A few decades ago, politicians hatched a Tom Friedman-esque idea to
unite U.S. and Western Europe. Did it succeed?
The idea of a country seems pretty simple. I live in America, and I’m
an American. She lives in France, and she is French. The Americans have
a president who is their leader, the British have a prime minister, the
French have their own president, and so forth.
But the way
political decision-making around security issues ricochets around the
world, from Western capital to Western capital, is making a mockery of
commonly held conceptions of national sovereignty. In recent weeks, a
British parliament vote on Syria forced the U.S. president to seek
authorization from Congress, while leaked documents detailed extensive
cooperation between the intelligence services of the U.S. and other
nations. The president of Bolivia was forced to down his plane by Italy
and France, just because he joked about having Edwards Snowden on board.
And so on, and so forth.
This all demands the question: Why do we
hold the conception that we live in separate nation-states? Well, it
turns out that this question was actually asked after World War II, and
the answer American leaders came up with was … we shouldn’t.
In
fact, Western elites in America and Western Europe after World War II
made a serious effort to get rid of nations altogether, and combine all
“freedom-loving peoples” into one giant “Atlantic Union,” a federal
state built on top of the NATO military alliance.
As odd as it
sounds, the documentary evidence is clear. This movement did manage to
create a “European Union,” which came from the same ideological
wellspring as the “Atlantic Union.” Once we recognize that the Cold War
saw the construction of a powerful international regime that explicitly
sought to get rid of sovereign nations, these broad security
architectures revealed by the Syria situation and the NSA spying
revelations make a lot more sense.
The strange story of Atlantica
The
effort to unite Europe and the U.S. started in 1939, with the
publication of a book by an influential journalist, Clarence Streit.
This influential book was called ”Union Now,” and had a
galvanizing effect on the anti-fascist youth of the time, a sort of
cross between Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” and Naomi Klein’s
“The Shock Doctrine.” Streit served in World War I in an
intelligence unit, and saw up close the negotiations for the Treaty of
Versailles. He then became a New York Times journalist assigned to cover
the League of Nations, which led him to the conclusion that the only
way to prevent American isolationism and European fascism was for
political and economic integration of the major “freedom-loving”
peoples, which he described as America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia,
South Africa and most of Western Europe. The Five Eyes surveillance
architecture was created just a few years later, as was the
international monetary regime concocted at Bretton Woods.
When Streit wrote “Union Now,” in 1939, the German threat was
obvious, World War II was beginning, and fascism and communism had
linked arms through the pact between the Nazis and the Soviets. Streit’s
argument, that the West needed to combine its strength to fight
totalitarianism everywhere, was a powerful draw. The youth of the 1930s —
those who read Streit’s book — became the political and diplomatic
leaders of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and many of them went on to craft
the multilateral institutions and international policies of the Cold
War.
Indeed, the congressional record is peppered with resolutions
and hearings from the late 1940s to the 1970s pushing for Atlantic
Union. For example, in 1971, the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House
of Representatives convened a hearing to
discuss the prospect of combining the United States of America and
Western Europe into one country. This “Atlantic Union” would be a
federal union, very similar to the the one described in United States
Constitution. Existing countries would become states under a federalist
system, with the larger federal system having its own currency,
military, interstate commerce regulation and foreign relations
apparatus.
That day in 1971, the committee was discussing a
specific piece of legislation, a resolution — House Concurrent
Resolution 163 — to create an “Atlantic Union Delegation,” a committee
of 18 “eminent citizens” to join with other NATO country delegations and
negotiate a plan to unite. The subcommittee chairman presiding over the
hearing, congressman Donald Fraser of Minnesota, described the specific
goal of the legislation as convening an “international convention to
explore the possibility of agreement on a declaration to transform the
present Atlantic alliance into a federal union, set a timetable for
transition to this goal and to prescribe democratic institutions under
which the goal would be achieved.” It was to be a Constitutional
Convention.
Similar legislation, he noted, “was considered by the
full House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 1960, 1966, and 1968, with
favorable reports in 1960 and 1968.” Congress even passed the resolution
in 1960, and spent money to send a delegation to Paris for such a
convention (though John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson ignored the
delegation’s recommendations).
This proposal had a great deal of
elite support. Nearly every presidential candidate from the 1950s to the
1970s supported it, as did hundreds of legislators in the U.S. and
Western Europe. The context of first World War II, and then the Cold
War, made such a proposal sound reasonable, even inevitable. 1971 was
the tail end of the post-World War II era, during which there had been a
frenzy of international institutional creation work designed to avoid a
repeat of the Great Depression and the two world wars. A large
multilateral military force formed of allied governments and millions of
soldiers of all nationalities had recently defeated the fascist powers
on three continents. Millions had an experience of international comity
in the defeat of the Axis Powers — so the concept of political union was
not so far-fetched.
Moreover, the specter of the failed
diplomatic and monetary initiatives of the 1930s haunted postwar
leaders, and caused them to think deeply and act decisively to weave
together a system whose core was the economic, military and political
interdependence of sovereign allies. The Depression was seen as a
phenomenon borne of a failed international system based on short-sited
nationalist objectives. Streit, the president of the International
Movement for Atlantic Union, breathlessly advocated for a union lest
history be repeated. A lack of a union would lead to a monetary crash,
and then crushing poverty. As circumstances changed, Streit’s
testimonials to Congress changed. Just after World War II, he noted that
Hitler’s appeal came from fascists arguing for political
totalitarianism under the slogan “you can’t eat freedom.”
He argued, consistent with the anti-communism of the time, that such a
union was the only way to beat the Soviet threat. Later, he pointed out
that union was important because with nuclear weapons at hand, the world
could not afford a repeat of pre-World War II foreign policy mistakes.
Then, as Bretton Woods began breaking down in the 1960s, he argued that a
1930s-style financial crash was inevitable without union.
Streit
and his fellow Atlanticists were pragmatic; they sought to build the
Atlantic Union on top of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or
NATO, the Atlantic military alliance. And there was momentum on the side
of the Atlanticists; the post-WWII international institution-building
was impressive. In 1944, officials from the U.S. and U.K. — primarily
John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White — worked at Bretton Woods to
create what would become the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank. These institutions were designed to avert a monetary crisis such
as the one that had occurred in the 1930s. The General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, was created in 1947, similarly, to avert a
trade war. The United Nations was constructed to do what the League of
Nations had not, to serve as a legitimate forum for nations of the world
to continuously deliberate. NATO could apply the united military
strength of the West. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development, or the OECD, served originally as a forum whereby the
United States could funnel aid to Europe to create the European Union.
And this is to say nothing of the collaborative Cold War spying
apparatus.
Faced with a Soviet threat, it seemed only natural to
think that the next step after all of this institution-building was an
Atlantic Union. Richard Nixon in 1966 supported the “Atlantic Union
resolution” as a “forward-looking proposal which acknowledges the depth
and breadth of incredible change which is going on in the world around
us.” President Dwight Eisenhower, upon leaving office, thought such a
trans-Atlantic union was inevitable, and argued it could cut massive
Cold War defense costs by half. Eugene McCarthy, just before entering
the presidential primary race against Lyndon Johnson (who did not
support the measure), cosponsored the resolution in the Senate. Bobby
Kennedy, George McGovern and Estes Kefauver were ardent believers. Even
Barry Goldwater supported it; Ronald Reagan was the only major national
figure in the Republican Party who opposed it, and Lyndon Johnson was a
significant opponent in the Democratic Party.
The far right hated
this idea. Gunthler Klincke of the Liberty Lobby called it a scheme for a
socialist world government, and Myra Hacker of a group called the
“American Coalition of Patriotic Societies,” said proponents of this
plan “distrust and despise the American citizen” and that it was a plan
for “national suicide.” Though the proposal for Atlantic Union has been
written out of liberal historical memory, there are echoes of this
episode in right-wing rhetoric about One World Government. The irony of
this is that, as liberals gently chuckle at right-wing paranoia about
what they perceive as an imagined plot to create a world government, it
is the conservatives who have a more accurate read on history. There was
a serious plan to get rid of American sovereignty in favor of a
globalist movement, and the various institutions the right wing hates —
the IMF, the World Bank, the U.N. — were seen as stepping stones to it.
Where the right wing was wrong is in thinking that this plot for a
global government was also a communist plot; it wasn’t, it was motivated
by anti-communism. The proponents of the Atlantic Union in fact thought
that this was the only way to defeat the USSR.
Streit explained
that uniting the countries of Western Europe and the United States would
“give their union a hand strong enough to win for peace peacefully, a
land that no combination of dictatorships could challenge — all four
aces and the joker. By this I meant: The ace of spades or productive
power; the ace of diamonds or raw material power; the ace of clubs, or
armed power; the ace of hearts, or moral power; and the joker — their
growing power, their ability to admit to this nuclear union of the free
other nations that desired to enter it, and were willing and able to
uphold its standards of liberty. These few freedom practicing peoples
needed only unite federally to” achieve it.
The question of
Atlantic Union, proposed in 1939, percolated as a catch-all answer to
Western foreign policy problems, until the 1970s. There were two basic
arguments for Atlantic Union. The architects of NATO and the OECD
believed that closer interdependence of nations in the non-Soviet “free
world” would isolate the USSR. And this same group recognized that the
Bretton Woods system, whereby the United States held most of the world’s
gold and operated its reserve currency, was breaking down as Western
European nations rebuilt their economies and as U.S. banks sought to
escape regulation domestically by parking dollars abroad in those newly
prosperous economies. Combining Western Europe and the U.S. into one
federal union with one currency and regulatory harmonization of
“interstate commerce” could avoid this “Eurodollar” problem.
A
formal Atlantic Union was not a realistic proposal, though it was not as
unimaginable as one might think — American support for the now-existing
European Union came from the same intellectual and political tradition.
The State Department, and politicians in power like Lyndon Johnson,
opposed global federalism. And as the years crept on, it became less and
less realistic. The World War II generation had idolized “Union Now” in
their youth, but they had to confront the failures of the war in
Vietnam and the global colonial project that Streit ignored (or worse,
embraced). The new political generation drew their inspiration not from
hoary pre-WWII tomes of global utopianism, with the implications of a
global rich white man’s club. As one New Left-influenced witness in the
1971 hearing put it, “The 1960′s revolution of political consciousness
within the United States means the rejection of Atlantic Union ideas or
alliance structures such as NATO in the seventies.”
But Atlantic
Union was an important part of the debate of how the postwar era would
be structured. Think about the debate as follows. On the right, you have
the Liberty League and the right-wing patriots, represented by
politicians like then governor of California Ronald Reagan. These people
wanted a return to an isolationist or hyper-nationalist model of
foreign relations. Then you had the mainstream State Department liberal
internationalists, the JFKs and LBJs, who built entangling institutions
like the IMF, the World Bank, the U.N. and so forth. Even further on the
globalist spectrum, you had the Atlantic Unionists. All three strands
echo, today. Consider Larry Summers, who in 2000 as treasury secretary
argued for allowing cheap Chinese goods into the U.S. as a way of
establishing “a fifth column for openness” in that country. Failure to
integrate China in the global system with trade concessions, he said,
would not only cut the average American’s paycheck, but would “make it
more likely his son will be in a war in Asia.” This Thomas
Friedman-esque “The World Is Flat” argument owes an intellectual debt to
Streit. Integrate, the case goes, or perish.
The formal concept
of Atlantica cracked under the weight of Vietnam and the coming
neoliberal revolution in finance. The United States didn’t maintain its
monopoly on stores of gold, as Nixon repudiated Bretton Woods in the
face of high inflation and monetary instability. But as first Jimmy
Carter, and then Ronald Reagan, deregulated the banking industry, global
capital flows once again became a reality. Only, global capital flows
just weren’t run by nation-states, as the Atlantic Unionists and liberal
internationalists imagined, they were run by institutions like
Citigroup and politically captured regulatory entities such as the
Federal Reserve.
Did the plan succeed?
The
institutional framework of a world government composed of Western
European and American states remains far more potent than we like to
imagine, even beyond the security apparatus revealed by Snowden’s
documents. For example, in every major free trade agreement since NAFTA,
U.S. courts have been subordinated to international tribunals, which
operate according to rules laid out either by the World Trade
Organization, a division of the World Bank, or by a division of the
United Nations known as UNCITRAL (the United Nations Commission on
International Trade Law). These tribunals rule on consumer, labor, and
environmental questions – not just trade. And they are trans-national,
much as the supply chains of Apple, Ford, Toyota, or any other
multi-national corporation are, or the technology that Google,
Microsoft, or IBM promote all over the world.
There are other deep
links. The Basil banking accords seek international harmonization of
capital standards. Why? It’s not clear what the benefits are of having
global standards for what banks should do. But the global elites push
onward, regardless, towards a one world solution. And lest one think
this is just theoretical, the Federal Reserve supported the European
Central Bank with unlimited swap lines during the financial crisis,
lending as much as $500B to the ECB in 2008 and 2009. European and other
foreign banks drew liberally from the New York Federal Reserve’s
discount window. The Fed became the central banker to the world.
Questions
of sovereignty still exists – as just one of many examples, the U.S.
still refuses to sign the Law of the Sea Treaty, which is a nod to the
Liberty League. But the history and reflexive embrace of globalism is
far more complicated than we want to admit. And it’s time to begin
grappling with the international architecture that we have. This means
recognizing that the Cold War involved constructing a “deep state” to
partially subordinate national sovereignty, and therefore, voting
populations, to transnational elites.
As the spying scandal, a
truly global scandal, continues, activists, citizens and journalists are
recognizing the powerful remnants of this Cold War-era global deep
state. The players in the scandal hop from country to country, some safe
zones and some not. The Guardian is a British newspaper, and is now
partnering with the New York Times, to keep the global intelligence
services at bay. Cyberspace is a new and strange transnational front
combining elements of war, trade, journalism, finance, activism,
surveillance and applied government power. The Syrian situation too is a
global security problem, with the French and the British tied to the
American political order. The American executive is finding himself
buffeted by British debates that should be irrelevant in a sovereign
state acting solely in its vital national security interests.
Streit
never achieved his goal of having a formal “Atlantic Union.” But with
an international “intelligence community,” globalized supply chains,
increasingly global free trade agreements that subordinate national
court systems, and globalized private and central banks, all couched
under the rubric of promoting “freedom,” he has as much claim to being
the true animating force behind what we’re facing today as anyone else.
Edited by WD
Art by WB7
No comments:
Post a Comment