Saturday, May 10, 2008

Brzezinski: Supranational Jurisdiction


One of Barack Hussein Obama’s core supporters is Jimmy Carter’s former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. It is, therefore, instructive to pay attention to the world view Brzezinski outlines. The reasoning follows from the principle that socialism needs to be international. It requires a “workers of the world unite” foundation. It is telling that the story begins with reflections on sovereignty.

Zbigniew Brzezinski: America today is the world's most sovereign state. To be sure, in our time the concept of sovereignty has been largely drained of content by the reality of increasing interdependence among states. For most states, sovereignty now verges on being a legal fiction.

After all, even the undeniable reality of America as the sovereign power of last resort still begs the question: Sovereignty for what? Doubtless many would answer: for the sake of America's national security. But that reply begs a deeper question: Might not efforts to perpetuate America's unique status as an unconstrained sovereign eventually come to threaten America's national security, and its civil liberty as well?

America needs to face squarely a centrally important new global reality: that the world's population is experiencing a political awakening unprecedented in scope and intensity, with the result that the politics of populism are transforming the politics of power. The need to respond to that massive phenomenon poses to the uniquely sovereign America an historic dilemma: What should be the central definition of America's global role?

It will require increasingly supranational cooperation, actively promoted by the United States, to compensate for the weakness of nominally sovereign states that in fact are becoming ever less sovereign or even self-sustaining. The nation-state framework has become too narrow for the political solutions, economic remedies and social "depressurization" that a majority of populations urgently need.

The historic paradox of our time is that supranational cooperation toward these major goals is only possible if the lead is taken by the last sovereign state, and joined by the more resilient regional powers willing eventually to subsume their own sovereignty under more effective supranational arrangements.

The most concise way to summarize all of this is that America needs to change to adapt to the world, rather than the world adapting to become more like America. It is the view of people who believe American exceptionalism depends on injustice and should not be emulated.

When I term the Obama wing of the Democratic Party Theorists, is it precisely because they believe the “nation-state framework has become too narrow for the political solutions, economic remedies and social "depressurization" that a majority of populations urgently need”. They see an international set of problems requiring international solutions delivered by international organizations with supranational jurisdiction.