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COPYRIGHT 2000 Professors World Peace Academy
While it is clear that a world government would considerably reduce the threat of nuclear war, only a very tiny minority of world government advocates believes that this advantage outweighs the countervailing disadvantage that such concentration of political and military power might set the stage for global tyranny. A proposal is put forward for a type of world government that would be far less centralized and powerful than is normally envisioned. Despite its limitations, this plan of world government would make a valuable, albeit gradual and evolutionary, contribution to the furtherance of global governance and the assurance of the future destiny of human civilization.
Time marches on, and the twentieth century is now part of history. "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times," wrote Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, describing the French Revolution. Dickens' immortal words could as well be applied to the twentieth century. This tumultuous century saw two disastrous world wars, dozens of "lesser conflicts," extermination camps, the gulag archipelago, monstrous dictators, horrific totalitarian regimes, the threat of nuclear holocaust, genocidal outbursts, runaway population growth, widening global inequality, and accelerating environmental degradation. At the same time, the twentieth century witnessed marvelous technological advances: the development and dissemination of automobiles and airplanes, radio and television, computers and the Internet, as well as the continuous improvement of prouction techniques across the entire range of commodities from basic foodstuffs to high-tech gadgetry. These advances have laid the basis for living standards in the wealt hiest nations of the world which would have been unimaginable in earlier times. They have also laid the basis for an equally unimaginable expansion of the human population throughout the world.
It has become virtually a platitude that mankind's social and political progress has not kept pace with our scientific and technological progress. Scientific and technological progress is routinely applied to augment the destructiveness of weaponry, but owing to humanity's innate propensity toward hatred and violence, which has not yet been satisfactorily controlled through the social and political institutions of governance, this highly destructive weaponry is routinely employed in both domestic and international warfare. Most dramatically, the tremendous scientific breakthroughs of nuclear fission and nuclear fusion were immediately utilized to manufacture atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs, while equally tremendous breakthroughs in rocketry and inertial guidance were immediately utilized to manufacture ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear bombs with pinpoint accuracy to targets on the other side of the world. The upshot of this was that at the height of the Cold War during the latter half of the twentieth century, had a decision been made by the leadership of any of the nuclear superpowers that war was necessary, it was literally true that within a few hours, hundreds of millions of human beings around the world would have been dead or dying, and much of human civilization would have lain in ruins. People coped with the nightmarish unreality of the situation by means of comforting thoughts to the effect that a nuclear world war would be so overwhelmingly devastating that only madmen would commence one, and since madmen were unlikely to gain control over a nuclear superpower, nuclear world war was therefore extremely unlikely. This is an illustration of a psychological phenomenon well-known to psychiatrists: denial. When reality is too terrible to contemplate, deny reality. The single most important flaw in the comforting argument described above is that madmen in power is not a necessary condition to start a nuclear war. Such a war could be a consequence of the same sort of miscalculated brinkmanship that sparked both World War I and World War II. The respective leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev, were fully sane, sensible and intelligent men. Khrushchev had the good sense to back down at the critical moment, which averted a nuclear world war in 1962. Had Stalin or Hitler been in power at that moment, it seems much less likely that the world would have been spared nuclear war.
Opportunity Lost
Throughout the twentieth century, world federalists argued that the agonies and vicissitudes imposed on humanity by warfare could be greatly reduced, if not terminated altogether, by the formation of a world government with strong and effective authority over the nations. Just as the various national governments do not permit organized warfare to transpire between subsidiary political components within their territories, such as provinces, states, districts, counties, cities, and so on, so too a world government would not permit organized warfare to transpire between subsidiary political components within its territory, up to and including the nations themselves. Not only would human civilization be rid of the death, pain, destruction and sorrow directly inflicted by warfare, it would also be rid of the endless apprehension over warfare that blights human happiness even during the most prolonged intervals of peace, as well as the continuing heavy economic burden of maintaining military armament and forces sup posedly sufficient to deter potential opponents in other nations from launching aggressive wars. Guided by an almost utopian vision of eternal peace and prosperity, world government advocates poured out a profusion of proposals, recommendations and provisional constitutions throughout the twentieth century. [1] The world government concept reached the height of its influence in the few short years just following the Second World War. On top of the prodigious carnage wrought by the War, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave humanity a profound shock, a terrifying vision of what would probably occur if a Third World War were fought with nuclear weapons. The advent of these weapons significantly strengthened the longstanding position of world federalists that in the absence of a world government, the sovereign nation-state system was likely to generate warfare of such magnitude and intensity as to cause the downfall and possible annihilation of human civilization. World-renowned scientists, statesme n and philosophers declared themselves in favor of world government, world federalist organizations and movements proliferated, and millions of people around the world began thinking seriously about the idea.
The postwar world government boom proved to be highly ephemeral. Unfortunately for the prospects of human civilization, just as the advent of nuclear weapons strongly suggested to humanity the advisability of establishing a global political structure superior to the national governments, the simmering, long-term ideological conflict between communism and noncommunism boiled over into the Cold War. During the interwar period, the Soviet Union had been alone and isolated as the sole communist nation in the world. Although the Soviet leadership boldly proclaimed the impending demise of capitalism throughout the world, in reality it was acutely fearful that the capitalist nations would instead mount an invasion of the Soviet Union for the purpose of nipping the socialist menace in the bud. This fear was indeed realized with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941--although fortunately for the Soviet Union, there were by that time other powerful capitalist nations in conflict with Nazi Germany Given t he chronic paranoia of Stalin and the Soviet communist party leadership, it is not surprising that, amid postwar chaos, the Soviet Army was instructed to install communist regimes in several overrun Eastern European nations, and that Soviet military support was extended to communist revolutionary movements in many other nations--support which was instrumental to the communization of several nations, most notably China. By the early 1950s, acute apprehension in the noncommunist West over the emergence of an aggressively expansionist communist bloc of nations had reached a fever pitch.
Among the earliest casualties of the Cold War was the world federalist movement. By the time of the Korean War, all but the most enthusiastic advocates of world government realized that the window of opportunity created by the newly emergent nuclear threat was rapidly closing. The establishment of a world government presupposes at least a modicum of mutual respect, toleration and trust among the nations who would compose it. The raging ideological conflict between communism and noncommunism precluded the achievement of even this modicum. Communist ideologues denigrated the market capitalist economic system as immoral, inequitable, inefficient, anarchic and unstable, and further denounced Western democratic institutions and procedures as a hollow sham intended to conceal from the people their actual political subjugation to the plutocratic capitalist class. Defenders of market capitalism and Western democracy replied with equal vigor and vitriol to the effect that the proposed socialist cure was far worse tha n the capitalist disease, judging from such evidence as chronic economic hardship in the communist nations, as well as various revolutionary excesses under such communist dictators as Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, who were in no way less objectionable than the fascist dictators brought down by World War II, most notably Adolf Hitler.
Both sides rejected the concept of world government on the grounds that such a government would quite likely enforce upon them the hateful socioeconomic and political preferences of the other side. The Western noncommunist nations were fearful that a world government would be somehow subverted by the communist nations and transformed into an instrument for the further expansion--not to say the final triumph--of communism. The Eastern communist nations were equally fearful that a world government would be subverted by the noncommunist nations and transformed into an instrument for reaction, leading to the abolition of socialism throughout the world and the restoration of capitalism. In the minds of both sides, the greater probability of nuclear holocaust (with no world government in existence) constituted an acceptable risk, when compared to the greater probability of domination (with a world government in existence) by the opposite side of the ideological struggle. Both sides employed such terms as "totalita rianism" and "tyranny" to describe the regime that would be imposed on them by a potential world government under the control of the other wide. Try as the world federalists might to dispute the validity of this calculus, and to get humanity to agree with them that the threat of nuclear war without world government was worse than the threat of totalitarianism with world government, their appeals fell on deaf...
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