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Presentation |
The Road To Survival – World Federation
It is said that the “greatest sin of all is indifference”
and one has to be completely indifferent to what is going on
in the world today not to see that a global Armageddon is
rapidly approaching, not an Armageddon in the biblical
sense, the “end of all things,” but one where, as T. S.
Eliot put it, the world ends “not with a bang but [with] a
whimper.” Weapons of mass destruction certainly do
pose the threat of a nuclear “bang”, where the end comes
relatively quickly, as portrayed in “On The Beach.”
Indeed, the Scientists’ Doomsday Clock still stands at seven
minutes before “midnight.” Instead, I think that,
unless we take on a sense of urgency like the world has
never done before, and immediately begin to deal with the
global, interconnected and devastating crises that are
already threatening us and will continue to threaten us at
an ever accelerating pace, we will find ourselves in a slow,
agonizing descent into a hellish existence of
incomprehensible suffering and a painful disintegration of
human society.
There is no secret about the practices and forces that are
combining to push humankind to the brink of ultimate
disaster. Global warming is at the forefront and Al
Gore’s recent movie and book, An Inconvenient Truth,
sets forth the cold, hard facts about where we are headed as
a Planet and a civilization. There is a rising
consensus that we only have about ten to fifteen years left
before the cancer of global warming becomes lethal and
incurable. With the clash of civilizations, the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the persistent
and deadly reality of global terrorism and the continued
reliance upon war to resolve our differences, world peace
seems more elusive than ever before. And all the
while, humankind is stupidly pouring over one trillion
dollars per year down the black hole of arms, war and
killing each other. General Douglas MacArthur was
exactly right in the late 1940’s when he said that “[we]
have our last chance. If we will not devise some
greater more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our
door.”
But, how do we confront this enveloping dreadnought that is
so rapidly approaching? How do we, indeed, keep
Armageddon from Mother Earth’s door? Many Americans,
and for that matter many from around the world, will say
that we should continue to rely upon the Nation-State
system, with some help from the present United Nations, to
deal with the present global predicament. But the
Nation-State system, which arose out of the ashes of the
Thirty-Years War with the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, has
just taken us through the bloodiest and dirtiest
(environmentally speaking) century in history. As
Emery Reves, in his noted book, Anatomy of Peace, put
it, “we cannot risk reliance upon a method (the Nation-State
system) that has failed miserably hundreds of times and
never succeeded once.” In the vacuum of international
anarchy in which we now live, the only legal means we have
for handling global problems is the treaty process
but that process is slow and treaties contain no real
enforcement mechanism. Bismarck was right, “Treaties
are made to be broken.” Indeed, the Kyoto Treaty on CO2 emissions
is essentially a failure because the biggest polluter in the
World (the U.S.) simply refused to ratify it.
As to the present United Nations, I agree with Paul Kennedy,
and many of his observations about the good things the U.N.
has done over its 61 year existence, as expressed in his
recent book, “The Parliament of Man.” But the stark
reality about the U.N. cannot be ignored. It was –
primarily because of the single nation veto – still born in
1945. Prime Minister Churchill, just five years later,
recognized that it was not working and stated that “unless
some effective supranational government can be set up and
brought quickly into action, the prospects of peace and
human progress are dark and doubtful.”
Thus, it is obvious that we can rely upon neither the
Nation-State system nor the present United Nations to act
swiftly and effectively enough to extricate the world from
“harm’s way.” But what kind of a system must we have
to save us from almost certain self-destruction? Mahatma
Gandhi gave us the answer in 1942: “… the future peace,
security, and ordered progress of the world demand a world
federation of free nations, and on no other basis can the
problems of the modern world be solved.” Emery Reves
states that world federation “is not an ultimate goal but an
immediate necessity,” noting that “it has been overdue since
1914.” Many great thinkers, leaders and institutions,
both before and after Gandhi, have manifested the same
higher moral cognition as Gandhi and supported a world
federation or something similar to it – Alfred Lord
Tennyson, President Ulysses S. Grant, President Harry S.
Truman, E. B. White, H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Justice
William O. Douglas, Winston Churchill, Arnold Toynbee, Thor
Heyerdahl, Jawaharlal Nehru, Hubert Humphrey, Peter Ustinov,
U Thant, Willy Brandt, Norman Cousins, General Hap Arnold,
the Catholic Church (Pope John XXIII, Pope John Paul II and
the Catholic Bishops Pastoral Letter of 1983), the United
Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church (Episcopal Bishops
Pastoral Letter of 1962), and the Baha’i Faith.
Why is it that we do not listen to these wise people and
institutions and recognize how urgent it is that we
immediately create a federation of the Nations of the world
that is democratized and empowered to take the global
actions that are essential for our survival? If you
mention “world federation” to American Congresspersons, most
of them, both Republican and Democrat, run for cover; they
think it is political suicide even to discuss the subject.
What a pity! They claim to be our leaders but they
prove once again the imperative of present day democracies:
“if the people lead, the leaders will follow.” There
is no doubt about the power of people literally to change
the world. In view of what the “people” did in the
second Russian Revolution (where, with almost no shot being
fired, they threw off the shackles of a communist
dictatorship), there is no reason why “the people” cannot
wreak the ultimate change on this Planet Earth – the
creation of a democratized and empowered Federation of all
Nations.
But how do we get from here – a world of international
anarchy – to there – a world justly governed by a
democratized world federation? One World Now strongly
believes that the only way to get there is by
using as a model the American Constitutional Convention
process of 1787 and by carrying out that process through a
Charter Review Conference under Article 109 of the present
U.N. Charter.
The Articles of Confederation rendered the Continental
Congress almost as impotent as the United Nations is today.
Neither had or have the essential powers of a real
government. Our forefathers persuaded the Continental
Congress to call a convention to “amend” the Articles of
Confederation but they ended up writing a completely new
Constitution. If they had not had the courage to step
up to the challenge and create a real structure of national
governance, we would not have today the America of which we
are so proud. This kind of courage is precisely what
is now needed on the global level. Emery Reves put it
plainly, “the Articles of Confederation had to be discarded
and a new constitution created and adopted … because that
was the only remedy then and it is the only remedy now.”
Captain Tom Hudgens has written in his booklet, Let’s
Abolish War, that the world can, as did our American
forefathers, “solve the [global] predicament” it now faces
by comprehensively “reforming the United Nations to create a
federal republic with strong legislative, executive and
judicial branches [and] with strong checks and balances on
each.” And, he added, the American Constitutional
Convention “can serve as the model for this global
federation.”
As to the legal mechanism for creating a democratized and
empowered federation of the Nations of the Earth, there is
only one place we can find such a mechanism – what we call a
legitimization process – and that is Article 109 of the U.N.
Charter. Article 109 provides that 2/3rds of
the members of the General Assembly can call a Charter
Review Conference and 2/3rds can
adopt a comprehensively amended United Nations Charter at
that Conference. These first two steps of the Article
109 process can be carried out without the consent of the
five Nation-States with the single-nation veto (U.S.,
Britain, France, Russia, and China). However, Article
109 does
require that the third step of the amendment process, the
ratification of the newly amended Charter by 2/3rds of the
Nation-State members, include ratification by those five
Nation-States.
Many will say that the United States will never ratify a new
Charter creating a democratized and empowered federal
republic because it will never yield the sovereign power
that is necessary for such a structure of governance to
exist. There is no doubt that we will have a long,
hard battle to complete the Article 109 ratification
process, much like our forefathers had in 1789.
Indeed, at the Constitutional Convention only 39 of the 55
delegates to the Convention would sign the Constitution.
In the first year thereafter only 11 of the original 13
states ratified the Constitution, with Massachusetts
ratifying by only 17 votes, New Hampshire by only 11 votes,
Virginia by only 10 votes and New York by only 3 votes.
North Carolina initially rejected the Constitution but
finally ratified it a year later and Rhode Island, the
thirteenth state, did not ratify until three years after the
Convention.
To say that the United States will never ratify a new U.N.
Charter establishing a democratized and empowered world
federation is, I believe, to sell the American people short.
First, upon navigating through the first two steps of the
Article 109 process, which can be accomplished without the
consent of the United States, and with the inevitable rapid
growth of People Power the world over supporting the Article
109 process, it is our belief that the global momentum for
ratification will become so compelling that the people of
the United States will recognize that America cannot afford
to say no and will apply sufficient political pressure upon
the Administration and the Congress to secure ratification.
To be sure, as Americans, we should insist that the United
States, the world’s greatest democratic federation, not just
support the Article 109 process but take the lead in
getting it done. More and more Americans are
realizing that our effort to “manage the world” is creating
devastating fiscal deficits, making the tax burden on the
American people ever more intolerable, costing far too many
precious American lives and severely aggravating the depth
and breadth of anti-Americanism around the world.
Furthermore, there is, I believe, a rising consciousness in
America of the fact that there really is only one Earth and
that all of us on this Planet – of whatever nationality,
race, culture, religion or economic station in life – are in
this together and that we are all fighting for our planetary
lives. Indeed, many Americans who have read the
proposed new U.N. Charter written by One World Now (see
www.one-world-now.com),
have come to realize how much a democratized and empowered
world federation is in the best interests of Americans, not
just because it is our best chance for saving the Planet,
but because it is the best way to guarantee a safer world
and thus a safer America. It can be seen from the
proposed new Charter how one of the geniuses of the U.S.
Constitution – the checks and balances that protect
Americans from what de Toqueville described as “the tyranny
of the majority” – has been carried forward into the
proposed Charter.
Finally, more and more Americans are beginning to comprehend
the reality of what scientists like Dr. Martin I. Hoffert
are saying. In order to deal with the impending global
warming disaster, Dr. Hoffert, physics professor at New York
University, states that the world needs immediately to
“embark” on “six or seven energy research programs on the
scale of the Manhattan Project that built the … atomic bomb
... or the Apollo program that put man on the moon” and “be
prepared to invest several hundred billion dollars over [the
next] ten to fifteen years” on developing renewable sources
of energy such as earth-based solar, space-based solar,
wind, next generation nuclear, hydro/geothermal, wood and
plants and carbon storage, as ways of substantially reducing
CO2 levels.
However, these kinds of projects can take place only
through an empowered structure of global governance.
George Soros believes that a Carbon Tax can provide a great
incentive for all of us to take these urgent actions but
such a tax would also require a structure of global
governance as a vehicle for its adoption, implementation and
enforcement.
What America did in World War II, the world can do now
through such a structure of global governance. I was
only ten years old when the United States entered World War
II. I still remember gas and sugar rationing, the
Victory Garden and the War Bonds. But America rose to
the occasion. Our government did not institute gas and
sugar rationing on a voluntary basis. It made it a
crime not to comply because there are always those who will
cheat unless forced to comply. And the great majority
of Americans, knowing that all other Americans were forced
by law to ration their use of gasoline, complied willingly
and America went on to a noble victory.
The world is faced today with a much more dangerous
situation than faced America in the 1940’s. We face a
war against ourselves, to prevent an E.L.E (Extinction Level
Event). Humans in most of the world, led by America,
are obsessed with the automobile, consumerism, materialism
and with an overall self-centeredness that did not exist in
the 1940’s. There is no doubt about it, if the world
is going to win this battle against climate change and all
the other potential catastrophes facing us, all world
citizens are going to have to make the same kind of
sacrifices Americans made during World War II and these
sacrifices will have to be instituted by world law through a
structure of global governance that has the power to
initiate and enforce such laws. Indeed, E. B.
White was right on point when he said: “Government is the
thing. Law is the thing. Not brotherhood, not
international cooperation … Where does security lie, anyway
– security against the thief, the murderer, the foot pad?
In brotherly love? Not at all. It lies in
government.”
The greatest danger we face in trying to “beat the clock” on
global disaster is that posed by those who seek only
incremental reforms of the U.N. Charter. I was very
disappointed that Paul Kennedy, in the Parliament of Man,
expressed the view that “massive constitutional
restructuring of the world body … is not possible right now,
even, if the merits are undeniable” and that the
“transformation [of the U.N.] will have to be partial and
gradual.” If Professor Kennedy is correct, then the
world is doomed. We simply do not have the time to
make, on a “partial and gradual” basis, the radical changes
that are necessary to save the world. In 2005, a few
minor reforms were adopted at the behest of Secretary
General Kofi Annan and they were hailed as a “first step” in
the right direction. Emery Reves had this to say about
such blandishments: “We are always beginning … we
never continue, never carry on, complete or conclude.
We never take a second step … our international life is
composed of an unending sequence of beginnings that do not
begin, of first steps that lead nowhere. When are we
going to tire of the game?” We must not let a few
minor reforms of the U.N. act as an “opiate of the people.”
Truly, we can avert the “gathering global storm” only if
we immediately and comprehensively amend the U.N. Charter to
create a democratized federation of the Nations of the World.
I can see the day coming when the great majority of the
people on this Planet will join arm-in-arm in a great and
grand march toward the “sunlit upland” of self-governance, a
global democracy where every world citizen has the right to
vote, where peace prevails, where the Bill of Social Rights
(safety net of food, clean water, adequate medical care,
educational and job opportunity, and social security for the
aged, disabled and unemployed) is available to every World
Citizen, where we live in an environmentally sustainable
world, where each human being enjoys the basic individual,
human and civil rights to which we are all endowed by our
Creator and where, together, we have overcome the dark and
dangerous challenges to our very existence and we have
fought the battle for survival and we have won.
Through the irrepressible People Power we have in our hands,
we must demand that the politicians do our will and do it
urgently and comprehensively. If we fail to do that,
then Senator Byron Dorgan will have been right when he says
that “brain-dead politics are selling out America” and
Abraham Lincoln will have been wrong when he said that we
have a government of the people, for the people and by the
people. However, I say that Abraham Lincoln was
absolutely right. There is no reason on God’s Earth
why “we the people” of this Planet cannot bring about the
world so beautifully described by Alfred Lord Tennyson in
1842 in Locksley Hall:
For I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would
be.…
[Where] the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the
battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. |
