Sam Schulman
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
PERPETUAL PEACE. That's the dream that world-government enthusiasts hold out
for us. And they are in the ascendent right now: oddly, our national
security is being overlooked by Stobe Talbott, who yearns for a time when
when "nationhood as we know it will be obsolete: all states will recognize a
single, global authority." We're forced to listen to a chorus of lectures on
world government: the noisy selective moralists Bill Clinton and Tony Blair;
pushy leaders of supranational organizations like the UN and the EU. The
song is the same: the only decent thing for a national government to do is to
surrender their citizens' rights to some distant and unelected authority.
What's curious is that, by a quirk of fate, we have the opportunity to
examine the kind of world peace under which most people would have to live,
were Talbott, Blair, Annan, and the Eurocrats to get their way. If you
squint and look around, you'll see what "peace" under a world government
would be like.
Here are some of its features, now and in the future:
1. The unchecked violent rule of local warlords within their own sphere:
Today's versions are Russia, China, and Iraq. A power, if big enough, but
not too big, is easier for a central authority to appease than to overcome.
So if these warlord states can persuade the central governments that they
only want to control their own territory, then they will be left alone to do
as they like to their citizens and smaller neighbors. So today Russia today
is able to act out its re-enactment the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia in
Chechnya, and no one really objects.
2. The appeasement of terrorism as long as the capital is safe. In Northern
Ireland and Israel, the "world government" stand-ins are pushing settlements
on civilian populations that, arguably, put them in harm's way and destroy
their individual security. It is arguable in both cases (though I think it
is a catastrophically bad argument) that compromising and sharing power with
terrorists is a good idea. But conviction on the subject is not why the
great powers are pushing it. They push it because they have no vested
interest in the security of people who are politically and militarily
insignificant to them. Tony Blair can rule without Northern Ireland as part
of the UK; Israel has always been a nuisance to US foreign and economic
policy.
3. Highly selective enforcement of the "rules," abetted by an obedient
opinion-making establishment. The "world government" today operates as a
real world government would do: imposing its rules on its weaker enemies, but
looking the other way when it is convenient to do so, as in Russia. In the
mean time, it has hardly been reported, but NATO's war against Yugoslavia has
just lost its final justification. The problem is stark-a dramatic shortage
of Serb atrocities. The forensic pathologist leading the Spanish
atrocity-hunting team has gone home in disgust. He had been told to expect
to find about 2,000 bodies in his bailiwick: he found only 187. Dr. Pujol
told the Sunday Times "I calculate that the final figure of dead in Kosovo
will be 2,500 at the most. This includes lots of strange deaths that can't be
blamed on anyone in particular." But a world government is never called to
account.
Another example is the bombing of the almost certainly innocuous chemical
plant in Sudan. The New York Times revealed that no one in the
administration ever seriously believed that the factory was a terrorist
operation. But it doesn't matter. On the other hand, remember the
desperately abject nature of Clinton's apologies for the "mistaken" bombing
of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The difference? Sudan is nugatory, but
China is a warlord state, towards which we must elaborately interpret "the
rules" in its favor.
Strobe Talbott hailed the European Union last month in London: It ``not only
gave Europe its first stateless currency since the days of the Roman Empire
but also helped bring into being a concert of liberal democracies -- in some
ways the first and certainly the most advanced in history.'' His reference
to Rome is correct. Under the world government envisioned by the enthusiasts
in Washington, London, Turtle Bay, and Brussels, how we would live would
resemble quite a bit how Roman citizens had to live under their empire.
Here's some advice: make sure you live close to where a legion is stationed.
Otherwise, life will be a bloody, contingent, and lonely business. You'll
live with no access to those who rule you; and no reliable guide to conduct
or protection from authority.
Peace? Yes. It will be a peace based on a
happy co-existence between two forces equally opposed to you: bureaucrats
answerable only to "Rome," and local bullies or terrorists who have a gun big
enough to push you around, but small enough not to pose a threat to global
authority.
JWR contributor Sam Schulman is deputy editor of Taki's Top Drawer, appearing in New York Press, and was formerly publisher of Wigwag and a professor of English at Boston University. You may contact him by clicking here.
