John Fonte is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute Orbis/Summer 2002

Liberal Democracy vs. Transnational Progressivism: The Future of the Ideological

Civil War Within the West

by John Fonte

Nearly a year before the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, wire

service stories gave us a preview of the transnational politics of the future. It was reported on

October 24, 2000, that in preparation for the UN Conference Against Racism, about fifty

American nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) sent a formal letter to UN Human Rights

Commissioner Mary Robinson calling on the UN “to hold the United States accountable for the

intractable and persistent problem of discrimination” that “men and women of color face at the

hands of the U.S. criminal justice system.”1

The NGOs included the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Amnesty International-

U.S.A. (AI-U.S.A.), Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Arab-American Institute, National

Council of Churches, American Friends Service Committee, the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Mexican-American

Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the International Human Rights Law Group, the Lawyers

Committee for Civil Rights under Law, and others. Their spokesman, Wade Henderson, of the

Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, stated that the NGOs’ demands “had been repeatedly

raised with federal and state officials [in the United States] but to little effect. . . . In frustration

we now turn to the United Nations.”2 In other words, the NGOs, unable to enact the policies they

favored through the normal processes of American constitutional democracy-the Congress, state

governments, state courts, the federal executive branch, or even the federal courts-felt it necessary

to appeal to authority outside of American democracy and beyond its Constitution.

In the two weeks before September 11, from August 31 to September 7, 2001, the UN

World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance

was held in Durban, South Africa. The American NGOs listed above attended the conference

with financial support from the Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur, and Charles Stewart Mott

Foundations. At the conference the NGOs worked with delegates from African states that

supported “reparations” from Western nations as compensation for the transatlantic slave trade of

the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. American NGOs provided research assistance and helped

develop reparations resolutions that condemned only the West, without mentioning the larger

traffic in African slaves that were sent to the Islamic lands of the Middle East. In addition, the

NGOs endorsed a series of demands, including:

• U.S. acknowledgment of “the breadth and pervasiveness of institutional racism” that

“permeates every institution at every level.”

• A declaration that “racial bias corrupts every stage of the [U.S.] criminal justice process,

from suspicion to investigation, arrest, prosecution, trial, and sentencing.”

• Support and expansion of federal and state hate crimes legislation.

• Condemnation of opposition to affirmative action measures.

• U.S. recognition of an adequate standard of living as a “right, not privilege.”

• A statement deploring “denial of economic rights” in the United States.

1 Anthony Goodman, United Nations, Reuters, Oct. 24, 2000.

2 Ibid.

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• Promotion of multilingualism instead of “discriminatory” English-language acquisition

emphasis in U.S. schools.

• Denunciation of free market capitalism as a fundamentally flawed system.”3

Most importantly, the NGOs insisted that the United States ratify all major UN human rights

treaties and drop legal reservations to treaties already ratified. For example, in 1994 the United

States ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), but

attached reservations declaring that it did not accept treaty requirements “incompatible with the

Constitution.” The official State Department reservations memorandum specifically notes that the

CERD’s restrictions on free speech and freedom of assembly are incompatible with the First

Amendment. Yet leading NGOs including the HRW and AI-U.S.A. demand that the United

States drop all reservations and “comply” with the CERD treaty.4

On August 6, 2001, Reuters reported that the United States had presented its first

explanation of how it was implementing the CERD treaty to a UN committee. An NGO

representative from the Center for Constitutional Rights reportedly said that “Almost every

member of the UN committee raised the question of why there are vast racial disparities . . . in

every aspect of American life-education, housing, health, welfare, criminal justice.” A

representative from HRW declared that the United States offered “no remedies” for these

disparities, but “simply restated” its position by supporting equality of opportunity and indicating

“no willingness to comply” with CERD.5 (This would presumably mean the enactment of policies

resulting in statistical equality of condition for racial and ethnic minorities in education, housing,

health, welfare, criminal justice and the like.)

Indeed, to comply with the NGO interpretation of the CERD treaty, the United States

would have to turn its political and economic system, together with their underlying principles,

upside down-abandoning the free speech guarantees of the Constitution, bypassing federalism,

and ignoring the very concept of majority rule-since practically nothing in the NGO agenda is

supported by the American electorate.

The NGOs at the Durban conference exemplify a new challenge to liberal democracy and

its traditional home, the liberal democratic nation-state. These have always been self-governing

representative systems comprised of individual citizens who enjoy freedom and equality under

law and together form a people within a democratic nation-state. Thus, liberal democracy means

individual rights, democratic representation (with some form of majority rule) and national

citizenship. Yet, as the vignettes of the Durban conference (and myriad other conflicts of the past

four decades) demonstrate, all of these principles, along with the very idea of the liberal

democratic nation-state, are contested today in the West, suggesting that we have not reached the

“end of history” in the ideological sense delineated by Francis Fukuyama in his groundbreaking

1989 essay.6

Post-September 11

Three weeks after the September 11 attacks, Fukuyama stated in an article in the Wall

Street Journal that his “end of history” thesis remained valid twelve years after he first presented

it, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama’s core argument was that after the defeat

of communism and National Socialism, no serious ideological competitor to Western-style liberal

democracy was likely to emerge in the future. Thus, in terms of political philosophy, liberal

3 NGO demands listed in “Report of the U.S. Leadership Meetings on the World Conference Against Racism,” convened by Gay

McDougall, International Human Rights Group, 2001.

4 Reuters, AP, New York Times August 6, 2001 by Karen Iley on Yahoo! News.

5 Ibid

6 “The End of History?” National Interest, Summer 1989.

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democracy is the end of the evolutionary process. To be sure, there will be wars and terrorism,

but no alternative ideology with a universal appeal will seriously challenge the ideas and values

of Western liberal democracy as the “dominant organizing principles” around the world.

Fukuyama correctly points out that non-democratic rival ideologies such as radical Islam

and “Asian values” have little appeal outside their own cultural areas, but these areas are

themselves vulnerable to penetration by Western democratic ideas. The September 11 attacks

notwithstanding, “we remain at the end of history,” Fukuyama insists, “because there is only one

system that will continue to dominate world politics, that of the liberal-democratic West.” There

is nothing beyond liberal democracy “towards which we could expect to evolve.” Fukuyama

concludes by stating that there will be challenges from those who resist progress, “but time and

resources are on the side of modernity.”7

Indeed, but is “modernity” on the side of liberal democracy? Fukuyama is probably right

that the current crisis with the forces of radical Islam will be overcome, and that, at the end of the

day, there will be no serious ideological challenge originating outside of Western civilization.

However, the activities of the NGOs suggest that there already is an alternative ideology to liberal

democracy within the West that for decades has been steadily, and almost imperceptibly,

evolving.

Thus, it is entirely possible that modernity.thirty or forty years hence.will witness not

the final triumph of liberal democracy, but a new challenge to it in the form of a new

transnational hybrid regime that is post-liberal democratic, and in the context of the American

republic, post-Constitutional and post-American. I will call this alternative ideology

“transnational progressivism.” This ideology constitutes a universal and modern worldview that

challenges in theory and practice both the liberal democratic nation-state in general and the

American regime in particular. The aftermath of September 11 provides the possibility of a

resurgence by the forces of traditional nation-centered liberal democracy. But before addressing

this possibility, it is necessary to examine in detail the theory and practice of “transnational

progressivism.”

Transnational Progressivism

The key concepts of transnational progressivism could be described as follows:

(1) The ascribed group over the individual citizen. The key political unit is not the

individual citizen, who forms voluntary associations and works with fellow citizens regardless of

race, sex, or national origin, but the ascriptive group (racial, ethnic, or gender) into which one is

born. This emphasis on race, ethnicity, and gender leads to group consciousness and a

deemphasis of the individual’s capacity for choice and for transcendence of ascriptive categories,

joining with others beyond the confines of social class, tribe, and gender to create a cohesive

nation.

(2) A dichotomy of groups: Oppressor vs. victim groups, with immigrant groups

designated as victims. Influenced (however indirectly) by the Hegelian Marxist thinking

associated with the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and the Central European

theorists known as the Frankfurt School, global progressives posit that throughout human history

there are essentially two types of groups: the oppressor and the oppressed, the privileged and the

marginalized. In the United States, oppressor groups would variously include white males,

heterosexuals, and Anglos, whereas victim groups would include blacks, gays, Latinos (including

obviously many immigrants), and women.

7 Francis Fukuyama, “History Is Still Going Our Way,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 5, 2001.

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Multicultural ideologists have incorporated this essentially Hegelian Marxist “privileged

vs. marginalized” dichotomy into their theoretical framework. As political philosopher James

Ceaser puts it, multiculturalism is not “multi” or concerned with many groups, but “binary,”

concerned with two groups, the hegemon (bad) and “the Other” (good) or the oppressor and the

oppressed. Thus, in global progressive ideology, “equity” and “social justice” mean strengthening

the position of the victim groups and weakening the position of oppressors-hence preferences for

certain groups are justified. Accordingly, equality under law is replaced by legal preferences for

traditionally victimized groups. In 1999, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

extended antidiscrimination protection under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to illegal

immigrants.

(3) Group proportionalism as the goal of “fairness.” Transnational progressivism

assumes that “victim” groups should be represented in all professions roughly proportionate to

their percentage of the population or, at least, of the local work force. Thus, if women make up 52

percent and Latinos make up 10 percent of the population, then 52 percent of all corporate

executives, physicians, and insurance salesmen should be women and 10 percent should be

Latinos. If not, there is a problem of “underrepresentation” or imbalance that must be rectified by

government and civil society. Thomas Sowell recently wrote-as he has for several decades-that

many Western intellectuals perpetually promote some version of “cosmic justice” or form of

equality of result.8 The “group proportionalism” paradigm is pervasive in Western society: even

the U.S. Park Service is concerned because 85 percent of all visitors to the nation’s parks are

white, although whites make up only 74 percent of the population. Therefore, the Park Service

announced in 1998 that it was working on this “problem.”9

(4) The values of all dominant institutions to be changed to reflect the perspectives of the

victim groups. Transnational progressives in the United States (and elsewhere) insist that it is not

enough to have proportional representation of minorities (including immigrants, legal and illegal)

at all levels in major institutions of society (corporations, places of worship, universities, armed

forces) if these institutions continue to reflect a “white Anglo male culture and world view.”

Ethnic and linguistic minorities have different ways of viewing the world, they say, and these

minorities’ values and cultures must be respected and represented within these institutions. At a

1998 U.S. Department of Education conference promoting bilingual education, SUNY professor

Joel Spring declared, “We must use multiculturalism and multilingualism to change the dominant

culture of the United States.” He noted, for example, that unlike Anglo culture, Latino culture is

“warm” and would not promote harsh disciplinary measures in the schools.10

(5) The Demographic Imperative. The demographic imperative tells us that major

demographic changes are occurring in the United States as millions of new immigrants from non-

Western cultures and their children enter American life in record numbers. At the same time, the

global interdependence of the world’s peoples and the transnational connections among them will

increase. All of these changes render the traditional paradigm of American nationhood obsolete.

That traditional paradigm based on individual rights, majority rule, national sovereignty,

citizenship, and the assimilation of immigrants into an existing American civic culture is too

narrow and must be changed into a system that promotes “diversity,” defined, in the end, as group proportionalism.

(6) The redefinition of democracy and “democratic ideals.” Since Fukayama’s treatise,

transnational progressives have been altering the definition of “democracy,” from that of a system of majority rule among equal citizens to one of power sharing among ethnic groups composed of both citizens and non-citizens. For example, Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda wrote in

8 Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice (Free Press, 1999).

9 John Leo, “Long on Diversity Division,” Washington Times, May 21, 1998.

10 In Jorge Amselle, “Reverse Imperialism,” National Review, Oct. 12, 1998.

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the Atlantic Monthly in July 1995 that it is “undemocratic” for California to exclude noncitizens, specifically illegal aliens, from voting. Former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)

general counsel Alexander Aleinikoff, declaring that “[we] live in a post-assimilationist age,”

asserted that majority preferences simply “reflect the norms and cultures of dominant groups” (as

opposed to the norms and cultures of “feminists and people of color”).11 James Banks, one of

American education’s leading textbook writers, noted in 1994 that “to create an authentic

democratic Unum with moral authority and perceived legitimacy the pluribus (diverse peoples)

must negotiate and share power.”12 In effect, Banks said, existing American liberal democracy is

not quite authentic; real democracy is yet to be created. It will come when the different “peoples”

or groups that live within America “share power” as groups.

(7) Deconstruction of national narratives and national symbols. Transnational

progressives have focused on traditional narratives and national symbols of Western democratic

nation-states, questioning union and nationhood itself. In October 2000, the British government sponsored Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain issued a report that denounced the

concept of “Britishness” as having “systemic . . . racist connotations.” The Commission, chaired

by Labour life peer Lord Parekh, declared that instead of defining itself as a nation, the UK

should be considered a “community of communities.” One member of the Commission explained that the members found the concepts of “Britain” and “nation” troubling. The purpose of the Commission’s report, according to the chairman Professor Parekh, was to “shape and restructure the consciousness of our citizens.” The report declared that Britain should be formally “recognized as a multi-cultural society” whose history needed to be “revised, rethought, or jettisoned.”13

In the United States in the mid-1990s, the proposed “National History Standards,”

reflecting the marked influence of multiculturalism among historians in the nation’s universities,

recommended altering the traditional narrative of the United States. Instead of emphasizing the

story of European settlers, American civilization would be redefined as a “convergence” of three

civilizations-Amerindian, West African, and European-the bases of a hybrid American

multiculture. Even though the National History Standards were ultimately rejected, this core

multicultural concept that that United States is not primarily the creation of Western civilization,

but the result of a “Great Convergence” of “three worlds” has become the dominant paradigm in

American public schools.

In Israel, adversary intellectuals have attacked the Zionist narrative. A “post-Zionist”

intelligentsia has proposed that Israel consider itself multicultural and deconstruct its identity as a

Jewish state. Tom Bethell has pointed out that in the mid-1990s the official appointed to revise

Israel’s history curriculum used media interviews to compare the Israeli armed forces to the SS

and Orthodox Jewish youth to the Hitler Youth. A new code of ethics for the Israel Defense

Forces eliminated all references to the “land of Israel,” the “Jewish state,” and the “Jewish

people,” and, instead, referred only to “democracy.” Even Israeli foreign minister Simon Peres

sounded the post-Zionist trumpet in his 1993 book, The New Middle East, where he wrote that

“we do not need to reinforce sovereignty, but rather to strengthen the position of humankind.” He

called for an “ultranational identity,” saying that “particularist nationalism is fading and the idea

of a ‘citizen of the world’ is taking hold. . . . Our ultimate goal is the creation of a regional

community of nations, with a common market and elected centralized bodies,” a type of Middle

Eastern EU.14

11 Alexander Alienikoff, “Citizens, Aliens, Membership and the Constitution,” Constitutional Commentary 7, 1990, p. 30.

12 James Banks, “Transforming the Mainstream Curriculum,” Educational Leadership, May 1994, p. 4.

13 Philip Johnston, “Straw Wants to Rewrite Our History, Electronic Telegraph, Oct. 10, 2000.

14 Quotes from Tom Bethell, “The Cultural Wars in Israel,” paper prepared for Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies

conference on “Israel: The Advanced Case of Western Afflictions,” Washington, D.C., Dec. 15, 1997; David Remnick, “The Dreamer,”

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(8) Promotion of the concept of postnational citizenship. “Can advocates of postnational

citizenship ultimately succeed in decoupling the concept of citizenship from the nation-state in

prevailing political thought?” asks Rutgers Law Professor Linda Bosniak.15 An increasing

number of international law professors throughout the West are arguing that citizenship should be denationalized. Invoking concepts such as inclusion, social justice, democratic engagement, and human rights, they argue for transnational citizenship, postnational citizenship, or sometimes global citizenship embedded in international human rights accords and “evolving” forms of transnational arrangements.

These theorists insist that national citizenship should not be “privileged” at the expense

of postnational, multiple, and pluralized forms of citizenship identities. For example, the Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace, under the leadership of its president, Jessica Tuchman

Mathews, has published a series of books in the past few years “challenging traditional

understandings of belonging and membership” in nation-states and “rethinking the meaning of

citizenship.”16 Although couched in the ostensibly neutral language of social science, these

essays from scholars from Germany, Britain, Canada, and France, as well as the United States,

argue for new, transnational forms of citizenship as a normative good.

(9) The idea of transnationalism as a major conceptual tool. The theory of

transnationalism promises to be for the first decade of the twenty-first century what

multiculturalism was for the last decade of the twentieth century. In a certain sense,

transnationalism is the next stage of multicultural ideology-it is multiculturalism with a global face. Like multiculturalism, transnationalism is a concept that provides elites with both an

empirical tool (a plausible analysis of what is) and an ideological framework (a vision of what

should be). Transnational advocates argue that globalization requires some form of transnational

“global governance” because they believe that the nation-state and the idea of national citizenship

are ill suited to deal with the global problems of the future. Academic and public policy

conferences today are filled with discussions of “transnational organizations,” “transnational

actors,” “transnational migrants,” “transnational jurisprudence,” and “transnational citizenship,”

just as in the 1990s they were replete with references to multiculturalism in education,

citizenship, literature, and law.

Many of the same scholars who touted multiculturalism now herald the coming

transnational age. Thus, at its August 1999 annual conference, “Transitions in World Societies,”

the same American Sociological Association (ASA) that promoted multiculturalism from the late

1980s to the mid-1990s featured transnationalism. Indeed, the ASA’s then-president, Professor

Alejandro Portes of Princeton University, argued that transnationalism is the wave of the future.

He insisted that transnationalism, combined with large-scale immigration, would redefine the

meaning of American citizenship. University of Chicago anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has

suggested that the United States is in transition from being a “land of immigrants” to “one node in

a postnational network of diasporas.”17

It is clear that arguments over globalization will dominate much of early twenty-first

century public debate. The promotion of transnationalism as both an empirical and normative

concept is an attempt to shape this crucial intellectual struggle over globalization. The adherents

of transnationalism create a dichotomy. They imply that one is either in step with globalization,

and thus with transnationalism and forward-looking thinking, or one is a backward antiglobalist.

New Yorker Jan. 7, 2002; and Yoram Hazony, “The End of Zionism?” Azure Summer 1996. On post-Zionism in general see Yoram

Hazony, The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul (Washington, D.C. and New York: New Republic/Basic Books, 2000)

15 Linda Bosniak, “Citizenship Denationalized,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Spring 2000, p. 508.

16 See T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglass Klusmeyer, ed, From Migrants to Citizens: Membership in a Changing, World

(Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 200); and T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer, ed.,

Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001).

17 In Linda K. Kerber, “The Meaning of Citizenship,” Dissent, Fall 1997, p.36.

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Liberal democrats (who are internationalists and support free trade and market economics) must

reply that this is a false dichotomy-that the critical argument is not between globalists and

antiglobalists, but instead over the form Western global engagement should take in the coming

decades: will it be transnationalist or internationalist?

Transnational Progressivism’s Social Base: A Post-National Intelligentsia

The social base of transnational progressivism could be labeled a rising postnational

intelligentsia, the leaders of which include many international law professors at prestigious

Western universities, NGO activists, foundation officers, UN bureaucrats, EU administrators,

corporation executives, and practicing politicians throughout the West. The postnational

intelligentsia is an eclectic group but it would include an identifiable group of thinkers and actors.

• British “third way” theorist Anthony Giddens, who declared that he is “in favor of

pioneering some quasi-utopian transnational forms of democracy” and “is strongly

opposed to the idea that social justice is just equality of opportunity.” 18 Giddens writes

that “the shortcomings of liberal democracy suggest the need to further more radical

forms of democratization.” Instead of liberal democracy, Giddens, using the language of

Juergen Habermas, posits a “dialogic democracy” with an emphasis on “life politics,”

especially “new social movements, such as those concerned with feminism, ecology,

peace, or human rights.”19

• Italian Marxist theorist Toni Negri (who clearly knows his Gramsci) and Duke University

Literature Professor Michael Hardt, the authors of the best-selling book Empire, lauded

by the New York Times as the “next big idea.” In Empire, Negri (a jailed former associate

of the terrorist Italian Red Brigades) and Hardt (his former student) using Marxist

concepts such as the “multitudes” i.e., “the masses” vs. the Empire attack the power of

global corporations and, without being overly specific, call for a new form of “global” or

transnational democracy.

• University of Chicago philosophy professor Martha Nussbaum, who called for

reinvigorating the concept of “global citizenship” and denounced patriotism as

“indistinguishable from jingoism” in a debate several years back that set off a wide

ranging discussion among American academics on the meaning of patriotism, citizenship,

and the nation-state.20

• Strobe Talbot, former undersecretary of state, who wrote when he was an editor of Time

magazine in the early 1990’s that he was optimistic that by the end of the twenty-first

century “nationhood as we know it will be obsolete: all states will recognize a single

global authority. . . . All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to

changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at

any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary.” He characterizes the

devolution of national sovereignty “upward toward supranational bodies” and

“downward toward” autonomous units is a “basically positive phenomenon.”21

Complementary to this general (and diffuse) sentiment for new transnational forms of governance

is the concrete day-to-day practical work of the NGOs that seek to bring the transnational visionto fruition. When social movements such as the ideologies of “transnationalism” and “global

18 Kevin Davey, “Left Renewal,” New Times (UK), June 1999.

19 Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 2, 14-19, 90–91.

20 see Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitianism,” Boston Review, Oct.-Nov. 1994.

21 Strobe Talbot, “The Birth of the Global Nation,” Time, July 20, 1992, pp. 70–71.

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governance” are depicted as the result of “social forces” or the “movement of history,” a certain

impersonal inevitability is implied. However, in the twentieth century the Bolshevik Revolution,

the National Socialist Revolution, the New Deal, the Reagan Revolution, the Gaullist national

reconstruction in France, and the creation of the EU and its predecessor organizations were not

inevitable, but were the result of the exercise of political will by elites who mobilized their

strength and defeated opponents.

Similarly, “transnationalism,” “multiculturalism,” and “global governance,” like

“diversity,” are ideological tools championed by activist elites, not “forces of history.” The

success or failure of these values-loaded concepts will ultimately depend upon the political will

and effectiveness of these elites.

Facing popular resistance on issue after issue, a wide range of American NGOs seek to bypass the normal democratic process to achieve their political ends by extra- or postconstitutional means, demanding that the United States:

• join the International Criminal Court;

• ratify the UN Convention on Women’s Rights;

• drop reservations to the UN treaty against racial discrimination;