It is undeniable that the United States is currently a hegemonic power which can set universal norms for the international society, reflecting its own values, let alone its specific interests, as if they overlap with universal values. Besides military and economic power, such appeal that the United States is the representative of universal values constitute one important source of American hegemonic power.
Once widely accepted, however, international norms will gain an authoritative status independent of American arbitral control. And such universal norms will also gain biding power over the members of the international society, including the United States, even though the United States continues to believe that it can interpret and apply norms as it likes.
This article focuses on one of the natures universal norms have, namely the boomerang effect, and explains how such effect works to balance out the current predominance of the United States as the norm keeper of the international society.
Among the norms set by the United States around the end of the Cold War are human rights and democracy. The United States especially emphasizes building strong civil society, reflecting its own history of nation building. Through governmental assistances and those by government-affiliated NGOs, the United States has poured lots of resources into civil society organizations of transforming nations. Such features of civil society as political participation, youth and women's empowerment, free press as plural information source, and independent advocacy power, are the main focus of American democratic assistance.
It is quite ironic, thus, that it was such civil society organizations that played an important role in finding out, and challenging, the American conducts in its global war on terrorism that failed to meet the very norms the United States itself has claimed to be so important, namely human rights and democracy.
One case which well illustrates such boomerang effects of universal norms is the reaction of the international society against American war on terrorism. Although terrorism is said to be the ultimate abrogation of human rights, American policies against terrorism also violate human rights standards. The network of global human rights NGOs, along with international institutions, challenges American arbitral use of norms and forcing it to comply with the universal norm of human rights.
It is still too early to say whether the biding power of the universal norms is equally applied to the hegemon like the United States, and thus deprives it of the authority as the unitary norm keeper. The challenge the global network of NGOs and international/regional institutions is currently making against the United States, however, is a promising sign that such mechanism will emerge to counterweight American predominance.
抄録全体を表示