is it a judge’s duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution, and state constitutions in the cases of state and local judges, or is it their duty to uphold foreign law and United Nations treaties? Should what a judge sees as “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights govern court decisions, or the U.S. Constitution?

It was the former – not the U.S. Constitution – that determined last year’s Roper v. Simmons decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the execution of a convicted murderer because he was 17 years old at the time of his offense. [...]

Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker has little patience with his colleagues who use their office to impose their values instead of applying the written law, but he’s in trouble for saying so. Judge Parker wrote an opinion article that was published in the Birmingham News on Jan. 1. It criticized the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision that banned executions for murderers who were under 18 when they committed their crimes. [...]

Joel Sogol, former chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union’s litigation committee, filed a complaint against Judge Parker with Alabama’s Judicial Inquiry Commission. The complaint charges Parker with violating Alabama’s judicial ethics standards when he publicly criticized his eight Supreme Court colleagues and the Roper v. Simmons U.S. Supreme Court decision. Sogol says that Judge Parker’s criticism breeds contempt for the law.

Sogol has it wrong. It’s the court’s failure to meet its constitutional duties that breeds contempt for the law.

At any rate, we can all agree about the contempt.

Comments Off | INTERNATIONAL LAW | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

COOL BRITANNIA:

March 28, 2006

Blair cooling on green targets for Kyoto successor (Philip Webster in Auckland, Mark Henderson and Lewis Smith, 3/29/06, Times of London)

TONY BLAIR was accused last night of caving in to American pressure by proposing a watered-down replacement for the Kyoto Protocol that relies on new technology rather than binding greenhouse gas cuts as the solution to climate change.

The Prime Minister will call today for a new international goal of stabilising temperatures and carbon emissions at present levels when the Kyoto agreement expires in 2012, to be achieved primarily by investment in cleaner energy technologies. [...]

Mr Blair’s proposal, which comes as the Government admitted that it would miss its pledge to reduce carbon dioxide output by 20 per cent of 1990 levels by 2010, will be laid out in a speech to a climate change conference in Wellington, the New Zealand capital.

When George Bush co-opted India, China, Japan and Australia it was the end of Kyoto for all but fanatics.

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YET ANOTHER BENEFIT OF THE IRAQ WAR:

March 25, 2006

UN speeds up Darfur peace mission (BBC, 3/24/06)

The UN Security Council has voted unanimously to speed up preparations for UN peacekeepers to be deployed to Darfur in western Sudan.

The council is calling on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to come up with a range of options within one month. [...]

“It’s a real step forward in building peace across the entire country,” Britain’s UN Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry said in a statement.

In 2002 the President challenged the UN to be true to its principles and help enforce its own resolutions against Saddam. It failed. Nice to see it shamed into doing the right thing this time.

Comments Off | CRUSADER STATE/JACKSONIANISM, KOFI ANNAN, UNITED NATIONS | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

PERCEIVED?:

March 18, 2006

U.N. to raise its profile in Iraq (Betsy Pisik, 3/18/06, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

The senior U.N. official in Iraq yesterday said that the United Nations will soon be raising its profile there, acknowledging that its “perceived absence” has been noticeable since a tragic suicide bombing after the U.S. invasion three years ago.

Might have been a good idea to help us enforce the UN Resolutions in the first place.

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Posted by orrinj

LIBERALIZATION GOOD, HOMOGENIZATION BAD:

March 15, 2006

SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH CZECH PRESIDENT VÁCLAV KLAUS: “The Past Is the Past”: Czech President Václav Klaus, 64, discusses his criticism of the European Union, the problems of exporting democracy and his country’s postwar relationship with neighboring Germany. (der Spiegel, 3/13/06)

SPIEGEL: Your fundamental criticism stands in stark contrast to the great attraction the EU has had in the last 16 years for many people, especially in Eastern Europe. Hasn’t the European Union played a decisive role in promoting democracy in Eastern Europe?

Klaus: No, the EU didn’t advance our democracy by a single millimeter.

SPIEGEL: What about Slovakia, where authoritarian Prime Minister Vladimír Meciar was voted out of office in 1998?

Klaus: But the Slovaks did that on their own. As far as I’m concerned, it would be unacceptable to push forward such a process from the outside. We created our democracy ourselves. And besides, EU membership isn’t a question of attraction. There simply is no alternative. For the countries in question, EU membership represented important political recognition. In fact, the rule of thumb in Europe is that the good ones are EU members, while the bad ones are not.

SPIEGEL: But didn’t the EU encourage processes that wouldn’t have gotten underway as quickly otherwise? Think about the development of a new legal system, for example. Current membership candidates Bulgaria and Romania are now going out of their way to satisfy EU standards by reforming their judicial systems.

Klaus: The Bulgarians and Romanians are already interested in a normal, free and democratic society. They don’t need anyone to tell them that that’s what they want. We developed our democracy for ourselves — not to make someone in Brussels happy.

SPIEGEL: You are opposed to minimum social standards in Europe and a common tax policy. Do you find a common foreign policy equally objectionable?

Klaus: I think a common foreign policy is completely unnecessary. The various European countries have widely differing priorities, goals and prejudices. It would be wrong to force them all to follow the same course. Just look at the outcome of the popular referendums in France and the Netherlands. Voters in the two countries rejected the constitution for very different reasons. And that’s ok. We can’t allow someone to show up and force us all to buy the same shirt size, even though one person has a size 39 collar and another a size 41.

SPIEGEL: You certainly have many objections to the EU. How far should integration go, in your opinion?

Klaus: The development of European integration can be divided into two phases. The first era ended with the Maastricht Treaty. It was a liberalization phase, with the main goal of European integration at the time being the removal of various barriers and borders in Europe. I was completely in favor of that. But the second phase is a homogenization or standardization phase, one that involves regulation from the top and growing control over our lives. In my view, this no longer has anything to do with freedom and democracy.

Comments Off | AXIS OF GOOD, EUROPEAN UNION | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

NAH, THEY'RE ASIANS…:

March 14, 2006

U.S., Malaysia to Launch Free-Trade Talks (MARTIN CRUTSINGER, 3/08/06, The Associated Press)

The United States and Malaysia announced Wednesday that they have agreed to begin negotiating a free trade deal to eliminate trade barriers between the two nations.

The decision was announced at a crowded Capitol Hill news conference attended by lawmakers from both political parties, marking an effort by the administration to build bipartisan support for its trade policies at a time when the country is running record trade deficits.

By selecting Malaysia for free trade negotiations, the administration chose a country that is already America’s 10th largest trading partner with $44 billion in two-way trade. The administration announced last month that it planned to launch free trade negotiations with South Korea and free trade talks with Thailand, another economic power in the region, are already under way.

And, luckily, the Right is too stupid to know they’re Muslims.

Comments Off | ISLAMIC REFORMATION, TRADE | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

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