Many people complain that American foreign policy is self-interested, unilateralist, and brutish, and wish that the United States would participate more enthusiastically in multilateral institutions, such as the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the Kyoto Treaty. Defenders of American foreign policy argue that these institutions just do not serve America's interest. Jeremy Rabkin offers an alternative version of this argument: He says that yielding sovereignty to global institutions violates America's constitutional traditions, and the attractive mixture of freedom and security that these traditions support. Global governance is bureaucratic, insensitive to democratic pressures, and indifferent to local variation in values and interests. Further, liberty requires the rule of law, and the rule of law can prevail only in a sovereign state. Global governance undermines sovereignty and thus undermines the rule of law and freedom as well.

Rabkin has no objection to international law per se. So long as international law is created by the governments of sovereign states, which retain the option to violate or withdraw from treaties, it can do much good. What he objects to is the transfer of loyalty of the general public, and important domestic institutions such as courts, from the constitutional government of the state to international institutions or vague international norms or standards that are advanced by busybody nongovernmental organizations: “If the United States can be subject to the will of outside powers, it cannot be governed by the schemes ordained in the Constitution” (p. 266). Rabkin fears that Americans will be tempted to succumb to rule by the mainly foreign employees of international institutions because it promises security, prosperity, and promotion of human rights; will become accustomed to such rule; and then will not realize until too late that they have lost the capacity to engage in self-government. And given that international institutions coddle tyrants, appease aggressors, and impose elite values on the common people, Americans will realize too late that they have lost more than they have gained.

Rabkin's bête noir is the European Union, which is itself a quasi-international institution to which constituent states have yielded some sovereignty. He attributes the viability of the EU to the dirigiste, bureaucratic, and aristocratic traditions of the Continent, and argues that the Europeans want to foist their idealistic commitment to global governance on the Americans as well, whatever damage it might do to American democratic and constitutional values. Europeans might like the EU but that is because they discount the values of self-governance and freedom. For Americans, the EU shows what happens when state sovereignty gives way to supranational institutions.

The author raises important questions. Although some American legal scholars have raised constitutional concerns about American participation in certain international institutions, their objections are narrowly legalistic, and could be silenced through constitutional amendment or (more likely) narrow interpretation of troublesome constitutional provisions by courts that tend to defer to the political branches' foreign policy. Rabkin, by contrast, appeals to American traditions and ideals that the Constitution, as currently understood, embodies.

Ironically, Rabkin's argument echoes the worries of the early critics of the U.S. Constitution. These critics feared that the sovereignty of the former colonies would be lost to a distant, imperial national government, and with the loss of sovereignty would come the loss of prized traditions of self-governance. These critics lost the battle in the 1780s and were forever silenced by the Civil War. American constitutional traditions celebrate freedom but they also embrace empire. Power, prosperity, and prestige were the benefits gained in return for yielding local self-government to a remote national elite. To be sure, the federalist system preserves local autonomy to some extent, but the final product is very much a compromise, and certainly permits further expansion if warranted by the gains. Advocates of global governance, as well as critics like Rabkin, can find ammunition for their views in American constitutional traditions.

Rabkin's argument thus depends less on American constitutional ideals than on a theory about the limits of lawmaking. The author thinks that only sovereign states can make and enforce laws that serve the interests of the people, and he appears to think that the size of sovereign states has a natural limit. When states become too large—at the extreme, a world state—they lose the power to enforce the law, and to the extent that they can, they become imperial, bureaucratic, remote, soulless. But nobody today equates “global governance” and a world state. Rabkin argues, rather, that the intermediate institutions advocated by supporters of global governance create, or are likely to lead to, global institutions that fall short of a world state but nonetheless are harmful in similar ways.

The argument seems too extreme. Not even the Europeans want to extend the EU to the United States, China, and Indonesia. The international criminal court, the Kyoto Treaty, and the World Trade Organization do not impinge on sovereignty in the way that the EU does. Rabkin fears that if Americans acquiesce in these forms of global governance today, they will acquiesce in an EU-like system tomorrow, but the idea that we should reject valuable international institutions, if they are valuable, because of the remote chance that Americans will become complacent about global governance, in general, is not plausible.

These criticisms aside, Law Without Nations? has much value. Advocates of global governance often talk as though international institutions have only benefits and no costs, and opposition to them is irrational or purely self-interested. Rabkin draws attention to the moral and political costs of these institutions, and convincingly argues that more is at stake than their immediate consequences for foreign policy. He is right that there are natural limits on the size of states, and that people who transfer their loyalties from national institutions to international institutions take grave risks with their freedom and well-being. Even if the American and the European systems have worked well for their own citizens, it does not follow that these systems can be expanded beyond their current boundaries.