Collective Conscious

A quick excerpt from the Guardian today: “any fur­ther trans­fer of UK sov­er­eignty to the EU will be sub­ject to a vote.”  This isn’t a sen­tence you’re likely to hear any­time soon about the United States. The US has been exceed­ingly care­ful to avoid any trans­fer at all of its self-​​governance to a higher power, a tra­di­tion dat­ing back at least as far as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations.

What’s this all about? Why are Euro­peans increas­ingly will­ing to sub­mit their nations to cen­tral­ized gov­er­nance, while the US insists on stand­ing alone and exert­ing power from a “first among equals” posi­tion? The answer lies in the shift­ing sta­tus of the nation-​​state.

Where once nation-​​states were the end-​​all and be-​​all of inter­na­tional rela­tions, they have lost ground in recent years to the emer­gence of new world pow­ers. Ter­ror­ist net­works, multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions, and inter­na­tional legal bod­ies have devel­oped the power and con­fi­dence to chal­lenge sov­er­eign gov­ern­ments on their home turf (see Al-​​Qaeda v. the US, Google v. China, etc.). With­out the absolute power that they held dur­ing the 20^th cen­tury, the nation-​​states have had to adapt their global approach to suit this new reality.

Some, as in Europe, have opted to expand their col­lec­tive sov­er­eignty. The Euro­pean Union is the fore­most embod­i­ment of a supra­na­tional body meant to gov­ern over states them­selves; it attempts to rule by shared law over the cor­po­ra­tions and per­sons of the whole of Europe.

Oth­ers have flatly denied the emer­gent new pow­ers. The United States, for exam­ple, “does not nego­ti­ate with ter­ror­ists.” This doc­trine stands in marked con­trast to the Euro­pean approach, where even dur­ing the 20^th cen­tury gov­ern­ment fre­quently nego­ti­ated with the vio­lent fac­tions that sprung up even within their own bor­ders (for exam­ple the IRA, the Baader-​​Meinhof group, etc.).

The US approach to this issue is a reasser­tion of the exclu­sive sov­er­eignty of the nation-​​state, and this view is reflected in many of its pol­icy posi­tions regard­ing, to name a few, Israel, the ICC, and the United Nations. And why shouldn’t it? It is the most pow­er­ful nation-​​state in the world, and has lit­tle to gain from hav­ing to con­front a wide array of acknowl­edged new pow­ers. Sur­ren­der­ing sov­er­eignty to a cen­tral author­ity is merely a sign of its com­plic­ity in a new world where plu­ral­ism and mul­ti­lat­er­al­ism, even among non­state actors, becomes the norm.

There’s no evi­dence that such a world would be desir­able — it’s never been attempted. It is, how­ever, emerg­ing, and its bor­ders grow closer to those of the United States every day. It may be in the cards of his­tory that state sov­er­eignty becomes just one of sev­eral over­lap­ping types, but the strate­gic posi­tion of the US guar­an­tees that it will be the last to admit it.

(Photo: Jeremy Bur­gin)