Politicians: Don't Fence Us In

UK foreign secretary William Hague, in threatening recently to storm the Ecuadorian embassy in London and arrest Julian Assange, displays the same degree of contempt for national sovereignty that Western nations have shown repeatedly since the end of the Cold War. The examples of this contempt are legion, from invading countries to bring about regime change, to the unelected officials of the Troika (the European Commission, European Central Bank and the IMF) lecturing and threatening Greece into sacrificing itself on the altar of the interests of the European Union. And in each case, the core principles of national self-determination and of democratic sovereignty, once championed by Woodrow Wilson and Lenin alike, are more likely today to be attacked as the fig leaves of dictators.