What happened in Philadelphia

Didn't stay in Philadelphia

A quarter-millennium ago a bunch of guys in a room in Philadelphia took a leap of faith and declared that people should govern themselves. The idea wasn't original. The Greeks and the Romans had given it a try. The English were doing so within the guardrails of a monarchy. Most of the indigenous peoples of North America approximated it. But with the declaration of American independence, the inhabitants of British North America essayed to implement self-government on an unprecedentedly broad scale.

The experiment succeeded but not without problems. There were persistent tensions between different parties and tiers of government, and a catastrophic breakdown that resulted in the loss of several hundred thousand lives in civil war. For much of the quarter-millennium, self-government applied to but a minority of the American population. Recently Americans have grown discouraged by the fecklessness of Congress, their central institution of self-government.

The idea of self-government caught on in other countries, but by no means all. In the late twentieth century it seemed that democracy, the label by then applied to self-government within nations, was sweeping all before it. The appearance was deceiving. The democratic tide crested and began to ebb, in part because of an inherent conflict between self-government within nations and self-government between nations.

National sovereignty—essentially, self-government between nations—was an offspring of that same Philadelphia meeting. The American war for independence from Britain was followed by wars for independence by the American colonies of Spain, and eventually by wars for independence by nearly all colonies of all colonizing powers around the world. Enshrined in the charter of the United Nations at the end of World War II, sovereignty asserts that each country is the master of its own domain, in which no other countries can legitimately meddle.

This inter-national version of self-government experienced tensions not unlike those that afflicted domestic self-government. Some nations were better international citizens than others; even the best international citizens had interests that conflicted with those of other international citizens. Domestic self-government dealt with domestic problems by the most basic method of government: legitimate force. The United Nations attempted to construct something similar among nations. The UN Security Council could pass resolutions chiding member nations for misbehavior and summoning other members to undo the misdeeds. But the most powerful countries, including the United States, refused to be bound by resolutions they didn’t like and insisted on a veto power. The result was a half-baked system of international order that worked only in fits and starts.

When democracy was rapidly gaining ground a generation ago, the problems created by the postwar reverence for national sovereignty seemed tractable. Theorists in democratic countries convinced themselves that democracies were more peaceful than autocracies; war—the most obvious manifestation of international disorder—would soon become obsolete.

War ignored the theorists. As Russian democracy dissolved into autocracy, the country of the czars bullied its neighbors. China, which never joined the democracy trend, threw its weight around the South China Sea and reiterated its insistence that Taiwan was Chinese. The Middle East, where democracy was almost as scarce as in China, was wracked by violence, peaking for the present in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas.

The United States, a quarter-millennium after setting the two great trends in motion, finds itself in the middle of two wars—between Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and Hamas—and nearing the brink of a third, between China and Taiwan. At the center of each conflict are the questions of self-government and national sovereignty. Will Ukraine remain a sovereign nation, and will the Ukrainians be able to choose their government for themselves? The Palestinians are seeking self-government and national sovereignty; Israel, fearing for its safety if the Palestinians have their way, is opposed. Taiwan practices self-government without formally claiming national sovereignty; China is determined to prevent the latter and isn’t particular happy about the former.

Both democracy and national sovereignty are defended morally in terms of human rights, of which the most salient is equality. You have no right to order me around because I’m as good as you. Your country has no right to rule mine, because mine is as good as yours.

There is a fundamental conflict between these statements, though. What if my country has 300 million inhabitants and yours has 3 million? If equality is measured by people, my country should have a hundred times more say in international affairs than yours. But if equality is measured nation by nation, then your people have a hundred times more say per person than mine do.

Americans hammered out a compromise for themselves in their constitutional convention of 1787—also held in Philadelphia—creating a bicameral legislature in which people are represented equally in the House of Representatives and the states represented equally in the Senate. The United Nations made a gesture toward a similar compromise, with a Security Council controlled by the big nations and a General Assembly in which all nations are represented equally. Neither works perfectly, nor at times even very well. 

The problem is essentially irreconcilable. We humans are individuals, but we are also members of communities. We want both aspects of our identity to be recognized. 

To quote the political philosophers Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, "You can't always get what you want." We can hope for the rest of that lyric: that sometimes we get what we need.