Our generation has grown up with an implicit
internationalism.
Since preschool, we have been learning about the damage people
are doing to the Earth. Many of us are concerned enough about
sweatshops in developing countries to avoid buying clothes we know
are made there. MEChA activists wear t-shirts saying, “We
didn’t cross the borders. The borders crossed us.” My
own fifth-grade class learned to sing “We Are the
World” for the school’s winter pageant.
In “The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,”
John Perry Barlow referred to the Internet as “a world that
all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race,
economic power, military force, or station of birth.” Many of
us came of age in that world.
The global environmental crisis facing humanity reveals our
interconnectedness. Burning rainforest in Brazil causes ice at the
North Pole to melt. Pollution from China’s coal-burning power
plants blows over to Southern California. U.S. chemical companies
sell pesticides long banned in the United States to developing
nations and the toxins return home on imported produce.
On a more positive note, environmental groups like Greenpeace
and the World Wildlife Fund work all over the world, and thousands
of smaller local organizations now network using the Internet.
Where are all these trends, positive and negative, leading us?
What do we do about growing global corporate power and the nuclear
weapons stockpiles that still threaten us all? How do we react to
the rise of nearly instantaneous communication and to those
stirring images of the Earth against the cold blackness of
space?
One response is world federalism ““ an exciting idea with
an enormously dull name. I prefer to think of it as an
acknowledgement of global citizenship and loyalty to all of
humanity. World federalists believe we need a system of democratic
global governance on top of (not instead of) national governments.
Such a system would provide enforceable legal mechanisms for
resolving conflicts, protecting human rights and safeguarding the
environment.
The current United Nations can provide a base for this kind of
world state, but only with many changes. A crucial change would be
switching from one-nation-one-vote to a voting system based on
population, so that a country with a population of one million does
not have the same voting power as one with a billion. Methods of
global law enforcement will also have to be developed. To learn
more about the changes that will have to be made, check out the web
sites of the World Federalist Association (www.wfa.org) and World
Federalist Movement (www.worldfederalist.org).
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the world federalist vision
is the prospect of eliminating war. Just as California does not
need to defend itself from Nevada, the countries making up a world
state would not need weapons and armies to protect themselves from
each other. Right now, the world impoverishes itself, spending a
trillion dollars each year on ways to kill people. Just think of
what could be accomplished if that money was available for peaceful
ends.
Can world federalism possibly succeed? According to Paul H. Ray
and Sherry Ruth Anderson, authors of “The Cultural
Creatives” the social movements that succeed in the long run
are those that challenge cultural assumptions and reframe issues in
a larger context. Some, like environmentalism, question widely held
beliefs; others, like the civil rights movement, challenge people
to live up to their ideals. Either way, the political and cultural
arms of such movements together accomplish what neither could
alone.
What cultural assumptions do world federalists challenge?
We’re saying, “People outside your borders are no less
morally important than those inside them. It’s not acceptable
that children’s chances of surviving are dictated by
arbitrary lines around their place of birth.”
In April, human rights groups and world federalists celebrated
the creation of the International Criminal Court. This is a
permanent body for trying individuals suspected of committing war
crimes, genocide, or crimes against humanity, including murder,
enslavement, deportation, torture, rape, genocide and apartheid.
Unfortunately, the United States has withdrawn from the treaty
creating the ICC, but this will not stop the court from going
forward.
There is a powerful reframe in the very term “crimes
against humanity.” Certain acts are so heinous that, if
committed against civilians during a war, they are considered
crimes not just against their specific victims but against all of
humanity.
“For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness and
irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation,” wrote
Lewis Thomas in “The Lives of a Cell.” Surely we can do
better than this. Indeed, if humanity is to survive, we have to do
better. Our loyalties, as Carl Sagan put it, must be to the species
and the planet.