countries. However in circumstances in which an individual nuclear power was
resisting the world government, and agreement on scales of activity had been
defined by a global-sampling referendum, the possibility would exist for
such countries through the world government to co-ordinate their use of them
in retaliation against a nuclear strike. No one country need possess a huge
number of such weapons as long as the collective total would together
outweigh those owned by any individual recalcitrant nation, and as before
there would be every reason to hope that the world government could
gradually force the levels down to their minimum throughout the world.
Benefits – International ecology
Urgent international ecological problems, such as the excessive production
of ozone-destroying chemicals and the destruction of rainforests, could also
be dealt with by this sort of world government. It could pass laws which
acted across countries in mutual ways, backed up ultimately by the
possibility of enforcement via the global-sampling system. For example, the
world government might enact a balanced general law which imposed severe
limits on rainforest destruction, and also appropriately penalised wealthier
economies whose economic activity tends to encourage it. As always such a
law could be neutralised by a population for their own country (although I
would argue that we would be much more likely to see a positively altruistic
response from ordinary people than from their governments, which tend to
react to public pressure, rarely to lead it). But if such a law actively
broke down because of high levels of veto, the world government could try to
resort to a global-sampling referendum to ‘enforce it’ using the threat of
economic sanctions. Again the ‘jury’ of randomly-chosen populations would
become the conscience of the world in deciding how important the problem
was.
There could also be an emergency procedure whereby nations affected in a
negative way by the policies of their neighbours – a good ecological example
of this is provided by the Scandinavian nations, which currently suffer from
acid-rain generated largely in the United Kingdom – could request the World
Parliament to enforce a combined binding referendum of all of the involved
populations on the topic. There might also be a procedure where a petition
signed by 0.1% of the population of a country could lead to a binding
referendum on any issue within that country via the powers of the World
Parliament.
Democratic assumption
It might be argued that such a system of world government, while allowing
considerable cultural variation among its member countries, nevertheless
makes the assumption that democracy is acceptable and desirable within all
cultures. This is true, but there are two mitigating points to be made.
Firstly, it should be remembered that membership of the world system would
be voluntary, depending on governments responding to public pressure to join
it, and in each case would only be deemed to be ratified by a majority vote
in a popular referendum. Where democracy was genuinely not acceptable to a
culture then there would be no such internal pressure, or membership would
fail at the initial referendum stage, and such a country would then
voluntarily remain outside the system. In practice, if people were polled by
fair referendum, it seems most unlikely that there would be any cultures,
except perhaps the most primitive, which would reject the basic
preferability of democracy over dictatorship.
Secondly, the international standards for democratic practice need neither
be uniform nor blindly instantiate the common model of Western European or
American practice. Individual nations could use any method apporved by the
standards – and there would almost certainly at the very least be a spectrum
of possibilities from the ‘one person one vote’ method to many types of
proportional representation – for both the election of their MWPs and the
conduct of internal referenda. There is no reason why forms of fair practice
which arise from other cultural backgrounds should not be incorporated. As
long as some fundamental general criteria were met by a procedure for
establishing the will of a populace then it could be approved. The criteria
might include such things as freedom of expression without fear of reprisal,
and no inequitable influence on the outcome by minority groups [%f: For
example, it is not obvious that some procedures used in small tribal
communities for arriving at consensus, although secret voting is not
involved, are not fair in this fashion].
Indeed it could even be stated in the world constitution that any form of
procedure would be acceptable as long as it was approved once by a member
nation’s population in a referendum carried out using an already approved
practice. It might well be the World Court in which the interpretation of
the standards and the arbitration on practices would best ultimately lie.
Getting from here to there – Step 1
But isn’t this all just a pipe-dream? Could we ever get from where mankind
is now to this seemingly ideal situation? Could it be done without force?
Funnily enough, it may not be too difficult. One of the beauties of this
system is that it threatens the sovereignty of individual countries only to
a minimal degree, making it difficult for them to have grounds for resisting
popular pressure to join in.
The full system could possibly be achieved in three graduated steps over a
period of a number of decades. The process would start with the setting up
through the UN of an international organisation of Electoral Observers,
rather like the current Electoral Reform Society but on a much larger scale
and on a more formal basis. Their aim would be to produce the international
set of standards and procedures for the conduct of democratic referenda and
governmental elections, allowing for the many different systems of direct,
proportional and other representation which might be used. These standards
would no doubt cover issues such as how to keep votes unattributable to
individuals, procedures for fair counting of votes, and safeguards against
victimisation of voters. The job of the UN Electoral Observers would then be
to monitor the actual practices of democracy in the world against them. That
this is all not an unrealistic scenario is shown by the fact that in 1991
the countries of the Commonwealth gave serious consideration to the
development of just such an organisation.
No doubt many democratic countries would have no objections to the UN
Electoral Observers monitoring and reporting on their practices. Over time
they would become a familiar and accepted feature of democratic practice in
numerous countries, although clearly there would remain many countries which
would continue not to welcome them.
Getting from here to there – Step 2
After some years or decades, once the UN Electoral Observers were well
established, a voluntary treaty would be drawn up by the UN to develop the
system to a second level. The treaty would commit signatory countries to
make use of the Electoral Observers for all subsequent elections and
referenda, and to repeat any which the Observers classed as failing to meet
their basic standards of democratic practice. The established, mostly
developed democracies would almost certainly, if there was a sufficient
groundswell of public opinion in favour of such a strategic move towards
underpinning the basic quality of democracy, again tend to accept this
treaty and operate under its regime. As a result a considerable weight of
moral and public pressure would build on other governments in the world to
follow suit. Gradually other countries if they had any pretence to democracy
would be forced by both internal and external opinion into the fold. It has
taken Britain many centuries of the ‘democratic-habit’ to build up genuinely
democratic practices, and such a system of independent international
observers with enforceable standards could go a long way to assuring
populations, especially those of underdeveloped countries in Africa, South
America and Asia, of the viability of proper democracy in their countries.
Getting from here to there – Step 3
It might well take decades before numbers had grown significantly, but
eventually there would come a time when a significant percentage of the
world’s population, living in a considerably wider variety of cultures than
the merely European and American, were enjoying governmental systems which
operated within the system of democratic safeguards. Finally, at that time,
a world government treaty would be drawn up incorporating the full system of
global government described earlier, for countries again to sign
voluntarily. As an additional ’smoothing in’ mechanism, for perhaps the
first 50 years of its life the World Parliament might have the existing UN
as its ‘upper-house’ – able to review its laws and at least suggest
amendments. It would also probably be sensible for global financial
institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to
eventually be brought under the control of the world government. These very
significant global powers would then be under a more direct democratic
control, and would be more likely to make a fairer spreading of the world’s
financial resources into the impoverished underdeveloped world.
As before there is every chance that there would be enormous popular
pressure on most national governments to back this final phase of
development and to join the world government system, because people would
see that its effect would be to ensure deeper and fuller democracy
throughout the world. Perhaps again the initial core of member-countries at
each step would be made up of the mature western democracies, but because of
this pressure it would not be long before membership became wider.
Conclusion
We have all witnessed in recent years the populations of many countries (the
Phillipines, China, the USSR, Eastern Europe, etc.) doing their best to
bring about local democracy. In some cases this seems to have worked
reasonably smoothly (eg. Poland) but in others (the Phillipines) the
resulting government has always been balancing on a knife-edge, threatened
on all sides by despotic forces; in some cases (China) the population has
failed to win through. One of the major benefits of the full world
government system would be that populations would only have to force their
governments to sign the voluntary world government treaty, by the sort of
courageous popular action we have seen so much of, in order to ensure their
country’s future democratic health; from this single action all else would
safely follow. If their government subsequently started to digress from the
democratic path, or was overthrown and replaced by a totalitarian
alternative, no doubt it would soon fall foul of some world government laws,
and would then leave itself open to the full range of sanctions which the
world government could persuade other populations to bring against it.
A fitting plan for the opening decades of the 21st century? Perhaps. If it
worked such a system of world government would almost certainly represent a
quantum leap forward in the levels of freedom enjoyed by the poorer citizens
of the world, as well as to some extent those of us in the developed
nations.