Governar o mundo?: uma idea liberal-utopista - book review

The Old, New World Order
Yascha Mounk
The Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2012

Over the course of the 19th century, the idea of a global government so powerful that it would make nations all but obsolete took hold of the European mind. Futurist writers like Felix Bodin in France and George Griffith in England popularized the notion that a single world order was "the only possible solution of the human problem," as H.G. Wells later put it. But unrealistic dreams bred exaggerated fears. Soon pessimists were convinced that powerful international institutions would usher in global despotism.

In "Governing the World: The History of an Idea," Mark Mazower gives a splendid account of these and other utopian dreamers and their adversaries. In his telling, the era of international government started after the Napoleonic wars. Prince Metternich, Austria's foreign minister, realized that the victorious forces of the old order needed to band together to contain revolutionary fervor. So he designed the "Concert of Europe," a kind of mutual-aid society for morose monarchies.

Enlarge Image

Governing the World

By Mark Mazower

(Penguin, 475 pages, $29.95)

Radicals of all stripes loathed the Concert's aims yet were inspired by its internationalism. A nascent peace movement hoped that a better set of institutions might do away with war. In England, Richard Cobden, a Radical member of parliament, argued that free trade would enrich every corner of the globe. Meanwhile, Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian unifier, dreamed of a "brotherhood" of democratic, independent nations. These were partially competing visions. Even so, they were all important influences on the two most ambitious international institutions mankind has known: the League of Nations and the United Nations.

Mr. Mazower's intellectual history of world government is highly compelling. But his book's greatest merit is the author's treatment of the practical realities of the U.N. He gives clear-minded attention to a crucial, oft-neglected question: What real impact have international organizations had on the world? His answer implicitly challenges both the realist and liberal camps in international relations.

Many realists consider international organizations mere sound and fury. Powerful nations, they say, care about their ability to enforce their interests on the battlefield, not about the deliberations of a feckless body like the U.N.'s General Assembly. But this skepticism, Mr. Mazower argues, is hardly borne out by history. Even at the height of the Cold War, American leaders were loath to be isolated at the U.N. What's more, multilateral institutions have helped the United States influence its own allies: Over the past two decades, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have remade the international economic order much more radically than the White House could have done on its own.

In ascribing real importance to the U.N., Mr. Mazower's account dovetails with that of many liberal scholars. Yet, unlike them, he thinks that the U.N.'s influence is rather more sinister than meets the eye. He notes that many of the U.N.'s key features, like the veto held by the five permanent members of the Security Council, were designed to favor the winners of World War II. Going a big step further, he argues that we should see the partisan interests of the West lurking behind the high-minded, seemingly neutral language of documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Far from constraining the actions of the world's high and mighty, the U.N. has proved to be "a vital instrument for Washington in its pursuit of global power."

If this focus on the dark side of international norms and institutions is another of the book's strengths, it is also responsible for some of its greatest weaknesses. According to Mr. Mazower, for example, the 19th-century origins of international law were deeply influenced by a self-serving, arbitrary distinction between civilized and uncivilized nations—one that had the not-so-subtle aim of justifying Europe's brutal rule over its colonies. This is no doubt right. But to conclude that the fledging discipline of international law "translated into the massacres, aerial bombings, and systematic detentions that characterized European imperialism" is to put the cart before the horse.

Such exaggerations are particularly troubling because they prepare the ground for some contemporary conclusions. After the U.N.'s failure to stop genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the General Assembly in 2005 adopted the so-called Responsibility to Protect, a resolution that obliges the international community to stop genocide even when it is taking place inside a sovereign state. Most human-rights activists applauded. But Mr. Mazower writes off the Responsibility to Protect as a ploy to erode the sovereignty of weaker nations. So, while U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hailed the West's intervention in Libya as the first real-world application of this new norm, Mr. Mazower was reminded of "Fascist Italy's cynical rationalization of its invasion of Ethiopia." The Responsibility to Protect, he concludes, is nothing other than "the old ghost of the standard of civilizations."

Great powers will always be tempted to twist international law to serve their own ends. Even so, Mr. Mazower's extreme comparisons obfuscate as much as they reveal. To equate a norm designed to protect vulnerable populations with a legal standard that was created to exploit them doesn't just play loose with history; it is also a curiously self-satisfied way to shove aside, in the name of anti-colonialist clairvoyance, our moral duty to prevent genocide.

"Universalism," Mr. Mazower concludes, "is in the eye of the beholder." But this is too extreme—and too easy—a lesson to draw. Though supposedly universalist norms have often been invoked in bad faith, it is not always impossible to distinguish just from unjust laws, or to extract colonialism from humanitarian intervention. Unless we resign ourselves to total moral relativism, there is little alternative to striving for relations between states that are governed by universal rules. Early enthusiasm about the emancipatory promise of world government now seems hopelessly naive. But the imperative to build an order capable of safeguarding peace and protecting individual rights has hardly become less urgent.

Mr. Mounk is a doctoral student in political theory at Harvard University and the founding editor of the Utopian.