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Democratic World Government 2

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


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p>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.

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