Jonathan Delaney is a Professor of International Relations
and 20th Century History at Montgomery College, Maryland, and worked
within the Veterans Coalition for the McCain-Palin campaign. He is also
a former adviser to Conservative MEP Geoffrey Van Orden.
Forgive me for stating a truism, but we are living in an age of unprecedented internationalism. Having started early in the 19th century (with the 1814 Congress of Vienna) this process slow-burned until the 20th century, when, in the aftermath of two World Wars, support exploded as political leaders across the spectrum pledged their allegiance to this fledgling concept. From the IMF to the World Bank, from the GATT to the WTO, from the League of Nations to the UN, from the EU to the African Union, from ASEAN to MERCUSOR to NAFTA to CARICOM, there is not a single matter of import today that is not considered at the international level.
If your conspiracy theory sensor is starting to sound the alarm, then allow me to pull back from the edge and offer something more tangible. First, though, a clarification: international cooperation is vital. Unless we desire to become a hermit state akin to North Korea, there will always be a significant role for international organizations of the strictly intergovernmental kind. This is welcome. But the increasing trend towards supranationalism is not.
Let’s consider the case of the European Union. The precursor to the EU was the Economic Coal and Steel Community of 1952, established by France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The initial integration of six European countries was focused around the steel and coal sectors for a very precise reason: it was a technocratic first step, deliberately confined to this sphere to prove to European populaces that integration could produce beneficial results. This is the functionalist theory of integration, whereby spillover from the coal and steel sectors would then provide the impetus for further integration in related fields, now with added public approval.
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