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Globalism and Freedom Do Not Mix |
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By Jeffrey Tucker |
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Commentary
Speaking with a friend about the migrant crisis in the United States, she made an interesting observation. Many of the most prosperous Western nations in the world today are facing the same problem. They are flooded with migrants who are overwhelming the system, infuriating the citizenry, adding fiscal burdens, disrupting public order, and leading to possible political instability. Interesting question: Why after many multiple decades of only localized migrant issues, most having to do with border wars or other disruptions, have so many nations at once dealt with floods of people exploiting broken migration systems? In other words, how did a local problem become a global problem so quickly? How did all border systems break at once? And consider the problem before this one. We had a globalized response to the COVID crisis. In most nations of the world, the policy response was eerily similar. There was masking, distancing, closures, travel restrictions, and capacity limits, while big business was allowed to stay open. The same methods, which have no modern precedent, were attempted in all countries in the world except a few. The states that did not go along—Sweden, Tanzania, Nicaragua among others—face unrelenting attacks from world media. The problem of migration plus pandemic planning are only two data points but they both suggest an ominous reality. The nation states that have dominated the political landscape since the Renaissance, and even back in some cases to the ancient world, are giving way to a new form of government, which we can call globalism. It doesn’t refer to trade across borders, which has been the norm for all human history. It is about political control, away from citizens in countries toward something else that citizens cannot control or influence. From the time of the Treaty of Westphalia, signed in 1648, the idea of state sovereignty prevailed in politics. Not every nation needed the same policies. They would respect differences toward the goal of peace. This involved permitting religious diversity among nation states, a concession that led to an unfolding of freedom in other ways. The system worked but not everyone has been happy with it. Some of the most brilliant intellectuals for centuries have dreamed of global government as a solution to the diversity of policies of nation states. It’s the go-to idea for scientists and ethicists who are so convinced of the correctness of their ideas that they dream up some worldwide imposition of their favored solution. Humanity has by-and-large been wise enough not to attempt such a thing beyond military alliances and mechanisms to improve trade flows. But in the 21st century, we’ve seen the intensification of the power of globalist institutions. The World Health Organization (WHO) effectively scripted the pandemic response for the world. Globalist foundations and NGOs seem to be heavily involved in the migrant crisis. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, created as nascent institutions for a global system of money and finance, are exercising outsized influence on monetary and financial policy. The World Trade Organization is working to diminish the power of the nation state over trade policies. I happened to be in New York City a few weeks ago when the United Nations met. No question that it was the biggest show on planet Earth. Vast swaths of the city were shut down to cars and buses, with diplomats and heavy-hitting financiers arriving via helicopter on the roofs of luxury hotels, all of which were full for the week of meetings. The prices of everything were jacked up in response since no one was spending his own money in any case. The attendees were not only statesmen from all over the world but also the biggest financial firms and media outfits, along with representatives of the largest universities and nonprofits. All of these forces seem to be coalescing at once, as if they all want to be part of the future. And that future is one of global governance wherein the nation state is eventually reduced to pure cosmetics with no operational power. The impression I had while there was that the experience of everyone in town that day, all swarming around the big United Nations meeting, was one of deep separation of their world from the world of the rest of us. They are “bubble people.” Their friends, source of financing, social groupings, career aspirations, and major influence are detached not only from normal people but from the nation state itself. The fashionable attitude among them all is to regard the nation state and its history of meaning as passe, fictional, and rather embarrassing. Entrenched globalism of the sort that operates in the 21st century represents a shift against and repudiation of half a millennium of the way governance has worked in practice. All governance came to be organized around geographically restricted zones of control. The juridical boundaries restrained power. The king of France could govern France but required a war to influence England, and so too for Russia, Spain, Sweden, and so on. The expansion of the juridical boundaries required conquering or some form of colonialism but such arrangements are temporary because they are ultimately subject to the consent of the governed. The idea of consent gradually came to dominate political affairs from the 18th through the 19th century until after the Great War which dismantled the last of the multinational empires. That left us with one model: the nation state in which citizens exercised ultimate sovereignty over the regimes under which they live. The United States was initially established as a country of localized democracies that only came together under a loose confederation. The Articles of Confederation created no central government but rather deferred to the former colonies to set up (or continue) their own structures of governance. When the Constitution came along, it created a careful equilibrium of checks and balances to restrain the national state while preserving the rights of the states. The idea here was not to overthrow citizen control over the nation state but institutionalize it. All these years later, most people in most nations, the United States especially, believe that they should have final say over the structure of the regime. This is the essence of the democratic ideal, and not as an end in itself but as a guarantor of freedom, which is the principle that drives the rest. Freedom is inseparable from citizen control of government. When that link and that relationship are shattered, freedom itself is gravely damaged. The world today is packed with wealthy institutions and individuals that stand in revolt against the ideas of freedom and democracy. They do not like the idea of geographically constrained states with zones of juridical power. They believe they have a global mission and want to empower global institutions against the sovereignty of people living in nation states. They say that there are existential problems that require the overthrow of the nation-state model of governance. They have a list: infectious disease, pandemic threats, climate change, peacekeeping, cybercrime, and I’m sure there are others on the list that we’ve yet to see. The idea is that these are necessarily worldwide and evade the capacity of the nation state to deal with them. We are all being acculturated to believe that the nation state is nothing but an anachronism that needs to be supplanted. Keep in mind, this necessarily means treating democracy and freedom as anachronisms too. In practice, the only means by which average people can restrain tyranny and despotism is through voting at the national level. None of us have any influence over the policies of the WHO, World Bank, IMF, much less over the Gates or Soros Foundations. The way politics is structured in the world today, we are all necessarily disenfranchised in a world governed by global institutions. And that is precisely the point: to achieve universal disenfranchisement of average people so that the elites can have a free hand in regulating the planet as they see fit. This is why it becomes supremely urgent for every person who aspires to live in peace and freedom to regain national sovereignty and say no to the transfer of authority to institutions over which citizens have no control. Let me conclude with this: I had not always understood this. When the United States pulled out of the WHO in 2020, I was genuinely puzzled. It seemed rather unsporting. These days, I get it. Devolving power from the center is the only path by which we can restore the ideals of the great visionaries of the past like Thomas Jefferson. In the end, governing institutions must be in citizen control, and pertain to the borders of particular states, or it necessarily becomes tyrannical over time. |
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