Global Progressive elites have been busy in recent years deconstructing the traditional narratives and national symbols of Western democratic nation-states. In October 2000, the British government-sponsored Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain issued a report that denounced the concept of "Britishness" as having "systemic.racist connotations." The Commission, chaired by Labour life peer Lord Parekh, declared that instead of defining itself as a nation, the UK should be considered a "community of communities." One member of the Commission explained that the members found the concepts of "Britain" and "nation" troubling. The purpose of the Commission's report. according to the chairman Professor Parekh, is to "shape and restructure the consciousness of our citizens." The report declared that Britain should be formally "recognized as a multi-cultural society," whose history needs to be "revised, rethought, or jettisoned."

In the United States in the mid 1990s, the proposed "National History Standards," reflecting the marked influence of multiculturalism among historians in the nation's universities recommended altering the traditional narrative of the United States. Instead of a Western nation formed by European settlers, American civilization is described as a "convergence" of three civilizations, Amerindian, West African, and European that created a "hybrid" American multi-culture. Even though the National History Standards were ultimately rejected, this core multicultural concept that that United States is not primarily the creation of Western Civilization, but the result of a "Great Convergence" of "three worlds" has become the dominant paradigm in American public schools.

In Israel, adversary intellectuals have attacked the Zionist narrative. A "post-Zionist" intelligentsia has proposed that Israel consider itself "multicultural" and deconstruct its identity as a Jewish state. In the mid-1990s the official appointed to revise Israel's history curriculum used media interviews to compare the Israeli armed forces to the SS and Orthodox Jewish youth to the Hitler Youth. A new code of ethics for the Israel Defense Forces eliminated all references to the "land of Israel," the "Jewish state," and the "Jewish people," and, instead, referred only to "democracy." Even the current Foreign Minister of Israel, Simon Peres sounded the post-Zionist trumpet in his 1993 book, The New Middle East, calling on Israelis to live without borders and take up an "ultranational" (i.e. supranational) identity. His "ultimate goal," Peres insisted, included the creation of a regional community of nations with "elected centralized bodies," as well as a common market, a type of Middle Eastern EU. In Peres' formulation, the State of Israel (and thus traditional Israeli democracy) would ultimately be transformed into a new hybrid post-national regime.

(8) Promotion of the concept of Post-National Citizenship.

"Can advocates of postnational citizenship ultimately succeed in decoupling the concept from the nation-state in prevailing political thought?" asks Rutgers Law Professor Linda Bosniak. An increasing number of international law professors throughout the West are arguing that citizenship should be "denationalized." In the name of "inclusion," "social justice," "democratic engagement," and "human rights," they argue for "transnational citizenship," "postnational citizenship" or sometimes "global citizenship" embedded in international human rights accords and "evolving" forms of transnational arrangements. These theorists insist that national citizenship should not be "privileged" at the expense of postnational, multiple, and pluralized forms of citizenship identities. For example, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, under the leadership of its President, Jessica Mathews, has published a series of books in the past few years on "challenging traditional understandings of belonging and membership" in nation-states and "rethinking the meaning of citizenship." Although couched in the ostensively neutral (and often ponderous) language of social science, these essays from scholars from Germany, Britain, Canada, and France, as well as the U.S., argue for new and "evolving" transnational forms of citizenship as a normative good.

(9) The Idea of Transnationalism as a major conceptual tool.

The theory of transnationalism promises to be for the first decade of the 21st century what multiculturalism was for the last decade of the 20th century. In a certain sense, transnationalism is the next stage of multicultural ideology-it is multiculturalism with a global face. Like multiculturalism, transnationalism is a concept that provides elites with both an empirical tool (a plausible analysis of what is) and an ideological framework (a vision of what should be). Transnational advocates argue that globalization requires some form of transnational "global governance" because they believe that the nation-state and the idea of national citizenship are ill suited to deal with the global problems of the future. Academic and public policy conferences today are filled with discussions of "transnational organizations," "transnational actors," "transnational migrants," "transnational jurisprudence," and "transnational citizenship," just as in the '90s they were replete with references to multiculturalism in education, citizenship, literature, and law.

Many of the same scholars who touted multiculturalism now herald the coming transnational age. Thus, at a recent conference, the same American Sociological Association (ASA) that promoted multiculturalism from the late 1980s to the mid-'90s now featured transnationalism. Indeed, the ASA's then-president, Professor Alejandro Portes, argued that transnationalism is the wave of the future. Combined with large-scale immigration , transnationalism will redefine the meaning of American citizenship, he insists. The distinguished University of Chicago anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has suggested that the United States is in transition from being a "land of immigrants" to "one node in a postnational network of diasporas."

It is clear that arguments over globalization will dominate much of early 21st century public debate. The promotion of transnationalism as both an empirical and normative concept is an attempt to shape this crucial intellectual struggle over globalization. The adherents of transnationalism create a dichotomy. They imply that one is either in step with globalization, and thus with transnationalism and forward-looking thinking, or one is a backward anti-globalist. Liberal democrats (who are internationalists and support free trade and market economics) must reply that this is a false dichotomy-that the critical argument is not between globalists and anti-globalists, but instead over the form Western global engagement should take in the coming decades: will it be transnationalist or internationalist?

THE SOCIAL BASE OF TRANSNATIONAL PROGRESSIVISM:
A POSTNATIONAL INTELLIGENTSIA -

The social base of global progressivism could be described as a rising post-national intelligentsia. Defining "intelligentsia" in the broadest sense it includes three elements: (1) the producers of ideas and concepts, (2) the popularizers or publicists of ideas and values, and (3) the practitioners who implement ideas and values at all levels. This could include anyone from a Western government official to an elementary school teacher. One need not be particularly intelligent to a member of an intelligentsia. A Kindergarten teacher pushing the crudest form of multiculturalism could be conceived as belonging to what John O'Sullivan calls the "lumpenintelligentsia."

Leaders in the post-national intelligentsia would include many international law professors at prestigious Western universities, activists in non-governmental organizations (NGOs), foundation officers, UN bureaucrats, EU administrators, corporation executives, and practicing politicians throughout the West. The post-national intelligentsia is an eclectic group but it would include the following thinkers and actors.

. British "Third Way" theorist Anthony Giddens, who declared that he is, "in favor of pioneering some quasi-utopian trans-national forms of democracy." Giddens writes: "The shortcomings of liberal democracy suggest the need to further more radical forms of democratization." Instead of liberal democracy, Giddens (using the language of Juergen Habermas) posits a, "dialogic democracy," with an emphasis on "life politics," especially "new social movements , such as those concerned with feminism, ecology, peace, or human rights." Giddens also declares that he "is strongly opposed to the idea that social justice is just equality of opportunity."

. Italian Marxist theorist Toni Negri (who clearly knows his Gramsci) and Duke University Literature Professor Michael Hardt are the authors of the best-selling book Empire, lauded by the New York Times as the "next big idea." In Empire, Negri (a jailed, former associate of the terrorist Italian Red Brigades) and Hardt (his former student) using Marxist concepts such as the "multitudes" i.e., "the masses" vs. the Empire attack the power of global corporations and, without being overly specific, call for a new form of "global" or transnational democracy.

. University of Chicago Philosophy Professor, Martha Nussbaum calls for reinvigorating the concept of "global citizenship" and denounces patriotism as "indistinguishable from jingoism" in a debate several years back that set off a wide ranging discussion among American academics on the meaning of patriotism, citizenship, and the nation-state.

. The late Carl Gerstacker, the legendary chairmen of the board of Dow Chemical in the 1960s and 1970s expressed the libertarian strand of transnationalism when he declared, "I have long dreamed of buying an island owned by no nation and of establishing the World Headquarters of the Dow Company on the truly neutral ground of such an island, beholden to no nation or society."

. Strobe Talbot, former Undersecretary of State, when he was an editor of Time magazine wrote that he was optimistic that by the end of the 21st century "nationhood as we know it will be obsolete: all states will recognize a single global authority.All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary." Further, he declares that the devolution of national sovereignty "upward toward supranational bodies" and "downward toward" autonomous units is a "basically positive phenomenon."

Complementary to this general (and diffuse) sentiment for new transnational forms of governance is the concrete day to day practical work of the NGOs that seek to bring the transnational vision to fruition. When social movements such as the ideologies of "transnationalism" and "global governance" are depicted as the result of "social forces" or the "movement of history," a certain impersonal inevitability is implied. However, in the 20th century the Bolshevik Revolution, the National Socialist Revolution, the New Deal, the Reagan Revolution, the Gaullist national reconstruction in France, and the creation of the European Union and its predecessor organizations were not inevitable, but were the result of the exercise of political will by elites who mobilized their strength and defeated opponents.

Similarly, "transnationalism," like "multiculturalism" and "global governance," like "diversity," are not "forces of history" but ideological tools, championed by activist elites. The success or failure of these values-loaded concepts will ultimately depend upon the political action and political will of these elites contrasted to the political actions and the political will of their opponents: the forces of the liberal democratic nation-state.

On issue after issue, a wide range of Western NGOs are attempting to achieve political ends that they would not be able to achieve through the normal democratic process. They do so by going outside the liberal democratic framework, using extra-constitutional or post-constitutional means. These issues include:

. the International Criminal Court

. the UN Convention on Women's Rights

. reservations on the UN treaty against racial discrimination

. policing United States borders

. implementation of affirmative action legislation

. imposition of the death penalty

. the Kyoto Treaty on global warming

. legal rights of non-citizens in a constitutional regime

THE NGOs

The major NGOs supporting transnational progressivism include:

. Amnesty International USA

. Human Rights Watch

. Oxfam

. American Friends Service Committee

. American Civil Liberties Union

. Leadership Conference on Civil Rights

. Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund

. NAACP

. National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium.

. National Council of Churches, USA

. International Human Rights Law Group

Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights under Law