Contents
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Read the entire book in PDF Format
Chapter 1
The Peoples of the World Are Sovereign
Today we must develop federal structures on a global level.
We need a system of enforceable world law--a democratic federal
world government--to deal with world problems.
--Walter Cronkite
Imagine an old Star Trek series like this: Captain Kirk and crew are out exploring deep space, getting into quirky dramas on far-distant planets; meanwhile, back on earth, Kirk's home planet is a war-torn cauldron of sovereign nation-states armed to the teeth. A dozen wars are going on at any one time, and thousands of children die of starvation daily. Its leading superpower is fighting a global war on terrorists, mounting computerized weapons in space, and standing by while global warming destroys the planet's ecosystem.
Not exactly a suitable home port for a Captain Kirk.
Star Trek instead depicted an "Earth Federation" in our future--an advanced civilization ruled by a democratic global government. Pessimistic science fiction writers usually resort to the flipside scenario, some version of a nightmarish future dystopia in which humankind has failed to rise to the manifold challenges of war, conflict, and greed. They indulge in an imaginative extension of the current planetary anarchy that we read about in the newspaper every day.
Which portrayal will win out? This book is about the proposition that there really is no acceptable future without enforceable global laws that will outlaw war, redistribute resources, and control pollution. We will present the vision of a real-life "earth federation," and we believe that today's progressives must lead the worldwide grassroots campaign that will make it come true--before it's too late. But can we dare to imagine a global democratic government evolving, even in our own time? Or must the whole world endure more deadly warfare, terrorism, and ecocide before we come to our senses? Our common foe is the destruction of the planet by the quick method of nuclear war or the slow method of environmental collapse. Let us soberly look to these common threats, and summon the courage to affirm the ideal of uniting all of humanity around a global social contract. It was the great scientist Albert Einstein who wrote: "The UN now, and world government eventually, must serve one single goal--the guarantee of the security, tranquility, and the welfare of all mankind."
The ideal of "one world"
was established in the 1940s
The ideal of a united human family began to dawn on masses of people, at least young Americans, in the great activist era of the 1960s. The first pictures of the earth from space were beamed back from the moon in 1969. The Apollo astronauts reported great epiphanies as they viewed the planet from deep space for the first time. The visionaries and antiwar activists of the sixties, and these fortunate astronauts, pictured planet earth as it really is: a unified whole, a global family of humanity, a gorgeous sphere without the artificial borders that can lead to division and war.
Seen from a distance in space or time, our deadly internecine squabbles, our monstrous war system, and our inability to protect the global environment and feed the poor seem backward and childish indeed. In this book we will invite you to step back in your imagination, and envision our planet's true destiny that lies beyond our current nationalistic prejudices--the earth as a politically unified sphere of diverse peoples who live in peace.
This vision of a unified humanity has been growing ever since the 1960s, and in recent years has found remarkable expression in a rugged, worldwide peace and justice movement. This movement comprises a key part of the progressive vanguard of the coming "one world democracy." Probably its greatest public moment was the simultaneous demonstrations on February 15, 2003 in over forty cities worldwide by an estimated 30 million people opposed to the Iraq war.(1) Another key element of this global progressive movement is the annual meetings of the World Social Forum. The WSF was created in 2001 to provide an open platform to discuss strategies of resistance to the prevailing model for globalization that gets presented each year at the annual World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland by large multinational corporations, national governments, the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the World Bank, and the WTO.
But as you will see in this book, a crucial element is still missing from these creative and potent expressions of protest and resistance: a positive program to end war and exploitation through enforceable global law and a federation of nations, including a world legislature. We call those activists who susbcribe to this approach "enlightened progressives."
We believe that such a vision of a great global democracy, ruled by just laws and based on the inherent sovereignty of the people of the world, could powerfully unify today's progressive activists. With a clear objective of making war illegal through the rule of enforceable global law, the antiwar movement will grow similar to the way the abolitionist movement grew to eliminate slavery in the US in the nineteenth century.
The roots of this vision are not just a matter of imagination or science fiction. We need only backtrack a few decades from the antiwar movement of the '60s and revisit the "one world" ideals of the postwar generation of the late 1940s.
The narrative of the post-WWII peace movement and its various initiatives for "one world" through world federal government is an inspiring story of noble ideals and courageous leadership. Very few of today's progressive activists are aware that a vibrant world federalist movement dominated the scene in the US in the second half of the 1940s--long before the 1960s. This movement had its beginnings in that unsung generation of activists and thinkers of the post-war era who arose after the nuclear era was suddenly inaugurated in the mushroom ball at Hiroshima. Renowned writers and leaders such as philosopher Mortimer Adler, physicist Albert Einstein, Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, presidential candidate Henry Wallace, attorney Grenville Clark, educator Robert Hutchins, and journalist E.B. White led the way and set the tone for thousands of activists.
During that forgotten era, an activist group called the Student Federalists was considered the most progressive. The largest organization, the United World Federalists (UWF), formed in 1947 by the merger of five groups, once had over 50,000 members, with affiliates in almost every state and on scores of campuses. Declining after the disillusionment of the Korean War, the UWF went through several changes until it reemerged in the 1960s under the leadership of Saturday Evening Post editor Norman Cousins. After a period of decline, it was resurrected as the World Federalist Association (WFA) in 1976, and was based for three decades in Washington D.C. The WFA recently changed its name to Citizens for Global Solutions (CGS), with a focus on legislation and UN reform. The formation of CGS left behind several important splinters, most notably the Democratic World Federalists, based in San Francisco, which is a new national organization more specifically dedicated to the goal of world federation. In chapter four we also review two other grassroots movements dedicated to global democracy.
To get a sense of what the earliest blossoming of the "one world" movement was like, here is one vivid story of the progressive activism from that era:
Garry Davis was a young professional actor and a former US air force pilot who had become disillusioned with war after personally participating in the fire-bombing of German civilian targets. Mulling over his war experience one day in late 1948, something profound rose up in him and moved him to act. He pulled together some money and flew to Paris, to the temporary United Nations headquarters then at Palais Chaillot. Appearing outside the palace before the press and a crowd of observers, he dramatically renounced his US citizenship, proclaiming himself a "citizen of the world." His next move was to literally camp just outside the UN headquarters on a small bit of space that he publicly declared to be "liberated world territory."
Then, with the support of activists whom he had rallied to his cause, Davis conceived of another publicity-grabbing event. One day, he made bold to enter the UN's General Assembly itself. He stood up and interrupted a session to present a dramatic plea for a genuine world government--that is, until he was seized by UN guards. But at that very moment an associate named Robert Sarrazac, a former lieutenant colonel in the French military, arose and finished Davis' speech, saying, "We, the people, long for the peace which only a world order can give. The sovereign states which you represent here are dividing us and bringing us to the abyss of war." Sarrazac called on the astonished delegates to cease their national disputes and "raise a flag around which all men can gather, the flag of sovereignty of one government for the world."
Inspired by Davis' sensational activities, over 250,000 people from many nations registered as "world citizens" through his new organization in the months thereafter; each made their own personal declaration of world citizenship. Meanwhile, approximately 400 cities and towns throughout France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and India--in part following Garry Davis' example--proclaimed themselves "mundialized," (or world territory), in the next few years. The so-called mundialization movement, largely symbolic in nature, soon faded in the confusion of the Cold War, but the world citizens' movement had now been launched.(2)
This incident colorfully illustrates the key concepts of sovereignty that underlie this introductory discussion of global government. The issues and questions involved here are profound: What is true sovereignty? Can there be a "flag of sovereignty of one government for the world," as Davis and Sarrazac proclaimed, or was this a fanciful metaphor? Does the evolution of sovereignty end with nation-states? Do individuals have rights only as citizens of nations--but not as citizens of the world? And what would it take to "mundialize" our world once again, only this time for good?
Peace always grows
as sovereignty expands
To get at an answer, we must first ask what sovereignty actually is, and how and from whom it is derived. After the fall of Rome in the West, the term came to refer to the so-called divine right of kings to rule, a right of sovereignty that was believed to be conferred on the throne directly by God.
A great landmark was reached when King John of England was compelled to sign the Magna Carta in 1215, which established in principle that the king was not above the law, and that noblemen and ordinary Englishmen have distinct rights. Beginning in the sixteenth century in Europe, Renaissance and then Enlightenment thinkers began to demolish the intellectual foundations of the feudal concept of divine right. They reasoned that the source of sovereignty must ultimately derive from the people over whom kings once ruled, rather than being a set of rights conferred upon the people by the king.
Later theorists have held that sovereignty is inherent and inalienable in individual persons, and cannot as such be transferred to governments. They have argued that the people simply grant "powers of governing" to different levels of government when it is legitimate, or that dictators may temporarily usurp people's innate sovereignty when government is illegitimate.
Generally speaking, all of these writers and legislators have established the enduring democratic truth that sovereignty resides both in individual citizens and in the collective whole of all the people. And thus began the transfer of the power to rule from one person (or one class or one race) to all the people, and the simultaneous recognition that each citizen has the right to "life, liberty, and property"--not just the king, or the nobles, or the ruling classes. This earth-shaking conception of democracy soon became the motivating force that drove the American and French revolutions, inexorably leading humanity to the era of the modern democratic state. Democracy has expanded from these roots in Europe and the US and is now practiced in some form in over one hundred and twenty countries worldwide.
Here is our point: If sovereignty has its source in the people, and if the world has progressively moved in the direction of increasing democracy in recognition of that fact, then this concept must have an even greater destiny than we see today.
History records the fact that the definition of sovereignty has been broadening to encompass ever-larger concepts of human community--ever-more inclusive definitions of who "the people" are. Each such expansion--where limited by constitutional government--has brought peace and security and advances in human rights and liberty to more and more people.
In the most general sense, the evolution of sovereignty can be said to have begun with the primitive family; this was followed by consanguineous (blood-related) clans and tribes. Next came city-states and then warring city-states, such as ancient Greece during its fabled wars between Athens and Sparta, or China before it was unified in the Han Empire.
Much like the Han emperors in the East--and around the same period in world history--the Romans greatly extended sovereignty in the West. Rome enjoyed an unprecedented era of peace known as Pax Romana (Roman Peace) that lasted from just before the time of Christ through the fourth century, by incorporating once-sovereign and warring cities and states around the Mediterranean into an integrated whole. The Han Empire, as well as the later Tang and Ming periods in China, were also golden ages of high culture and civil peace. These blessings were conferred upon these peoples through the broadening of the sovereignty of the Chinese state over large regions.
History describes the ways in which the broad reach of these ancient empires did at times break down, causing retrogressions to intervening eras of warring states; this was witnessed after the fall of the Roman Empire as Europe fragmented into hundreds of warring sovereign entities in the "dark ages." Similarly, after its own golden era of several centuries, the fall of the feudal Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century led to the fragmentation of the Arab world that we see today.
Europe fared far better than the Islamic world in the transition to modern forms of sovereignty and democracy. The intervening era in Europe between feudal empire and modernity witnessed the slow formation of functionally sovereign nations. In the early modern era in the West, the first nation-states arose out of the warring feudal estates of medieval Europe, some later to become sea-faring empires. The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 enshrined the concept of sovereign nation-states in Europe. Ever since this treaty, the general goal of war and diplomacy has been a "balance of power."
Notable in this evolution were the formation of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy--Europe's great nations to this day. The frequently warring provinces of Burgundy, Brittany, and Normandy consolidated to form the nation of France in the fifteenth century. James I united Scotland and England early in the seventeenth century, ending centuries of egregious violence. The unification of Germany and Italy came much later. Europe has lapsed into continent-wide wars many times in the last few millennia, only to overcome this curse with the great success of the European Union (EU) that was effected in the late twentieth century. This political union of Europe is a regional democratic federation of nations that, perhaps more than anything else, presages the world federation to come.
Without exception, all such instances of the broadening and sharing of sovereignty have resulted in peace within the larger sovereign unit; retrogressions have usually led right back to outbreaks of fratricidal conflict.
Peace through broader sovereignty was also in evidence when the early Americans rejected their confederation of thirteen states--each with its own militia and sovereign power--and adopted a federation of states with a constitution that transferred the right to make war to a national federal government. The colonies won their independence from Britain in 1783, but struggled for five more years as a confederation of states in which each state retained sovereignty. Pennsylvania and Connecticut almost went to war over the treatment of Connecticut citizens who had settled in Pennsylvania. New York and New Jersey exchanged canon fire in New York Harbor over the issue of who would collect taxes from incoming boats. It was not until 1788, after the federal constitution was ratified, that the US was able to become the country we know it to be today, with the first Congress and President seated in 1789.
This act of federal union that led to the United States of America, and more recently the federation of the states of Europe that led to the EU, provide the best modern examples of how a people's decision to grant governing and law-making powers to larger and larger political entities confers the blessings of peace, law, and democracy to a wider territory. Europe, through the recent development of supranational law, has finally found peace after having been a killing field for centuries. Some thirty other countries around the world are based on some form of federations as well.
We've noted that sovereignty can be transferred not only upward but also downward, resulting in a new cycle of wars or the threat of war. In the US, this occurred in the American Civil War, a breakdown of national sovereignty that created two warring "sovereign" units. Something equally deadly occurred in the former Yugoslavia when its socialist federation was broken up into the smaller warring countries of Serbia/ Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia, and later Kosovo.
History teaches that any political union can be challenged even after it has become well established; as with any government, a global government will require the continued vigilance of its members and of a vigorous world press if it is to endure and remain free of corruption.
The UN does not represent
the sovereignty of humankind
We've seen that, throughout human history, sovereignty has been broadening to encompass an increasingly larger concept of community. We know that this increase in the recognition of the innate sovereign power of the people--based on the inalienable rights of individual citizens--has resulted in peace within the new and larger sovereign unit, and that this broader peace is maintained just to the extent that the rule of law and justice is maintained in that sovereign entity.
The United Nations, of course, does not supply this wider recognition of sovereignty and law; it is not a true sovereign union. We can say categorically that the UN has failed to bring the peace and stability that the broadening of sovereignty has been shown to confer upon humankind.
The UN is a relic of the post-WWII era, hindered in its work by a design similar to that of the failed American confederation of states, which preceded the federal constitution of the US. Under the UN Charter, the right to make war is retained by individual nations; all actions are voluntary; and those agreements approved in the UN Security Council that are not vetoed by one of the five great powers are virtually unenforceable. A global arms race, dozens of bloody wars, and increasing global pollution mark the era of the confederation of nations known as the United Nations. Further, individual rights as such have no standing before the United Nations. Neither the innate sovereignty of the world's people, nor the inherent human rights of persons, are reliably protected by the United Nations charter.
War and anarchy can be eliminated only when a new sovereign source of law is set up over and above the old clashing groups, creating an integrated whole and a higher source of law. The UN is not such a source of supranational law. The UN created a community of nations, and acts on the world stage as an agent for member nations.
But the challenge of our time is the quest to redefine our community as all of humanity. We currently see ourselves as Americans, Russians, or Chinese, but are we not truly one human community? Are we not unified by a common source, by the earth we all share, and by the desire for security and peace equally held by people all over the world? Global survival requires that we expand our loyalty to include not just our family, city, state or province, and country, but to humanity and the planet as well--and that we affirm this with global law and democratic governance.
Our loyalty seems to have stopped with the nation, but competitive nationalism is the greatest barrier to redefining our community as all humanity. Internally, nationalism is not necessarily an evil; it has been a unifying factor in many countries. But how long can humankind continue as two hundred separate countries, with two hundred armies engaged in an arms race? If nationhood continues to be the reigning form of sovereignty on this planet--and is kept in place through the legitimizing vehicle of the UN--then our future prospects are indeed stark.
It is often said that global government is overly idealistic and not a realistic solution to today's problems. But it seems to us that the real dreamers are those who believe that today's anarchic system of nationalism and war will bring a lasting peace. Anyone who thinks we can find peace by building more weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) should think again. Anyone who argues that the US can create security with a massive Pentagon budget need only bring to mind the scene of the Pentagon itself suffering a withering attack by a few clever terrorists. Those dreamers who think that peace results from an endless arms race will eventually return to square one: History proves over and over again that peace prevails only under the rule of government.
There is much to consider here. Many nations have built or can build weapons of mass destruction. This knowledge cannot be somehow erased by attacking these nations; this information is easily spread far and wide. The nuclear genie has long been out of the bottle. Who can put it back in, when each nation fears for its very survival? The UN has been almost powerless to stop nuclear proliferation. It is therefore only a matter of time until another Hitler, Stalin, or Saddam Hussein emerges to threaten the world with nuclear weapons or some other WMD. And probably nothing short of a reign of global justice based on enforceable global law could prevent terrorists from attacking on a more massive scale than they did on September 11, 2001. Global government may also be the only way to stop the dire threat of global warming--a problem all humans share equally. Multinational treaties and UN Security Council resolutions lack the force of law and simply cannot carry out these massive tasks.
With enlightened progressives all over the world in the lead, we must move beyond the obsolete concept of a community of nations and embrace the vision of the sovereignty of the entire world's people, or face a dismal future.
True sovereignty is
personal and global
The "one-world guerilla theatre" of world government pioneer Garry Davis dramatized that there are ultimately only two permanent and functional levels of sovereignty: the free will of the individual person--the "citizen of the world"--and the collective sovereignty of humankind as a whole. Throughout this book, we will explore the proposition that these two forms of sovereignty are irreducible, each providing a kind of bookend on one side or the other of the concept of sovereignty.
We saw earlier that leaders in Davis' generation pointed to the truth that only world government teamed with a global bill of individual rights could protect humanity in the nuclear age. But this achievement of the history of consciousness--so evident to the clearest thinkers after WWII--was lost with the adoption of the UN charter and in the hard realities of the Cold War that descended upon the world in the early 1950s.
Courageous postwar progressives of the 1940s loudly proclaimed these great dual truths that the peoples of the world are the true sovereigns of this planet--not nation-states--and that each individual has universal rights. They produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 as a first edition of a proclamation of these principles. However, their leaders betrayed them, bequeathing to us the UN, an institution that was unable to prevent the devastating Cold War arms race--and the dozens of wars that have disgraced and disfigured our planet since that time.
Nations retain their identity
in a world federation
Sovereignty transcends, but it also includes; the evolution of sovereignty does not in the least obliterate the previous levels of sovereign power. The replacement of the UN with a world government does not mean the abolition of local, national, and regional governments--it entails the federation of intact national (or regional) governments into a global sovereign power. Initially, nations will transfer only their war-making powers to the central government, just as the thirteen American colonies surrendered their war-making authority to the federal government, while still retaining their state militias.
It should be clear from our account that intervening "sets" of human groupings will and must exist between the level of the individual person and the "superset" called world federation. As conservative thinkers going back to Edmund Burke have shown, a political order must take measures to preserve the integrity and healthy functioning of each level of the "scaffolding" of society that exists between the individual citizen and the state--in our case, between the two fundamental levels of the person and the planetary state. This mandate includes respecting the needs and rights of such relatively sovereign units as the family, clan, tribe, province, and nation--recognizing that these evolve over time, even as the individual citizen and the planet-as-a-whole remain limits of the concept. (One can include such groupings as ethnicities, churches, political parties, labor unions, and professional associations in this list as well.)
But these transitional political and social entities are always temporary, always only of relative value in the evolution of sovereignty. What we are saying here is that vast empires, leagues of nations like the UN, nation-states, tribes, clans, and recent global contrivances such as the WTO and IMF--all organizations of power short of personhood and planethood are useful, but only insofar as they enhance the welfare and progress of the individual or of humankind as a whole.
Stated again, in the evolution of sovereignty, what are of ultimate value are the permanently enduring entities: the individual and the whole species. It was long ago pointed out by the philosopher John Stuart Mill that the purpose of political evolution is to foster the greatest good for the greatest number of all persons and for the greatest length of time. To the extent that the benefits of law and government are extended to larger and larger bodies of men and women in this way--just to that extent is there progress. If the scaffolding of any intervening and transitory level of sovereignty prevents this forward progress, then the people of the world have the sovereign right to discard or reform it. Just as Thomas Jefferson asserted that the people have the right of revolution against tyranny, so also must a global right of rebellion become a new rallying call for progressives longing for a peaceful and just world. As with the Founding Fathers of the United States, today's enlightened progressives will inevitably turn to the federal idea to replace our obsolete United Nations confederation.
But none of this requires that nationhood as such will be destroyed; it only means that the "absolute sovereignty" of nationhood is discarded, as real nations (and all other human groupings) become integrated into a more just and lawful political order at the global level.
Sovereignty is legitimate
political power--in action
Seen in another light, sovereignty is nothing but political power. It grows by organization (and almost always by military might), and it is maintained and validated by the quality of the justice dispensed to individual persons through law and government.
By our stated criteria, the progressive growth of the organization of political power is good and proper, for it tends to encompass ever-widening segments of the total of humankind, thereby lessening the possibility of war.
But our cursory study of world history also shows that this same growth of organization creates a problem at every intervening stage. Political organizations, be they tribes, cities, or nations, are usually reluctant to trade a portion of their sovereignty to gain the benefits of an expanded rule of law. People instinctively fear rule by "foreigners" whenever any federation of powers is contemplated. But as history shows, the benefits accruing from the extension of the rule of law outweigh the risk of tyranny at all levels of government.
By the same token, many people rightly fear global government because of the downside possibility that vicious minorities might gain control. It is possible, of course, for any government to become tyrannical. A good constitution that guarantees rights and a separation of powers does not carry a guarantee that courts will uphold the laws or that the executive branch will enforce them. The constitution of the Soviet Union was in many ways a progressive document, but was generally ignored; the policies that Hitler pursued were considered legal under German law as it evolved under Nazism; in the US, Congresspersons of both parties voted the Bush administration's Patriot Act into law. What do these angers point to? In the end, the burden of freedom always falls on the true sovereigns, not on government bureaucrats and politicians who are always subject to the temptations of corruption; it is the citizens' responsibility to make sure that government serves the needs of the people and is true to the democratic intent of its creators.
Yes, a global government could become tyrannical, but then any government or organization can become corrupt. Shall we therefore eliminate all government or all organizations? Shall we fail to institute government where it is needed, narrowing our vision to the status quo? Shall we say that it makes sense to have local, state, and national governments, but that it would be wrong and dangerous to have a global government? What is it about the global level of government that changes this equation? These questions will be addressed as we go.
But one fact is obvious: Presently, if a foreign country attacks another country, the latter has no choice but to fight back, either alone or through a treaty alliance. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the US had no choice but to defend itself by declaring war and creating a giant war machine. If one country is determined to violate the supposed sovereign rights of another, the only way to stop the aggression is to go to war--risking the use of WMDs or even world war. Under a global government, such foreign invasions will be outlawed; all military forces come under the control of the world body insofar as they cross national borders, and global law, democratically agreed upon and enforced by global marshals and a world police force, governs the actions of individual nations in global affairs.
In truth, living under a system of war and anarchy with WMDs readily available for use on the field of battle--that is the really frightening choice when it is compared with tyranny. Under a constitutional system of global government, political crimes will surely be committed, but they will be dealt with by the world police force and court system; a democratic world legislature will represent the eyes and ears of the world's people; political parties at the global level will compete for power on the basis of the fruits of peace and prosperity that they offer. One wonders how this can be seen as inferior to relying on a war system that allows nation-states the unlimited sovereign power to attack one another at will and permits corporations to plunder the global environment outside the rule of law.
There are great challenges at each step between the two enduring levels of the individual person and the final consummation of political growth--i.e., the federal government of all humankind, by all humankind, and for all humankind.
At the moment, our world is stalled in a quagmire of nationhood, held up by centuries of inertia from proceeding toward planethood. The problem facing us at this stage is the delusion of national sovereignty, especially when linked to the corrupting influences of war profiteering, religious fundamentalism, and rapacious global banks and corporations.
The hard truth is this: The concept of the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state is the profound political problem of our time--it is a transitory form that has served its purpose. Nation-states were first created to ensure basic law and order within their boundaries, but today they can no longer claim to provide even the most basic protections. When we wake up each day with the fear that a repeat performance of a terrorist attack like that of 9/11 is imminent, then we need to realize that it is time to move to the next level of sovereignty.
Our forebears in the late 1940s knew that the nuclear age had brought about a sea change. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in a world of international anarchy has created an unprecedented set of dangers. The nation-state as a provider of security and protection is bankrupt. There is no state in the world that can now provide reliable security. When the state can no longer fulfill its basic purpose, then it is time for reform. Progressives should be the first to realize that people have a right of rebellion against the spurious notion of the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state. The people of the nations of the world must transfer their war-making powers to a world federation, based on the dual recognition of the sovereignty of all humankind and the intrinsic rights of all individuals--or face catastrophe. The global governance movement is not trying to build a utopia; rather, it is urgently trying to prevent worldwide disaster.
A federation of all humanity . . . would mean
such a release and increase of human energy
as to open up a new phase in human history.
--H.G. Wells