Are International Organizations a smart way to govern?

The urge to international goverance is an admirable one, but it runs into problems when one looks at the pratical applications thereof. The world that Americans, and Westerners full of goodwill, want to mount and ride, feed and pat, is not a sweet-tempered pony but a huge, vile-tempered mule.

The words "United Nations" have a slendid sound. The United Nations has been offered to the world over and over again as the highest representation of hunity.

Not so fast!

It is a "union" of couse, not of nations but of states. And many U.N. states exist---even not counting ones recognized as "rogue"---that in no sense embody a civilized past, present, or future for the world or for themselves. Its members include governments largely or totally opposed to their own citizens' liberties and, of course, to Western culture in general. It lost some prestige when, for example, the U.N. Commission of Human Rights elected Libya as its chairman (see previous post on this). Sudan is also a member, but the United States was dropped in 2001. Israel is in effect permanently barred. Meanwile Syria was elected to the presidency of the Security Council.

It is not, therefore, a body whose powers can be allowed to include rulings contrary to our principles. It is a forum for dicussion, compromise, adjustment, and possible agreement on certain general issues. The United Nationa itself is an arena in which views are publicized and interests pushed and a venue for negotiation. At best, it is more like a stock exchange or a hockey field than a nice family picnic.

If the United Nations is regarded as having the potential to become a world government, one can only say that this potential is very weak and could only develop when the majority of states become politically civilized ... not just in rhetoric but reality as well.

Taking a look at international mandates it is maintained that binding the United States by signature to a treaty is automatically a good thing. The obvious objection don't seem to register in some critical minds: Not only do some of the states putting ink to paper fail to carry out anything like their obligations (Iraq comes to mind) in the real world, but permitting international bodies to intrude into the law-and-liberity countries also involves the institutionalization, on purely abstract grounds, of an, as yet primitive apparet. A very important trouble with international arrangements of all types has also been that Western government sign on to policies that have not been properly (or at all) argued or debated by their publics or legislatures. Thus these arrangements are a means of giving more power to their own executive branches and, of course, more power to the international bureaucracies and permanent staff, whose interests are so deeply involved.

What we witness today is the general diffusion of power, and the largest and most intrusive and expanding element is, of course, the new bureacuscracy. That alone shoudl be thought of as a recipe for the long-term decline of pluralist civilization. The only probable outcome of this enterprise is a resentment against the system itself where a build up of international government leads to a corrupt corporate culture.