For your amusement, here are a few reactions to Francis Fukuyama's recent declaration that he's no longer a neocon. Was he ever? was the question I found myself asking, but then, I remember when Michael Huffington was running for Senate and Arianna Huffington was the darling of the DC Republican/Conservative circuit & a girlfriend of mine and I shook our heads as we asked ourselves how people could think this woman was Conservative or in any way a serious person. But no one listened to us, and now look. But I digress.
Here's Joseph Knippenberg's take-down. In essence, Fukuyama has coverted to the Kerry position: foreign policy has to pass a "global test." Which isn't completely wrong --the Declaration pays "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." But it isn't an adequate answer either, as Knippenberg explains:
Nations pursue their own interests and presumably only consent to things that they regard as in their own interest. So long as there are conflicting national interests, legitimacy will be contested. Nations will disagree about what’s right and just. Legitimacy, then, would seem to be in the eye of the beholder. What we have are coalitions of the willing and of the unwilling. Why a particular institutional arrangement, or a particular international institution, would remedy this problem is not at all clear. Stated another way, it is likely always to be possible to find both a group of nations willing to support an action we take and a group to oppose it. Is our action then legitimate or illegitimate?
Is it merely opinion that makes a foreign policy action right? Or are there principles of justice to which we are properly bound?
The only way around the way in which this empty institutionalism or proceduralism confuses the issue of legitimacy is to appeal to some substantive principle of international justice, either the law of nations or the law of nature. To the extent that the former purports to limit the actions of sovereign states, it does so by either securing their consent or by appealing to a principle of justice (a law of nature) that ultimately doesn’t require their consent. But if there are principles of justice that don’t require consent to be valid and obligatory, then a nation is entitled to uphold and enforce them whether or not others agree.
Whatever one's opinion of the Iraq War, there's the matter of Oil-for-spoil & the post-tsunami Peace-keeper rapists. It's hard to understand how anyone could look back at the past three years and have an enhanced respect for international institutions.
Here's Gary Rosen's review of Fukuyama's book, in which he argues that Fukuyama's not at war with the neocons, but with himself.
