I think the public discourse in America still oppose the 1960s and the idea of a broad welfare state that takes care of everyone’s needs and look to the government to solve everything for us. Instead, our politics still seem to favor tax cuts and smaller governments. Even today, in regards to the debate around coronavirus and the response to the pandemic, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump thought that the Federal Government should be in charge of opening and closing businesses nationwide. The Federal Government did not try to take charge of who gets the vaccine and when. Instead, the States are the ones who decide in these questions. Because of that diversity, there are states such as Texas and Florida that are allowing business and schools to be more open during the coronavirus epidemic. Then there are States, like California, which have been more draconian in their lockdowns. I think Americans still respond to the argument that individual liberty depends on having a restrained government. We may still fight over its size at the margins, but we are still not talking about going back to the welfare state of the 1960s either.
You made an interesting point about the issue of internationalization of major public policy questions. Is it fair to say that the current era somehow reflect a struggle between globalism and localism?
Yes and it is actually happening much faster in Europe. According to progressive theory, when you have international problems like global warming, drug trafficking or trade flows then the level of government that address these issues has to be the same power and size. If climate change is global, then the effective solution must come from power exercised at the supranational level. The European Union is trying to pull power from the nation states upwards far more than this occurs in the United States.
The conservative view opposes these supranational solutions because it sees it as pulling apart the nation state and diluting its sovereignty.
I think this goes back to the original question about Trump. Even though Trump may not have thought about it in these terms, I think he was trying to conserve the sovereignty of the nation state rather than allowing it to be pulled upwards to the international level or to a supranational government.
The American Revolution was a revolution by a nation state against a multinational empire, the British Empire. The original idea behind the Revolution was that government close to the people is more responsible to the people and the exercise of the sovereignty of the people has to be close to home. Since there is something different about each nation, the borders drawn on maps are not irrational. The next step of the Wilsonian idea of bureaucracy is to create a very large international bureaucracy at a supranational level because problems are increasingly global. In contrast to this view, a sovereignty-based approach holds that nation states are the most important actors. They should cooperate to tackle global problems but they should never cede their sovereignties to anybody else.
Since you mentioned the period when Americans are revolting against a multinational British empire, I am wondering whether this case is now the other way around and Brexit was a signal against the EU that aspires to become an empire…
I wrote a book about this dilemma several years ago titled Taming Globalization: International Law, the U.S. Constitution, and the New World Order. I addressed the constitutional problems raised by transferring governmental powers beyond nation states. This problem looms large in many countries of the West. Hungary is facing it too as well as other Central and Eastern European countries. And this problem of course was raised by Brexit in the United Kingdom. On the one hand, there are efforts to create a supranational government in the European Union. On the other hand, you see a reaction by nation states to protect their sovereignty. I think scholars and international bureaucrats sometimes say that nation states are inconvenient since they represent an irrational attachment to history, to people, and to land. In my view, however, the nation state is still the only effective actor in the world affairs.
There is a reason that people are attached to their nations.
I do think that Brexit and Trump both expressed the reassertion of nation state sovereignty.
There are several cracks among the Member States of the European Union. These cracks have become increasingly visible in the past decade that brought a crises period to Europe. How do you see these cracks from overseas?
Different countries see the EU in different ways and from different perspectives. Given the horrors of WWII, the reaction of Western European countries was to place less trust in their national governments. They might say that we are not Italians or Germans but Europeans instead. However, if you are Eastern European the experience is quite different. People in Central and Eastern Europe lived under one international totalitarian ideology after another: first fascism and then Communism.
There, nation states were the protectors of the people in Central and Eastern Europe
from the totalitarian ideologies.
How do you see the outcome of these different approaches as well as the future of Europe?
Some of the Founders of the European Union wanted integration to lead to a European super state. Frankly, I do not see that happening. Why should each people, such as the Hungarians, Poles, and British want to lose its individual historical distinctiveness and cultural uniqueness in order to merge into a great European superstate. I think the better outcome is a system where nations cooperate on certain matters such as a unified market or external defense.
The problem with the EU is that it uses the internal common market as an excuse to extend its powers into other areas, which are not necessary related to a free market.
It would seem to me that having a European system where the nations states still control most of everyday life is still best. That would also preserve healthy competition between States and the right live based on your attachment to your country. One lesson of the American experience is that decentralizing regulatory powers among competing States closer to the people better protects individual liberty.