Contents
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
PRESS BACKGROUNDER
Humanity has a long list of achievements in the last century of which to be proud. Mankind has launched deep space probes; doubled the human life span; vastly improved productivity; and built communication systems that link the world at the speed of light. Gleaming cities now dot the landscape throughout the world. Education, literacy, health, and prosperity levels are rising in most countries. We have in fact made progress in virtually every sphere of human life, but with one glaring exception: international politics and the pursuit of world peace.
War in all its savagery still blights the earth; its weapons are increasingly deadly. Our manner of settling international disputes through sanctioned killing is nothing less than ritualized insanity--a form of institutionalized madness on a global scale. War, our greatest crime, now poses dangers of unimaginable proportions. Meanwhile, global environmental degradation has reached a critical turning point and its ravages have also become a threat to survival.
And why is this? Despite incremental improvements in the function of international law and the United Nations, the world system is fragmented. Disharmony and lawlessness reign. The best interests of humanity are set aside in favor of "sovereign" nations in search of security, by a superpower bent on imperial domination, and by unaccountable global corporations or banking interests seeking profit. We are haunted by militant ethnic or religious groups unable to find the freedom or justice they seek. And lurking behind it all are global elites, the ultimate insiders who use their privileged access to the levers of power to manipulate any part of the global system for private wealth and power. These subgroups of humankind are focused inwardly on their own needs and largely do as they please--in an anarchic rule of self-righteousness and might makes right. They may achieve some of their short-term goals, but the result for the planet as a whole has been ecological destruction, economic injustice, and war after bloody war--and more recently the menace of a worldwide threat of terrorist attacks.
An estimated 150 million people were killed during two world wars and countless other conflicts in the twentieth century and early twenty-first century. Even though the Cold War ended in 1989, more than 4,500 nuclear bombs in the United States and Russia remain on hair-trigger alert, and nuclear proliferation and weapons of mass destruction in the hands of rogue states or terrorists remain a serious and terrifying threat.
Although the planet as a whole spends nearly a trillion dollars on defense every year, no one in the world is truly safe. Instead, we feel increasingly less secure--and more prone to build more weapons--especially in the United States.
Worldwide, nations and groups with grievances against one another still settle disputes on the battlefield, or with threats of force, instead of by reasoning with each other in a court of law or through legislative deliberations. War involves humans doing the most horrible things imaginable to each other in the name of country, race, religion, tribe, or "security." To the modern, civilized person, international wars and civil wars should be an absurdity, a barbaric relic of our bloody past. Each new act of egregious pollution and every war or terrorist event is an example of civility and humanity defeated.
War remains our greatest challenge. Emotionally speaking, fear, hate, and greed are the motivating forces that drive wars. Greedy ruling elites with hidden agendas use propaganda to manipulate ordinary people into fear and hatred of "enemies." In the absence of law and courts for adjudicating legitimate conflicts, it is a simple matter for those who have something to gain from the war system to keep it in place by fomenting fear and hate.
Under the guise of "national interest," the search for profit, or racial or ethnic pride, the division between "us" and "them" that is built into international politics has exacted a terrible price, especially in the twentieth century. There is an alternative to this pitiful division of humanity into warring camps. It is presented in Part I of this book, "Concepts and Principles of Global Governance." In these chapters, we illuminate the ideal of the indivisible unity of humankind, the vision of one people--all treated equally and living in peace under the rule of law. Chapter one explains how the reality of our common humanity is the source of the political sovereignty of humankind, which in turn is the basis of the coming global government--one world democracy.
Groups and nations go to war because they have nowhere else to go for resolving differences or grievances. Today there is no court with the unquestioned power to settle international disputes through the application of law, and no executive able to enforce the just rulings of such a court. The newly founded International Criminal Court (ICC) does not yet have the power to end war and resolve most disputes but does foreshadow the coming of courts that will. Chapter two develops the case for supranational law at this critical time in our planet's history.
Today, we still fight over territories and resources just as we have for centuries, but on a far larger scale. We've progressed from clubs and spears to guns and bombs, and now to nuclear bombs and deadly germs, magnifying our brutality. These new and terrible methods of war do nothing to solve our conflicts. They merely leave us in a state where we have even more to fear from our "enemies," and they from us. The cycle just continues. We cannot avoid a nuclear or biological catastrophe in the near future without some drastic improvement in our peacemaking ability.
After two world wars and more than 291 conflicts since World War II, with over 22 million people killed, with 25,000 people dying daily from hunger or poverty-related disease, it is obvious that our system of unlimited state sovereignty is becoming obsolete. National rights must give way to human rights--the rights and duties of sovereign individuals before the bar of humanity. Chapter three of this book explains this new approach: world citizenship as the basis of world democracy.
Ideas of global governance are certainly not new. There have been a number of sincere attempts to create a functional governing body in the last century. After World War I, which President Wilson called the "war to end all wars," European nations set up the League of Nations at Wilson's recommendation with the hope of laying the groundwork of global law. It failed due to a lack of support: The isolationists in the US Senate refused to ratify membership and Germany, Italy, and Japan eventually withdrew from the League. The United Nations was formed just after World War II, this time with US support. President Roosevelt proclaimed "the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power," and promised in their stead "a universal organization in which all peace-loving nations will finally have a chance to join ... a permanent structure of peace."
The great hope during the UN's founding in San Francisco was that this historic new institution would put an end to war. But President Truman's visionary proposal in 1946 for UN control of atomic energy and nuclear weapons quickly failed. This early failure marked the beginning of a nuclear arms race that continues to this day, and provided an early indication of the inherent weakness of the United Nations system.
The UN was a leap forward, but today it is a great disappointment. The primary reason is the organization's structure. The UN's member countries retain almost all prerogatives of state sovereignty, locking in an arbitrary fragmentation of the human community. The General Assembly cannot pass legislation; its procedures depart very far from a democratic body whose votes represent real constituencies. The current UN Charter gives veto power to the five permanent members of the Security Council that were the victors in World War II: the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and France. Year after year and vote after vote, this veto power has prevented effective action by the Security Council in critical moments. In chapter four we look at the only viable alternative to this dangerously dysfunctional system: a genuine global democratic government whose centerpiece is a world legislature--the subject of chapter four--as well as a federation of nations, the topic of chapter five.
In recent years, with the world's focus has shifted from the tension between the US and Russia to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The need for a world body to create enforceable law has never been greater.
World peace and justice depends on our developing a system of global law that can resolve disputes without violence; just as America's forefathers went from a league of states under the Articles of Confederation to a federal constitutional government, so must the UN Charter be scrapped or radically reformed and a global constitution adopted. Ways in which this can be accomplished are the subject of chapter six.
It is obvious that many problems that threaten the well being of the entire planet simply cannot be solved at the national level. Part II of this book, "Global Problems that Need Global Solutions," illustrates the benefits of the application of democratic global government to a selection of these challenges. War and nuclear weapons are humanity's most pressing dangers, but a slower and more insidious threat is the destruction of the environment. Species that took millions of years to evolve are being wiped out in a generation. Forests are rapidly disappearing. Coral reefs are dying. Fisheries are being depleted or poisoned. Due to our continued abuse of the atmosphere, even the climate is changing. Meanwhile, the human population has doubled since 1960 and continues to grow. Wilderness is irreversibly disappearing at an accelerating rate. Allowing this to happen is a form of collective insanity. We need a plan to stop this accelerating and suicidal process of the arming of the world and the slower suicidal march to environmental collapse. We present key features of such a plan in chapters seven, eight, and nine.
Chapter ten explores the question of the colossal divide between the poverty of the developing world and the affluence of the developed world. This difference between the haves and the have-nots will lead to continued international tension unless global laws are established that fairly regulate economic globalization, deal with global health issues, and protect the environment.
In order to find intelligent responses to these challenges, we desperately need reason and cooperation. It is clear that, unless drastic changes in our political systems are made, we will spin out of control and face a cataclysmic future. A high point on the international scene is the unprecedented breaking down of borders and the merging of nations now taking place in Europe as the European Union grows and evolves. The development of supranational law in Europe may well mark the beginning of the revolution for global government. The fate of the world may depend on how this process can be expanded to benefit the whole world by creating a new social contract between nations. In this connection, we take a close look at the issue of international borders in chapter eleven. The global role and mission of the United States (chapter twelve), and the crucial question of the global regulation of multinational corporations (chapter thirteen) are also covered in Part II.
This book raises questions, provides information, and presents ideas and arguments about the most practical way to prevent war, poverty, oppression, and ecocide. It portrays two possible futures: The first is the dark and dangerous world we will likely see if we continue on our present path. The other is one of hope, optimism, creativity, and possibility. Our purpose throughout is to stimulate discussions in thousands of ordinary schools and communities and to bring forward the issue of humanity's common fate in the context of global governance. Part III amplifies on the hopeful option, exploring the change of consciousness that is required if today's visionary activists are going to view the world as a whole instead of a jigsaw-puzzle of nations. Here we suggest that progressive leaders think bigger, more holistically, more proactively--and that they courageously open to radical solutions to intractable global problems.
For if we as progressives do not shape our own future and that of the world, someone else surely will, and the result may be far from our liking--in fact, it already is. If we want a peaceful, prosperous, healthy, and just world, then we must deeply feel the interconnections among all living things--people, plants, and animals--and express our love for life at the global level as well as in our neighborhoods, and in addition to the local and national levels of our advocacy for transformation. Expressing this more inclusive love entails standing up for our rights as citizens of the world and for the sovereignty of humankind as a whole. It requires that we joyously take up our obligations to the planet.
It is in this spirit that we invite you to take part in the global revolution to unite the world under the rule of law, and to do this by the supremely creative act of founding a democratic, constitutional, global government. It is time for us to end the military madness and ecological destruction that threaten our very existence. To accomplish this will require enforceable global law--the crystallization of brotherly love on a planetary scale. This book explains how, working together, we can get there together.