IS THERE NO INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY?

David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002) ("But what thinking person can take seriously the idea that there is any such thing as the international community? Where are the shared values uniting the United States and China, Denmark and Indonesia, Japan and Angola, that make such talk anything more than an exercise in self-flattering rhetoric? Of course, there is an international order, dominated by the United States, and there are international institutions, like the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank. But the reality is that the international community is a myth and a way to conceal the bad news about the present in septic sheets of piety about the future. This should be clear to anyone who considers the question of force. As Sir Brian Urquhart, one of the key figures of the first four decades of the UN's existence, once put it, 'If there is a world community, then who is the sheriff?' Does anyone imagine that the United States will act in the altruistic way such a mandate implies? And if not the United States, then who? The Russians? The Chinese? The reality is that the moment one taps on the idea of the international community it falls apart like a child's broken toy." Id. at 8-9. Still, as an individual, one ought think globally and internationally, and not nationalistically or tribalistically as many Americans are tragically prone to do.).