In the US constitutional system, the executive branch generally conducts foreign relations. But in recent years, the nonexecutive branches—the judiciary and Congress—have challenged the exclusivity of the president’s authority to conduct foreign relations by opening direct channels of communication with foreign governments’ executive branches.
International Law
Political sociologist Claus Offe has diagnosed the participatory deficit in North Atlantic democracies as the product of an imbalance in state–market relations. When the market is supreme, public policy can do little to constrain the market’s ever-expanding realms.
The European Union was founded in the 1950s as an experiment in postwar regional integration, in part to help rebuild national economies damaged by World War II through economic integration, and in part to ward off, by means of closer legal and political integration of states, the threat of totalitarianism and Soviet expansion.
In his farewell address, George Washington urged that “[t]he great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is . . . to have with them as little political connection as possible.”
On a December morning in 2015, H.A. left early from his home in central Gaza to tend to his fields of wheat, barley, peas, and fava beans a couple hundred meters from the Israeli border fence. He arrived to find a low-flying Israeli aircraft spewing a thick, white substance over his farmland as it traveled south along the Palestinian side of the divide.