The Death of Sovereignty

It used to be that treaties were seen as a positive resolution between nations. I recount the Treaty of Paris which ended the American Revolutionary War between Great Britain and the United States of America. These treaties defined the grounds for which the participating nations would act and intern provide a form of understood sovereignty.

A proper functioning nation is one that is sovereign without allegiances to other countries or individuals. What we are finding is that this sovereignty is being degraded by the likes of modern day treaties which are claiming to have supranational authority, in essence superseding the sovereignty of the participating nations. This is exampled by the Treaty of Lisbon which has forced the hand of signatory nations to abide to Commissions and Institutes who dictate the manner in which they are to govern their own countries. These movements give way to the 'nation-states', most notably that being the European Union.

Within this nation-state you have countries that suspended democracy and gave up their sovereignty by allowing self-proclaimed 'leaders' to act in a dictatorial manner, or as they like to refer to themselves as the technocrats. Two countries within the EU that have succumbed to this anti-democratic regime of an unelected 'leader' are the Italian prime minister designate, Mario Monti, and the Greek prime minister designate, Lucas Papademos. The commonality between these Technocrats, besides being unelected, is that they stem from the banking system and are acting in the best interest of these financial institutions with the likes of Goldman Sachs. This puts them in direct odds with the interests of the citizens which they are to represent.

It is only a matter of time before other countries such as Spain, Portugal and Ireland start following suit. Once signed onto this new framework it exposes the evils tied into the Treaty of Lisbon and it will be too late. As an alternative we can look at Iceland for direction on how they handled their debt situation without giving up sovereignty and showing that there is a better alternative.

Today, treaties have changed by taking on a new identity under the guise of a more eloquently sounding Trade Agreements. Alongside these are other legal frameworks that are instituted in one country and are followed by cooperating countries whose sovereignty is given up in this process. A few examples include NAFTA, ACTA, PIPA, and SOPA, and UN Agenda 21 to name a few. Even at a city level we see this type of framework being instituted, such as those cities that sign up to ICLEI. These frameworks are based on global governance using a socialistic flavour, and destroy the freedoms and rights of its populace such as private property rights.

If there is no support by the citizenry for these frameworks then the people will force alternatives that support sovereignty. My desire is that the lawmakers are more attentive to the areas which contradict the laws of the participating nations when contemplating and entering into these legal frameworks.

These nations however should also realize that their laws come first.  A minor exception is in the United States where the majority of the individual States laws come first as the States collectively make up what is known as their Federal government. An example of where this was exercised in taking down these sovereign killing framework is in the State of Virginia where they managed to nullified the NDAA. Other success stories towards fighting down legal frameworks aside from the earlier example of Iceland, with respect to how they successfully navigated their nation debt issues without giving up their sovereignty, would be Poland and how the citizenry took to the streets and achieved political persuasion, forcing the country to retract their support of the ACTA treaty.

It is through the support of the citizenry that nation laws have power and it is in the best interest of these individuals from those nations to remain sovereign.