We will never accept global governance, third, because we love our Constitution and will never grant any other law supremacy over it. Like most peoples (Europeans are the exception), we will never allow transnational organizations to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents. We think our Constitution is superior to the sloppy authority granted to, say, the International Criminal Court.it's often been noted that americans are in love with our own constitution. every now and then americans have been accused of trying to proselytize our system to other countries. meanwhile, americans have had a huge influence on the drafting of constitutions around the world. indeed, americans have all but written several of the world's constitutions (e.g. panama, the philippines, japan, germany, and now afghanistan and the current transitional basic law of iraq). and yet, as far as i can tell, none of these constitutions are like the american constitution
most democracies in the world are parliamentary-style democracies, where the executive is chosen by whoever has a majority in parliament. putting it in american terms, in a parliamentary system the executive is essentially an extension of the legislative branch of government, rather than a separate co-equal branch as the american executive is. you can debate endlessly about which kind of democracy is better, parliamentary-style democracies avoid the problem of divided government (when the executive and legislative branches are controlled by different parties) and the political paralysis that can follow when that happens. on the other hand, parliamentary governments can be less stable, the government falls when the governing party loses its majority (post-war italy is exhibit A for that kind of problem)
what is odd is that most governments that the u.s. had a hand in engineering are parliamentary-style systems, not the american system. if we really love our constitution so much and think it's the best in the world, why don't we export that as part of our democracy export package? don't get me wrong, i'm not advocating that we do, i'm only wondering why we haven't. i've been mulling this over during the past few months as i've been reading about the difficulties in forming a government in iraq since the january 30th elections (a problem that would not exist if the transitional law that americans wrote were more like the american system). is it because we fear giving another country a strong independent executive like the american president? is it because we don't think our system will work elsewhere? or is there some tacit understanding that our system is somehow less advanced than more recent innovations like parliamentary systems? anyone have any ideas?
