| Presentation
by Francis Fukuyama on May 23 at the American Committees on
Foreign Relations:
"…The
visionary founders of the postwar order were institution-builders,
who created not just the much-maligned UN system, but the
Bretton Woods institutions, NATO, the U.S.-Japan and U.S.-Korea
alliances, the GATT, the WTO, and a host of other international
organizations. Institution-building is not something that
has occupied the time of officials in the Bush Administration,
but it should. If the United States does not like the fact
that the UN is dominated by non-democratic regimes, then it
should invest in an effort to build up other institutions,
like NATO or the Community of Democracies founded during the
Clinton Administration, that are based on norms and values
we share. The Community of Democracies initiative, which the
French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine tried to strangle at
its birth, was never taken seriously by the Republicans, for,
I assume, "not invented here" reasons. But such
a global alliance of democracies, led by newer ones in eastern
Europe and Latin America, could play a legitimizing function
around the world in a way that NATO cannot.”
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