Archive for July 11th, 2008

A central tenet of John McCain’s foreign policy plan is the so-called “League of Democracies.” This new international organization, as designed, would bring together democracies to work for a sustainable global peace and to spread the ideals of representative government. After the Bush Administration’s insistence on unilateral action, this emphasis on institutional diplomacy is, at surface, a welcome development.

However, any further thought shows this to be a silly idea which betrays the essentials for legitimate international action. I think it suffers from two poor assumptions.

The first is that all democracies support similar policies. This is hardly true. Take Iraq, where many well-established democracies in Western Europe opposed American action. McCain, who continues to support military intervention in Iraq, seems to be in an odd position of supporting a League of Democracies which would oppose his principle foreign policy. In discussing this idea in the most recent issue of Foreign Policy (subscription required), Thomas Carothers points out that democratic processes often bring to power governments which do not support American policy – Palestine, Nepal, Nicaragua and Bolivia, for example. Even more, as Fareed Zakaria pointed out in his first book, The Future of Freedom, democracy does not necessarily demand liberal principles. In fact, it is often a muddy continuum from authoritarian governments to illiberal democracies to liberal republics. The superficial belief that a League of Democracies would be clearly opposed to authoritarian regimes falls apart under true study.

Secondly, this supposed new inter-governmental organization would not be as legitimate as supposed. It is a common projection by democracies to view their role as more legitimate than authoritarian regimes, but by excluding those who they oppose from decision-making, this organization would fall prey to more mislead diplomacy. Just as the Economist explained last week, the existing global institutions are becoming outdated because they do not reflect the world today. The IMF, UN, G8 and others reflect post-WWII realities, but what good is discussing oil prices or Iranian bellicosity at a G8 summit without OPEC countries or Iran?

I agree that we need to seriously rethink organizations like the UN and G8, but the answer is not in exclusion – it is in bringing more countries into the international fold. Expand the G8 and Security Council and don’t create American projections that aim to replace the UN, especially ones flawed in design like a League of Democracies.

Continuing the Publius Project this week is an essay by Ronald Deibert of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. In it, he calls for the defense of the global communication environment which faces a growing number of threats from a variety of actors. His involvment with the OpenNet Initiative has made Deibert keenly aware of the role that governments play in censoring the net; from Belarus to Burma governments censor the Internet and as Pakistan’s YouTube snafu shows, these can have broad ramifications. Profit-maximizing telcos are hoping to end net neutrality and, further, he points to the military and intelligence officials taking an interest in the net and is worried by the effect. “[M]otivated by short-term security and cultural concerns, dozens of governments and corporations are carving up, colonizing, and militarizing the once seamless Internet environment.”

Deibert ends the brief essay with a call to reestablish the foundational ethics of the Internet: collaboration, openness, free expression and tinkering. His call to arms is similar to Zittrain’s support of generativity and represents an increased awareness that the halcyon days of the Internet’s youth may be entering a time of great threat from short-sighted exclusionary and competitive behavior by governments and corporations.

In that same vein is Susan Crawford’s brainchild, OneWebDay – an annual day of celebration of the Web. What Earth Day is for the environment, OneWebDay, September 22nd, is for the Web. By focusing on the principles which enable so much creativity and community, OneWebDay is an important tool in defense of the Internet.

[Previous response to the Publius Project]

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