RELAX, THELMA, I'LL DRIVE:

Desperately seeking Hamilton (Christopher Caldwell, March 4 2003, Financial Times)

The epithet that Europeans have most often flung at American war hawks over the past year is "unilateralist." Especially in French and German public opinion, it is assumed that George W. Bush's administration seeks to conquer the world.

It doesn't. American hawks are pursuing a more subtle, and perhaps more durable, project. They are joining the European quest for a post-national global order, but on their own terms. Extrapolating from its own constitutional history, the US wants to supply today's inchoate order with what Montesquieu called "vigour" and Alexander Hamilton called "energy".

This may be a project that the world ends up not wanting. It may be one that is naive to the point of being silly. But it is a far cry from the "Bonapartism" that certain European observers discern in the administration's recent conduct. America does not aim to be a world dictator; it aims to be something more like a world executive. [...]

As America sees it, there are two obvious problems with the UN as a world government. First, it is incomplete. Old Europe ignores the fact that the world needs an executive, both to enforce the democratic will and balance a legislature's powers. For the time being, it is true, the US shows signs of arrogating that executive role to itself. But the US is groping towards a new constitutional order, not a global dictatorship. The Bush administration's courtship of "New Europe", whether through the Blair Eight or the Vilnius Ten, has been a bid for legitimacy.

Second, even if the world needs a legislature, the UN as presently constituted is ill-fitted to provide it. Many of its members are themselves undemocratic. In being selective about whom it listens to, the US is not being high-handed. It is striking a blow for political accountability. Noel Mamere, presidential candidate of France's Greens, may warn in his recent book of a nascent "American Bonapartism". But there is surely less risk that the US will act like a megalomaniacal Napoleon than that a mob of outlaw states gathered under the UN roof (Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Zimbabwe etc) will together pursue their common interests like Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety.

Some time before the end of the Iraq crisis, it will become clear that the US differs with Europe not over the need for post-national structures but over how those structures should be built. A nasty shock could be in store. By the time Europeans realise they do not have a monopoly on multilateral thinking, the US may already have come up with a more serviceable blueprint for a post-national order.

If he's right, we're joining a militia. But this begs the question of what's in it for America? Suppose that a new World State is the end goal of American policy--why would we voluntarily enter a system that is a house divided--between a very few liberal capitalist protestant (small "p") democracies and many socialisms, dictatorships, and theocracies and, as important, one where the redistributiuon of income would be from us to them? The sole benefit of such an arrangement is stability, but why would we want the world to be stabilized at this point, with Communism still a formidable fore; Islamicism plaguing the Middle East; and the rest of the West in drastic decline? That's not creating a new world order, it's entering into a murder-suicide pact. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 5, 2003 9:12 AM