Yoo, Cerone and Alford Debate Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization

The Liberty Forum has just posted a debate on sovereignty in the age of globalization between John Yoo, John Cerone, and yours truly. Here’s a taste of the exchange, which I encourage you to read in its entirety.

From John Yoo’s post:

Globalization has led to (1) the explosive growth in international trade; (2) the swift creation of international markets in goods and services; (3) the easy movement of capital and labor across national borders; (4) the rise of major transnational networks, such as international drug cartels, international crime-fighting regimes, and international terrorism; and (5) the global effects of industrialization on the environment and global commons.

These profound changes present challenges to the American constitutional order because they give rise to international law and institutions that demand the transfer of sovereignty in response. To limit carbon emissions, proposed follow-ons to the Kyoto accords seek to regulate energy use throughout the world. To allow for the smooth movement of capital, nations must coordinate their regulatory controls on the financial industry. These multilateral treaty regimes seek to regulate private activity under the control of independent sovereign nations. They ask states to delegate lawmaking, law enforcement, or adjudication authority to bureaucracies, such as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, or the World Trade Organization, that operate along undemocratic lines and remain unaccountable to any nation.

These efforts at global governance create tension with American constitutional controls on state power…. Many scholars of international law argue that globalization’s demands justify abnormal powers for the federal government. Treaties on global warming or the environment, for example, should have a reach beyond the Constitution’s normal limits on the powers of Congress. International institutions like the WTO or the ICJ should enjoy the power to issue direct orders in the U.S. legal system, overcoming contrary policies at the state or even federal levels. States should have no voice in responding to globalization. Courts, as the least democratic branch, should play a primary role in incorporating global governance at home without the intervention of the elected branches of government.

These efforts aim at nothing less than the erosion of American national sovereignty….

While relatively young, the new forms and orders of global governance should sound a familiar note to students of the American administrative state. Just as innovative international regimes seek more pervasive regulation of garden-variety conduct, so too did the New Deal seek national control over private economic decisions that had once rested within the control of the states. The Kyoto accords had their counterpart in the federal government’s efforts to control the production of every bushel of wheat on every American farm in Wickard v. Filburn. The new international courts and entities have their counterparts in the New Deal’s commissions and independent bodies, created to remove politics from administration in favor of technical expertise. These international bodies, to remain neutral, must have officials who are free from the control of any individual nation. Similarly, the New Deal witnessed the creation of a slew of alphabet agencies whose officials could not be removed by the President. The New Deal’s stretching of constitutional doctrine sparked a confrontation between FDR and the Supreme Court, which kept to a narrower and less flexible vision of federal power and the role of administrative agencies during FDR’s first term. Similarly, in the absence of a theory that allows for an accommodation of international policy demands with the U.S. constitutional system, these new forms of international cooperation may well produce an analogous collision with constitutional law.

Like nationalization, globalization will inevitably call on us to reconsider the same fundamental questions: the proper scope of the federal government’s regulatory power; the balance of authority between the President and Congress; and the appropriate role of the courts. We may only belatedly realize the consequences of economic and social transformation on constitutional doctrine. The inability of international organizations to provide legitimacy commensurate with the scope of their delegated authority—when combined with the serious strains that their delegations place on the federal government’s own legitimacy—weigh strongly in favor of enforcing the Constitution’s formal processes for exercising public power. A formalist approach would confer the greatest possible level of political and popular acceptance because any consent to international law and institutions would then occur with the full extent of the Constitution’s legitimating force. Such an approach might require rejecting some delegations, but it would at least ensure the full measure of domestic political legitimacy to support those that survive.

From John Cerone’s post:

State sovereignty is the fundamental building block of the international legal system. International Law, much like the US Constitution, is at once an expression of, and self-imposed limitation upon, sovereignty. At the same time, international law is much less of a limitation on US sovereignty than is the US Constitution, and rightly so.

Today’s international legal system is a strongly positivist, consent-based system. In general, states are not bound by any rules of international law that they have not themselves created or otherwise consented to. While states have chosen to greatly expand the scope and substance of international law, most of its rules remain in the form of broadly formulated obligations that leave the manner of their implementation in the broad discretion of states.

The US has been a proponent of the development of international law since the founding of the country, and this is reflected in its constitutional order. The Constitution of the United States was not created in a vacuum. It was well understood by the framers that they were drafting the Constitution against the backdrop of international law. They consciously chose to buy into the international legal system because it was clearly advantageous to do so. They wanted recognition as a sovereign equal, and all of the rights and protections that international law provided to states.

The international legal system of that time was a system largely oriented toward co-existence, and was one of relatively few rules. Since that time, there has been a dramatic expansion in international law, driven largely by the need for international cooperation in tackling the world’s ills and in harnessing its opportunities. The United States has played a central and powerful role in this evolution. Successive US governments have consented to be bound by literally thousands of treaties, and have supported the creation of dozens of international institutions. The US also frequently engages in treaty negotiations even in situations where it is clear that the US will not become a party to the treaty being negotiated. The robust engagement of the US in this process results from the recognition that international law and international institutions are useful in serving US interests.

From Roger Alford’s post:

While there are legitimate concerns about a nascent global administrative state, one should recognize that treaties are rarely a threat to national sovereignty. Indeed, treaties should be seen as an expression of sovereign will to protect and advance our national interests.

Treaties are optional commitments, freely entered into by political actors in order to achieve mutually-beneficial results. Like contracts, the first principle of treaties is party autonomy.

Sovereign nations negotiate the terms of a treaty and ultimately decide whether or not to join a treaty. The United States, for example, was intimately involved in the drafting of the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, but ultimately decided not to become a member because the final text included unacceptable terms. The same could be said of dozens of other treaties….

Even after signing a treaty, sovereign nations attach reservations, understandings, and declarations (RUDs) that condition, interpret, and limit the impact of a treaty. The United States quite often will include a RUD stating that the treaty is not self-executing, or stating that the terms of a treaty are coterminous with our constitutional obligations.

When a nation does sign a treaty, its obligations are rarely permanent. Treaties frequently allow for member states to withdraw from a treaty, and almost always permit suspension of treaty obligations in the face of a breach by another member state.

All of these tools are designed to preserve sovereigns’ prerogative to protect the national interest. But it is not simply the formation and termination of treaties that are designed to protect sovereignty. The performance obligations of treaties also are drafted to protect national sovereignty.

Most human rights treaties, for example, include Optional Protocols that require a nation to affirmatively opt-in to international adjudication of domestic behavior. The same is true of the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. The WTO and many bilateral investment treaties have incorporated self-judging national security exceptions, essentially rendering key questions of national sovereignty non-justiciable political questions beyond the purview of international courts. The WTO also designed the dispute settlement process in a manner that anticipates the possibility that member states will rationally decide to engage in an efficient breach of their obligations….

In conclusion, we have little to fear from treaties. Treaties are hardwired to protect national sovereignty. The process of formation, performance and termination of treaties was designed to advance sovereign interests. Occasionally there are unanticipated consequences that flow from adherence to treaties, but these risks to sovereignty are manageable. Widespread adherence to treaties reflects a political calculus that the benefits of membership outweigh the costs.