For Liberty to Survive, Globalism Must Be Defeated!
One of the great political sleights of hand of the post-war era has been the assumption that political authority becomes more enlightened as it becomes more distant from the people subjected to it. Local government is regarded as parochial, national government as dangerously nationalistic, while international government is supposedly enlightened, humanitarian and progressive. Move power far enough away from ordinary voters, place it in the hands of international organisations, treaty bodies, conferences, courts, NGOs and unelected experts, and somehow power itself is expected to become virtuous. There is no good reason to believe this, and J.B. Shurk, writing in American Thinker, makes the provocative argument that today's internationalists increasingly resemble the imperialists of earlier ages. His point need not be taken to mean that the United Nations or European Union is literally equivalent to the Roman Empire or Napoleon's conquests. The methods and institutions are obviously different. The deeper point concerns political power. Humanity has spent centuries struggling to constrain rulers, yet much of the post-war political order has simultaneously encouraged authority to migrate upward, farther from the individuals whose lives it regulates. That creates a fundamental problem for liberty.
The nation-state is certainly capable of tyranny, and the twentieth century demonstrated that beyond dispute. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, Maoist China and numerous lesser dictatorships showed what happens when governments acquire enormous power while individual liberty collapses. But the lesson should have been that concentrated and unaccountable power is dangerous. Instead, an influential strand of post-war political thought drew a different conclusion: nationalism itself was the problem. From this perspective, nations generated rivalry, rivalry produced conflict, and conflict produced war. The solution therefore seemed obvious. Nations should progressively surrender portions of their sovereignty to international institutions capable of regulating disputes and imposing common rules.
There was considerable logic behind the original project. After two catastrophic world wars, mechanisms for preventing another conflict were understandably attractive. International agreements governing aviation, shipping, telecommunications, trade and innumerable technical matters can be extremely useful, and countries obviously must cooperate. Few serious critics of globalism propose abolishing diplomacy, international trade or treaties. International cooperation is not the problem. Globalism becomes a problem when cooperation evolves into governance and governance becomes increasingly insulated from democratic correction. Two sovereign countries agreeing upon reciprocal rules remain sovereign countries. Their governments can renegotiate the agreement, withdraw from it or be removed by their voters. A supranational political structure possessing regulatory authority over populations is something different. The greater the distance between the decision-maker and the citizen, the more difficult democratic accountability becomes.
Political freedom requires more than occasionally holding elections. It requires a realistic connection between the governed and those exercising power over them. Citizens must be capable of identifying who made a decision, opposing it, organising against it and ultimately removing the people responsible. The nation-state is imperfect at all these things, but at least the machinery exists. An Australian who dislikes Canberra's policies can vote against the government. Political parties can campaign to reverse those policies. Parliament can repeal legislation and governments can fall. But what does the ordinary Australian voter do about an international bureaucracy? Who exactly does he vote out?
This democratic deficit becomes particularly important when international institutions move beyond coordinating relations between sovereign governments and begin shaping domestic policy. Climate policy, migration, public health, financial regulation, trade, environmental standards, digital regulation and human-rights law increasingly involve networks of international agreements, expert bodies and bureaucratic institutions. Each individual arrangement may be defensible, but the cumulative effect deserves much greater scrutiny. Decision-making moves upward while accountability becomes increasingly diffuse. National politicians can then perform an extraordinary political trick when voters object: governments point towards international obligations and explain that they are merely implementing agreements, while international organisations point back towards member governments that supposedly consented to those agreements. Everyone possesses some authority, yet nobody seems entirely responsible. That is not an ideal architecture for liberty.
There is also an important historical mistake in treating nationalism itself as synonymous with totalitarianism. Love of country does not logically entail dictatorship, and national sovereignty does not require racial supremacy, militarism or conquest. A nation can be intensely patriotic while maintaining constitutional government, freedom of speech, private property and individual rights. Indeed, some of history's most successful liberal democracies developed within strong national cultures. The crucial distinction is therefore not nationalism versus internationalism, but accountable versus unaccountable power. A small government can oppress, a national government can oppress, an empire can oppress and an international institution can oppress. Political authority does not acquire moral purity merely by crossing a border. The question must always remain the old liberal question: who possesses power, how much power do they possess, and what can ordinary people do when that power is abused?
Globalism becomes particularly dangerous when combined with a managerial philosophy that regards political questions as technical problems to be resolved by experts. Once this occurs, democratic disagreement itself begins to look like an obstacle. The people voted incorrectly, the public has been misinformed, experts know better, international commitments must be honoured, markets require certainty, the science is settled and the issue is supposedly too important to be left to populism. Any one of these propositions may occasionally contain some truth, but collectively they can become a philosophy for removing increasingly large areas of human life from democratic contest. This is precisely backwards. The more consequential a decision is, the stronger the case for democratic accountability.
Immigration provides perhaps the clearest example. Immigration changes labour markets, housing demand, infrastructure requirements, population size and potentially the cultural character of a country. Reasonable people can disagree strongly about the appropriate level, but the prior question is who possesses the moral authority to decide. Surely the people who constitute the political community have some special claim to determine who joins that community and in what numbers. Borders are therefore not merely arbitrary lines drawn on maps. They mark the boundaries within which democratic communities exercise political authority. Destroy the significance of borders while transferring authority upward and eventually the fundamental political unit ceases to be a self-governing people and becomes an administrative territory.
This is why the erosion of national sovereignty should concern traditional liberals as much as conservatives. Classical liberalism was built upon suspicion of power. Government had to be constrained because rulers, however noble their rhetoric, were human beings. Constitutions divided authority, parliaments controlled taxation, courts protected rights and elections allowed rulers to be removed. Global managerialism risks reversing that achievement by creating levels of authority increasingly difficult for ordinary citizens to influence. The defence of national sovereignty is therefore not necessarily a rejection of the outside world. Nations can trade, form alliances, exchange scientific knowledge, cooperate against crime, establish common technical standards and defend one another without dissolving their political independence.
Australia can cooperate closely with Japan without becoming part of a supranational Japanese-Australian government. Britain and America maintained one of history's closest alliances without abolishing their separate parliaments. Cooperation does not logically require political consolidation, just as opposition to globalism need not mean hostility towards foreigners. One can value other peoples while believing they should govern themselves. Indeed, genuine international diversity requires nations capable of remaining different. A world in which every country is progressively subjected to identical regulations, identical economic assumptions, identical migration policies and an increasingly homogeneous elite political culture is not particularly diverse at all. It is homogenisation on a planetary scale.
There is a final irony in all this. Globalism is frequently presented as the successor to imperialism, the peaceful alternative to powerful states imposing their will upon weaker peoples. Yet the principle of national self-determination historically developed partly as a rebellion against empire. The Poles wanted to govern Poland, the Indians wanted to govern India and the Irish wanted to govern Ireland. Colonial peoples throughout the twentieth century insisted that distant rulers, however sophisticated they considered themselves, had no inherent right to govern populations thousands of kilometres away. Self-government was regarded as liberation. Why should that principle suddenly become disreputable when Western citizens invoke it in defence of their own sovereignty?
The answer cannot simply be that today's international administrators are wiser or more virtuous than yesterday's imperial administrators. Every governing elite in history has possessed elaborate explanations for why its rule serves the greater good. Liberty requires something stronger than assurances of benevolent intention: it requires limits upon power. The nation-state is no guarantee of freedom, and nationalism can certainly become destructive when transformed into authoritarianism or aggressive expansionism. But constitutional nation-states possess one indispensable advantage: they provide a political space within which a defined citizenry can govern itself and hold its rulers responsible. That space should not casually be surrendered.
The great political struggle of the coming decades may therefore not be between international cooperation and isolation, because that is a false choice. The real struggle will concern whether sovereign democratic peoples continue to possess ultimate authority over their own political destinies. Countries can cooperate without surrendering themselves. They can trade without erasing borders. They can welcome newcomers without abandoning control over immigration. They can enter alliances without submitting domestic life to permanent external administration. Most importantly, citizens can remain citizens rather than becoming subjects of an increasingly remote global managerial system.
Shurk is right to force the issue because the central lesson of the twentieth century was not that the nation itself is evil. It was that enormous concentrations of political power are dangerous to human freedom, and that lesson applies above the nation-state just as surely as it applies within it. If liberty is to survive, globalism in the sense of unaccountable supranational rule must therefore be defeated. That does not mean defeating international friendship, diplomacy, trade or voluntary cooperation among nations. What must be defeated is the idea that self-government is an obsolete inconvenience and that decisions once belonging to citizens should progressively migrate beyond their reach. Liberty cannot survive indefinitely when political power moves somewhere the voter cannot follow.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/08/globalism-must-be-vanquished/
