Volume 3, Number 6 May 2002
by John Fonte
John Fonte is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. This piece is adapted from his article, "Liberal Democracy vs. Transnational Progressivism," which will appear in the Summer 2002 issue of Orbis, and is based on a presentation made last fall to FPRI's Study Group on America and the West, chaired by James Kurth.
Nearly a year before the September 11 attacks, news stories provided a preview of the transnational politics of the future. In October 2000, in preparation for the UN Conference Against Racism, about fifty American nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) called on the UN "to hold the United States accountable for the intractable and persistent problem of discrimination."
The NGOs included Amnesty International-U.S.A. (AI-U.S.A.), Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Arab-American Institute, National Council of Churches, the NAACP, the Mexican- American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and others. Their spokesman stated that their demands "had been repeatedly raised with federal and state officials [in the U.S.] but to little effect. In frustration we now turn to the United Nations." In other words, the NGOs, unable to enact the policies they favored through the normal processes of American constitutional democracy--the Congress, state governments, even the federal courts--appealed to authority outside of American democracy and its Constitution.
At the UN Conference against Racism, which was held in Durban two weeks before September 11, American NGOs supported "reparations" from Western nations for the historic transatlantic slave trade and developed resolutions that condemned only the West, without mentioning the larger traffic in African slaves sent to Islamic lands. The NGOs even endorsed a resolution denouncing free market capitalism as a "fundamentally flawed system."
The NGOs also insisted that the U.S. ratify all major UN human rights treaties and drop legal reservations to treaties already ratified. For example, in 1994 the U.S. ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), but attached reservations on treaty requirements restricting free speech that were "incompatible with the Constitution." Yet leading NGOs demanded that the U.S. drop all reservations and "comply" with the CERD treaty by accepting UN definitions of "free speech" and eliminating the "vast racial disparities_in every aspect of American life" (housing, health, welfare, justice, etc.).
HRW complained that the U.S. offered "no remedies" for these disparities but "simply supported equality of opportunity" and indicated "no willingness to comply" with CERD. Of course, to "comply" with the NGO interpretation of the CERD treaty, the U.S. would have to abandon the Constitution's free speech guarantees, bypass federalism, and ignore the concept of majority rule--since practically nothing in the NGO agenda is supported by the American electorate.
All of this suggests that we have not reached the final triumph of liberal democracy proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama in his groundbreaking 1989 essay.
Post-September 11
In October 2001, Fukuyama stated that his "end of history" thesis remained valid: that after the defeat of communism and fascism, no serious ideological competitor to Western- style liberal democracy was likely to emerge in the future. Thus, in terms of political philosophy, liberal democracy is the end of the evolutionary process. There will be wars and terrorism, but no alternative ideology with a universal appeal will seriously challenge the principles of Western liberal democracy on a global scale.
The 9/11 attacks notwithstanding, there is nothing beyond liberal democracy "towards which we could expect to evolve." Fukuyama concluded that there will be challenges from those who resist progress, "but time and resources are on the side of modernity."
Indeed, but is "modernity" on the side of liberal democracy? Fukuyama is very likely right that the current crisis with radical Islam will be overcome and that there will be no serious ideological challenge originating outside of Western civilization. However, the activities of the NGOs suggest that there already is an alternative ideology to liberal democracy within the West that has been steadily evolving for years.
Thus, it is entirely possible that modernity--thirty or forty years hence--will witness not the final triumph of liberal democracy, but the emergence of a new transnational hybrid regime that is post-liberal democratic, and in the American context, post-Constitutional and post-American. This alternative ideology, "transnational progressivism," constitutes a universal and modern worldview that challenges both the liberal democratic nation-state in general and the American regime in particular.
Transnational Progressivism
The key concepts of transnational progressivism could be described as follows:
The ascribed group over the individual citizen. The key political unit is not the individual citizen, who forms voluntary associations and works with fellow citizens regardless of race, sex, or national origin, but the ascriptive group (racial, ethnic, or gender) into which one is born.
A dichotomy of groups: Oppressor vs. victim groups, with immigrant groups designated as victims. Transnational ideologists have incorporated the essentially Hegelian Marxist "privileged vs. marginalized" dichotomy.
Group proportionalism as the goal of "fairness." Transnational progressivism assumes that "victim" groups should be represented in all professions roughly proportionate to their percentage of the population. If not, there is a problem of "underrepresentation."
The values of all dominant institutions to be changed to reflect the perspectives of the victim groups. Transnational progressives insist that it is not enough to have proportional representation of minorities in major institutions if these institutions continue to reflect the worldview of the "dominant" culture. Instead, the distinct worldviews of ethnic, gender, and linguistic minorities must be represented within these institutions.
The "demographic imperative." The demographic imperative tells us that major demographic changes are occurring in the U.S. as millions of new immigrants from non-Western cultures enter American life. The traditional paradigm based on the assimilation of immigrants into an existing American civic culture is obsolete and must be changed to a framework that promotes "diversity," defined as group proportionalism.
The redefinition of democracy and "democratic ideals." Transnational progressives have been altering the definition of "democracy" from that of a system of majority rule among equal citizens to one of power sharing among ethnic groups composed of both citizens and non-citizens. James Banks, one of American education's leading textbook writers, noted in 1994 that "to create an authentic democratic Unum with moral authority and perceived legitimacy, the pluribus (diverse peoples) must negotiate and share power." Hence, American democracy is not authentic; real democracy will come when the different "peoples" that live within America "share power" as groups.
Deconstruction of national narratives and national symbols of democratic nation-states in the West. In October 2000, a UK government report denounced the concept of "Britishness" and declared that British history needed to be "revised, rethought, or jettisoned." In the U.S., the proposed "National History Standards," recommended altering the traditional historical narrative. Instead of emphasizing the story of European settlers, American civilization would be redefined as a multicultural "convergence" of three civilizations- Amerindian, West African, and European. In Israel, a "post- Zionist" intelligentsia has proposed that Israel consider itself multicultural and deconstruct its identity as a Jewish state. Even Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres sounded the post- Zionist trumpet in his 1993 book , in which he deemphasized "sovereignty" and called for regional "elected central bodies," a type of Middle Eastern EU.
Promotion of the concept of postnational citizenship. In an important academic paper, Rutgers Law Professor Linda Bosniak asks hopefully "Can advocates of postnational citizenship ultimately succeed in decoupling the concept of citizenship from the nation-state in prevailing political thought?"
(9) The idea of transnationalism as a major conceptual tool. Transnationalism is the next stage of multicultural ideology. Like multiculturalism, transnationalism is a concept that provides elites with both an empirical tool (a plausible analysis of what is) and an ideological framework (a vision of what should be). Transnational advocates argue that globalization requires some form of "global governance" because they believe that the nation-state and the idea of national citizenship are ill suited to deal with the global problems of the future.
The same scholars who touted multiculturalism now herald the coming transnational age. Thus, Alejandro Portes of Princeton University argues that transnationalism, combined with large-scale immigration, will redefine the meaning of American citizenship.
The promotion of transnationalism is an attempt to shape this crucial intellectual struggle over globalization. Its adherents imply that one is either in step with globalization, and thus forward-looking, or one is a backward antiglobalist. Liberal democrats (who are internationalists and support free trade and market economics) must reply that this is a false dichotomy--that the critical argument is not between globalists and antiglobalists, but instead over the form global engagement should take in the coming decades: will it be transnationalist or internationalist?
Transnational Progressivism's Social Base: A Post-National Intelligentsia
The social base of transnational progressivism constitutes a rising postnational intelligentsia (international law professors, NGO activists, foundation officers, UN bureaucrats, EU administrators, corporate executives, and politicians.) When social movements such as "transnationalism" and "global governance" are depicted as the result of social forces or the movement of history, a certain impersonal inevitability is implied. However, in the twentieth century the Bolshevik Revolution, the National Socialist revolution, the New Deal, the Reagan Revolution, the Gaullist national reconstruction in France, and the creation of the EU were not inevitable, but were the result of the exercise of political will by elites.
Similarly, transnationalism, multiculturalism, and global governance, like "diversity," are ideological tools championed by activist elites, not impersonal forces of history. The success or failure of these values-laden concepts will ultimately depend upon the political will and effectiveness of these elites. <snip> http://www.fpri.org/ww/0306.200205.fonte.ideologicalwarwithinthewest.html