Is a League of Democracies Enough?

Jackson Diehl writes in today's Washington Post about how John McCain's "League of Democracies" has liberal roots. This concept also has its Neocon roots in the work of Aaron Wildavsky and Max Singer in their book The Real World Order. They propose an almost Bismarkian hybrid of representation by population and representation by a factor of GDP and would give democracies much greater weight. I have a different proposal along these lines, but it goes a bit farther than a league of sovereign states.

First, I would create regional governments within the larger nations in NATO (the U.S., Germany, France, UK) and give each region a great deal of autonomy on taxation, spending and regulation. The national and later allied government would coin and print money, suggest economic policy to the regions, homogonize regulation by regional consensus, regulate joint military affairs with a singe commander-in-chief and executive, deal with environmental issues and oversee equal protection rights vis-a-vis regional and sub-regional (state and provincial) governments, as well as human rights violations by employers. It would have an allied judiciary and directly elected legislators - 2 per region. The chief executive would be chosen by an Allied College consisting of the legislature and the chief executives of each region.

Most importantly, nations would not be allowed to join unless they actually adopted the same level of individual liberty as found in the U.S. and Europe. In essence, we would be joining the EU as 7 member states and insisting that it adopt a more federalist government than it currently has.

I don't think McCain will go that far - however I am not sure the rest of the alliance has much patience for the U.S. and NATO if we do not eventually go down that road.