The great global governance scare

The fear of “global governance” runs rampant among conservatives and libertarians, as if an unaccountable global autocracy was just around the corner. It’s not.

 
After the creation of the United Nations (UN) in 1945, world leaders and intellectuals from President Harry Truman to Albert Einstein hoped that the organization would herald the advent of a new era, in which a global government would prevent conflicts and settle disputes between nations. It is safe to say this hope was disappointed. Instead of a central government, the world got an alphabet soup of treaties, agencies, and platforms for cooperation. Some are global, others regional; a few appear well-run, but many are bloated and inefficient; a handful are influential, and many have grown irrelevant. None of them, however, has any real coercive powers.

And yet the fear of “global governance” runs rampant among conservatives and libertarians, as if an unaccountable global autocracy was just around the corner. Hudson Institute’s John Fonte claims that “the forces of global governances” count among three most “serious opponents” to liberal democracy—the other two being “radical Islam” and “a rising autocratic China.” Unless confronted forcefully, it will result in a “suicide of liberal democracy,” which has been underway in European countries, subordinated to the “supranational legal regime of the European Union.”

It is easy for a conservative or a classical liberal to be irritated by the bureaucracy, mission creep, and waste of international organizations. However, no serious person can honestly see those agencies as a threat to free societies in any way comparable to the rise of autocratic regimes around the world. No cabal is being formed to replace democratic decision-making with unaccountable bureaucrats or judges in opaque international agencies. Indeed, pretending that there is is itself a much bigger threat to liberal democracy: it adds fuel to the populist wave that risks undoing the fabric that has kept the western world peaceful, democratic, and increasingly economically integrated.

 
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The great global governance scare

 
Πηγή:  American Enterprise Institute