“Is the Nation State Threatened?” This question, though apt, may fail to convey how dire the threat to sovereignty truly is. It might be better to ask, “Is the Nation State Terminally Ill?” Are we witnessing the death march of sovereignty, and with it democratic self-determination?
The question resonates on each side of the Atlantic. That militant Islam is at the core of this question presents, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, a double irony. First, Jihadists flatly reject central tenets of Western liberal democracy: separation of religion and politics, freedom to choose any, or no, religion, freedom to make laws that contradict scripture, equality of Muslims and non-Muslims, and of men and women. Yet, as we debate the enduring tension between liberty and equality, Jihadists have somehow come to embody the very rights against government intrusion they would ruthlessly deny upon supplanting western governments with the hegemonic Caliphate of their dreams.
Relatedly, the radicals of Dar al-Islam are unabashed about their hostile intentions toward the sovereign states of what they tellingly call Dar al-Harb, the realm of war. Because this is so—because, to borrow Justice Antonin Scalia’s memorable phrase, “this wolf comes as a wolf”—jihadists are, in reality, the sheep’s clothing for the more deadly wolf in this equation: the interlocking networks of primarily Western elites so perceptively identified by the Hudson Institute’s John Fonte as “transnational progressives.”
It is no secret that this internationalist movement is composed of nongovernmental organizations
