We have heard much in recent years, during the administration of US President George W. Bush, about the tension between unilateral and multilateral foreign policy. Many claim that the United States, many claim, is unilateralist, while Europe is multilateralist. The issue predates the present debate, dating back to at least to the end of World War II. The United States does often act more unilaterally than other nations, and Europe does emphasize multilateralism. Yet neither has a monopoly on one paradigm or the other.

For many, the debate has taken on moral overtones. Unilateralism is “bad,” while multilateralism is “good.” For some, multilateralism has become an ideology. Eschewing selfish national interest and adopting world governance and its corollary, universal jurisdiction, is the only way to survive the dangers of globalization and the challenges of the new century. Others take the opposite view. This is a “Hobbesian” world. We must be willing to act unilaterally to protect our interests, even when doing so is unpopular; to rely on the cooperation of others threatens our security. For committed multilateralists, multilateralism is a universal moral imperative, based on the primacy of international law and the notion that there is universal jurisdiction that should supersede national boundaries. The cynical Hobbesian would respond that this view is naïve and ignores the realities and dangers of the world in which we now find ourselves.

More thoughtful commentators might adopt the view that any concept of universal jurisdiction is inherently undemocratic and, in fact, runs directly counter to American democracy which is constitutionally based and which, through checks and balances, protects our values. Why should the United States subject itself to an organization like the International Criminal Court or even to the United Nations, which has members that are not democratically governed and might arbitrarily interfere with our freedom of action or even with our constitutionally based sovereignty in certain instances?

Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld pointed out in his essay “The Two World Orders” that Europeans experienced the consequences of national polities gone berserk in both Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. For many Europeans, universal jurisdiction is critical not just to guard against brutal dictatorships but also to protect against tyrannies associated with mass political psychosis. Some have argued that the United States has an obligation to act multilaterally because it was the prime architect of such postwar international organizations as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank. Rubenfeld drew the distinction that the United States was not itself acting multilaterally; rather, it was imposing multilateralism because it was in its national interest to do so. Its Security Council veto and weighted voting in the IMF protected the United States from the perceived dangers of multilateralism.

In the late 1940s, the United States scuttled a treaty establishing a formal international trade organization because Congress in particular feared that the United States would be surrendering some of its sovereignty. Even today, some US politicians say that the United States should withdraw from the World Trade Organization for essentially the same reason.

A more extreme version of the argument is that the United States need not subject itself to the dictates of any international organizations because in our “exceptionalist” view, we do things correctly. Our constitutional system protects democratic values, and multilateral organizations—to the extent we need them at all—are there to shield us from possible abuse at the hands of other states.

Bridging the Gap

The question then becomes, how can the gulf between unilateralism and multilateralism be bridged? The answer lies in how the issue is framed. Whether a country acts unilaterally or multilaterally relates not to moral imperatives, but to that country’s perception of its national interest.

A decision to act unilaterally in any given situation is based on three factors: sovereignty, power, and perceptions of national interest. Sovereignty may be defined as a country’s freedom to act without securing the permission or consent of others. The United States had the ability—the sovereign freedom—to invade Iraq; there was no one to stop it. The European Union, on the other hand, is a supranational organization in which sovereignty is in part pooled. But lacking many attributes of the nation-state, it could not agree on a common policy toward Iraq to take sovereign action.

Power is the ability to execute an action. The United States clearly had the military and technological capability to carry out the invasion of Iraq. With very few exceptions, other sovereign nations lack such capabilities.

The national interest is harder to define, as interests are subjectively determined. When leaders perceive that their country’s core interests are engaged, they will not hesitate to act unilaterally if the opportunity presents itself and they have the requisite capabilities. Much of the rest of the world might believe that invading Iraq was not in the US national interest, but the strong view within the Bush administration that an invasion was necessary to protect and advance key US interests made that irrelevant.

From the above, one can formulate the following equation: sovereignty plus power plus “the national interest” equals unilateralism. In other words, the more sovereignty a country enjoys, the more likely it is to act unilaterally—assuming it has both the power to execute its preferences and a strong interest in doing so.

The European Example

Europe shows how this equation works. The European Union has not been able to develop a consistent common foreign policy. It does not have the sovereignty, the military power, or the confluence of member states’ national interests to act unilaterally. Individual member states often act alone; in matters relating to the use of force, they typically either align themselves with the United States, as the United Kingdom did during the Iraq war, or attempt to stymie US action, as France did in early 2003, when it threatened to exercise its Security Council veto on any resolution explicitly authorizing the use of force against Iraq.

Europe’s inability to act unilaterally has been a major cause for its coalescing around a “softer,” more multilateral approach on many issues. But European multilateralism has also been a conscious choice. To avoid the disastrous mistakes of the past, members of the European Union—with the consistent support of the United States—are determined to work toward continued European integration and enlargement, to build a common defense capability that will not exceed what is necessary for limited peacekeeping and humanitarian missions, and to solve foreign policy and global issues through engagement in international organizations. This has not been an ideological choice, but a calculated decision as to how Europe can best grow economically and democratically, avoid future conflict, and exercise global influence. It is in Europe’s interest to act multilaterally.