The Case For Humanity (Part I)

“We needn’t regard internationalism as a failed or misguided project, which the 20th century demonstrated was destined for the ash heap of history. Rather we should regard it as our first, clumsy, and tentative steps towards establishing a more complete global union.”

Introduction

“…a nation is not an idea only of local extent, and individual momentary aggregation; but it is an idea of continuity, which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space. And this is a choice not only of one day, or one set of people, not a tumultuary and giddy choice; it is a deliberate election of ages and of generations; it is a constitution made by what is ten thousand times better than choice, it is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil, and social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time. It is a vestment, which accommodates itself to the body. Nor is prescription of government formed upon blind, unmeaning prejudices—for man is a most unwise and a most wise being. The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.”

Edmund Burke

The period immediately following the Second World War was characterized by the emergence of a huge number of international institutions. The League of Nations gave way to the United Nations and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The European Economic Community formed in 1957, which eventually evolved into the European Union in 1993. These institutions birthed a number of important international institutions and rules, from the European Court of Human Rights to the Schengen area. This inspired the formation of other international unions, such as the African Union in 2001. The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials spurred the imagination of many human rights advocates, who imagined that they could create a world where even the most powerful heads of state could be held accountable for their crimes. The fruits of their efforts produced the various international tribunals in the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Rwanda, and finally the International Criminal Court in 2002.

More significantly still, the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement gave rise to the serious argument that the international economy itself could be moderated and directed to the benefit of all. The consequence of this was the rise of international financial and economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. These institutions were never free of controversy. But despite various slips and slides, many believed that they were a sign of things to come. In an increasingly interconnected and globalizing environment, internationalism was the only way forward. Concurrent with these developments was a growing belief in the universal rights of all human beings: that regardless of the state one belonged to, all individuals were entitled to a certain level of treatment by states and private officials. This moral universalism, some might say “utopianism,” quickly became the subject of both great hope and tremendous scorn.