So, in the last couple of posts we looked at the philosophical justification for a world state and the broken notion of the National Interest that blinds our diplomats to their real mission.

The problem with idealism

But the central problem with a world state is the possibility of disaster- what happens if someone like Gaddafi or Kim Jong-il were to get their hands on it’s apparatus? Would we have saved them trouble of starting world war three, and handed them world domination on a plate?

Our imperative is thus to design something which has the attributes of a world state, without creating that all powerful position of a world president, or any bureaucracy remotely resembling that type of office.

The fluffy federalist solution comes in two parts- an ICC and an FUN.

International Criminal Court

The existing system of international courts has a major flaw: it is without an enforcement division. Without the power to arrest members of governments – hang diplomatic immunity – it is a pointless insitution. Only the losers of wars are ever tried, and those trials are only for show. What about the Cameroonian bureaucrat, taking backhanders to the detriment of his entire economy? The North Korean policeman, who spends his days pulling out people’s fingernails?

The federalist ICC must have a very narrow jurisdiction: it only presides over members of governments (politicians, bureaucrats, police and soldiers,) and it must have the power to both issue and enforce warrants for the arrest of any of the above. The crimes it punishes for should be, among others, war crimes, holding political power for longer than a year without a democratic mandate*, holding political power for more than six years without a renewed democratic mandate*, corruption**, crimes against a nation, crimes against humanity, and so on.

Enforcement of such international law and arrest warrants should fall on all officers of the law everywhere, (police, not soldiers) and the second great federalist institution.

Federation of Unarmed Nations
(the federation is armed, but not the nations…)

While the ICC already exists, and can be beefed up by a few UN resolutions, the Federation itself must grow over time. Diplomatic treaties, ratified by referenda, which (at the least) cede high command of the military of it’s signatories to an international council of the heads of state/elected leaders of the whole federation.

No More Vetoes

No vetoes on military action on this council, but a 2/3rds majority (and 100% quorum) would both be required to authorise a go order. The majority should be population based.

Note that undemocratic governments are not recognised by the FUN, and while an anarchist state could exist, any unelected government, military coup or revolution sustained for more than a year would be subject to an arrest warrant with the onus on local police or the FUN to implement an arrest of all culpable governing officials.

The continuing role of the UN

The FUN would obviously supersede the UN security council once the Federation had enough members (preferably a majority of the democratic governments)- the treaty must therefore formerly be with the UN as well as the other FUN members.

Additionally, the FUN’s military powers granted under such a UN treaty would only include self defence (explicitly excluding preemptive attack) and implementing the wishes of the independent ICC- they would not have the power to invade and occupy for more than a year (otherwise the soldiers would be culpable under the ICC provisions on holding political power without a democratic mandate).

The UN, however, must remain independent from the FUN (apart from it’s treaties with it), and must continue its humanitarian mission including maintaining open and friendly diplomatic missions to all nations, democratic or not, in order to allow peaceful solutions to international disputes where possible.

No President

While the FUN council would have a rotating chair, in name only, no institution holds the power of a world president. The Federation would only gain a UN mandate to start once it had suitable backing, and even then the power is distributed to the democratically elected leaders of those countries. The ICC remains a UN institution, it just has a few extra powers and crimes, and the FUN takes orders from it, not the other way round.

Political crimes will no longer go unpunished

But, in spite of the fact that we’ve steered clear of a head of world state office, we still have the attributes of a state: a set of UN specified, relevant laws (the FUN council has no power to change the law of any state) and a mechanism by which they are enforced (police, and a common army of, eventually, all peoples).

Of course, this idea itself is a work in progress, and probably has problems I haven’t thought of. But it should be possible to build a system of international consensus (where undemocratic non-states like China do not have a veto), common military command and joint purpose that can deliver, finally, a world where cruelty to another person, or people, is always punishable.

* these require an adequate internationalisible definition of political power, and non-political civil servants.

** Again, with a narrow definition.

And so, the case for world federalism part 2, an interlude on the nature of the National Interest. If you’ve been dozing at the back, here’s a reminder.

Blair and Mubarak

There is a fine example of what I want to talk about happening at the moment. Shortly after the protests in Egypt began, Tony Blair was arguing that Mubarak needed to stay in power in order to maintain the “Cold Peace” between Egypt and Israel. Similarly, the argument that Autocrats are better than Islamic Republics for western interests (like Oil, Tax Havens like Dubai, or temporary and unsustainable peace in Israel,) is regularly deployed in the media in the UK and US. Similar arguments were also used when at the end of Gulf War 1, when leaving Saddam in power, directly following his chemical weapons attacks on the Kurdish civilian population.

Blair’s personal relationship with Mubarak notwithstanding, the former Egyptian president had amended the constitution so that only he and his son could ever run for the top job, in addition to running an all-beating all-torturing police state, oppressing his people, fostering a corrupt and poverty stricken society, and crushing dissent for 30 years.

No wonder that the Reddit link to the reporting of Blair’s support was titled “oh, he’s just taking the piss now…”

The west tolerating Dictators and Autocrats who crush all political opinion in the Gulf (apart from in Iran, where their government proceeds without our assistance) and thus sustaining our “National Interests” in the region is unjustifiable; promoting poverty and suffering to sustain our own standard of living.

The morally bankrupt philosophy that we are justified in sustaining these horrors performed by non-states, the long term consequences of temporary Leviathan, in order to increase our own prosperity should not get the muted agreement that is seems to everywhere from the Today Programme to the Daily Mail. This argument lets murderers and torturers go about their business, and implicitly asking their victims to “lie back and think of England”.

Why Principals Matter

“Power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile. This is a party of government and I will lead it as party of government.”

Tony Blair

Principals are more important than our behated former leader suggested there. An unprincipled world is an unsustainable one, as we saw in my previous post; real democracy is the only effective weapon to banish anarchy and all its ills once and for all.

The only way that the Middle East is ever going to exist in sustainable peace is if the people who live there are allowed to determine their own fate. Currently Israel can*, Egypt has started the process**, but the many of the rest are mired in diktat kingdoms and undemocratic republics of nonsense. We have to, and I am glad to see Hague doing this, consistently support peaceful movements for change, and denounce attacks on peaceful protesters (as we’ve seen in Egypt recently, and Iran more recently).

We need to go further to divorce our words from our own interest, and actively call on someone like the UN to support peaceful movements attacked by undemocratic non-governments with the deployment of peacekeepers. Of course the UN is not a suitable body to perform such a controversial intervention in a state’s internal affairs; China would surely veto in order to prevent a precedent that would later turn on their own government in a likely copycat protest, and indeed much else about a true world superstate would never get off the ground, in the UN or otherwise.

I’ll go on in my next internationalism post to describe the sort of entity that can play the role of an impractical world government, and a possible mechanism for achieving it in time to prevent the various looming military and climate disasters waiting for us in the next few decades.

* Even if the Palestinian Authority needs officials to rubber stamp what is already widely accepted among ordinary Israelis; that the peace process requires Palestinians have their own state and borders.

** Keeping my fingers crossed and a firm eye on the army…

So, what does Internationalism have to do with the State*, I hear you cry? Well, it’s the starting point of a long argument that will take several posts. The first part of this is to look critically at the State, and see what we think of it.

Leviathan, or Violent Monopolies?

So why do we think government should exist? What is the basis for having a State? Weber said that the state was any body which held a monopoly on violence to impress order onto a set of people. This takes the rather Hobbesian position that people, left to their own devices, will tear the world apart (the Leviathan) which I broadly agree with – although someone I know thinks people would co-operate with each other to survive without a state.

I would refute this optimistic position by saying that while small groups (up to, say, a hundred) might be capable of sustained spontaneous co-operation, they would have to defend their resources from other (less scrupulous) groups, and with no legitimate authority to defer to, no law saying who “owns” resources etc, the only way to resolve these disputes is with violence (or rather that sooner or later it will come down to violence.) This is Hobbes reworded.

I would also say/concede that the idea of co-operation in the name of collective prosperity is what States are all about in the first place; and as such humanity will naturally form States, derived from these small co-operative endeavours, in order to stave off the Leviathan in potentia, whether it ever exists or not.

The reason the Leviathan is a valid argument in modern times, if in ancient times it was only ever a scary story, is that we have very large, complex societies now, with lots of portable resources to fight over. If a government were to suddenly collapse, the results would (in the short term) be disastrous for the population, and even if a steady state was reached without a government the quality of life for the former citizens of the late State would be much reduced.

In this sense I argue that Anarchy is a real and present danger to people currently living in States, because it would result in either a sustained Leviathan or more likely a government formed in a power vacuum, with chaotic arrangements of informal power (like the legally-immune Revolutionary Guard in Iran, for example.)

So, the State is better than the only alternative; we would rather have government than not at all. But let’s look critically at the state anyway, and see what we think.

The worst, apart from all the others…

Democracy, if successfully implemented as it sort-of is in much of Europe, the US, Canada, and a few other places**, allows the people to kick out governments without using violence. In other types of states, as found in China, much of Arabia, and parts of Africa, including rather topically Egypt, you need to practically start a war in order to oust the government.

This is not good! We said that the state was necessary in order to prevent anarchy and mass suffering – requiring a decent into the Leviathan every time your leader becomes complacent or corrupt is no substitute. As physicists might put it, it’s the difference between stable and unstable equilibrium; whether you’re rolling around in a valley or perched on the top of a hill. Real democracies may change government every few years, but they rumble on in relative prosperity in spite of this; think of it as oscillating about a mean point at the bottom of a dip. Autocracies and dictatorships require armies of secret police and soldiers to hold the government in place, at the top of the hill pushing from all sides; a constant energy input into scaring people out of challenging their government publicly, which sustains it’s authority.

The real measure of democracy, thus, lies in the freedom of political speech. If a group can become government peacefully simply by pointing out the problems in the existing government clearly enough, then democracy has successfully made the State into something better than Anarchy. Otherwise, there isn’t much difference between the two.

So, surely, that’s the answer: conquer the world and install democracies!!1

Well, no. The thing is that you cannot “install” real democracy without killing a whole lot of people (and persuading others to kill a whole lot of other people too). Democracy is about power to the people; the movement needs to come from the people, not be impressed from without.

That said, I am not necessarily against all outside influence. If the people are trying to install a democracy over an autocracy and the autocracy is fighting back, then I have no problem with an international body intervening to crush the autocracy; Egypt take note, be sad/glad I am not UN Secretary General right now***.

But, assuming that the world eventually becomes a set of well behaved democracies, each with their own State, national interest, and stable political process, what’s next? Is this Utopia?

The Final Hurdle

I have one remaining problem with multiple real democracies. What happens when their interests collide?

We have a whole diplomatic bureaucracy built around the National Interest of a huge set of States, which range from competing for natural resources to disputing territory. Note that until now we have not had to mention land: it is only when more than one State is involved that who “rules over” land becomes important for any reason. People have been buying and selling land, of course, under the watchful policeman eye of the State ensuring no-one steals anything from anyone else, but when land is disputed by Countries you have war and death rather than mere litigation.

You might try and argue that a democracy won’t ever start a proper war with another democracy, but you’d be wrong. Even ignoring modern wars like the Israel Palestine conflict (where the refusal to allow the formation of a State causes immense economic deprivation and plenty of violence,) in a world of rapidly shrinking resource reserves can you really say that two grown up countries definitely wouldn’t come to blows over oil or even water shortages?

The problem with the Webian formulation of the State was that it needs a monopoly on violence. You can’t have competing monopolies; that’s just a market. And States aren’t set up to act in a market; they’re built on “Sovereign Power” and have armies and Nuclear Weaponry, and deal in absolutes. The diplomats may hold enough power for now to prevent war by promoting trade and compromising over things, but the delicate balance of this arrangement could easily be disturbed by a significant natural disaster or resource crisis.

Why States have failed

Thus, the crux of my argument; having more than one State is unstable and will result and has resulted in an international Leviathan****, we need a Superstate which really does have a monopoly on violence.

In order for this Superstate to be any better than the status quo, however, it must be measurably democratic. No totalitarian world autocracy thank you very much, but a genuine bumbling intellectually-conflicted noisy rabble, who aren’t inclined to riot because the standard of living is too good, and if they want to really sort things out they could always stand for office.

This idealist position; that we need a World Superstate rather than coexisting nation States, is not necessarily practical. It is not necessarily implementable in the sense that we now understand our governments. I will explore how we might build a Superstate and what it might look like in my next post on Internationalism.

But for now, I hope I have convinced you that in theory the idea of a single World Superstate is better than the idea of lots of separate, armed, competing ones.

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* State with a capital S refers to the Country/government/bureaucracy, and state with a small s means a state of being.

** That list should probably be longer, but I’m afraid I don’t have time to read up on every government ever at the moment. Not China, possibly not Iran (but Ahmadinejad is more popular than you’d think..) and definitely not N Korea or Myanmar/Burma.

*** The UN is the wrong organisation to jump into conflicts like this; I only invoke its name because it is the only organisation recognised worldwide as impartial and with an army. I’ll go into more detail about why the UN should never be part of a federalist movement in a later post.

**** North Korea’s undocumented atrocities against its citizens, the conflicts in the disputed holy lands, Western soldiers stationed in Baghdad, the ongoing violence in rural Afghanistan and Pakistan, and so on and so on.