May 31, 2008
"Bogus world brotherhood"
Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian, Once, 'international' sounded saintly. Now it means bureaucracy and waste...(Thanks to Orrin)
Gazing briefly at the Eurovision song contest this week I could not rid my mind of a quite different image, that of Nato's multilateral force headquarters in Kabul. There was the same flag-waving and confusion of purpose, the same small-state rivalry and cynical balancing of interests. There was the same belief that, simply by being international, a so-called community of nations was forged.
For Eurovision and Nato, read the Olympics and Burma, read the Moscow cup final and Darfur. Read the European parliament, Fifa, the World Bank, the Organisation of African Unity, the European parliament. I was brought up to regard "international" as synonymous with saintly. It was a concept to supplant the rude nationalism of the 20th century in a worldwide concord of peace, ruled by a clerisy of selfless bureaucrats; Dag Hammersköld out of Albert Schweitzer.
Today the word "international" suggests tailored suits, tax-free salaries, white Land Cruisers and Geneva. The Eurovision contest is run by the European Broadcasting Union with 400 staff in Switzerland, with no risk of oversight or reform. It takes after the International Olympics Committee, which now charges its host taxpayers $20-30bn for two weeks of extravaganza in the name of bogus world brotherhood...
Read it all; there's lots to appall.
But Jenkins is wrong on one point. Actually, "internationalism" was bogus from the beginning. It was never an "ideal" that was corrupted. The UN was, from its very founding, supported by Leftists because it would hinder and limit the United States of America, and would hurt Western Civilization. Millions of ordinary people bought into the "ideal," and imagined something noble, (Lots still do, despite evidence) but it was always a lie. And it was always intended to thwart what was truly noble, our working to spread freedom and capitalism and—most importantly, democracy, to the masses of this planet.
"Internationalism" is always about elites running things without accountability to voters.
Posted by John Weidner at May 31, 2008 08:03 AMMeh. I think your last paragraph over-reaches, John.
"Internationalism" was NOT everywhere and at all times a plot to cripple the United States and the cause of freedom. Firmly patriotic people such as Joseph Grew, our ambassador to Japan from 1932 to 1942, were internationalist in the sense that they believed (and not without reason) in the workings of diplomacy and of the League of Nations to make the world a better, safer place.
Now, if you want to argue that internationalism (since 1945 or so, at least) was in the beginning tainted by socialism, and has in more recent years been consumed by the totalitarian desires of leftists and their fellow-travelers-- well, you'll get no argument from me.
Posted by: Hale Adams at May 31, 2008 08:12 PMDiplomacy is not, in itself, internationalism. And it was not unreasonable back then to imagine that the League might be useful. Much like people now speculate that a "league of democracies" might work in a way the UN has not. (I'm doubtful, myself. Ad hoc initiatives of the Anglosphere are, I suspect, the only "internationalism" that will ever accomplish much.
Perhaps the big difference then was that the US was not clearly a super-power, though obviously we were potentially one. We weren't such a threat to the Left. I suspect that our make-over of Germany Italy and Japan into bourgeois democracies was what really shocked the international Left. They couldn't really condemn this, but it probably gave them a sort of "A specter is haunting Planet Earth" feeling. Today the Bundesrepublik, tomorrow.......Iraq.
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