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Opponents of U.S. sovereignty used to applaud “world government,” thus providing an easy target, since there has never been more than a shred of sympathy here for such an idea. Over time, academics and activists alike have therefore adopted the phrase “global governance” to describe a more piecemeal, less rhetorically threatening approach, reflecting also that not all global governance advocates themselves feel comfortable that their final objective is world government. The soothingly entitled 1995 blueprint, Our Global Neighborhood , argues that global governance “is part of the evolution of human efforts to organize life on the planet, and the process will always be going on.” This underlines the debates between Americanists, who want to preserve our sovereignty, and globalists, who want to see it, in whole or part, constrained or transferred to international organizations.
Most Americans, busy with their daily lives, have paid scant attention to the global governance debate in places like the United Nations, the European Union, and the universities. Nonetheless, academics and the international Left, despite their differences, can be heard repeating endlessly, like a Greek chorus, that national sovereignty is diminishing inexorably because of the press of global problems. They emphasize the EU example, where the drift of national authority toward EU headquarters in Brussels and away from London, Berlin, and other capitals has indeed seemed inevitable and irreversible. Global governance advocates frequently minimize the importance of re - duced sovereignty, citing, for example, the treaty-making authority. Although normally understood as an elemental example of exercising national sovereignty, treaties, say the globalists, actually limit sovereignty by reducing the scope for unilateral action. Since treaties have been around from time immemorial, what is the problem today with more ambitious treaties that diminish sovereignty somewhat more visibly? Isn’t the whole argument just one of degree rather than basic philosophy? Why be so uncomfortable?
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