In US President George W. Bush's State of the Union address last month, he said that the continuing push for democracy remains the nation's key overseas mission.
Yet a recent suggestion by President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) that the time has come to seriously consider scrapping the National Unification Council and the guidelines for national unification upset the US Department of State, which believes that Chen's plans may result in a change of the cross-strait status quo.
Suspicions have also been raised by several media outlets in Taiwan, which have been eager to point out that the guidelines are the foundation on which cross-strait relations are built and that they therefore they must not be abolished arbitrarily.
But if we take a closer look at the guidelines, whose historical implications have been regarded as sacred by Taiwan's opposition parties, Chinese authorities and some US politicians, we see that they are in fact not sacred at all.
The guidelines were enacted in 1991, and the main force behind them, former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), was elected in 1990 by the first National Assembly.
Although the first National Assembly -- which didn't face elections for more than 40 years -- had a legal foundation, it lost all legitimacy amid vigorous calls for new elections to be held.
As a result, the legitimacy of a president elected only by the assembly was in doubt. The fact that the guidelines were hammered out by the Presidential Office without consulting the public highlights their expedient nature.
The guidelines removed the restrictions of former president Chiang Ching-kuo's (蔣經國) "three noes" policy -- "no contact, no compromise, and no negotiation" with the Chinese Communists.
This played an important role in helping to kick-start landmark talks between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait in the early 1990s.
But since the guidelines were implemented without first gaining public consent, however, their legitimacy was clearly questionable. After Lee became the first popularly elected president in 1996, the guidelines were shelved.
The guidelines set out short-, mid- and long-term goals for achieving the unification of Taiwan and China, but from the perspective of legal theory, they are only a policy statement or a basis for short-term administrative expediency. In the absence of public consent, the guidelines should not be used to plan Taiwan's cross-strait policies.
Strangely, the US government does not hesitate to send soldiers to Iraq, but when faced with the thorny cross-strait situation, it ignores the guidelines' undemocratic character.
The US tolerates China's "Anti-Secession" Law, which amounts to a unilateral change to the cross-strait status quo, but it does not support the abrogation of a policy statement which is not even a law.
When a great global power, which has declared that it will defend democracy unnecessarily criticizes democratic Taiwan in this way, its double standards are laid bare for all to see.
The opposition parties' worship of the guidelines -- which have not been approved by any elected institution or been given any other form of authorization by the public -- ignores the damage the guidelines inflict on Taiwan's democracy. They continue to backpedal by standing on the opposite side of democracy.
Li To-tzu has a master's degree from the Graduate Institute of National Development at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Lin Ya-ti
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