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
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.