The International Community And Trans-National Establishments

From The New Ledger:

International Community and the Transnational Establishmentby Benjamin Kerstein








One of the strangest terms in common use today is “the international community.” It is used endlessly, invoked as a moral arbiter, and proclaimed a transcendent ideal. But no one seems to have the slightest idea what it actually means, and it is regularly employed in so many different ways that arriving at a meaning would probably be impossible. It is probably long since time for the term to be retired, since it is essentially undefinable, and thus inherently misleading, but it is useful in that it points us toward the existence of a phenomenon which has been remarked upon before but never fully defined. Put simply, without anyone really intending to, and in some cases against the better judgment of all involved, we now find ourselves living in a world that is profoundly guided and influenced by an “international community” of a certain kind, one that would perhaps be better described as a Transnational Establishment.



“The Establishment,” like “the international community,” is a supremely popular and much abused term, but it is based on a fairly insightful analysis of power and the way power manifests itself. It was coined by a pugnacious British journalist Henry Fairlie, who wrote in 1955,



By the “Establishment,” I do not only mean the centres of official power—though they are certainly part of it—but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised. The exercise of power in Britain (more specifically, in England) cannot be understood unless it is recognized that it is exercised socially.



Fairlie realized something that goes beyond the British context he was describing. Namely, that power and the exercise of it is not merely a political and economic phenomenon, but also—perhaps primarily—a social phenomenon. Quite often, he realized, power is achieved, maintained and exercised socially, and not politically and economically. One need not be rich, titled, smart, or elected in order to be part of the Establishment and thus to take part in its power. One simply had to be socially accepted within its ranks.



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Fairlie, it should be noted, was careful in his use of the term. In its abused form, “the Establishment” refers to a secret, all-powerful cabal that rules illegitimately from behind the scenes. This was not what he meant. And indeed, simple common sense reveals readily enough that, in reality, our world is a mosaic of various Establishments, rising and falling, competing against each other and amongst themselves. Establishments, as Foucault once said of power, are everywhere.



They are also probably inevitable. Human beings, as even the most ancient observers of the species noted, are social animals, and they have tendencies to form associations and thus, inevitably, hierarchies. And ultimately, the bonds of friendship and personal sympathy within these associations are just as, if not more, important than the ideological, religious, or economic interests they share.But there is something about the Establishment generally referred to as the “international community” that is new. Put simply, the Transnational Establishment is new in that it is genuinely transnational. In fact, the term “transnational” may, in and of itself, ultimately prove to be redundant, since the primary defining factor of the phenomena is that nation and national borders are irrelevant to it.



One can point, of course, to previous international organizations: the great organized religions, the Freemasons, the Red Cross, the League of Nations, etc. But for the most part, these organizations were closed unto themselves. They did not constitute, in other words, an “international community.” This came about only after World War II, with the founding of the United Nations and its various subsidiary organizations. Previous to this, international relations had always been those between nation-states and empires. After it, international relations began to be defined by self-sustaining and autonomous institutions. These organizations were, of course, made up of the people who ran and worked for them, and as they inevitably grew and multiplied, they began to constitute an entity that existed and exists of its own momentum and on its own behalf. As Colm Brogan, in response to Fairlie, wrote of the British Establishment, “A small group which quite readily admits valuable outsiders and maintains a fringe of hangers-on is all that really matters. They are England versus the rest.” What we are seeing now is a similar phenomenon, except now they are “the international community” versus the rest.



During the Cold War, the development of this new Establishment was somewhat truncated and stunted. International relations were, for the most part, defined by a bipolar rivalry between two superpowers. The end of this rivalry, however, and the coming of a “unipolar world,” allowed the new Establishment to come into its own for the first time. While it is popular to see the immediate post-Cold War era as one dominated by the United States; it was in reality one of vast confusion and to some extent indifference to international relations. The US swung between intervention and isolation, while the rest of the world looked to its own interests and wondered where everything was heading in the absence of a defining conflict. Even 9/11 did not really redefine things, although it gave an added impetus and urgency to those seeking to do so.



Ironically, it was precisely this vacuum created by the end of the Cold War which allowed the new Establishment to both come into its own and to become truly transnational in nature. With the nation-states in disarray, the only real power left on an international scale was the one whose internationalism was its raison d’etre. The new Establishment, unlike everybody else, could not ignore the international realm, because, by definition, it had no other. Thus, while the Transnational Establishment appeared to be losing power to a dominant United States, it was actually consolidating itself and its influence, and as a result, significantly magnifying its power. This situation was similar to what Fairlie described in regard to the post-World War II British establishment,



The spread of the “Establishment’s” influence is due partly to the increase in the number of official and semi-official bodies… and partly to the apparent diminution in the formal powers of the “Establishment” which has made people less suspicious of the actual power and influence which its members exercise.



The parallel becomes clear when one considers that on issues like human rights, the environment, world poverty and development, women’s rights, racism, and numerous others, the word of the Transnational Establishment has essentially come to be accepted as something like a divine pronouncement. These issues are overwhelmingly defined, influenced, and acted upon by NGOs, the UN and its subsidiary organizations, ad-hoc international gatherings like the G8, and various other institutions, almost all of which are by definition transnational. More importantly, the same people compose most of these groups, they travel in the same social circles, and recognize each other as sharing a social kinship.



A good example of this was given by Hillel Neuer, the director of UN Watch, in an article he wrote for the periodical Azure. In examining the career of Human Rights Council Advisory Committee member Jean Zeigler—an outspoken political extremist who has defended Hamas and Hezbollah, among other similar organizations, and kept a longtime relationship with the Khaddafi regime in Libya—Neuer explains how such a man has managed to retain so many prestigious positions at the United Nations and other international organizations,



UN diplomats prefer a certain measure of vice over bad publicity for the world body as a whole, leading them to indulge even the most problematic conduct by their peers. To be a UN diplomat is to be a member of an exclusive club that has the potential to reward loyalty with lucrative jobs and benefits from an array of interconnected foundations and organizations. This practically requires that members “go along to get along”—or face the loss of their professional future.



This indicates both the force that binds any Establishment together, i.e. social advantage; and why such phenomena are often inherently problematic. It is true that an Establishment, per se, may not be a bad thing, but all of them have a tendency toward insularity, nepotism, and inevitably, a certain amount of corruption. Fairlie quoted William Cobbett on the subject, who said, “THE THING exists for the sake of its members, not for ours.”



This tendency manifests itself not only in the circling of wagons around dubious members, but also in the specific ways the Establishment chooses to exercise its powers. Many critics have asked such questions as why the UN appears to be obsessed with condemning Israel while essentially ignoring Darfur and only reluctantly interdicting Iran; why the international community appears suddenly obsessed with solving global warming while refusing to embrace nuclear power, the only currently viable alternative to fossil fuels; or why an NGO like Human Rights Watch accepts funding from human rights violators. The answer is that such actions are not motivated by logic, reason, statistical evidence, science, or pragmatic assessment. They are motivated by the culture of the Establishment. As such, they are emotionally and socially driven, and cannot be expected to be rational or, at times, even explicable. Like Fairlie’s post-war British Establishment, they can only be understood if they are understood as an essentially social phenomenon.



As already stated, there have always been Establishments of one sort or another. But the nature of this particular Establishment raises some questions that have not been raised by its predecessors. In determining whether an Establishment is good or bad, it is usually best to ask whether it upholds the values of the society that encompasses and, to a great extent, protects it. When an Establishment ceases to uphold these values, opposes them, or abandons all values as a result of a slide into decadence, a society is entitled to seek its replacement.



In the case of a genuinely Transnational Establishment, however, this is simply impossible. By definition, such an Establishment is encompassed by no society, and can uphold no particular values. It can continue for a time on the basis of vague universalist principles, but as its power increases, it will be forced to apply these values to particular situations, and because the Establishment lacks, indeed refuses, any specific principles, this must always be a purely arbitrary process. The only means, then, of ascertaining the good or ill of a situation will be recourse to the social mores and interests of the Establishment itself, and these will inevitably be in contradiction to the interests of those outside of it. By definition, then, a Transnational Establishment exists and can only exist for the sake of itself.



It may be, then, that a Transnational Establishment is doomed from the outset. It may avoid corruption so long as it is largely impotent, but once it acquires real power – apparent or not – its decline is quite precipitous. Nonetheless, the Transnational Establishment is here, and it is not going away so long as, ironically, the nation-states that fund it and provide it with the proper and necessary deference continue to see it as necessary. For various reasons, the emergence and consolidation of such an Establishment was probably inevitable; but the question of whether this was for good or for ill is one that all of us whose lives are, to some degree, influenced by it, ought to consider.



Benjamin Kerstein is Senior Writer for The New Ledger.