It is significant, but little noticed, that many of same NGOs (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International) and international law professors who have advocated transnational legal concepts at UN meetings and in international forums are active in U.S immigration and naturalization law. On this front the global progressives have pursued two objectives: (1) eliminating all distinctions between citizens and non-citizens and (2) vigorously opposing attempts to assimilate immigrants into the "dominate Anglo culture."

Thus, Louis Henkin, one of the most prominent scholars of international law when discussing immigration/assimilation issues attacks "archaic notions of sovereignty" and calls for largely eliminating "the difference between a citizen and a non-citizen permanent resident" in all federal laws. Columbia University international law professor Stephen Legomsky argues that dual nationals in influential positions (who are American citizens) should not be required to give "greater weight to U.S. interests, in the event of a conflict" between the United States and the other country, in which the American citizen is also a dual national.

Two leading law professors (Peter Spiro from Hofstra, who has written extensively in support of NGOs, and Peter Schuck from Yale) complain that "since 1795" immigrants seeking American citizenship are required "to renounce 'all allegiance and fidelity' to their old nations." In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, they advocate dropping this "renunciation clause" from the Oath. They also reject the concept of the hyphenated American and prefer what they call the "ampersand" individual. Thus, instead of thinking of a traditional Mexican-American who is a loyal citizen, but proud of his ethnic roots, they prefer immigrants (or migrants) who are both "Mexican & American," who retain "loyalties" to their "original homeland" and vote in both countries, thus ignoring the solemn Oath of Renunciation and Allegiance.

University Professor Robert Bach was the author of a major Ford Foundation report on new and "established residents" (the word "citizen" was assiduously avoided) that advocated the "maintenance" of ethnic immigrant identities, supported "non-citizen voting," and attacked assimilation (suggesting that homogeneity not diversity "may" be the "problem in America.") Bach later left the Ford Foundation and became deputy director for policy at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in the Clinton Administration, where he joined forces with then INS general counsel T. Alexander Alienikoff, to promote a pro-multicultural, anti-assimilation federal policy. Alienikoff, a former (and current) immigration law professor, has characteristically declared, "we need to move beyond assimilation."

It has been well-documented (through Congressional hearings and investigative reporting) that the financial backing for this anti-assimilationist campaign has come primarily from the Ford Foundation, which in the 1970s made a conscious decision to fund a Latino rights movement based on advocacy-litigation and group rights rather than on civic assimilation. On this front, the global progressives have been aided if not always consciously, certainly in objective terms, by a "transnational right." It was a determined group of transnational conservative Senators and Congressmen that prevented the Immigration Reform legislation of 1996 from reducing unskilled immigration. The same group worked with progressives to block the implementation of a computerized plan to track the movement of foreign visitors in and out of the United States. Whatever their ideological, commercial, or political motives, the constant demand for "open borders" and "free movement" of people as well as goods by the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages and by certain commentators, lobbyists, and activists on the transnational right has strengthened the anti-assimilationist agenda of the global progressives.

THE EUROPEAN UNION AS A STRONGHOLD
OF TRANSNATIONAL PROGRESSIVISM

Whereas ideologically driven NGOs represent a subnational challenge to the values and policies of the liberal-democratic nation-state, the European Union is a large supranational macro-organization that to a considerable extent embodies transnational progressivism, both in governmental form and in substantive policies. The governmental structure of the EU is post-democratic. Power in the EU principally resides in the European Commission and to a lesser extent the European Court of Justice. The European Commission is the EU's executive. It also initiates legislative action, implements common policy, and controls a large bureaucracy. The EC is composed of a rotating presidency, nineteen commissioners chosen by the member-states and approved by the European Parliament. It is unelected and, for the most part, unaccountable. A White Paper put out by the European Commission suggests that this unaccountability is one of the reasons for its success: "The original and essential source of the success of European Integration is that the EU's executive body, the Commission, is supranational and independent from national, sectoral, or other influences." This "democracy deficit" is constantly lamented, particularly by the Germans who have proposed greater power to the European parliament, but, at this stage, the issue remains and represents a moral challenge to EU legitimacy.

The substantive polices advanced by EU leaders both in the Commission and the European Court of Justice are based on the global progressive ideology of group rights discussed earlier that promotes victim groups over "privileged" groups and eschews the liberal principle of treating citizens equally as individuals. Thus, statues on "hate speech," hate crimes," "comparable worth" for women's pay, and group preferences are considerably more "progressive" and less "liberal" (in the traditional meaning of the term) in the EU, than in the United States. At the same time, the European Court of Justice has overruled national parliaments and public opinion in nation-states by ordering the British to incorporate gays and the Germans to incorporate women in combat units in their respective military services. The European Court of Justice even struck down a British law on corporal punishment declaring that parental spanking is internationally recognized as an abuse of human rights

A group of what Undersecretary of State John Bolton has referred to as "Americanist" (as opposed to "Globalist") thinkers have emphasized the vastly different philosophical and ideological foundations of the American liberal democratic regime and the European Union. Two Washington lawyers, Lee A. Casey and David B. Rivkin, Jr., argue this position forcefully in a recent article ("Europe in the Balance: The Alarmingly Undemocratic Drift Of the European Union") in Policy Review (June & July 2001). Casey and Rivkin note that in the American "philosophical and constitutional traditions the question in determining whether any particular model of government is a democracy is whether the governed choose their governors? in practice as well as in theory." On the other hand, they see in the European Union, ".the reemergence of a pre-Enlightenment pan-European ideology that denies the ultimate authority of the nation-state, as well as the transfer of policymaking authority from the governed and their elected representatives to a professional bureaucracy as is evident in the EU's leading institutions." All of this "suggests a dramatic divergence from the basic principles of popular sovereignty once shared both by Europe's democracies and the United States."

In the world of practical international politics, in the period immediately prior to the events of September 11, the European Union clearly stood in opposition to United States on some of the most important strategic global issues including the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the Land Mine Treaty, the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty, and policy towards missile defense, Iran, Iraq, Israel, China, Cuba, North Korea, and the death penalty. On most of these issues, global progressives in the United States including many practicing politicians supported the European Union position and attempted to leverage this transnational influence in the domestic debate. At the same, the position of the Bush administration on many of these issues has support from elements in Europe, certainly from members of the British political class and public, and undoubtedly from some segments of the Continental European populace as well (on the death penalty for example).

Interestingly, both conservative realists (such as Henry Kissinger) and neo-conservative pro-democracy advocates (such as Elliott Abrams) have argued that elements in the European Union, the UN, and among the NGOs threaten to limit both American democracy at home and American power overseas. As Jeanne Kirkpatrick puts it, "foreign governments and their leaders, and more than a few activists here at home seek to constrain and control American power by means of elaborate multilateral processes, global arrangements, and UN treaties that limit both our capacity to govern ourselves and act abroad."

CONCLUSION

Scholars, publicists, and many others in the Western world, especially the United States, original home of constitutional democracy, have for the past several decades been arguing furiously over the most fundamental political ideas. Talk of a "culture war," however, is somewhat misleading, because the arguments over transnational vs. national citizenship, multiculturalism vs. assimilation, and global governance vs. national sovereignty are not simply cultural, but ideological and philosophical. In a word, they are about political philosophy-in the sense that they pose such Aristotelian questions as: What kind of government is best? What is citizenship? What is the best regime?

In America, there is an elemental argument about whether to preserve, improve, and transmit the American regime to future generations or to transform it into a new and different type of polity. In the terms of contemporary political science we are arguing about "regime maintenance" vs. "regime transformation."

In the final analysis, the challenge to traditional American concepts of citizenship, patriotism, and assimilation from transnational progressivism is total and fundamental. It is a challenge to the regime itself, or to American liberal democracy. If our system is based not on individual rights, but on group consciousness; not on equality of citizenship, but on group preferences for non-citizens (including illegal immigrants) and for certain categories of citizens; not on majority rule within constitutional limits but on power-sharing by different ethnic, racial, gender, and linguistic groups; not on constitutional law, but on transnational law; not on immigrants becoming Americans, but on migrants linked between transnational communities; then the regime will cease to be "constitutional," "liberal," "democratic," and "American," in any real sense of those terms, but will become in reality a new hybrid system that is "post-constitutional," "post-liberal," "post-democratic," and "post-American."

This intramural Western conflict between liberal democracy and transnational progressivism began at some point in the mid to late 20th century; it should continue well into the 21st century. It could well turn out to be a perpetual conflict with no permanent winner or loser, a continuous end game that is never concluded. From the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 until the attacks on the heart of the American republic on September 11, 2001, another "date which will live in infamy," the transnational progressives were on the offensive. Since 9/11, however the forces of the liberal-democratic nation state and the American regime in particular appear to be reasserting themselves. Clearly, in the post-September 11 milieu there is a window of opportunity for those who favor a reaffirmation of the traditional norms of liberal-democratic patriotism and a rejection of post-democratic transnational values. Whether that segment of the American intelligentsia committed to liberal democracy as it has hitherto been practiced on these shores has the political will to seize this opportunity is not yet clear. Key areas to watch include official government rationales for the use of force and the conduct of the war; the use and non-use of international law; assimilation-immigration policy; border control; civic education in the public schools; and the state of the patriotic narrative in popular culture.

CODA

I suggest in this paper that we add a fourth dimension to a conceptual framework of international politics. Three dimensions are currently recognizable. First, there is traditional realpolitik, the competition and conflict between and among nation-states (and supranational states such as the EU.) Second, is the clash (or at least the competition) of civilizations, conceptualized by Samuel Huntington Third, there is the division (and conflict) between the democratic world and the undemocratic world, what Aaron Wildavsky and Max Singer in 1993 called the separation of the world into the zone of peace (democratic zone) and the zone of turmoil (undemocratic zone). I am suggesting a fourth dimension, the conflict within the democratic zone (and particularly within the West) between the forces of liberal democracy and the forces of transnational progressivism. If the third dimension is struggle between democrats and anti-democrats, the fourth dimension is conflict between democrats and post-democrats.

At one level, the fourth dimension amounts to a struggle between the American (or Anglo-American) and the Continental European models of governance-of what Western Civilization ought to be. The later travels the road to bureaucratized social democracy and the security of the welfare state; the former emphasizes the sometimes conflicting values of civic republicanism and the liberal values of openness and individuality, within a market-driven milieu. As John O'Sullivan and others have pointed out there are Europeans who support an entrepreneurial, liberal, Anglo-American style regime and there are many Americans (particularly among elites) who favor a more collectivist Continental European approach.

The conflicts and tensions within each of these four dimensions of international politics are occurring simultaneously and affected by each other. The statesmen and student of international politics should incorporate all of these dimensions into a comprehensive understanding of the world of the 21st century. In the end, I believe Fukuyama is wrong to suggest that liberal democracy is the final form of political governance, the evolutionary end point of political philosophy. During the 20th century liberal democracy finally triumphed militarily and ideologically over powerful anti-democratic forces that were, in a sense, Western ideological heresies: National Socialism and Communism. In the course of the 21st century, I believe that Western liberal democracy, after defeating its current anti-democratic non-Western enemy in what will essentially be a material-physical struggle, will continue to face an ideological-metaphysical challenge from powerful post-liberal democratic forces, whose origins are Western, but, which could, in James Kurth's words, be described as "post-Western."

John Fonte is a Senior Fellow and Director of Hudson's Center for American Common Culture.