Broken Promises

The international community is neither international nor a community. It is not international because, as a moral idea, it does not exist in any recognizable organizational form. It is not a community because it has little to do with social relations, spatial intimacy, or long-term moral amity. Yet there is something compellingly real about this misnamed object. That reality lies in its moral promise.

The moral promise of the idea of the international community rests on a moral premise and a wish. Sometime in the period after the birth of the League of Nations, and fortified by the ascendance of the idea of human rights in the international order after World War II, a decisive shift took place away from the notion that relations between nations were fundamentally premised on power and interest and toward the idea that all nations could form some sort of genuine moral system on a planetary scale. The emergence of the United Nations and its affiliated agencies was the main expression of this shift. Ever since, a deep battle has raged between these two visions of politics beyond the nation — one fundamentally realist and instrumental, the other moral and moralistic. The international community is today less a social fact and more a way to remind nation-states of the common humanity of their citizens and of the essential decencies that must guide relations between nations. It is the single strongest slogan of the liberal value of empathy at a distance, the idea that makes everyone feel obliged to recognize the suffering and needs of all human beings.

The social expression of this moral slogan is, of course, not completely ephemeral. It appears in a web of relations and institutions defined by those nations springing directly from the democratic revolutions of the 18th century — along with their direct supporters outside this original set — and those international organizations that either came out of the League of Nations or the Bretton Woods consensus. But for most of the world, the international community is less a community than a club for the world’s wealthiest nations, notably those in North America and Western Europe, which have combined relatively strong democratic polities with high standards of living for the bulk of their citizens.

Thus, as a social and political reality, the international community does not inspire any real sense of ownership among the poorer 80 percent of the world’s population. And even among the upper 20 percent, it remains a network for a relatively small group of politicians, bureaucrats, and interventionist opinion makers. Yet its political exclusiveness is not its most difficult challenge.

The central problem is that the international community today is a Westphalian form struggling to remain the ruling authority in an era of increasingly transnational loyalties, regional polities, and global economic regimes. Each of these trends is bad news for polities, economies, and societies conceived in national terms. Diasporic affiliations and mobile, media-linked communities of migrants are redrawing the relationships of location and affiliation. Sri Lankan Tamils, Kurds, Chinese emigrants, Indian techno-coolies, each in their own way, owe their allegiance to multiple forms of citizenship. Their mental geography is surely no longer Westphalian. In this sense, these communities mimic the global market, which is now strikingly beyond the regulative capabilities of most nation-states. Even a nation as wealthy as the United States no longer escapes the net of the global economy, if nothing else because its runaway financial engine can hardly function wholly within the confines of the U.S. national economy. More generally, both on the street and in the chambers of the technocrats, the fraught debates about an institution such as the World Trade Organization are more than indicators of resistance to reform or of anti-Americanism in many quarters. They are symptoms of the impossibility of constructing new global organizations on an international conceptual foundation.

A certain vision of internationalism is therefore coming to an end. The world needs global organizations and transnational arenas for citizenship and sovereignty. The exclusivity of the international community is not just one more chapter in the story of how wealthy nations have always behaved — carving up the world in the names of their own civilizing missions. Rather, the challenge for the international community is to transform itself into an instrument of global governance. This objective cannot be achieved by stretching the current liberal vision of international law and a common humanity to accommodate more countries and points of view. Rather, new ideas about global governance are a prerequisite for tackling the problem of inclusion.

So, what of the premise and promise of the international community, as primarily a landscape of conscience more than a political or legal formation? Those who today speak on behalf of the international community must tackle the following challenges: Can notions of global equity, peace, and freedom remain regulated by the relations between nations, when markets, migrants, and money have all slipped substantially beyond the control of the nation-state? Can the world continue to behave as if covenants between nations exhaust the limits of what happens with air, water, land, and all other biological resources, when the fate of the environment is clearly affected by transnational processes, interests, and profit-making strategies? Can the world continue to behave as if nations are the most significant receptacles of large-scale loyalty in a world where various forms of religious, moral, and political affiliations are plainly transnational in scope? And finally, can the world rely on any sort of international force to bring peace when it is increasingly clear that wars have become an affair of everyday life and of civil society itself in many countries?

If the answers to these questions are not built on a new cultural architecture that recognizes that global politics are not just international politics by another name, the international community — with its moral promise — may well be reduced to an exclusive club or a museum devoted to memories of Westphalia.