Democratic World Government – An Outline Structure Essay, Research Paper
Introduction – problems and benefits of World Government
The idea of world government has not received a good press for many years.
It tends to make most of us think of Stalinist dictators and fascist
domination of the globe. I wish to argue, though, that there is a viable
form of democratic world government which could bring many benefits.
A democratic world government that really worked would lead to a major
increase in the freedom enjoyed by all people on the planet. It would also
make more equitable the international balance of power which currently so
heavily favours the rich developed nations and their citizens at the expense
of the much larger numbers of citizens in the underdeveloped world.
The billion-dollar question is, though, whether there could be a form of
democratic world government which was workable and sustainable, not
inefficient and expensive, and above all which was fair?
Conventional ideas about world government, which typically picture it in the
form of a global parliament passing universal laws in order to create an
identikit legal framework for all world citizens, suffer from three severe
problems. Firstly, the near-impossibility of persuading all of the world’s
countries to hand over their sovereignty to a global government of this
sort. Secondly, the risk – of which we are, and must always be, very aware -
of permitting a future global dictatorship of a particularly intransigent
kind (imagine how difficult it would be to dislodge a Hitler if he was in
possession of the kind of absolute power available through such a form of
government). And thirdly, as we see sometimes today in the European
Community, the tendency of such a large-scale government to create detailed,
uniform laws for the entire area it governs; the impetus would be towards a
sort of global standardisation, almost certainly based in the cultural
attitudes of the West, which would massively erode the rich cultural
variations which exist in the world.
A preferable system of world government, if such could be invented, would
meet all of these objections, as well perhaps as providing a global
framework designed to encourage the democratic possibilities of all nations.
Perhaps such a system might look something like the one I shall now
describe.
New form of World Government – outline structure
The new World Parliament would be a single elected chamber, possibly similar
in format to the House of Commons in the UK but with places for up to 1000
elected representatives – Members of the World Parliament, or ‘MWP’s. The
MWPs would be elected from national or supra-national constituencies, one
per so many head of population (but probably with a minimum of at least one
per nation, at least in the early decades [There are approaching 200 nation
states in the world at the moment, with populations ranging from 50,000 - St
Lucia - to 5,000,000,000 - China. This represents a variance of a factor of
100,000, so the disparity in representation could not be tolerated
indefinitely. In due course some notion of communal MWPs, shared by small
countries of reasonably alike culture, would have to be introduced.]). They
would be subjected to re-election every 5 years. The world government
envisaged here would have no army and would require only minimal
administrative support. As a result, its costs would be small. It would not
be allowed to raise any taxes, instead being funded in a similar way to that
in which the United Nations is today, by contributions from the
nation-states which make up its membership. Such nation-states would
continue to exist in the new system just as they do now, forming an
essential balancing power to that of the world government, and would be
without significant loss of sovereignty.
Membership of the new system which the world government represented would be
voluntary for each nation in the world, just as membership of the United
Nations currently is [Some democratic nations choose not to join the United
nations even today, Switzerland being a prime example.]. Becoming a member
would involve them adding their signature to a world treaty, which decision
would need to be ratified by the population of the country in a referendum.
Only upon so joining the ‘club’ would a country’s people have the right to
vote into the world government one or more MWPs, and in turn the world
government would only have the right to instigate actions which related to
countries within its membership. Once in the system a country would be able
to extricate itself only by majority vote of its population in another
referendum.
The world government’s purpose would be to enact laws by normal majority
voting within its chamber, but laws which were couched in general terms.
Because presented in general terms, the laws would permit individual
countries to retain or create their own culturally-based detailed laws and
social practices as long as these did not conflict with the general
world-law.
The laws, although couched in general terms, would be very real. A World
Court would exist, providing a top-level of appeal for individuals once they
had exhausted their domestic forms of justice and where they thought they
were innocent under the general world law (much as we in Europe can now make
an ultimate appeal to the European court).
But what would the powers of the world government be? The new system must
not permit the world government to enforce its desires in an absolute way
upon the world population because that would immediately raise the twin
dangers of global dictatorship and imposed cultural uniformity.
World Government’s only power – enforced referenda
Instead, nations would be allowed to transgress world-laws – to pass local
laws, or otherwise operate, in contradiction to them – but only where the
population of that country was in agreement with its government in that
course of action. The principal element of the new world constitutional
system would be the provision of just such a check that any country which
went against a world-law was expressing the will of its people. So the world
government’s one and only direct power would be that of requiring any nation
within its membership to undergo a binding referendum on any issue, and
ultimately if necessary a general election, which would be conducted
according to a set of internationally agreed standards. These standards,
written into the world treaty, would include the fact that the world
government must be given equal opportunity to present its arguments to the
country’s people as the host government.
So say, for example, that a generalised human rights law had been passed by
the World Parliament. At some later point in time a majority of MWPs might
come to consider that a particular member country was violating this law,
either in its current activities or in a new law which it had enacted
locally. Then the world government could require a binding referendum to be
held in the offending country, so that the people of that country could have
a democratically-valid opportunity to decide whether they wanted their
national government to adhere to the world-law on this point.
If the result of the referendum was in the local government’s favour then it
could continue to operate as it had chosen, and no further action would
follow. On the other hand, if the outcome favoured the world government’s
view then its general law would take precedence in the nation. If in turn
that fact was not promptly acted upon, then the world government could
enforce a general election. The country’s population would thus become the
final arbiters of the question.
The effects of this sort of setup are fairly clear. On issues where most
human individuals are likely to be in agreement irrespective of their
background, such as on the immorality of torture, the imposed referendum
would ensure that governments tending towards dictatorship would be stopped
in their tracks. But where a putative world government law was based on
cultural prejudices the local population would almost certainly be in
agreement with their own government’s decision to ignore the global law and
would vote in favour of the local decision. In doing so of course they would
have effectively taken their nation out of the world system as regards this
one issue, and would therefore have to forego access for themselves to the
World Court on the global law in question.
Constraint on World Government
How would the world government be constrained to only pass laws couched in
general terms? Well, if it passed laws which were too detailed they would
almost certainly be rejected by many populations supporting their domestic
governments in internal referenda. Concern about high-levels of such
refusals would probably in itself be enough to restrain the world government
from being too precise on many issues. To buttress this impulse, though, a
constitutional mechanism would be built into the world treaty, sucha that
the MWPs themselves would be automatically subjected to a general world
election en masse if more than, say, 10-20% of countries rejected a world
law in national referenda.
But how would a world government which had no military power of its own
impose referenda and elections and make them binding? What if a country’s
government, perhaps tending towards dictatorship, chose simply to ignore the
world government’s requests for it to hold a referendum on some issue?
Enforcement
The answer is simple, and maintains the principle that the world
government’s only direct power should be to enforce referenda. Faced with
this sort of threat the world government would be constitutionally allowed
to initiate synchronised referenda of the populations in, say, 5
randomly-chosen nations in order to sample world opinion at a
statistically-significant level. It would put before those populations its
suggestions as to what co-ordinated sanctions should be used by all
countries against the offending nation. The result of the vote would dictate
what collective world action could be taken. The action to be taken might be
initially an economic blockade by all member countries, but ultimately if
the crisis escalated could become a collective invasion of the offending
country. It would be up to the polled populations, acting as a world jury,
to decide on behalf of the whole world whether they were going to allow the
principles of world government to be upheld by voting for such sanctions, or
were going to let the world slip back into its messy and dangerous old ways.
In practice the mere threat of the tight, global economic sanctions which
could be invoked by this method would in most cases very rapidly bring a
recalcitrant member country back into line. But if not such sanctions could
quickly be put in place after the sampling referenda. If they in turn proved
inadequate and if a sampling world vote upheld military intervention then
ultimately an invasion could be carried out. As the world government itself
would have no army, this would be planned and mounted by a collective
military force made up of units from all, or a selection of, the armies of
each member country of the world – in the same way as the UN Peacekeeping
forces are today. (Once again, in many cases the mere planning of such an
action would persuade the country to drop its resistance.)
If however the sampling votes activated in such a crisis failed to back the
world government then at best the world government itself should be
subjected to an immediate election, and at worst the entire system of world
government would be threatened and might start to unravel. The important
point here is that economic and military action would be decided upon by
vast numbers of ordinary people, rather than by governments swayed by all
sorts of ‘interests’ and biases. In a very clear way a responsibility for
the future of the world would reside with each of us. The fact that it would
so reside with the people of the world would be a safeguard as ultimate as
could ever be achieved against the possibility of a dictator assuming global
power through the apparatus of the world government. The dictates of such a
despotic world government would doubtless very soon cause it to lose such a
sampling referenda, and it would not itself be in possession of any miltary
power on which it could call.
The system of global governance, composed of the world government in
co-existence with multitudinous nation states, would thus embody a balanced
set of powers and checks. Nation states would retain much power, although
subject to the general will of the world government. As long as they acted
in accordance with the wishes of their citizens they would be able to
implement any policies they pleased. They could probably also defy the world
government without the backing of their citizens to a small extent with
ease, but any larger revolt would be prevented by the need to carry a
majority of the population. If they pursued their defiance they would face
the ultimate threat of economic and then military isolation in the world.
Or at least, that is how things would be as long as the world government
confined itself to passing humane and unbiased laws. It itself would be
subject to a strong counter-balance to its powers. If it showed any tendency
to err from such a widely accepted moral basis then the continued existence
in the world of a large number of varied and independently-willed nation
states would guarantee that transgressions of unpopular global laws would
commence fairly rapidly. Referenda would follow, in which local populations
would almost certainly vote against the world government line and thus
eventually force its members to face re-election.
The world government would in fact only be able to operate by sticking to a
very broadly accepted seam of morality. Indeed it is more than likely that
after an initial phase of establishing a basic canon of general world-laws,
the main emphasis of the world government would turn to reviewing the
practices of nations of the world. There would of course always be
occasional requirements for new general laws, or amendments to existing
ones, but much of the work of the mature world government would probably
consist in monitoring national conformance with world-law and deciding upon
appropriate actions in cases of transgression.
Benefits – Reducing militarisation
Could the existence of the world government do anything to reduce
conventional military tensions in the world? Well, there seems no reason why
the world government should not take the view that unsanctioned war between
countries should be totally illegal, and pass a law to such an effect. Then
if war did break out between any two countries, the standard procedure of
global-sampling referenda could be invoked to enforce devastating economic
sanctions against both of the warring nations, or to raise a collaborative
army with which to overwhelm them and enforce peace. In effect this would be
an active version of what is currently the passive UN Peacekeeping Forces.
Furthermore, the world government could impose limits on the size of armies
and quantity of weapons any country could be permitted, and then over time
gradually force these down, so producing a world which in the long-run would
become stable and virtually military-free.
In the absence of a fool-proof ‘Star Wars’ system providing a defensive
umbrella-shield against inter-continental missiles and planes, a
precondition of such action and of the functioning of the world government
as a whole, would be some sort of collectivisation of nuclear weapons and
any other vastly destructive technology. An individual country in possession
of and willing to use nuclear weapons could resist all of the co-ordinated
international power at the disposal of the world government unless at least
a comparable destructive capacity could be rapidly switched against it as a
deterrent. So, as part of signing the world government treaty countries in
possession of such technology would have to agree to make a proportion of it
available for use in such circumstances. Such weapons might be sited in a
neutral, and sparsely-populated territory such as on one of the polar
ice-caps, and would remain under the control of the individual owning