Sovereignty For A New American Century
...of American
Sovereignty Against the Idea and Institutions of Global Governance
Jean-François Drolet
D.Phil Candidate in International Relations
University of Oxford, The Queen’s College
Email: jean-francois.drolet@politics.ox.ac.uk
Paper Prepared for the SGIR Sixth Pan-European Conference on International
Relations
University of Turin, Italy
12-15 September 2007
This paper is part of a broader research project that seeks to offer a critical theoretical
engagement with American neo-conservatism at the level of its intellectual
foundations. It is very much work in progress. Please do not cite without permission.
2
As the strongest and richest country in the world, the United States can
afford to safeguard its sovereignty.
Jeremy Rabkin1
Introduction
Although it has its origins in the 1980s, the American Right’s reaction against the
advances of global governance and international law only really took shape
throughout the 1990s under the leadership of a number of political scientists, jurists,
diplomats and media commentators organised around neo-conservative think tanks
such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Project for a New American
Century (PNAC). Against the background of the uneven and incomplete transition to
globalisation and the emergence of a seemingly unipolar world, neo-conservatives
criticised both the woolly legalism of the Clinton administration and the Republican
isolationist tendencies and urged a re-orientation in foreign policy that would put the
sovereignty of the American nation-state at the heart of the international liberal order.
The primary motivation for this offensive was strategic, and it remains so to this day.
With the end of the Cold War, the argument goes, as violence and discontent becomes
increasingly directed at the world’s only superpower, the multilateral framework
through which the US...
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