(Also posted at the United
States Studies Centre blog.)
In the diplomatic negotiations that
followed the First World War, Woodrow Wilson ushered in a new era in
international relations by committing the United States to supporting the right
of national self-determination. That principle still plays some role in the
formulation of U.S.
foreign policy, but its application has been inconsistent. A more forceful
defence of self-determination might win America more respect around the
world.
In the 1950s, Eritreans were told by John
Foster Dulles to put their national aspirations on hold, as Ethiopia was an American ally whose sovereignty
over part of the Red Sea coast was crucial to
control of the world’s arterial water routes. A similar situation presented
itself in the 1970s, when Washington backed Pakistan’s control of its rebellious eastern
region (now Bangladesh).
And in August 1991, the elder President Bush delivered the ‘Chicken
Kiev speech’, in which he warned the peoples of the Soviet Union, some of
whom had spent centuries under Russian domination, to think twice before adding
new names to the General Assembly roll call. Even Wilson himself was not
immune: his closeness to Britain
during Ireland’s
struggle for independence had devastating consequences
for his party at the 1920 elections. On occasions such as these, realpolitik has made the United States the defender of regimes trying to
put down revolts within their borders (and an unsuccessful one – Eritrea, Bangladesh,
Ukraine, and Ireland
all won their independence in the end).
The 2008 decision of the U.S. (and its
allies) to recognise the independence of Kosovo, and its support for South
Sudan’s separation in 2011, were thus something of a break with the practice of
recent decades, whereby the U.S. has leant toward preserving existing national
borders (a principle known in international law as uti possidetis juris). The results of these decisions can be seen
in the politics of places such as Iraq and Bosnia-Herzegovina, where
mélanges of warring of ethnic groups who would undoubtedly be happier living
apart are forced into complex power-sharing arrangements. The cases of peaceful
secession (such as Slovakia’s
‘velvet divorce’ from the Czechs or Montenegro’s
split from Serbia)
are overshadowed by the fear of ‘balkanisation’.
The recognition of Kosovo was quickly denounced
by Russia, which backs
separatist rebels in regions such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia (in Georgia) and Transnistria (in Moldova). In the intervening years,
the Kremlin has become more assertive about the issue, and has used its veto on
the Security Council to prevent Kosovo’s acceptance into the UN. Its official
recognition of the two breakaway Georgian regions explicitly cited the Kosovo
precedent, and some
have speculated that it will allow for the normalisation of Kosovo’s status
only in exchange for the West doing the same for Abkhazia or South
Ossetia.
In the early days of the Cold War, American talk
of human rights abuses in the Soviet Union was
characteristically dismissed with the retort ‘and you are
lynching Negroes’. Today, Moscow defends its
support for its client states with a similar comeback: ‘and you are recognising
Kosovo’ (shamelessly ignoring the hypocrisy of its own stance on Chechnya).
Just as the mid-1960s victories of the civil rights movement allowed the U.S.
to regain the high moral ground and force the world’s attention onto the human
rights records of its enemies, Washington might consider the benefits of
granting recognition to more aspirant states: not just in the Caucasus, but
places such as Palestine, Somaliland, and Northern Cyprus. The downside of such
a shift might be a thaw in relations with countries like Georgia, but the potential upside is worth
thinking about: the U.S.
would be seen as supporting self-determination everywhere, not just for regions
and peoples with whom it is allied; indeed, it would find new allies among the
beneficiaries of its neo-Wilsonian stance.
1) Romney has done what he needed to do –
not choose another Sarah Palin. Most American political observers seem to
subscribe to the Game Change
narrative of the 2008 election, in which John McCain threw away any chance of
winning by an impulsive and desperate choice of running mate. This narrative
has its faults (i.e. it overlooks the fact that it wasn’t the Republicans’ year
regardless of who was on the ticket, and feeds into the conservative narrative
that America is a ‘centre-right country’ and therefore Obama’s election was
some sort of temporary aberration), but conventional wisdom is often at
variance with the facts. As one of the Very Serious People adored by the
professional centrists/bipartisans/post-partisans in Manhattan and D.C., Ryan won’t be treated
with the same class- and gender-inflected contempt that Palin was.
2) For those keeping track of the religious
and ethnic affiliations of presidential and vice-presidential candidates, Ryan
will be the eighth Catholic on a major-party ticket, the second Catholic on the
Republican ticket (after Barry Goldwater tapped William E. Miller in 1964), the
fifth Catholic vice-presidential nominee (after Miller, Sargent Shriver,
Geraldine Ferraro, and Joe Biden), the seventh Irish-American on a major-party
ticket, and the third Irish-American running mate (after Miller and Biden). He
is also partly of German-American heritage; I believe he is the first to appear
on a major-party ticket since Eisenhower’s re-election in 1956 (Walter Mondale
was nicknamed ‘Fritz’, but was actually Norwegian-American). Thus, we have the
first presidential election ever in which none of the four major-party nominees
is a white Protestant.
3) Choosing a sitting member of the House is
certainly unusual – apart from the sui
generis case of then-Minority Leader Gerald Ford’s double elevation, the
last House members to be elected President and Vice-President respectively were
James Garfield (R-OH) in 1880 and John Nance Garner (D-TX) in 1932. From the
Republicans’ perspective, it makes sense. Ryan can only do so much as Budget
Committee chair, there are other young talents (such as Eric Cantor) blocking
his path to the Speakership, and Wisconsin doesn’t provide any Senate openings
in the near future. By nominating him for V-P, even if the ticket loses, he
would have to be pencilled in as the favourite for the presidential nomination
in 2016; the intervening four years having been spent developing credentials on
foreign policy and social issues to match his economic ones.
1) The cities of Chicago
and Boston
would not be violating any law or constitutional provision, as far as I am
aware, if they were to refuse to grant planning permission to a Chick-Fil-A
outlet based on the political beliefs of the company’s President. States and
their subdivisions (which include municipalities) have wide latitude under the
Tenth Amendment to use their police power (which includes planning and
licensing); the only barrier would be an Illinois
or Massachusetts
state law limiting what actions the city can take.
2) There are plenty of historical
precedents for corporations being targeted for special regulation on account of
their owners’ political activities. Companies which did business with Nazi
Germany had assets seized and fines imposed under the Trading with the Enemy
Act, and France’s state-owned rail company, SNCF, can’t bid for a contract to
operate on California’s proposed high-speed rail network because its trains
were commandeered by the Vichy Regime to transport French Jews to the death
camps; California law requires companies doing business with the state to
disclose any involvement in the Holocaust. There are also various federal laws
governing industrial relations which deny access to arbitration by the NLRB to
labour unions led by communists.
3) As a writer at the Nation has noted,
the fact that the corporation donates money to anti-gay organisations means
that this is not about the First Amendment rights of Chick-Fil-A’s President.
Those who defend Chick-Fil-A are defending corporate personhood.
4) Denying planning permission to build an
outlet of a fast food chain somewhere is not a violation of anyone’s rights.
Glenn Greenwald poses a few hypothetical examples in thisSalon piece to illustrate the dangers
that would ensue if Congress were to criminalise the spending of money to
advocate liberal causes. They aren’t relevant, because no-one is proposing
sending the President of Chick-Fil-A to jail (or depriving him of any civil
rights) for his views; planning permission to build a chicken franchise is an
entitlement, not a right.
Of all the constitutions enacted by the
thirteen colonies upon their emergence from British rule, the most democratic
was that of Pennsylvania.
Its features included a unicameral legislature elected annually, a plural
executive consisting of one member elected from each county and possessing no
powers to veto or initiate laws, a Council of Censors elected every seventh
year to investigate corruption and propose constitutional amendments, and an
extensive bill of rights. It made no pretensions to establishing a separation
of powers – the legislature was clearly dominant over the other branches, a
natural reaction to the pre-1776 colonial authorities’ control of the executive
and judiciary. Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin helped to create the
constitution and vigorously defended it, while the elite classes across the
fledgling United States were horrified, preferring the scheme described in John
Adams’ Thoughts on Government, which
provided for an upper house and a governor to check the will of the lower house.
The preference for a weak executive was due
to the influence of Country Party political thought in the American colonies.
After the mercantile classes took power in England with the Glorious
Revolution in 1688, they set about using the public purse to fund the
development of capitalism. They established the Bank of England, passed
enclosure laws to dispossess poor farmers, and stepped up the colonisation of
North America and India.
To keep the money flowing, the Crown needed an ally who could command the
support of the House of Commons, and thus control its traditional right to
initiate supply bills; thus, the informal post of Prime Minister, usually
synonymous with that of First Lord of the Treasury, came into existence.
Country Party ideology developed in opposition to the domination of the
legislature by the executive, which it viewed as a recipe for enriching the
Crown and the City of London
at the expense of the people. To Americans in 1776, the legislature was
synonymous with democracy and economic equality, while a powerful executive
meant tyranny and mercantilism.
In the years between 1776 and the Constitutional
Convention, colonial legislatures passed laws which threatened the privileges
of the elites. Primogeniture was outlawed, preventing the emergence in the United States
of a hereditary aristocracy, paper money was issued to redress economic
inequalities and assist poor farmers and labourers in paying their debts, and
land was confiscated from Loyalists. The Articles of Confederation, which came
into force in 1781, replicated Pennsylvania’s
preference for legislative supremacy, and lacking a single executive, the
Congress divided executive authority among a plethora of committees. The elite
backlash against the radical-democratic political culture of post-revolutionary
America culminated in Philadelphia in 1787,
where a constitution providing for an unelected Senate, President, and federal
judiciary was presented to the nation.
Across the Atlantic, the spirit of Pennsylvania in 1776 was
keenly felt by the partisans of the French Revolution. A series of
constitutional proposals littered the years between 1789 and 1793, providing
for constitutional monarchies, upper houses, British-style cabinets, and other
anti-democratic devices. The Montagnards rejected all these in favour of making
the executive subordinate to the legislature. In practice, they used their
control of the National Convention to sideline the ministerialist Executive
Council in favour of a Committee of Public Safety. Although this body was
dominated, with tragic consequences, by the personality of Robespierre, its
purpose was to turn the executive branch into a mere committee of the
legislature. In their constitutional theory, the Montagnards designed a model
of legislative supremacy – the proposed constitution of 1793, in which the
relationship between the legislative and executive branches was modelled on
that of Pennsylvania.
The preference of French radicals for legislative supremacy (known as the régime d’assmblée or régime conventionnel) was again
exhibited in the Paris Commune (famously described by Marx as “a working, not a
parliamentary body”) and the first Constituent Assembly of 1946.
The propertied men who drafted the
Constitution sometimes let their guard down about the anti-populist intent of
their document. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison assures readers that the
“rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of
property, or for any other improper or wicked project” generated by legislative
supremacy would be blocked under his design. At the convention, he proposed a
‘Council of Revision’ with the power to veto laws, consisting of the President
and a number of Supreme Court justices, the effect of which would be to harness
the power of the other two branches to combat the legislature. The undemocratic
features of the constitution were mostly ironed out – the Senate, controlled by
the Slave Power and then Wall Street throughout the nineteenth century, became
elective, and the Supreme Court moved away from its historic role as the
protector of Loyalist gentry (Martin v.
Hunter’s Lessee), cosy academic elites (Dartmouth
v. Woodward), and corporations (Lochner
v. New York),
to become a champion of individual liberty (Roe
v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona,
etc.). The presidency, though it has come to be elected on a democratic basis
(notwithstanding Electoral College malapportionment), has usurped the
democratic legitimacy which should rightfully lie in the legislative branch.
In the early decades of the republic,
Americans were in no doubt that the will of the people resided in Congress
(particularly in its popularly-elected House of Representatives), and that the
President’s role was to merely execute its laws, though he was granted some
leeway in conducting foreign policy and using his veto pen to stop
pork-barrelling or the passage of clearly unconstitutional laws. Beginning,
arguably, with Andrew Jackson, the idea of the presidential mandate began to
develop, and the direct election of presidential electors gave Presidents the
democratic legitimacy to position themselves as tribunes of the masses, in
opposition to the local interests represented in Congress. With the increase in
the size and power of the federal government, and the increased media attention
on presidential elections, the ‘chief magistrate’ gradually assumed the mantle
of ‘Leader of the Free World’. The question posed by John Jay to George
Washington during Shay’s Rebellion (‘shall we have a monarchy?’) has been
answered in the affirmative.
The modern U.S. President can veto laws
duly passed by Congress for whatever reason, declare parts of them inoperable
with a signing statement, and impound funds which they require to be spent. He
can initiate military action, restrained only by the War Powers Act, whose
constitutionality is dubious. Then there’s the abuses of power – Watergate, Iran-Contra,
Fast-and-Furious-gate. The counterpoint to the imperial presidency is the
personal invective levelled at Presidents. The rise of ‘birtherism’ during the
Obama Administration is not a new or unusual phenomenon: Martin van Buren was
said by his opponents to engage in orgies in the White House, Lincoln was
apparently ‘Abraham Africanus’ whose presidency would lead to miscegenation,
and Chester A. Arthur was singled out for his supposed Canadian birth. The
personal nature of the office invites critics of its occupant to forgo policy-based
criticisms in favour of personal invective.
The existence of a presidency elected
separately from the legislature has many adverse consequences for American
politics. By strengthening the effects of Duverger’s Law, it inhibits the
growth of third parties. The desire of Presidents to be seen to be above the
partisan fray retards the growth of strong political parties and encourages the
selection of cross-party running mates (which, in turn, leads to unexpected
changes in party control of the White House when a John Tyler or an Andrew
Johnson succeeds to the nation’s highest office). Most importantly, the presidency
encourages Americans to think of themselves as dutiful servants of an elected
monarch. MSNBC host Chris Matthews’ recent request that Obama “give us our orders”
illustrates perfectly how individual agency is suppressed in favour of
deference to the Commander-in-Chief. Americans have come to see the presidency
as the focus of all political power – liberals greet every new Democratic
administration with dreams of a re-run of FDR’s first hundred days, while
conservatives want the Oval Office to be filled by a macho figure who’ll make
‘No Apology’ for torture, the Patriot Act, or American exceptionalism.
Amazingly, some Americans want to replace
the imperial presidency with a parliamentary system, which would remove all
traces of independence from Congresspeople who would be obliged to support
their party’s government (or oppose that of the other party). The prominent
advocates of parliamentarism (such as Carter Administration official Lloyd
Cutler, blogger Matt Yglesias, or, most famously, Woodrow Wilson) want the
legislative branch to surrender more aspects of policy-making to the executive.
The increasing presidentialisation of the office of prime minister in
parliamentary countries shows that such a change wouldn’t rein in the bonapartiste nature of the presidency,
and the reverence for the Westminster system among American parliamentarists
(as opposed to the world’s numerous parliamentary republics) suggests that
their preferences are grounded in the anglophilia of America’s coastal elites.
The United States would benefit from a
rediscovery of the constitutional principles of the post-revolutionary era: the
primacy of the legislative branch, short terms of office (Benjamin Franklin:
“where annual elections end, tyranny begins”), the undemocratic nature of
malapportioned upper houses, and the danger to liberty posed by an executive
with a greater popular mandate than individual legislators.
