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Peace at any cost is a prelude to war!
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U.N.'s shaky foundation
By Alan Keyes
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Republican Party elites who have worked so hard to nominate George W. Bush
tend to be uncomfortable with the conservative agenda of defending American
sovereignty. Is this charge unfair? Certainly it is the Democrats who are
most eager to blur the line between the nation and the world. But Republican
support for such internationalist briar patches as the Kosovo intervention
and the World Trade Organization reveals a deep confusion about American
sovereignty and why it matters. As Republican "strategists" plot their autumn
"gotcha's" for Al Gore, they seem oblivious to the fact that an entire core
Republican constituency may walk away from the Republican ticket, unless that
ticket takes a clear stand on the sovereignty issue. The Republican
leadership needs to understand why concern over the issue is so high, and I'd
like to explain it to them.
The center of internationalism, of course, is the United Nations. So if we
are to understand what is wrong with internationalism, we need to understand
clearly what the United Nations represents. To be fair, we should begin by
acknowledging that the U.N. arose from motives that, however misguided, were
not altogether malicious. Despite the dangerous flaws in the conception and
development of the United Nations' vision of global unity, it is important to
remember that the effort itself began during the closing days and aftermath
of the Second World War. At the end of such a period of exhausting war and
wickedness it was natural that there would be a great desire to relieve the
world of it happening again. The nations that originally formed the U.N. were
those that had just heroically spent themselves in the struggle to defeat
international evil. We should be slow to criticize their decent impulse to
use that moment of great moral focus to lay a foundation of common action
that would prevent the return of the unimaginable wickedness they had just
seen.
The Charter of the United Nations states that one of the basic purposes of
the organization is "promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and
for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex,
language, or religion." On Dec. 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United
Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Much as the Declaration of Independence did in the American context, the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights has come to epitomize the effort of the
United Nations to advance the cause of human dignity in the world.
So why are conservatives so worried about yielding some of our national
sovereignty to an organization aiming at such high and noble goals? Should we
not fall in line with the more general effort of people around the world to
overcome the distinctions and divisions of nationhood and replace them with a
global community -- particularly when it is so clear that communication
technologies and other factors are rapidly producing a global community
whether the governments of nations like it or not?
That sounds good, until you look at the actual record of the United Nations
over the past half-century. For all the formal rhetoric about human rights,
the United Nations has failed to advance that cause. This failure is
particularly marked in precisely those areas that involve the attempt to
translate the universal language of the Universal Declaration into concrete
respect for human rights. On issue after issue we can tell the sorry story of
the impotence and even the active complicity of the United Nations in the
systematic suppression of both understanding of and respect for those rights.
Like accumulating symptoms that point undeniably to some hidden cause of
physical illness, so the record of the United Nations in advancing human
rights is a list of the symptoms of a fundamental corruption in the effort
itself.
We all need to ask the causes of this failure, because we need to learn from
it. Republican leaders need to learn from it the reasons that many of their
core supporters will withdraw that support if the Republican ticket is tone
deaf on the sovereignty issue. But there is a more important reason to ask
why the U.N. has failed. It is that whatever the eventual fate of the United
Nations may be, or of the Republican ticket in this fall's election, the
effort to advance the universal cause of justice will continue. It is
particularly important that the United States and its citizens take an
intelligent and effective part in this effort, and that means we must
understand the root cause of what has gone wrong with the United Nations.
That cause of failure is actually quite clear. The founders of the United
Nations neglected to take account of moral reality. It was never
realistically to be expected that the institution could effectively respect
principles of decency and right when it was, from the beginning,
substantially composed of nations that do not base their own political order
on principles of decency and right.
Consider, as only the most prominent example, the role of the Soviet Union in
the United Nations. For much of the post-war era, the Soviet Union was the
principal impediment to the effective defense of human rights around the
world. The Soviets were wholly outside and opposed to the tradition of
respect for human dignity to which the U.N. was supposedly devoted.
But the Soviets didn't act in bad faith simply because they were wicked, but
because Marxism is materialist in principle and denies the distinct nature of
man. The Marxist view is intrinsically opposed to the doctrine of human
rights, and to the doctrine of eternal justice that underlies it. Man is just
an extension of the material world, in the Marxist view, and so all
professions of respect for human distinctness are in bad faith in principle,
because ultimately the only thing a consistent Marxist will respect is the
power of matter unfolding itself in history.
Soviet disrespect for moral truth was no secret to the founders of the United
Nations. And the decision to form an organization that included such a nation
is the clearest possible sign that right belief on moral matters was never a
defining characteristic of the community being formed.
So the U.N. has failed with respect to human rights because it is based on a
false practical principle -- it does not take seriously the requirement of
moral principle in politics. This is not just an incidental failure. It is a
failure that derives from a fundamentally wrong understanding of politics --
from the view that there can be a political whole that is not ultimately
rooted in a community of moral belief. No procedural or organizational
cleverness can bring tyrannical countries together with principled ones to
form a group that respects human liberty.
The na�ve expectation that this could be pulled off is not just a case of
excessive optimism on the part of the founders of the United Nations. It also
reveals a fundamental inclination to accept the social science vision of
politics -- that politics is ultimately about the patterns of organization
that will emerge from mankind's material and instinctive nature. From this
perspective, moral principle and claims of truth and justice are simply
manifestations of the deeper material basis of human nature.
Because the membership of the U.N. from the beginning included nations that
denied the real foundations of respect for human dignity, it is not
surprising that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would also betray
ambiguity at critical moments. Although defenders of the document have worked
hard to characterize it as a prudent expression of an implied doctrine of
natural law with an ultimate foundation in the God of nature, the fact is
that the document is an ungrounded moral fa�ade -- moral injunctions floating
free of any principled reason that would require assent, and thus moral words
without a corresponding soul.
The first article of the Universal Declaration makes reference to the
rational nature of all men, and this is indeed one of the paths to
understanding that the God of nature has willed that human beings be accorded
a special and equal dignity. But the document is strikingly silent on this
implication, and the effect is that while it does cling to some concept of
common humanity, it discards the ground of that concept. There must be a
principle that distinguishes us from matter and justifies our claim to
special dignity, and we cannot effectively assert that distinction without
acknowledging its transcendent source -- a Being beyond physical experience.
Silence on this point might be prudent under certain circumstances -- we are
not always obliged to speak fully of the deepest things. But when the
community of nations summons its best effort to state before the people of
the world the true nature and source of the particular rights that it exists
to protect, the only explanation for silence regarding that source is the
fact that the members of the community disagree about it. Omission in the
Universal Declaration of any mention of the authority of God, which is the
true source of all human rights, is a confession of the fundamental
disagreement of moral vision in the signatories.
Without the clear statement that human rights come from God, and must be
respected out of respect for the authority of God, the Universal Declaration
permits the impression that the rights it contains are a laundry list agreed
upon by human will. And precisely because the countries signing the document
were in disagreement about the actual source of those rights, it has proven
to be impossible to attain consistent support for the authentic rights in the
list, coherent understanding of what the various rights are and require, or
any rational basis for preserving the list from arbitrary, spurious or even
harmful additions.
Which brings us back to the challenge of defending American sovereignty in an
era of increasingly ambitious internationalism. American sovereignty matters
because it marks out for us and for the world a human community that is not
-- at least in principle, and in a great deal of its most important practice
-- unclear about the reasons that human dignity must be respected. The
authentic internationalism -- as our Founders understood -- aims not at one
world government, but at the universal acknowledgment by the community of
nations of the truth that human dignity comes irrevocably from God. Our
Founders addressed the Declaration to the world precisely because they knew
that this truth should be international, and might one day become so.
At the root of conservative discomfort about the emerging machinery of
internationalism is the sense that the fa�ades of transnational structures
conceal at least a dangerous ambiguity, and often even the strongest
disagreements about what human communities are for, and the limits they must
respect. For all our doubts about the state of the American regime, we know
that we have a deep tradition of national agreement on the most important
things. There is nothing like such agreement in the halls of the WTO.
Do the people in the back rooms of the Republican victory strategy sessions
understand this? And do they understand how important this question is to the
grass roots Americans they are counting on to bring the Party to victory in
November. I have my doubts.
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