Only An International Order Based On Classical Liberalism and US Constitutionalism Can Ensure Economic & Political Freedom

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Individualism & world order


John O. McGinnis


The National Interest, Winter, 2004


DISAGREEMENT about world order is a continuation of disagreement about domestic order. At its heart are the same questions. How much power should be given to centralized decision-making as opposed to decentralized decision-making and markets? Should regulatory authority be exercised through democratically accountable mechanisms or elite and bureaucratic ones? What is really at stake thus becomes much clearer when more traditional political concepts are used to elucidate such relatively opaque terms as sovereignty, multilateralism, global governance and customary international law.


Classical liberalism--the philosophy of limited and accountable government--provides an appropriate framework for analyzing the foundation of global order because liberalism actually began in discussion of international matters. After all, Adam Smith and David Ricardo initiated the case for classical liberalism two centuries ago when they attacked nation states' restrictions on international trade.


This same framework of ideas provides coherent and consistent answers to the two most salient questions of international legal order. First, what kinds of international organizations and agreements are justified? Classical liberalism provides a principled framework that approves of trade agreements that keep capital markets open, because these agreements create a market for governance for competing sovereigns. It is more skeptical of other global multilateral agreements, be they environmental accords, human rights conventions or an agreement on an international criminal court, because the bureaucracies needed to run them may create new centers of unaccountable powers.


Second, by what process should agreements be reached and interpreted? What role should non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play in generating international law? Before the rise of classical liberalism, specific factions, like the aristocracy, or self-appointed interpreters of natural and divine law, such as augurs or kings, generated law. The classical liberal project has advanced through replacing this structure with representative government and careful checks and balances. Treaties have the potential to make full use of these processes, and a world of increasingly democratic nations is beginning to realize that potential. In contrast, reliance on a customary international law shaped by NGOs and law professors is anachronistic--a return to generating norms by narrow factions and a secular priestly caste.


Agreements & Institutions


CLASSICAL liberalism proceeds from two principles. First, individuals should be free to interact with one another as they choose, subject to the proviso that they cannot harm others through force or fraud. Second, government's object is to protect these freedoms and the property they generate. The dilemma for the latter objective is that a government powerful enough to achieve this goal can also threaten freedom and property. Thus, another objective of classical liberalism is to restrain the exercise of official power and assure that it is confined to its proper function of providing public goods--those that the market and family cannot supply.


Thus, the classical liberal international order should advance freedom by breaking down barriers to exchange and other voluntary interactions among people of various nations. And it should welcome ways of restraining governments from acting beyond their legitimate purposes, so long as these restraints do not unduly empower international bureaucracies.


It might be thought that classical liberalism thus simply translates in international matters to a Wilsonian concern with advancing democracy at every turn. But even in a democracy large and diverse enough to inhibit majority tyranny, minority factions in the form of special interests can use their greater leverage to gain government resources at the expense of the public. Mechanisms beyond simple democracy are therefore needed to assure, in the political scientist Mancur Olson's phrase, that a nation is governed by an "encompassing interest" rather than by special interests. Such an encompassing interest--the diffuse majority or supermajority of citizens-has less incentive than special interests to engage in the expropriation of resources through government action. It would then be extracting resources largely from itself. The best international mechanisms thus do not promote simple democracy but instead promote governance by the encompassing interest within various nation-states.


Peaceful competition among sovereign nations furnishes a primary mechanism for empowering the "encompassing interest" of a nation and for reducing the ability of interest groups to take resources from the government. Under what political scientists term "jurisdictional competition", sovereigns compete by providing efficient levels of public goods. If they do not, investment will dissipate and companies will flee the jurisdiction. Such competition thereby restrains leaders from unduly rewarding themselves or their supporters and encourages policies that will make their people prosperous. Competition also permits each nation the opportunity to learn from good policies that others adopt.


Decentralized lawmaking by sovereign nations also has the virtue of allowing different nation-states to satisfy the preferences of diverse peoples in the world. It is not too much to say that jurisdictional competition and the satisfaction of diverse human needs are the defining virtues of modern sovereignty. In sharp contrast, centralized power exercised in the international sphere has the potential over time to become even more vexatious than domestic centralized power, for three reasons.


First, the international arena is opaque to most citizens, and this lack of transparency empowers leaders and the factions that support them. Concrete examples of the difficulty that citizens have in controlling international organizations abound. Brussels-based bureaucrats are more distant than those in the EU's home nations. It is thus not surprising that they engage in all sorts of financial shenanigans, including the recent expense-account abuses, that would never be tolerated at home. Second, more is at stake in formulating international rules. If a faction or interest group succeeds in obtaining a regulation that disadvantages competitors on a global scale, it can gain a world's worth of monopoly profits.


Finally, international regulations can extinguish jurisdictional competition that restrains overreaching behavior by domestic agencies.


From these considerations flow three general criteria to determine whether international agreements and organizations concerning trade, human rights, regulation and an international criminal court are justified.


Mutuality of Gains. Internationalizing structures of regulatory authority are generally appropriate only when the gains could not be realized by the nations acting on their own. This flows from a basic principle of subsidiarity. Localized institutions are generally easier to control and are more likely to reflect diverse preferences.


Facilitating the Encompassing Interest: International agreements and institutions should facilitate the governance of participating nations by an encompassing interest. Thus, agreements that intensify international jurisdictional competition are always welcome. In contrast, in areas where jurisdictional competition is not possible, establishing international rules can sometimes be more desirable.


Light Elaboration Mechanisms: The final criterion concerns the substantiality of the mechanism needed to make international agreements work. If complex international mechanisms creating substantial regulatory authority are needed to sustain the agreement, they run a higher risk of capture by special interest groups, because such institutions are distant from the citizens affected by them. Accordingly, even when nations have the possibility of realizing mutual gains from an international framework, these gains may be outweighed by the costs generated by the international framework itself. For instance, nations may lack incentives to control a particular kind of cross-border pollution unless they act together, but the utility of an international pollution control agreement nevertheless depends on comparing all the costs of enforcement, including the costs of special interest capture, with the gains from pollution control.


Specific Global Agreements


HAVING established the general criteria, let us proceed to examine the classical liberal approach to agreements and institutions concerning international trade, human rights, regulation of such matters as health, safety and the environment, and a criminal court.


Global Trade Agreements: Trade agreements, including agreements to permit free trade in goods and services and to preserve open capital markets, are the international agreements easiest to defend. First, they create wealth among all nations that are parties to them. According to the well-established theory of comparative advantage, nations prosper when they specialize in the goods and services they can produce most efficiently. Thus, the mutuality of wealth creation gives all nations a stake in sustaining these agreements.


It is true that unilateral free trade is beneficial, but multilateral free trade creates even greater benefits. The more fundamental reason for trade multilateralism, however, lies in domestic political economy. Protectionist interest groups in modern democracies can get politicians to create obstacles to trade by exchanging their political support for high tariffs. But by offering the possibility of reduced tariff barriers in other countries in exchange for lower tariffs at home, global trade agreements mobilize exporter groups to fight protectionist groups on behalf of free trade. Thus, not only does free trade permit mutual gains, but as a political matter these mutual gains are contingent on the actions of other states. The political contingency of tariff reductions in one country on tariff reductions in other countries provides the best rationale for trade policies to be pursued through a world structure, like the World Trade Organization.


The second advantage of trade agreements is that they need relatively simple elaboration mechanisms that are unlikely to be captured by interest groups. Reducing tariffs takes no positive regulation at all. It is true that some nations may seek to replace tariff barriers with discriminatory health and safety regulation. But eliminating such non-tariff barriers to trade does not require a huge administrative apparatus either, because the WTO can police them by requiring that nations not discriminate in their rules against foreign imports. The WTO does not need an elaborate bureaucracy to formulate substantive health and safety regulations itself.


Other elements of global economic integration also empower the encompassing interest within nations by facilitating jurisdictional competition. For instance, multilateral agreements on capital flows increase the mobility of capital. Mobile capital, in turn, increases the pressures of jurisdictional competition among nations, because people tend to invest in nations with sensible regulatory and tax burdens and with respect for the rule of law. While such agreements sometimes require regulatory changes in a nation's legal system, their overall thrust is deregulatory and therefore they do not require substantial international regulatory structures. Thus, open capital markets and investment agreements help make sovereignty work on behalf of the encompassing interest of society even though individuals cannot easily move from one nation to another.


Such multilateral economic agreements might ultimately create a world constitutive mechanism that resembles aspects of the original Constitution of the United States. The Constitution promotes decentralized order by creating a market for governance where open capital markets and free trade force state governments to deliver good and efficient government. As the economist Barry Weingast has noted, this system sustained very substantial growth and limited governmental expenditures through much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Similarly, the jurisdictional competition afforded by the world trading system in the era of globalization performs these same beneficial functions today.


Human Rights: The term "human rights" covers a variety of very disparate matters from property rights to welfare rights to civil rights. The advisability of international rules on human rights depends upon the substance of the rights protected. Unfortunately, some international agreements, like the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, include welfare rights, and many internationalists wish to expand them. These are the worst kind of rights to frame at the international level.


First, they violate principles of subsidiarity. Even assuming that government should guarantee some kind of welfare rights, it is clear that the particular guarantees must depend upon the budgetary constraints of individual nations. But if welfare rights are to take account of the differing circumstances of various nations and their traditions, substantial discretion must be given to international institutions that would enforce them. This discretion, in turn, empowers international bureaucrats and other elites who will determine the appropriate level of guarantees. Second, international agreements should not lock in specific economic and social policies that are likely to change with the political winds.


Civil rights connected to democracy, like voting, and the panoply of rights connected to the criminal justice system are more plausible for inclusion in international agreements than welfare rights but less plausible than international trading rights. Unlike international trade agreements, civil rights agreements lack the strongly contingent nature that provides the best justification for multilateralism. The international elaboration of civil rights by a multilateral mechanism in one nation does not directly generate civil rights in another.


Nevertheless, the case for global decentralization is weaker for civil rights than for economic matters. The relative immobility of persons in a world with relatively strict immigration laws inhibits jurisdictional competition in civil rights, whereas the relative mobility of companies and capital aids jurisdictional competition in economic regulations. Because of the inefficacy of jurisdictional competition in this area, internationalizing core civil rights, including the right to be free from torture or genocide, is beneficial.


But there are alternative ways of promoting civil rights more generally that carry less risk of international structures that may impose mistaken or ill-fitting conceptions of rights on particular countries. International trade agreements may themselves provide a mechanism. These agreements facilitate the expansion of civil rights not through flat but through encouraging the wealth creation that will generate pressure for such rights internally. Historically, this theory accords with the evidence that a rising middle class demands civil and political rights to help secure its swelling wealth against the dangers of tyrannical government and political instability.


Moreover, a bottom-up model of diffusing human rights through economic growth will lead to a bundle of rights that better fits the needs of each nation. Rights generated internally are more likely to take account of the particular preferences and traditions of individual countries. They are also likely to be more resistant to political backlashes, because they will be more securely rooted in the soil of these countries.


The potential of international trade agreements to cascade into civil rights has one other important advantage over the direct international pursuit of human rights, since the most glaring defect of human rights agreements is that they often do not help the peoples who are most oppressed. In fact, a recent study by Oona Hathaway of Yale Law School has shown that nations that signed human rights treaties sometimes had worse human rights practices than would otherwise be predicted, because they used their accession to deflect criticism of their actions.


In contrast, despots are more likely to honor trade agreements because expanding trade will make their nations richer and therefore redound to their personal advantage by permitting them to increase their tax revenues, not to mention their personal wealth. By offering attractive bait to hook despotic regimes, trade agreements may actually provide a more effective, if circuitous, route to securing civil and political rights than civil and political rights conventions themselves.


International Regulatory Agreements: The push for new international regulatory regimes often goes by the name of "harmonization." This term conjures up an image of citizens of many nations happily singing in harmony. But nations, like individuals, differ in their circumstances and endowments, and therefore the process of imposing similar regulations is likely to give rise to the opportunity for some nations to take resources from others. Some domestic groups will also systematically benefit from harmonization because they will be in a position to influence them to their advantage. For this reason, regulatory harmonization is always in danger of becoming the song of the oligarchs.


Accordingly, with one important exception, international agreements on regulatory issues are more problematic than trade agreements because they require many more complex institutions of elaboration that give additional leverage to special interests. First, mutual gains are unlikely to arise from international multilateral regulations in such circumstances. Countries differ in their level of development, traditions and preferences of their people and are likely to choose different regulations. While it is true that a multilateral regulatory regime could theoretically permit different nations to forge different regulations, the principle of subsidiarity suggests one jurisdiction should not frame and potentially distort another jurisdiction's regulatory regime.


Second, unlike the case of international agreements on trade, international regulation interferes with the operation of markets. This feature also necessarily makes its enforcement more bureaucratic, because the relevant agreements will need to formulate regulations rather than simply remove barriers. International regulatory regimes also may reduce jurisdictional competition among sovereign nations. Thus, if trade agreements have the virtues of the original Constitution, then regulatory multilateralism has all the dangers of command and control regulation with the added disadvantage of distance from citizens.


The one area in which the welfare gains from coordinating a uniform standard might outweigh the losses concerns cases of externalities or spillovers--where one nation, for instance, pollutes the territory of another. That is the justification given for the Kyoto agreement on climate change. Because of such spillovers, no nation in the absence of an international agreement has the appropriate incentives to control pollution: Since each country does not pay the full cost of its pollution, each country lacks the appropriate incentives to reduce pollution to reflect its real costs and benefits.


Nevertheless, even in such circumstances multilateral regulatory agreements do not always provide the proper solution. International regulatory regimes create the potential for political externalities, costs that one faction imposes on others through manipulating the regime. For instance, newly emerging industries may see particular kinds of pollution regulations as a way of driving up the costs of their rivals in other nations. Such political externalities are potentially very vexing in the case of international agreements, because the public cannot easily control international bureaucracies.


International agreements on regulations thus should meet four conditions. First, the externalities or spillovers from one nation to another must be clear. Second, the agreements must offer a real prospect of solving the externality problem. Third, other less centralized mechanisms fail to accomplish the job. Fourth, the regulatory regime must devise restraints to prevent multilateral institutions addressing externalities from becoming an engine of interest group power. Even under these conditions, however, global regulatory multilateralism does not reinforce the decentralized order and generate the cascading benefits of global trade agreements.


International Criminal Court: While the United States has not yet acceded to treaties establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC), most nations of the world have agreed to it. While limited in jurisdiction to certain heinous crimes, the ICC suffers from many of the same problems as other international regulatory regimes because criminal law is a species of regulation. The apparatus for enforcing international criminal law, like that for enforcing international regulations, will prove less accountable than criminal law enforcement in nations with democratic and accountable governments.


In particular, the ICC necessarily contemplates, like other systems of criminal justice, lodging substantial discretion in a prosecutor. A domestic prosecutor--himself elected or appointed by an elected leader--faces constraints that make it easier for the public to monitor his conduct. Moreover, his performance naturally interests the public whose happiness is acutely affected by their local crime rate.


In contrast, the lack of effective constraints on an international prosecutor is striking. While governments would appoint him through consensus, he would be accountable to no particular official. Because his docket would consist of cases that, for all their moral importance, would not be likely to affect the crime rates in many jurisdictions, he will come under less popular scrutiny. Nevertheless, ethnic and ideological interest groups will intensely focus on the symbolic value of prosecutions in the areas over which the court has been given jurisdiction.


In this way, the ICC may become a threat to the very rule of law its advocates want to inculcate in the international order. Its multilateral structure is not amenable to the control by the encompassing interest of citizens in the nations that are a party to it. It is surprising that enthusiasm for an international criminal prosecutor continues unabated in many quarters of the United States when we have become disillusioned with our own institution of the independent counsel. The lack of accountability and risk to neutral principles that an international criminal prosecutor poses are very similar to those created by the office of independent counsel, except this time the potential scope of abuse is global.


Concern about empowering a global prosecutor does not mean that the world legal order should not find innovative means to prosecute such crimes as genocide. Particular international tribunals, like the Rwanda tribunals, established for particular crimes in nations that lack democratic and accountable governments, can deter some of the worst crimes without creating an open-ended mechanism more subject to abuse. The touchstone here, as elsewhere, should be the creation of international structures that preserve accountability.


Generating International Law


BEYOND ADDRESSING the substantive shape of international rules, classical liberalism offers guidance on how best to create them. There are, broadly speaking, two ways of generating international rules. One is through express global agreements among the nations of the world. Another is through customary international law. Customary international law consists of rules that courts, international or domestic, or "publicists"--that is, international law professors--create based on their own assessment of what are widespread state practices.


The differences between these ways of generating international law may at first seem technical. But placed in a more general political context, they capture two very different views of the sources of political legitimacy--roughly corresponding to those now prevalent in the United States and "Old Europe." Creating international law through global treaties like the GATT suggests that contracts reached through express bargaining among nation-states will constitute the international order. Under this paradigm, solutions to international problems are particularistic with roots in the political legitimacy of sovereign nations. Government officials give assent to the written terms by which their people will be bound. The United States, with its view that the nation-state is still key to international relations, inclines to this view.


In contrast, modern customary international law depends on inferences about state behavior that jurists and publicists make. Moreover, because the principles it generates are not embedded in the context of actual agreements, customary international law has a tendency toward generating principles that become independent of context. In short, customary law can become a kind of ersatz natural law. Europe, which has a less happy history of the nation-state, not surprisingly has a preference for a method of international-rule generation less rooted in sovereignty. (1)


The debate about how to generate international law is also a debate about the centralization and the accountability of power--key issues for classical liberalism. Agreement to specific terms by a large number of nations--increasingly nations with representative forms of government--provides some, albeit not conclusive, indication that the treaty is beneficent. In contrast, customary international law provides far less firm evidence of consensus, because professional and judicial elites rather than sovereign states have substantial influence in framing such rules. Because there is as yet no global demos--no disciplined political structure for measuring global sentiment--those who want to fashion rules outside of the treaty context will necessarily have to make decisions with relatively little democratic input. They will be making discretionary decisions, more than occasionally relying on themselves as the prophets of international virtue.


IN THE increasingly democratic modern world, multilateral treaties have several advantages in representing the consensus of the peoples of the world and limiting the discretion of unaccountable elites. The first advantage of global international agreements over customary international law is the precision of a written text. This clarity is important. If a large number of nations with representative governments reaches a consensus, the agreement has a certain presumption of beneficence. Of course, a residue of ambiguity infects all written texts, but at least there is something in writing, in contrast to customary international law, which generates no text. Thus, the scope of customary principles is often less clear and more subject to manipulation.


Second, multilateral treaties provide assurance that states have actually agreed upon their requirements as obligatory under international law. In contrast, it is difficult to tell whether states have accepted a rule of customary international law. Customary law principles are traditionally created only when states both widely follow a practice and widely accept it as law. But substantial debate exists over what can constitute evidence of state practice. For instance, some scholars suggest that only acts of states can constitute state practice, while others suggest that statements, like UN resolutions, can also be evidence of state practice.


Furthermore, it has always been understood that the ubiquity of a state practice does not necessarily mean nations are engaging in a practice because they believe it is law. Accordingly, scholars frequently debate whether a practice reflects a sense of national obligation or merely prudence or some other motive. This kind of uncertainty also offers room for elites to shape the rules to their liking. Happily, such uncertainty does not exist with multilateral agreements, because by signing them nations show what provisions they accept as international obligations.


Third, treaties reduce what economists would call the "agency costs" of international lawmaking--the difficulty of making sure that the rules to which rulers agree reflect the interests of their citizens. In the growing number of states that have representative forms of government, the representative branch must ratify the treaty, thus providing better assurance that the agreement reflects popular consensus. In contrast, bureaucrats and judges, rather than officials accountable to voters, determine the content of customary international law.


Worse still, those responsible for determining the content of customary international law are in fact radically unrepresentative. Law professors--the modern publicists responsible for the development of customary international law--are predominantly from the developed rather than developing world. Second, even within their own nations, law professors, like intellectuals generally, have distinctly unrepresentative views--very often to the left of the society as a whole. In the United States, for instance, Democratic-leaning law professors outnumber Republican-leaning law professors by about five to one.


The combination of these two biases can be quite powerful. Because academics come from countries that are already wealthy, they profit less from growth than the average global citizen, who may be more willing to take some risks to better his relatively low standard of living. Because academics lean to the left side of the political spectrum they are also less sympathetic to entrepreneurial ideas. Thus, modern customary international law rules are likely to have built-in biases against free markets and other classical liberal ideas. For instance, many scholars have tried to argue that customary international law contains something called the precautionary principle--a rule that prohibits the introduction of new technology unless all risks from the technology can be ruled out.


This principle obviously would have more appeal to those who are already well off than to those for whom new technology may be life saving. It also represents a departure from the cost-benefit analysis that the United States for the most part applies to its own domestic regulations, further suggesting that principle does not reflect the practice of the democratic nations. (2)


The problem of unrepresentativeness affects other groups with power to create customary international law. International Court of Justice judges are always lawyers and share the characteristic biases of the legal class generally--an interest in "fair" process, rather than economic growth. Moreover, institutionally they possess a vested interest in expanding the power of international law, which is likely to mean a bias in favor of finding evidence of widespread acceptance of a practice among states even when one does not exist.


Some have conceded that treaties should have priority over customary law when the two conflict, but suggest that customary international law still plays a useful role in generating new rules in addition to treaties. But in the modern world, customary law can achieve little new that treaties cannot do better. In the past, when it was difficult for officials of nations to meet because of information and transportation costs, it was sometimes useful for scholars and courts to hypothesize what rules all nations would agree to, if their representatives had the opportunity to meet and deliberate. But with jet planes and the Internet, no such barriers prevent any set of nations from reaching agreement.


Others have argued that modern customary law is more likely today to represent a popular consensus--because NGOs are taking a greater role in framing and interpreting it. But permitting NGOs, rather than increasingly democratic nation-states, to shape international law in fact makes it more likely that international law will represent the views of a particular set of factions rather than the consensus of citizens of nation-states. NGOs are interest groups often extremely unrepresentative of the average citizen. Greenpeace, for instance, no doubt cares passionately about the environment and would like to press for the precautionary principle, but Greenpeace is a predominantly Western organization whose views are unrepresentative even of many citizens in the West.


To be sure, unrepresentative factions also often have disproportionate power in domestic polities as well. But the problems are worse at the international level. First, the cost of organizing an international faction is higher, and this higher expense screens out many groups who can counterbalance narrow interests. Even more fundamentally, domestic mechanisms, like the separation of powers and bicameralism, make it harder for unrepresentative factions to control policy. Finally, because of elections, democratic states take into account the preferences of citizens even when not tied to any faction. For all these reasons, NGOs' influence on the content of international law often undermines rather than enhances the likelihood that it will represent popular consensus.


Enforcement of World Order


THE ENFORCEMENT of international agreements also should respect the sovereignty of nation-states both to preserve government accountability and to limit the power of international elites. First, the agreements must be enforced in accordance with their terms. It might be thought this would go without saying, but many scholars now espouse using the mechanisms designed to enforce a specific agreement, like the WTO, as a vehicle for enforcing more general international law principles, including customary international law. But new rules of customary international law are not likely to be as beneficent as treaty provisions and thus certainly have a weaker claim to enforcement. Moreover, even if nations have tacitly consented to some principle of customary international law, they have not consented to its enforcement by a mechanism established for enforcing a completely different set of obligations. Thus, to maintain accountability, an international enforcement regime should enforce obligations only under its own regime.


Second, decisions of international judicial bodies interpreting international law should not generally be given "direct effect." Direct effect is a term of art in international law that means that the decision of the international tribunal is binding as a matter of a nation's domestic law and is thus implemented directly without any intervening action of a domestic legal authority. The problem with direct effect is that it weakens the accountability of government for its decisions and thus over time will make those decisions less likely to be good ones. Judges on domestic tribunals like the United States Supreme Court are generally appointed or elected. Thus, representatives of the people or the people themselves are at least indirectly accountable for their decisions. In contrast, the representatives and people of a nation affected by an international law decision will not be accountable for the majority, if any, of the judges on international tribunals.


Moreover, citizens in nation-states cannot easily control international bureaucracies and thus international tribunals may exceed their authority. One way of keeping such a tribunals on a short leash is to prevent their decisions from taking automatic effect and requiring that they be implemented by affected nation-states. The tribunals will then be more cautious in their interpretation, holding nations to account only when they are in manifest violation of their international agreements.


Indirect enforcement can nevertheless be effective. For instance, if a nation does not comply with a WTO tribunal ruling, the WTO now authorizes the offended nations to withdraw trade concessions from the offending nation. As Mark Movsesian of Hofstra University has shown, the withdrawal of concessions in turn can mobilize the exporters who are harmed by the withdrawal to lobby their government to comply. For example, when the WTO tribunal held that President Bush's imposition of additional tariffs on steel was illegal, Europeans were authorized to withdraw concessions that would have harmed exporters in states key to the President's re-election chances. President Bush complied with the decision and rescinded the tariffs.


This indirect enforcement makes use of the decentralized economic order of a nation rather than centralized power to promote compliance with international law. It has the additional virtue of providing a check on the potential overreaching of those charged with interpreting international law. Thus, like the substantive structures of international trade and the procedural processes of treaty ratification, this kind of international enforcement helps assure accountability under international law.


New technologies have so radically lowered the costs of information and transportation that globalization of some form is inevitable. But the issues of political structure that globalization raises are not novel, because new technology has not changed human nature. Thus, there is no need for a radically new philosophy of international governance--just the adaptation to the international order of principles that previously succeeded domestically.


Globalization can create both economic prosperity and better governance by sovereign states. But we can succeed in that goal only by creating international structures and organizations with the accountability, checks and balances, and decentralized rule-making that have marked the progress of liberty and prosperity in the domestic sphere. Otherwise globalization may usher in an era where global governance is a mask for uncontrolled power that will inevitably contract the scope of human freedom.


(1) For a discussion of the different general viewpoints of Europe and the United States in international relations that parallels file legal differences described here, see Francis Fukuyama, "Has History Restarted After Sept. 11?", John Bonython Lecture (August 8, 2002).


(2) For more on the precautionary principle, see Lawrence A. Kogan, "Exporting Europe's Protectionism", The National Interest (Fall 2004); and Roger Scruton, "The Cult of Precaution", The National Interest (Summer 2004).


John O. McGinnis is professor of constitutional and international law at Northwestern University. This article is based upon a paper given at a conference in Rome this June sponsored by The National Interest, the Federalist Society, the Ave Maria Law School, the Culture of Life Foundation, and the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute.

COPYRIGHT 2004 The National Interest, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group

Why Europe’s National Politicians Sign Away National Sovereignty

Brussels Journal


By John Laughland


Created 2007-12-19 15:15


http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2785


I have often compared the European Union to a cartel – a cartel of governments, engaged in a permanent conspiracy against their own electorates and parliaments. This analysis seems to have been dramatically confirmed by the Lisbon Treaty, signed last week, which replaces the defunct “constitution” rejected in referenda in France and the Netherlands in 2005.


Although a lot of anti-EU rhetoric rightly concentrates on the overweening power of the unelected European Commission – which indeed generates far too many laws and has an institutional self-interest in augmenting its own power – what many Eurosceptics overlook is that European integration also, and crucially, favours the power of national governments over that of their respective national parliaments. Because laws in the EU are made by the Council of Ministers, i.e. the committee of 27 ministers for whichever subject is being voted on, EU integration means that governments receive wide-ranging law-making powers.


This is, of course, incompatible with the principle of the separation of powers. According to that principle, the executive power (the government) should be separate from, and accountable to, the legislature (the national parliament) and of course the judiciary. Dictatorship is precisely the form of government in which the executive is not so constrained, and this is also the case in the EU.


Because the EU represents a dramatic and constant transfer of legislative power from national legislatures to national executives (sitting in the Council of Ministers), it can also be dubbed “a permanent coup d’état” (to use the phrase François Mitterrand used in 1965 to attack the powers of the Fifth Republic, long before he was happy to wield them himself). The fact that the Council of Ministers, the EU’s legislature, meets and votes in secret only makes the fundamentally anti-democratic character of the European construction even clearer.


It is for this simple reason that all establishment politicians, whether of Left or Right, are in favour of the EU. It increases their power and their room for manoeuvre. How much easier it is to pass laws in a quiet and secret meeting with your twenty-seven colleagues, than it is to do so in front of a fractious parliament where there is usually an in-built opposition which will attack whatever you do! How much more comfortable to engage in a bit of mild horse-trading with like-minded politicians from other countries, than to have to argue your case in the glare of public criticism! How much better to be able to vote an unpopular law and then blame “Europe” for it instead!


For many decades, this conspiracy worked wonderfully, mainly because Europe adopted and stuck to the so-called “Monnet method”. Named after the European Community’s brilliant if vain founder, Jean Monnet, the Monnet method consists in sapping power away from national parliaments on the quiet. This is achieved by pretending that the powers thus alienated are non-political – technical things like coal and steel, the common market, the single currency. This impression that the powers transferred are merely technical is reinforced by the fact that the transfers are usually effected by means of impenetrable treaties written in a language no one can understand.


There have been only two occasions when this principle has been abandoned, and on both occasions it had led to failure. The first was after the signature of the Maastricht treaty in December 1991. That treaty was conceived as a geopolitical quid pro quo for German unification: France agreed to the reunification of Germany on the basis that it would subsume its deutsche mark hegemony into that of the euro. In other words, it was a big political project which was presented to the electorate as such and as a great leap forward for European unification in general. It was rejected by Danish voters in June 1992. France responded by declaring that she too would hold a referendum, which in turn was very nearly rejected in September of that year. The Danes were forced to vote again in 1993, and so Europe’s pet project, the euro, passed by only a whisker.


The second time that Europe announced a big political project was when it drew up the constitution. However little interest people took in the details of treaty law, the word “constitution” was politically resonant. It focussed attention on the federal vocation of the EU, hitherto hidden from view by the Monnet method. People understood that it meant the permanent alienation of power from their nation-states, but it also allowed people to project their other worries clearly onto the EU, especially about excessive deregulation, competition from cheap labour countries in Eastern Europe, and of course the prospect of a new wave of immigration from Turkey if ever that country is admitted as an EU member.


Voters in France and the Netherlands, two founder members of the EU, therefore rejected the proposed constitution.


As a result of that rejection, Europe’s leaders have now decided to put behind them their foolish flirtation with democracy and return instead to the tried and tested method of doing things behind closed doors.


Rather than announcing a big political project in a language which most people can understand, the new Lisbon Treaty goes back to the old method of formulating only amendments to previous treaties. You simply cannot understand the text unless you go back through the previous treaties to see what articles are amended, which few people have the time or the inclination to do. Whereas the constitution at least had the merit of clarity, the new treaty displays all the old EU vices of opacity and legalese. This is quite deliberate. Europe’s leaders know that such a difficult text will never attract the same hostility as the old constitution because it is simply too difficult to understand.


How do we know that this is deliberate? We know because the author of the defunct constitution, the former French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, has told us so. In an article in Le Monde in October, Giscard wrote that the new treaty had been composed “by jurists” who had taken the content of the old constitution and simply re-formulated it in terms of amendments to existing treaties.


“They started with the text of the constitution,” he wrote, “took its elements apart one by one, and made them correspond by means of amendments to the two existing treaties, Rome (1957) and Maastricht (1992) […] What is the purpose of this subtle manoeuvre? First and above all to escape from the constraint of having to hold a referendum by dispersing the articles and by renouncing the constitutional vocabulary.”


As I say, the EU is a cartel of governments and a conspiracy by them against their electorates. It is an affront to democracy and should be dissolved.

Belien: Back in the 'EUSSR'

The following excerpt was taken from an article prepared by former George Mason University educator Eleanor Duckwall. It appears on “Eleanor Duckwall’s Spotlight” blog, which analyzes current events and exposes anti-Americanism of all forms.


http://sixthcolumn.typepad.com/duckwalls/2007/12/belien-back-in.html


http://sixthcolumn.typepad.com/duckwalls/2007/12/belien-back-inhtml#more


December 19, 2007


From an agreement on the coal and steel industries in 1951 to a totalitarian state, all within my lifetime:


Last Thursday, the heads of government of the 27 member states of the European Union convened in the Portuguese capital Lisbon to sign the EU Reform Treaty. That "Treaty of Lisbon" is almost identical to the European Constitutional Treaty, the so-called EU Constitution, which was rejected two years ago in referendums in major EU member states.


The EU rules stipulate that treaties only become effective when they have been ratified in all 27 member states. The "no" votes in the 2005 referendums killed the constitution, which would have transformed the EU from a supranational organization of 27 sovereign member states into a genuine single European federal state with 27 provinces. It was clear from the outset, however, that the peoples of the various European states were not willing to renounce their national sovereignty for a "United States of Europe."


Nevertheless, the European leaders are determined, no matter what their electorates say, to transform the EU into a USE. As Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg, said prior to the referendums: "If the vote is yes, we will say: We go ahead. If it is no, we will say: We continue." Or as the former president of France, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the chairman of the so-called convention, which drew up the constitution, said: "The rejection of the constitution [by the voters in referendums] was a mistake which will have to be corrected."


In order to correct the voters' mistake the reform treaty was drafted. This treaty is a copy of the constitution, with the articles in a somewhat different order, with many additions to deliberately complicate the text and without references to a national flag or anthem. As Mr. Giscard explained in June to the Paris leftist paper Le Monde: "Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly... All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way."


Or as Guiliano Amato, the foreign minister of Italy and the former vice chairman of the convention, said about the document that the European leaders signed last week: "They decided that the document should be unreadable. If it is unreadable, it is not constitutional, that was the sort of perception."


The EU leaders agreed that none of the member states (apart from Ireland, which is obliged to do so under its own constitution) will hold a referendum about the new treaty. Instead, the national parliaments will ratify the treaty. "There is a cleavage between people and governments," admitted French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "A referendum now would bring Europe into danger. There will be no treaty if we had a referendum in France."


Once the Lisbon Treaty is ratified in all member states, the legal nature of the EU will change into that of a state. The national constitutions and the national parliaments will be subordinate to the EU, which will be enabled to unilaterally increase its own powers.


Europe's politicians are very eager to sell out their national sovereignty to the EU because the Brussels-based EU governing bodies are either unelected (the commission) or unaccountable (the council). Moreover, the European Parliament is not a real parliament. It cannot reject the so-called EU directives, which the national parliaments are obliged to incorporate into their national legislation. Even today, up to 70 percent of the legislation in the various 27 EU member states emanates from Brussels.


Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky has coined the term "EUSSR" to refer to the EU. He claims Europe is on its way to developing into a totalitarian state. In the early 1990s Mr. Bukovsky was given permission to research the secret documents of the Soviet leadership. To his amazement he found a transcript there of a conversation held during a visit in January 1989 of Mr. Giscard to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. In this conversation the former declared to the latter that "within 15 years Europe is going to be a federal state." The USE project was delayed a bit by the 2005 referendums, but European politicians have managed to get it back on track in Lisbon. "Today's situation is really grim. Major political parties have been completely taken in by the new EU project. None of them really opposes it. They have become very corrupt. Who is going to defend our freedoms?" Mr. Bukovsky asks...

Europe's Religion of 'Negative' Environment-Centric Sustainable Development is Being Proselytized at the International & Local Levels

‘NEGATIVE’ SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INVOKES RELIGIOUS DUTY -- ENVIRONMENTALISM AS RELIGION [1]

A. The Growing Phenomenon of Religious Environmentalism

Environmentalists have long worked with liberal politicians and government officials on both sides of the Atlantic, with the clergy of various religions, and within the environmental, health and cultural agencies of the United Nations to forge and proselytize a new global religion – multilateral environmentalism.

Their goal simply is to convince UN member governments and their public constituencies at the international, national, state & local levels (the latter venues offering a much smaller and easier audience to persuade) that they must take proactive Precautionary Principle-based regulatory action, in the name of negative sustainable development, in order to ‘save’ the planet from an almost imminent destruction – a religious admonition – “no matter if the science is all phony”,[2] and no matter the cost.[3]

According to Philosophy Professor Peter Menzies of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia,

“In my experience, most Christians endorsing Kyoto don't spend a lot of time emphasizing science. Critiques citing original research or engaging in genuine critical analysis and original thought aren't very common. My sense is that this is more about particular philosophical and theological outlooks than about science. To illustrate, consider the following: ‘The debate about climate change and the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is fundamentally a public justice issue. We agree with the World Council of Churches that 'social justice for all people and eco-justice for all creation must go together.' ‘Because global climate change will harm much of Creation, hurting the less powerful…disproportionately, it is against God's will for God desires justice and shalom to reign on Earth.’ ‘Human induced climate change poses a great threat to the common good, especially to the poor, the vulnerable and future generations.’

Two things emerge from these quotes and further reading of these documents: 1) The driving force for rationalizing Kyoto is a perception that the protocol will advance the idea of social and eco-justice, and 2) The assumption that warming, especially if it is human induced, will cause serious harm to creation. Indeed, the debate is often framed in terms of ‘saving the planet’…[T]he goals of these Christian organizations seem to echo that of Christine Stewart, a Canadian Environmental Minister: ‘No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits ... climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world’” (emphasis added). [4]

Although many people may not be familiar with it, religious environmentalism is not a new concept, though it has only more recently been repackaged as negative ‘sustainable development’. Scholars and commentators were already discussing the concept over a decade ago. For example, in 1995, University of Wisconsin History Professor Paul Boyer described

“[T]he efforts of Christian fundamentalists to interpret current events as the fulfillment of ancient prophecies foretelling humanity’s final days. Each generation of fundamentalists, Boyer, explains, has thought that it was living in the end-times, and each generation has been willing to pay to hear and read about humanity’s imminent demise.” [5]

However, according to at least one commentator, Professor Boyer had overlooked the evolution of religious environmentalism into environmental hysteria.

“Rabbi Daniel Friedman, of Deerfield, Illinois, considers environmentalism to be a lay rehash of end-times mythology. ‘It is striking,’ he notes, ‘the extent to which Environmentalism resembles classic religious [prophecies about the end of time]. Man is still the rebellious sinner. The source of evil isn't Satan but the industrial revolution, technology, productivity, and capitalism. Redemption is to return to that Eden-like state of nature before man's corruption of Earth.’ Regardless of whether the Bible's Eden is a myth, the pre-industrial Eden imagined by environmentalists certainly is: Prior to the industrial revolution, most children didn't live past age five, and existence for the average adult was a plague-ridden, hungry affair, pretty much like ‘life’ today in those societies that have never discovered free enterprise. In the religion of environmentalism, it is the power of the state -- not the supernatural power of God or church -- that is designed to bring about salvation. Instead of Adam and Eve, the Burning Bush, and the Splitting of the Red Sea, environmentalism has alar, acid rain, asbestos, dioxin, global warming, and ozone depletion. The scientific literature exists to debunk these modern fables, but when it comes to environmentalist propaganda, [the media]…prefer to interview Hollywood celebrities and spokespersons or self-proclaimed ‘environmental groups’, rather than interview authentic scientists. And so the con game continues, even as one environmental ‘crisis’ after another is proven groundless”.[6]

This same point was brought up last year (2006) by a British science consultant and media commentator Martin Livermore in a BBC News ‘Viewpoint’ column.

“In the West, with the decline of organised Christianity and the discrediting of Marxism, environmentalism has taken the place of religion for many. In the words of Frank Lloyd Wright ‘I believe in God, only I spell it Nature’. Googling ‘environmentalism as religion’ returns 854,000 hits. The new orthodoxy teaches that Mankind is guilty of Original Sin by despoiling Eden (the pre-Industrial world). This guilt must be assuaged by repairing the damage and protecting all other forms of life. For the deepest Greens, the only real solution is the disappearance of our species from the Earth - the ultimate sacrifice - and for many others a much smaller ‘optimum’ population of humans is a desirable goal.

...In fact, all species affect their environment to a greater or lesser degree. Termites build complex homes, beavers construct dams to alter the flow of streams and grazing animals profoundly alter the balance of plant species. People do the same. The difference is that we have a uniquely greater capacity to do so. But, as this capacity has grown, so has our awareness of the consequences, and our ability to make rational choices between options. So, in the last half-century, environmental quality in the developed world has improved greatly by almost any measure…[Problems often arise, however,] when we try to manage the environment actively – to do what is ‘right’ – the result isn’t always what we expect.” [7]

With his last point, he, in effect, put his finger on a very important issue, namely, that despite the best of intentions as concerns proactive environmental stewardship we may cause more environmental and other (economic) harm than the harm we seek to avert.

A more recent January 2007 London Financial Times commentary also concerned itself with these issues, especially as it has evolved in Europe.[8]

“Environmentalism embraces a myth of the Fall: the loss of harmony between man and nature caused by our materialistic society. Al Gore recounted the words of Chief Seattle, as his tribe relinquished their ancient lands: ‘Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother?’ This lost Eden never existed. Humans have burned and eaten the environment since time immemorial. The first Americans crossed the Bering Strait and killed every tame animal they saw. Chief Seattle sold his heritage for a life of luxury and his eloquent speech may have been penned by a television scriptwriter.

But myths are literature, not history or science: classical epics and the great religious books are cultural treasures and their educational value does not depend on their literal truth. The Apocalypse myth is equally familiar. Our wickedness has damaged our inheritance and, although it is almost too late, immediate reform can transform our future. Christians look to the Second Coming, Marxists to the collapse of capitalism, with the same mixture of fear and longing…Environmentalism offers an alternative account of the natural world to the religious and an alternative anti-capitalist account of the political world to the Marxist. The rise of environmentalism parallels in time and place the decline of religion and of socialism”. [9]

He, too, discusses this issue in order to bring up the very same critical points: as the condition of many aspects of our global environment – our air, rivers, and seashores - have steadily improved over time due to human intervention, environmentalists are looking for “a [new] persuasive Apocalypse myth… In Europe, these stories no longer have the impact they did. Environmentalism now fulfils for many people the widespread longing for simple, all-encompassing narratives”.[10] And, in his estimation, environmental extremists seemed to have found it in the issue of global warming/climate change.

“The discovery of global warming filled a gap in the canon. That is why environmentalists attach so much importance to the assertion not just that the world is warming up, which is plainly true, but that this warming is our fault, which is less plainly true. The connection between rising carbon concentrations and the growth of modern industrial society provides justification for the link between the sins of our past and the catastrophe of our future. Environmental evangelists are therefore not interested in pragmatic solutions to climate change or technological fixes for it. They are even less interested in evidence that if we were really serious about reducing carbon emissions we could do so by large amounts without significantly affecting our economies or our lives. Windmills on roofs and cycling to work are insignificant in practical consequence, but that is to miss their point. Every ideology needs rituals of observance which demonstrate the commitment of adherents.” [11]

If one requires any more proof of the phenomenon of religious environmentalism and its increasing influence on the development of international, regional, national, state and local law, both here, in America and abroad, he or she need just consider the activities of a group called the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE). The NRPE, which was founded in 1993, has enlisted a diverse group of religious organizations, including the U.S. Catholic Conference, the National Council of Churches of Christ, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, and the Evangelical Environmental Network, to develop environmental programs that mesh with their own varied spiritual teachings. They “have been provided with resource kits on environmental issues, including sermons for clergy, lesson plans for Sunday school teachers, and even conservation tips for church and synagogue building managers.”[12] And these seeds appear to have taken root.

“The Colorado-based National Association of Evangelicals is urging its 30 million members to pursue a “biblically balanced agenda” to protect the environment alongside fighting poverty… Indeed, it was Evangelical minister, Reverend Jim Ball, who started the influential “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign promoting hybrid cars back in 2003. More recently, Ball has worked with likeminded Evangelicals to craft a faith-based policy statement on global warming. Another key organization is the Forum on Religion and Ecology, which holds conferences that bring religious leaders together from all over the world to discuss religion’s role in ecological matters. Earth Ministry, an association of 90 churches around Seattle, takes a more “hands-on” approach. It organizes hikes, book parties, and volunteer support for local agricultural projects, helping to educate thousands of people along the way. Some congregations also conduct church “greenings,” like replacing church light bulbs with energy-saving compact fluorescents and virgin copier paper with recycled paper. Some more hard-hitting environmental actions have sprung up at the congregation level as well. In Mississippi, Jesus People Against Pollution brought together local churchgoers to pressure authorities to clean-up local toxic waste sites. And in Detroit, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart turned a former crack house into a community vegetable garden. Meanwhile, New York’s Hamburg Presbyterian Church “adopted” a nearby creek and won it designation as a protected habitat. And just like good environmentalists everywhere, Hamburg Presbyterian’s parishioners continue to monitor the creek to ensure that it remains vibrant and healthy.” [13]

And, American academics looking to develop new course offerings that may increase university enrollments and raise alumni endowments have also migrated to this ‘rich’ and ‘controversial’ subject matter. [14]

B. Religious Environmentalism is a Key Premise Underlying Global Governance

With all of this in mind, curious persons may wish to ask the following question. If the environment is improving, and we, as humans, generally recognize that we must, in undertaking our daily economic activities, maintain an overall balance with Nature as we do with most other aspects of our lives, then what is the true purpose behind all of this alarmist ‘environmental religion’ and negative sustainable development/precautionary principle talk? The answer: to facilitate greater ‘global governance’-based legislation, regulation and standardization overseen by the self-proclaimed ‘elite’.[15]

Many current and former European and American government officials have participated in the process of erecting a legally binding global regulatory framework based largely on the French civil law ex-ante [16] model of regulation.[17] This movement is so advanced that proclaimed ‘economic reformer’ Nicolas Sarkozy, center-right Gaullist candidate for the French presidency, recently backtracked and announced that he was now in favor of “managed regulated free trade”. He also proposed that Europe’s mission statement include “the moralization of financial capitalism”,[18] which includes an assault on private property ownership.

This global governance work began as early as 1991, and was initiated through a newly formed UN Commission on Global Governance (UCGG). It resulted in the publication of a Commission report entitled, "Our Global Neighbourhood" [19] which set forth the following rationale:

“Half a century has passed since the [United Nations] Charter was signed in San Francisco. There has been no world war in that time, but humanity has seen much violence, suffering, and injustice. There remain dangers that could threaten civilization and, indeed, the future of humankind…nation- states find themselves less able to deal with the array of issues--some old, some new--that face them. States and their people, wishing to control their destinies, find they can do so only by working together with others. They must secure their future through commitment to common responsibility and shared effort...

The need to work together also guided the visionary men and women who drew up the Charter of the United Nations. What is new today is that the interdependence of nations is wider and deeper. What is also new is the role of people and the shift of focus from states to people. An aspect of this change is the growth of international civil society…These changes call for reforms in the modes of international co- operation--the institutions and processes of global governance…The international system that the UN Charter put in place needs to be renewed. The flaws and inadequacies of existing institutions have to be overcome. There is a need to weave a tighter fabric of international norms, expanding the rule of law world- wide and enabling citizens to exert their democratic influence on global processes. We also believe the world's arrangements for the conduct of its affairs must be underpinned by certain common values. Ultimately, no organization will work and no law upheld unless they rest on a foundation made strong by shared values. These values must be informed by a sense of common responsibility for both present and future generations [sustainable development]…

The development of global governance is part of the evolution of human efforts to organize life on the planet, and that process will always be going on… As this report makes clear, global governance is not global government…This is not to say that the goal should be a world without systems or rules… We make recommendations for managing economic interdependence, and for reforming the United Nations in ways that also offer a larger role to people through the organizations of international civil society. And we address the need for extending on the global stage the rule of law that has been so great a civilizing influence in national societies”. [20]

Europe quickly grasped how they could lead the push towards global governance and define the international legal and regulatory norms that other nations, working together multilaterally would need to follow.

“The world and with it Europe are in the midst of a rapid change on a global scale. Among the main factors which seem to drive these changes are: [1] the deregulation of markets, financial liberalization and the emergence of an integrated global market with new international actors (e.g. World Trade Organization (WTO))[;] [2] the emergence of new poles of dynamism in the world[; and] [3] the explosive growth of telecommunications, computers and the Internet. There is a broad consensus–at least in academic circles–that one of the most urgent problems to be addressed is that of how to govern this ever-changing world… But it is more difficult to name these problems, and therefore to understand them. This holds true for both politicians and scientists. Especially there are serious doubts that terms like ‘capitalism’, ‘globalization’, ‘global village’, among others, do lead to a better understanding of what is happening. There is a need for more distinctive terms…In 1991, a group of eminent persons of the world–most of them politicians–formed an initiative within the United Nations' organizational system in order to grasp these changes. Their report on ‘Our Global Neighbourhood’ was published in 1995. We believe that some of their findings could help us to define and structure some of the ongoing problems in Europe”. [21]

Among the report’s key findings was that “Although states are sovereign, they are not free individually to do whatever they want…It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the imperatives of global environmental cooperation” (emphasis added).[22]

Furthermore, having set forth a negative assessment of the environmental health of the planet, the Commission report prescribed the following legal, ethical and moral policy antidote: preventive environmental stewardship and use of the Precautionary Principle to achieve negative sustainable development.[23]

“The core value of ‘justice and equity’ is the basis for sweeping changes in the UN as proposed by the Commission… commitment to equity everywhere is the only secure foundation for a more humane world order in which multilateral action...improves global well-being as well as stability...Equity needs to be respected as well in relationships between the present and future generations. The principle of intergenerational equity underlies the strategy of sustainable development.

…The effectiveness of this global ethic ‘will depend upon the ability of people and governments to transcend narrow self-interests and agree that the interests of humanity as a whole will be best served by acceptance of a set of common rights and responsibilities’… Among the[se] ‘rights’ [is the right to] [a] secure life… The right to ‘a secure life’ means much more than freedom from the threat of war…The right to a secure life also means the right to live on a secure planet. ‘Human activity...combined with unprecedented increases in human numbers...are impinging on the planet's basic life support systems. Action must be taken now to control the human activities that produce these risks'.

... In confronting these risks, the only acceptable path is to apply the ‘precautionary principle’…This set of core values underlies Agenda 21 adopted in Rio de Janeiro. Virtually every international treaty and agreement introduced during this decade reflects this set of core values. The Commission's recommendations to achieve global governance seek to enforce these values through the programs authorized and implemented by a global bureaucracy growing from a revitalized and restructured United Nations system.” [24]

One of the most interesting aspects of this report is that it defines values that are anathema to American national interests and that threaten individual American’s fundamental constitutional rights.

“The foundation of global governance is a set of core values, a belief system, which contains ideas that are foreign to the American experience, and ignores other values and ideas that are precious to the American experience. The values and ideas articulated in the Commission's report are not new. They have been tried, under different names, in other societies. Often, the consequences have been devastating. These values, under new names, have been emerging in UN documents since the late 1980s, and have dominated international conferences, agreements, and treaties since 1992”. [25]

Another intriguing aspect of this report is its definition of the term ‘governance’. It would appear that it means compulsory ‘regulatory’ governance, which when circumscribed by a new definition of ‘sovereignty’ that transcends national borders invites legal enforcement at the global, local and regional levels with the assistance of civil society.[26]

Academics enamored of negative sustainable development and precautionary principle-based ‘social’ science have further confirmed this evolving movement towards global governance.

“Thus, the institutionalization of precautionary norms and ideas means that segments of what would once have been considered domestic policymaking may, increasingly, be carried out at the international level, which reinforces multilateral processes and underlines the importance of the convening, coordinating, and facilitating roles of international institutions such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)”. [27]

Given this framework’s reliance on the Precautionary Principle to achieve negative sustainable development, it is obvious that it has been designed to reverse the legal burden of proof and to hold industries and individuals throughout the world, especially those based in emerging and developing countries and in the United States, publicly accountable. Public accountability will ensured at both the regulatory and civil society levels via various types of administrative review, public criticism, and judicial enforcement. At first, this evolving system will be administered by national, state and local governments. Later on, it is intended that the system’s administration be assumed by and centralized at the United Nations. If they are successful, these extremist ideologues will weaken the recognition and protection of exclusive private property rights, the rule of law and free markets, within the United States and throughout the world.

C. French President Chirac Relates Environmentalism to Religious/ Ethical Values

In his recent speech at the Earth Conference for Ecological Global Governance, Monsieur Chirac made what could be characterized as a religious/ethics-based appeal for humankind’s ‘conversion’ from economic neo-liberal materialism to spiritual environmentalism:

“Humankind must stop seeing itself only as the ‘master and owner of nature’…We must move towards a new state – a state of responsible awareness: our intelligence must be devoted to protecting the planet. We must learn to cultivate a harmonious relationship between humans and nature, a new and necessary relationship.” [28]

D. UN Officials Cite Environmental Stewardship as Religious Obligation

President Chirac’s understated appeal to religion and ‘enlightened’ environmental ethics was in the tradition of similar appeals made previously by European officials at other UN forums. In a 1999 address to the World Council of Churches, [29] for example, a group that participated in the Conference of the Parties (COP-5) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in Bonn, Germany, former United Nations Under-Secretary General and UN Environment Program Executive Director Klaus Topfer endeavored to imbue the Precautionary Principle and environmental sustainability with a sense of religious urgency.

“We have entered a new age. An age where all of us will have to sign a new compact with our environment…and enter into the larger community of all living beings…A new sense of our communion with planet Earth must enter our minds”. [30]

According to the president of at least one U.S.-based nonprofit organization that promotes free markets, who attended the preceding church service and later heard Mr. Topfer’s address,

“[T]he pastor preached the new ‘earth gospel’ that industrialized countries are doing harm to the environment and that the world needs a far-reaching policy to achieve social and environmental ‘justice’. Industrialized countries must scale back our standard of living (become humble) in order to save the earth. The WCC has co-opted unsuspecting churches in their mission to save the earth...The UN spews its propaganda that the earth's carrying capacity (population explosion) has reached 6 billion people, although they cannot substantiate their numbers nor do they know how many people the earth's resources can provide for. Fertility rates in most "industrialized" countries are below replacement: 2.1 children per woman. The UN contends, however, that if the fertility rate in ‘developing’ countries drops to 2.2 children per woman, the world’s population would reach 8.9 billion by 2050 (The Dallas Morning News, “Population Problem Hasn't Been Solved,” September 11, 1999). These UN numbers require more faith than is required by any of the world’s religions!”. [31]

Mr. Topfer’s appeal was followed a year later by a newly published book authored by Adnan Z. Amin, former Director of the UN Environment Programme’s New York Office. Within the introduction to this UNEP book entitled, Earth and Faith: A Book of Reflection for Action, Amin, evoked similar religious undertones.

“As we enter a new century, characterized not only by sweeping and fundamental new changes and immense new opportunities, but also by greatly increased risks, the need to foster a new spirit of international cooperation has never been greater. As trade, economic and physical barriers among countries have progressively fallen and as wealth has increased in some countries, poverty and misery continue to be the lot of a large and growing segment of humanity. It is in this context that we increasingly witness new challenges to the security and sustainability of the planet. At the same time, we are also witnessing an era where the fundamental lessons for humanity contained in the religious and faith traditions of the world are increasingly coming to the fore and guiding and motivating our actions to meet those challenges. One of those challenges, environmental sustainability, is based on the realization that we can no longer blindly trust in the regenerative capacity of ecosystems…UNEP’s “Global Environment Outlook 2000” confirms that the environmental crisis confronting humanity in the new millennium is a world threatened, either because people have too much or too little. The continued poverty of the majority of the planet’s inhabitants and excessive consumption by the minority are the two major causes of environmental degradation”.[32]


E. Politicians and Clergy Rely On the Teachings of ‘Subsidiarity’ to Alter American Views Toward Environmentalism at the State and Local Levels

Central to the practice of religious environmentalism in Europe, is the region-wide EU political and legal concept known as ‘Subsidiarity’. In general, subsidiarity speaks to the political and legal relationship between and among EU member state governments and the regional Brussels institutions. It has been incorporated within Article 5 of the EU Maastricht Treaty[33] as a binding legal principle that applies to all areas of non-exclusive competence.[34]

“The Treaty on European Union has established the principle of subsidiarity as a general rule, which was initially applied to environmental policy in the Single European Act. This principle specifies that in areas that are not within its exclusive powers the Community shall only take action where objectives can best be attained by action at Community rather than at national level. Article A provides that the Union shall take decisions as close as possible to the citizen.” [35]


As it turns out, subsidiarity has long been a key tenet of Catholic social thought – it traces back as far as medieval times.

“[It] holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.” [36]

According to Church scholars,

“Subsidiarity applies to all human institutions, including the state. When the federal government usurps the rights and responsibilities of state and local governments, a flagrant violation of principle of subsidiarity has occurred.” [37]

Scholars have found that the Catholic Church employed subsidiarity

“[T]o limit the State’s interference in social issues and [to] consolidate its power. [It] [s]tress[ed] subsidiarity [and the need to maintain]…‘closeness to the individual’ in undertaking any social and economic activity as a way of restricting the intervention of the State…[This] was the main argument of the Church both in the Quadragesimo Anno and the later encyclicals “Mater et Magistra” (1961), “Pacem in Terris” (1963) and “Centesimus Annus” (1991) (Canatan, 2001: 29).” [38]

Adherence to subsidiarity is also looked upon as a way to support human dignity at the level of the individual, and to define the individual’s role and prescribed conduct within society vis-à-vis other individuals and society as a whole.

“The idea of subsidiarity in the Catholic doctrine rests on the metaphysical understanding regarding the dignity of human being… [A] person should be fully respected and should not be exploited or damaged in any way. However…this inherited dignity can only be finalized by the interactions of the person with the other persons in the society, which is the only way for him to fully realize his potential and his personality. By contracting among themselves, individuals should form different associations through which they can realize their goals and satisfy their needs. The important point here is to strike the right balance between the person and the society; that is the society should not intervene as long as the individual can realize his necessities. This is also the essence of the theory of “catholic personalism”, which later had serious influence on Jacques Delors (Follesdal, 1998: 12).” [39]

In etymological terms,

“[T]he word ‘Subsidiarity’ is a two-faced concept which embodies the Latin connotations of ‘subsidiary’, implying the higher level’s being in a state of secondary position; and of “subsidium”, implying the necessity of help and support by the higher level when the lower level is not capable of undertaking a certain duty.” [40]

Apparently, this notion of subsidiarity also informed the decisions of America’s founding fathers concerning separation of powers and the notion of states’ rights.

“As our founding fathers made clear in The Federalist Papers, the U.S. Constitution was designed to leave many issues of great importance in the hands of the states. The federal government was to do only those things which the individual states could not effectively do for themselves. The subsidiarity principle was at work in the foundation of our nation.” [41]

Thus, in many ways, the notion of subsidiarity within the Maastricht Treaty is similar to, but much less developed than, the U.S. ‘separation of powers’ principles reflected in the federal preemption, foreign and interstate commerce, and supremacy clauses of the U.S. Constitution and the 10th Amendment of the accompanying Bill of Rights. This distinction may flow from fact that the European Community is a confederation of separate and independent sovereign states with distinct histories and cultures, unlike the United States, which is arguably a federation of dependent, semi-sovereign states sharing the same culture and history. Some American scholars, mostly Europhiles, however, doubt that there is a genuine distinction at all between European subsidiarity and American states’ rights, and have been counseling EU member governments and American state legislatures and governors to act more assertively in environmental and foreign affairs as between each other.[42]

“[T]he EU has to recognize that political power in the US is not found exclusively in Washington. The US is in fact a federal system in which state governments are able to exercise considerable latitude in legislation as well as implementation. In the field of climate change policy, the states have in reality been leading the way. For those with a historical memory, the role of the states now on climate change recalls the role of the states in social policy in the 1920s and early 1930s. Essentially, states are experimenting with policies which are custom tailored to both individual state needs and governance structures…[Hence,] A constructive US-EU dialogue on climate change policy must include state governments. Brussels would acknowledge the leadership of states if the Commission proposed a new transatlantic forum dealing with climate change which included state officials .” [43]

Interestingly, while there may be overlap between the EU concept of subsidiarity and the American 10th Amendment notion of states’ rights as concerns the general political need and legal bases for retaining power and jurisdiction at the state and local levels, vis-à-vis the federal or regional government, over regulation, taxation and the trying of criminal offenses – if not otherwise expressly or impliedly delegated to the central government, there are also significant divergences. And such divergences are likely to exist at the individual rights level.

For example, individual rights, especially private property rights, as defined in the United States Constitution and accompanying Bill of Rights may be infringed upon, to the extent public environment, health and safety obligations premised on hazard-based regulatory presumptions of harm rather than empirical and/or probabilistic risk assessments conflict with, impair and otherwise contravene economic rights (free trade, financial and commercial market, and private property rights). If one harbors any lingering doubts concerning the interrelationship between religious environmentalism, European subsidiarity, UN-based global regulatory governance and European style welfare-state socialism, one need only engage in a bit more reading.[44]

Indeed, these findings raise an important question. If it is generally agreed that power over regulation, taxation and criminal prosecution should be retained by the states wherever possible to give voice and influence to the people over their own affairs, are there situations where this could conceivably work against them?[45]

For example, although well-known 18th century political philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville, generally supported the notion of subsidiarity/states’ rights, it is said that he abhorred the welfare ‘nanny’ state which, he believed, would eventually subsume the state and enslave its citizens, thus keeping them “in perpetual childhood”.[46] Is it possible that he foresaw how the socialist and environmental religious movements, here, and in Europe, are increasingly holding sway over state and local policy and rulemaking, perhaps, because it is easier for them to infiltrate neighborhoods and rule the few rather than the many? Is it possible that he also foresaw the degree to which such local control could seriously threaten the fabric of America - free market capitalism, the rational rule of law and the preservation of private economic property rights? And, is it possible that de Tocqueville foresaw that a schism may ultimately arise between competing interpretations of subsidiarity when it came to such key American values?[47]

According to one commentator,

“[T]hough the doctrine of subsidiarity presupposes that ‘local control’ is a Good Thing - is this necessarily so? In reality it can actually prove pretty oppressive. Ask anyone who's had to go back to live with his parents. Subsidiarity has also been lauded on the grounds that ‘neighbourhoods generally have better information about what they need than higher-level organisations do, and so are in a better position to direct funds efficiently to address those needs.’ However, this ‘better information’ can also severely compromise individual freedom. Ask anyone who lives in a village. In other words, subsidiarity can make you the responsibility of your family, the most ‘local’ unit of all, and thus deliver you into the power of the patriarch. It can also leave you at the mercy of the village elders. Subsidiarity is a subtle way to subjugate you to a group which is intimate enough to control you and deprive you of your rights as an independent citizen”. [48]

This raises another important point. Considering what is occurring today in Europe, the U.S. Congress and within some American state and local legislatures and governor’s mansions, and given Europe’s growing influence over international trade, international environmental, health and safety regulatory policy and rulemaking, and treaty and related customary international law formation, would it not behoove all Americans to reexamine their steadfast belief in the power of the 10th Amendment to safeguard our constitutionally protected personal freedoms and economic rights? Should we give our politicians a pass, or should we challenge them? Given their handling of these matters, should we continue to afford them the opportunity to govern us? Are they worthy of our trust, respect and admiration?

Many Americans have long embraced the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as a protection (backstop) against federal government largesse and overreaching. But, what if the 10th amendment, the U.S. presidency and even the U.S. Congress are no longer willing or able to protect citizens against the influence of foreign policies and laws, and the largesse, ineptitude and/or political agendas of foreign or American elected officials, at the federal, state and local levels? In other words, what if the foxes are already in the chicken coop? How do we chickens protect ourselves??


[1] See Michael Crichton, “Environmentalism As Religion”, Speech Presented at the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco California (9/15/03) at: http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speeches/speeches_quote05.html .
[2] See P.D. Brown, “Christians and Kyoto”, U-Turn, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring 2003) at: http://u-turn.net/9-1/christianskyoto.shtml (citing a statement made by former Canadian Environmental Minister Christine Stewart, as reported in the December 14, 1998 issue of the Calgary Herald).
[3] “The environment minister came calling this week with the news that one year after signing it, she still has no idea what the economic impact of the Kyoto Treaty on Global Warming will be in Canada. ‘We don't know the cost,’ Christine Stewart said. Oh good, I thought. The federal government is flitting about the world, signing treaties which provide -- as the minister conceded -- for more ‘equity’ in the world's economy and hasn't the foggiest idea how much it will cost. She did point out that some people think it will cost Canada a two- to three-per-cent decline in its GDP growth over 20 years but, oh heck, what's a loss of $ 100 billion dollars between friends if it's going to help those nice Indonesians?” See Peter Menzies, “Concerned About Cost of Kyoto”, Calgary Herald (12/14/98) at: http://www.sepp.org/Archive/controv/controversies/concerned.html .
[4] Ibid.
[5] See David G. Danielson, “Environmentalism: A New Religion?”, Heartland Perspectives (7/27/95) at: http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=177 .
[6] Ibid.
[7] See Martin Livermore, “In Thrall to the Green God”, BBCNews Viewpoint (3/3/06) at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4766096.stm .
[8] See John Kay, “Green Lobby Must Be Treated as Religion”, Financial Times (1/8/07) at: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2b1aa74e-9f4d-11db-9e2e-0000779e2340.html. (“Anthropologists have established how different cultures independently evolve similar myths – familiar stories, such as the myth of the Fall and the myth of the Apocalypse, which meet deep-seated human needs. The Christian tradition describes the temptation of Adam and Eve and warns of the Last Judgment.”). Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] See Peter Toot, “For Gods Sake: Religious Organizations Preach Environmental Stewardship”, About: Environmental Issues, at: http://environment.about.com/od/activismvolunteering/a/religion.htm .
[13] Ibid.
[14] See, e.g., “American Environmentalism: Science or Religion”, University of California, Santa Barbara, at: http://real.geog.ucsb.edu/research/esr/links.html . See also, John Proctor and Evan Berry, “Religion and Environmental Concern: The Challenge for Social Science”, University of California, Santa Barbara (2004?) at: http://geog.ucsb.edu/~jproctor/pdf/ERN2004.pdf .
[15] See “Invasion of the Property Snatchers”, Institute for Trade, Standards and Sustainable Development, supra.
[16] Ex ante is latin word for “beforehand”. “Risk management tools are ex-ante (regulation), and ex-post (judicial law). Both are intended to reduce the probability and/or size of an event occurring. An ex-ante approach imposes controls “before the fact” or independent of the occurrence of a specific event…Standards and guidelines are examples of an ex-ante approach to risk management. Ex-post (judicial law) or an “after-the-fact” approach is dependent upon the occurrence of an event and it allows damages to be recovered for harm done…Liability and negligence rules are examples of the ex-post approach…Both ex-ante and ex-post approaches to risk-management are needed to achieve the socially optimal allocation of risk damages and incentives for hazard reduction.” See Judith I. Stallmann, “Economic Impacts of Regulations Governing the Development and Dissemination of Animal Agricultural Biotechnologies”, in Ethics and Patenting of Transgenic Organisms, National Agricultural Biotechnology Council (2003) at: http://nabc.cals.cornell.edu/pubs/occ_paper_1/Occ1_toc.html; http://nabc.cals.cornell.edu/pubs/occ_paper_1/Stallman.html.
[17] See Henry Lamb, “A Summary Analysis of Report of the Commission on Global Governance” Ecologic (Jan./Feb. 1996) at: http://www.sovereignty.net/p/gov/gganalysis.htm . See also Yolande Hiriart, David Martimort and Jerome Pouyet, “On the Optimal Use of Ex Ante Regulation and Ex Post Liability” IDEI Working Paper No. 274 (3/2/04) at: http://idei.fr/doc/by/hiriart/optimal_use.pdf . (This paper entails “an analysis of the optimal use of ex ante and ex post interventions when a firm engages into activities potentially risky for the environment or third-parties and has private information about the level of the damage.” It concludes that, “The joint use of ex ante regulation and ex post liability ensures that the firm has a strict incentive to reveal its information”). Ibid., at pp. 1 and 4.
[18] “[W]hile [Sarkozy] believed in free trade it should be ‘managed, regulated free trade.’ [He said that] Europe needed to protect itself from ‘speculators and predators’ and from ‘Asian dumping.’ ‘If I am elected president…I will propose to our partners to assign as missions to the euro zone the moralization of financial capitalism and the promotion of an economy of production against an economy of speculation and rent.’” See Katrin Bennhold, “Sarkozy Tones Down His Image as a Reformer”, International Herald Tribune (2/22/07) (describing and citing portions of a campaign speech of Nicolas Sarkozy) at: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/22/news/france.php .
[19] See Ingvar Carlsson and Shridath Ramphal, Co-Chairmen’s Foreword to Our Global Neighbourhood, The Report of the Commission on Global Governance (Nov. 1994) at: http://web.archive.org/web/20020223232927/www.cgg.ch/foreword.htm .
[20] See Henry Lamb, “A Summary Analysis of Report of the Commission on Global Governance” supra.
[21] See Kei Ishii and Bernd Lutterbeck, “Governance and Subsidiarity in the European Union: Towards an Institutional Framework for a European Constitution”, Draft Report of the Permanent Study Group for the European Constitution in association with The European Institute, South Bank University London, England (3/31/98) at: http://ig.cs.tu-berlin.de/oldstatic/bl/031/ .
[22] “The foundation for global governance is the belief that the world is now ready to accept a ‘global civic ethic’ based on ‘a set of core values that can unite people of all cultural, political, religious, or philosophical backgrounds.’ This belief is reinforced by another belief: ‘that governance should be underpinned by democracy at all levels and ultimately by the rule of enforceable law”. See Henry Lamb, “A Summary Analysis of Report of the Commission on Global Governance”, supra.
[23] “Evidence has accumulated of widespread ecological degradation resulting from human activity: soils losing fertility or being eroded, overgrazed grasslands, desertification, dwindling fisheries, disappearing species, shrinking forests, polluted air and water. These have been joined by the newer problems of climate change and ozone depletion. Together they threaten to make the earth less habitable and life more hazardous. Both the rate at which and the way key resources are used are critical factors in determining environmental impact. Industrial countries account for a disproportionate use of non- renewable resources and energy... Poor people press on the land and forests, over- exploiting them to survive and undermining the resource base on which their well- being and survival depend. These countries must be helped to climb out of poverty and so ease pressure on their habitat. But as they become less poor, their living standards and therefore consumption levels will rise. The world must find ways to ensure they can do so without endangering environmental safety. They must have access to technologies that use fewer resources, such as energy- saving technologies. To keep global resource use within prudent limits while the poor raise their living standards, affluent societies need to consume less. Population, consumption, technology, development, and the environment are linked in complex relationships that bear closely on human welfare in the global neighbourhood. Their effective and equitable management calls for a systemic, long- term, global approach guided by the principle of sustainable development, which has been the central lesson from the mounting ecological dangers of recent times. Its universal application is a priority among the tasks of global governance” (emphasis added). See Our Global Neighbourhood, The Report of the Commission on Global Governance, supra at Chap. 1, at: http://web.archive.org/web/20020224001108/www.cgg.ch/chap1.html .
[24] See Henry Lamb, “A Summary Analysis of Report of the Commission on Global Governance” supra, summarizing and quoting excerpts from
[25] Ibid.
[26] “The frame of reference of the report is their understanding of the term Governance: ‘Governance is the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and cooperative action may be taken. It includes formal institutions and regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed to or perceive to be in their interest.’ The key points of the definition are: i. A new definition of sovereignty [which entails] [t]ransfer of competences to local, regional and global organizations. ii. The compression of international relations through compulsory rules. iii. The civic society as a source for efficiency in international co-operation” (emphasis added). See Kei Ishii and Bernd Lutterbeck, “Governance and Subsidiarity in the European Union: Towards an Institutional Framework for a European Constitution”, supra.
[27] See Steve Maguire and Jaye Ellis, "Redistributing the Burden of Scientific Uncertainty: Implications of the Precautionary Principle for State and Nonstate Actors",
pp. 505-526, at p. 506, in "Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations", W. Andy Knight, S. Neil MacFarlane and Thomas G. Weiss, eds., Vol. 11 No.4 (Lynne Rienner Publishers, Oct.-Dec. 2005), at: (http://www.rienner.com/ggsample.pdf ).
[28] See Speech by M. Jacques Chirac, supra. The religious undertones of Chirac’s appeal cannot and should not be ignored if, for no other reason, than France is one of three Catholic-denominated nations in Europe. However, his appeal has also seemed to resonate with American Catholic scholars and clergy. “Mark Stoll, a history professor at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, Tex., argues that Catholics have not been prominent environmentalists in the past because their religious worldview encouraged a sense of sacredness among a community of people rather than with nature. In a paper entitled The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Environmentalism, Stoll writes, ‘Religiously-minded Catholics dedicated themselves in service to the Church, or to the poor, or to the unconverted – to society, in other words...and by and large left nature writing to Protestants, alone in the woods with their God.’ While Catholics have certainly always appreciated the natural world, their passion for ecology has usually been an afterthought to their commitment to social concerns. But, as Stoll points out, ecology is becoming a social concern. In his statement for the World Day of Peace in 1990, Pope John Paul II said, ‘the ecological crisis is a moral issue [that] has assumed such proportions as to be the responsibility of everyone.’ In response, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued Renewing the Earth, in which they insist that ‘he ecological problem is intimately connected to justice for the poor’…Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, argues that people are not going to make the environment a critical issue until they have ‘an awareness of the question of human purpose in the greater web of life.’ The environment cannot be reduced to one issue among many, he warns. Rather, environmental awareness must take the shape of a ‘religious awakening.’ Until it does, no one is going to pay attention to a sermon about global warming. Also calling for a new way to understand our relationship to the environment is Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis, OP, the founder of Genesis Farm in Blairstown, N.J. A proponent of ‘the new cosmology’, Sister MacGillis, like Mark Stoll, believes that the traditional Catholic commitment to justice is centered on ‘the human in [the] beginning, middle, and end of our concerns.’ To change the environment, she proposes, we have to change our entire cosmology. Fundamental is a sense of humanity as part of creation, rather than as master of it, and an acknowledgment of all creation as worthy for its own good, rather than for the good of human beings. ‘You reverse everything when you do that. You see that the future of humanity is totally aligned with the future of the planet’…Sister Elizabeth Johnson writes that there are two ways to approach the ecological crisis in good faith: the stewardship model, which envisions the Earth in the service of humans; and the kinship model, which envisions humans in the service of the Earth….” See Jeffrey J. Guhin, “America: Whatever Happened to Catholic Environmentalists?” Catholic Online (2/3/06) at: http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=18579 .
[29] Mr. Topfer’s address followed a “ceremony organized by the Protestant Churches of Germany…The WCC Program based in Geneva, Switzerland, parallels the prophetic ‘one-world religion’ with its three-pronged agenda: justice, peace and creation.” See Cathie Adams, “Eagle Forum Alert United Nations Conference in Bonn, Germany: Reports IV, and V”, Texas Eagle Forum at Report IV, at: http://www.texaseagle.org/alert/1999/bonn2.html .
[30] See Klaus Topfer, United Nations Under-Secretary General and Executive Director, UN Environment Program, in an address to the World Council of Churches (10/31/99) in Bonn, Germany, cited in Earth and Faith: A Book of Reflection for Action, Libby Bassett Ed., John T. Brinkman and Kusumita P. Pederson Co-Eds., Interfaith Partnership for the Environment, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP ©2000).
[31] See Cathie Adams, “Eagle Forum Alert United Nations Conference in Bonn, Germany: Reports IV, and V”, supra.
[32] Ibid.
[33] “The Community shall act within the limits of the powers conferred upon it by this Treaty and of the objectives assigned to it therein. In areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence, the Community shall take action, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, only if and in so far as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States and can therefore, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better achieved by the Community. Any action by the Community shall not go beyond what is necessary to achieve the objectives of this Treaty” (emphasis added). See “Consolidated Version of the Treaty Establishing the European Community at: http://www.europa.eu.int/eur-lex/lex/en/treaties/dat/12002E/htm/C_2002325EN.003301.html .
[34] See “Subsidiarity: From Maastricht Until Today, Subsidiarity and Proportionality – Essential Principles”, Subsidiarity Monitoring Network, European Union, Committee of the Regions, at: http://www.cor.europa.eu/subsidinet/en/sub_hist.htm .
[35] See “Treaty on Maastricht on European Union”, Europa website at: http://europa.eu/scadplus/treaties/maastricht_en.htm#SUBSIDIARITY .
[36] According to at least one scholar, “The Pontiff wrote that the Welfare State was contradicting the principle of subsidiarity by intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility. This ‘leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.’” See David A. Bosnich, “The Principle of Subsidiarity”, Religion and Liberty Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 4 (July-August 1996) at: http://www.acton.org/publicat/randl/article.php?id=200 .
[37] Ibid.
[38] See Bengi Dimirci, “The Principle of Subsidiarity in the European Union Context”, A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate School of Social Sciences of Middle East Technical University (Sept. 2003) at p. 20, at: http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/1074673/index.pdf .
[39] Ibid.
[40] Ibid., at p. 17.
[41] See David A. Bosnich, “The Principle of Subsidiarity”, supra.
[42] According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington DC think-tank, The Clinton Administration [had previously] encouraged the states to act unilaterally in the area of climate change both as a way to achieve substantive change as well as to put pressure on Congress. And, CSIS has seemingly carried the Clinton Administration‘s climate change torch to the present as it recommends to the EU how best to engage the U.S. on climate change policy. In this regard, CSIS has advised the EU to practically bypass the White House in favor of the states. See Alberta M. Sbragia, “U S -EU Relations and Climate Change: The Need for Institutionalization”, prepared for the CSIS Think Tank Summit, titled “The Future of U S -EU-NATO Relations: After the Cold War and Beyond the War in Iraq”, at pp. 4-5, at: http://www.csis.org/zbc/tts_papers.htm; http://www.csis.org/zbc/sbragia.pdf .
[43] Ibid., at pp. 2-3.
[44] “[There are] inner feedback loops between solidarity and sustainability… Subsidiarity is all about ‘checks and balances’ within and between levels of governance, and these ‘checks and balances’, not unlike feedback loops, keep all the levels acting together for the common good…[G]ender equity [is necessary] for using well the subsidiarity principle… There is strong correlation between gender equity and adherence to the subsidiarity principle, and there is strong correlation between gender equity and both human wellbeing (including inner peace and integration) and biosphere wellbeing, i.e., the integrity of the human habitat. It is recognized that overcoming the patriarchal mindset of consumerism and domination, and embracing the tripod of solidarity, subsidiarity, sustainability, is a difficult transition process for both individuals and communities. For believers and non-believers alike, the practice of daily meditation (under competent guidance) is recommended as one of the best ways to make progress on the path toward solidarity and sustainability.” See Luis T. Guiterrez, “Solidarity and Sustainability”, A Newsletter on the Socio-Ecological Impacts of Religious Patriarchy, Vol.1, No. 8 (Dec. 2005) at: http://www.pelican-consulting.com/solisust08.html .
[45] One emerging conundrum concerns how the Catholic ‘left’ is employing moral suasion and making ethical appeals in an effort to manipulate the doctrine of subsidiarity so that it promotes ‘enlightened’ environmental stewardship at the US state and local levels. It is not surprising that these appeals come at the expense of private property rights. They are based on the prescriptions set forth within UN Agenda 21 which is informed by UN notions of environment-centric sustainable development that minimize private property rights. As you are aware, the notion of subsidiarity had long been relied upon in Europe by Church dioceses (since the Middle Ages) to justify their retention of authority and governance over local affairs i.e., to retain a modicum of sovereignty as against the monarchs. Today, the notion of subsidiarity is relied upon by the 27 EU member states as a means of better allocating resources (regulatory governance and authority) away from the Brussels institutions to the most local levels, in an effort to demonstrate democratic accountability. Subsidiarity was also brought to the United States and relied upon, in part, by the founding fathers as a basis for the federalist system we have today. In the US, state and local primacy ala the 10th amendment has been relied upon to control taxes, to govern social and religious issues, to ensure against over-regulation, and to protect exclusive private property rights. Arguably, the Catholic ‘left’ is now trying to reprioritize the philosophical bases for subsidiarity so that environmentalism, not private property rights, is advanced at the local levels.
[46] See David A. Bosnich, “The Principle of Subsidiarity”, supra.
[47] “The National Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to take a closer look at the principle of subsidiarity and to apply it more consistently. In the realm of economics, this would entail respect for the mechanisms of the free market and opposition to state intervention… The Bishops must understand that taking away the power of decision from producers and consumers and entrusting it to government bureaucrats violates the subsidiarity principle…If the Bishops understood this point, they would not be advocating government price controls on goods ranging from health care to cable television.” Ibid.
[48] See Muriel Fraser, “Subsidiarity – The Importance of Sounding Local”, National Secular Society (12/27/05) at: http://www.secularism.org.uk/subsidiarity.html?CPID=558642df95e5cf6680e567bab3d8c185 .