Is David Brooks a secret boundless cosmopolitan? Nah...

David Brooks, conservative columnist for the NYT and pinata of the liberal blogosphere, has some interesting things to say today. 

Let's start with this...

Today power is dispersed. There is no permanent bipartisan governing class in Washington. Globally, power has gone multipolar, with the rise of China, India, Brazil and the rest.

True. Brooks first acknowledges that the Post WWII Atlantic alliance was able to create an international framework that led to freer trade, the rise of the EU, and global democratization, because they could. In their sphere they were unchallenged. But today, as Zakaria has coined, it is becoming a Post-American world. It's much harder to get all countries to agree. Thus, the Doha Round of trade talks grinds to a halt, Darfur boils on, Zimbabwe grinds it's people ever downward.

Brooks laments in a way that almost makes him a boundless cosmopolitan, too...

But globally, people have no sense of shared citizenship. Everybody feels they have the right to say no, and in a multipolar world, many people have the power to do so. There is no mechanism to wield authority. There are few shared values on which to base a mechanism. The autocrats of the world don’t even want a mechanism because they are afraid that it would be used to interfere with their autocracy.

This is the challenge. Finding shared values and building mechanisms that work. Brooks, the conservative, sees this as a conservative would, it's obvious to him that each of these poles of this multi-polar world each represents a different culture, and therefore common values are non-existent. That's too easy. In terms of free trade, none of the powers that be can afford to go backward. The status quo may hold for awhile, but if the growing economies of China and India and Brazil want to keep growing, they'll have to find a way to keep improving the international structure. The Chinese experiment with autocratic capitalism continues, but I'm of the school that thinks rising living standards will eventually force a more open political system. 

We need bold, clever leadership that creates an international structure which channels economic and political development towards openness and prosperity. No individual leader can go too far yet; there is no critical mass of support for One World. 

Brooks concludes with his support for the nascent concept of a League of Democracies.

The best idea floating around now is a League of Democracies, as John McCain and several Democrats have proposed. Nations with similar forms of government do seem to share cohering values. If democracies could concentrate authority in such a league, at least part of the world would have a mechanism for wielding authority. It may not be a return to Acheson, Marshall and the rest, but at least it slows the relentless slide towards drift and dissipation.

I haven't yet given much thought to the League of Democracies concept. I do believe that democracy is the answer for all countries of the world because I think democracy is a universal value. (See Amartya Sen's Democracy as a Universal Value.) But I have questions to answer for myself first. Will the League once again make democracy a "western" notion since most members of the club will be western? Is an exclusionary league the best way to integrate non-democracies like China into the world system? What is the historical success of exclusionary international clubs like this?