Doctrinal Unilateralism and Its Limits: America and Global Governance in the New Century.

Abstract

This chapter assesses the shift toward American unilateralism during the first administration of President George W. Bush and what it means for global governance. I am not interested in routine unilateral acts, which are a standard practice of states, especially when taken in self-defense. The particular form of unilateralism that concerns me here is the doctrinal belief that the use of American power abroad is entirely self-legitimating, requiring no recourse to the views or interests of others, and permitting no external constraints on its self-ascribed aims. By global governance, in turn, I mean the constellation of treaty-based and customary international law, shared norms, institutions and practices by which the international community as a whole seeks to manage its common affairs. Are America and global governance on a collision course? If so, how did that come to be? And what are the consequences - for the U.S., and for the rest of the world? I have two aims in this chapter. First, I want to place the resurgence of American doctrinal unilateralism into its historical and conceptual contexts, in the hope that doing so will help us to understand it better. Second, I want to argue that, despite the vast power asymmetries that exist between the United States and the rest of the world, especially in the military realm, it isn't as easy as it may seem at first blush for the U.S. to sustain such a unilateralist posture today. One major reason, ironically, is the success of America's own post-World War II strategy of creating an integrated global order, inhabited by a diversity of state and non-state actors, and based on the animating principles, if not always the practice, of democracy, the rule of law, and multilateralism. Thus, the United States is locked in a struggle today not only with its allies and other states, but also with the results of its own creation and in that sense, with its own sense of self as a nation.