Carroll confesses that even if the United States “leads the world,” it isn’t clear to him that the rest of the world would follow in cutting down use of their own fossil fuels.  Mr. Carroll’s solution, offered somewhat whimsically?

“What we actually need is a president of the world….we all remember those science fiction stories where at some long time in the future…nations had melted away and been replaced by a council of wise people headed by a wise and calming man — or a madman, depending on which kind of story it was.”  He continues,  “A president of the world could tell China to get with the program.”

I wrote Mr. Carroll to compliment him on thinking like a world federalist, but pointed out that under the Earth Constitution as one proposed new constitution, there is no “world president”, no world dictator since the new governing system would be parliamentary, not presidential.  I also pointed out that the Earth Constitution’s third House in the World Parliament is for a House of Counselors.

It is significant that a popular writer in a major newspaper is figuring out that in order to deal with climate change, all nations must be involved and doing the right thing, and in order to accomplish that goal, we’ll need the equivalent of a world government.  Democratic World Federalists seek a democratic world federal government which will, for the first time, give a voice to “we, the people” regarding global affairs.

                                             by John O. Sutter

June 1989 was a month of contrasts.  The people of the world witnessed the Beijing Massacre as totalitarian oligarchs in China brutally suppressed the human rights of Chinese citizens, largely students and workers, protesting against corruption and striving for democracy and popular sovereignty.  But more positive signs appeared in Eastern Europe, with the glimmerings of parliamentary democracy.  Poland held the first comparatively free elections in Eastern Europe (excluding democratic Finland) since the end of World War II, as Solidarity’s candidates won by a landslide, gaining control of the newly created Senate.  But in the Sejm lower house of parliament) the Polish Communist Party reserved for itself 65 percent of the seats.  The Polish election came on the heels of the first comparatively free election in Soviet Russian history, although the ruling Communist Party there refused to allow opposition parties to form and participate in the election.  The Soviet Union’s huge newly elected Congress of People’s Deputies met in May and June to debate policies and then to bow out, leaving the day-to-day legislative work to the smaller, refurbished Supreme Soviet.  Members of the erstwhile ruling Communist Party Politburo had to defend themselves in person against criticism in the Congress, as “the rule of law” and the possibility of clearly defined and separated legislative, executive and judicial functions were for the first time discussed.

Madison on Popular Sovereignty

While parts of Eastern Europe, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Hungary are experimenting with democracy and expanded human rights, the United States was continuing to celebrate Bicentennial anniversaries of the creation of the longest existing federal union.  In June 1789 James Madison, the Father of the U.S. Constitution and then U.S. Representative from Virginia, kept a promise made during several close votes in 1788 to ratify the federal Constitution.  He introduced into the new House of Representatives a number of amendments to the new Constitution, which eventually became known as the Bill of Rights.  A watered-down version of the part of his draft that alluded to the sovereignty of the people was passed by Congress and then ratified by the States, namely:

“Amendment X.  The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people.”

But the draft of what Madison had proposed as the First Amendment was a stronger advocacy of democracy and popular sovereignty than what came out of Congress:

“That there be prefixed to the constitution a declaration, that all power is originally vested in, and consequently derived from the people.

“That Government is instituted and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right of acquiring and using property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

“That the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their Government, whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purposes of its institution.”

A leading American Federalist (who later joined the Democratic Republican Party), Madison spoke for the peoples of the world as well as for the peoples of America.  He might well have been, in spirit, the first American World Federalist.

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

Only two months after Madison opened debate on the American Bill of Rights, as the French Revolution was getting underway, the new French National Assembly, building upon Rousseau, the American Declaration of Independence, and the bills of rights of several American states, promulgated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.  Among such rights were:

“I. Men are born and remain free and equal in their rights.  Social distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on common utility.

“II. The aim of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man.  These are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

“IV. Political liberty consists in freedom to do anything that does not injure others.  The exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits other than those which are necessary to assure other members of society the free enjoyment of the same rights.  These limits can be determined only by law.

“VI. The law is an expression of the will of the community.  All citizens have a right to play a role, either personally, or by their representatives, in its formation…”

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

On 10 December 1948, 159 years after the American and French declaration of human rights, the three-year old United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Article 21 of the Declaration states:

“(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.

“(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.

“(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.”

* * * * * * *

Two hundred years after the American people accepted a federal system of government with guarantees of human rights and the French people cast off an oppressive monarchy, seeking a democratic republic with defined human rights, and 40 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, peoples in many nation states of the world are still not free and enfranchised.  Ideological, theocratic or military autocrats or oligarchs still rule many nations.  As dictators in Panama, Romania, Ethiopia, Burma, and nrthern Korea have shown, a democratic resolution with human rights is seldom possible in nation states isolated from the rest ofthe world community.

But just as tyranny in government and suppression of the rights of the citizens of certain member states of the United States of America were prevented or eliminated in response to public pressure throughout the American federation, might not tyranny and repression of the citizens of certain nation states be more readily restrained, and human rights enhanced, by world public pressure within a a global federation?

[This was first published in the Summer 1989 issue of the Northern California World Federalist.]

by Tad Daley, April 22, 2012, Washington, DC

Dear Young Zealots, Young Dreamers, and Young Architects of a New World:

I am very sorry that I cannot be with you for your visionary undertaking this weekend. I wanted to offer you a few reflections perhaps to guide you regarding the ultimate purposes of your endeavors, and our ultimate aspirations for the human race.

I have just begun to write my second book, one that I hope will awaken a broad general audience to one of history’s Great Ideas — that the establishment of something like a Federal Republic of the World could bring about a world without war, a world without armies, and a future of sustainability and justice and hope for all the members of the one great family of humankind.

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“The world’s present system of sovereign nations can lead only to barbarism, war and inhumanity. There is no salvation for civilization, or even the human race, other than the creation of a world government.”  — Albert Einstein, TIME magazine’s “Person of the Century” in December 1999.

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The idea of something like a world republic is very old — it is hard to say when it first appeared on the human stage. Many of the most brilliant minds ever to spring from the tree of humanity have advanced, elaborated, and endorsed the concept. This group includes St. Augustine, Dante Alighieri, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the founder of the Baha’i Faith Baha’u’llah, Winston Churchill, Clare Booth Luce, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dorothy Thompson, Carl Sandburg, Albert Camus, and many others.

Oh, and three bright young men who went on to play somewhat significant roles in the world history of the 20^th century – John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan [as well as Gerald Ford and Hubert Humphrey].

For a few short years during and after the Second World War, as the world trembled in the wake of the invention of the atomic bomb and its immediate use, a genuine full-blooded worldwide political and social movement arose — albeit short-lived — that proclaimed that a democratic federal world government was the only possible solution to the new problem of nuclear weapons, and the ancient problem of war itself. In the late 1940s, this movement was every bit as much a social and political force as, oh, the environmental movement or the Occupy Wall Street movement today, or the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements in the 1960s, or the labor movement and women’s suffrage movements in the first few decades of the 20th Century.

The time has come again to challenge the assumption that war must be perpetually part of the human condition. Does “human nature” condemn us never to surmount our own worst tendencies? Must groups of humans arm themselves against other groups of humans forever until the end of time? Must each one of our countries, on and on into the farthest mists of the human future, devote vast amounts of our finite toil and treasure to inconceivably destructive military forces to “defend ourselves” against other countries, which devote vast amounts of their toil and treasure to the same kinds of military forces to “defend themselves” against us?

Or might we imagine some distant day when permanent military establishments, and the political division of our one human race, have instead — like legalized slavery, like cannibalism, like the exclusion from full participation in society because of race or gender or sexual preference — become forever part of humanity’s past?

I submit that your most important mission during your conference in Guadalajara, and beyond, is to think about how we can reintroduce this glorious vision of the human future into the affairs of the world.

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” Our true nationality is humankind … A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history.” –H.G. Wells

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So what exactly is this Big Idea that is so completely undiscussed, unexplored, and unknown today?

It is the idea that the rampant “economic globalization” now taking place almost everywhere must eventually be accompanied by a political globalization.

It is the idea that just like on every other level of governance – local, regional, national — someday the global level of human governance can be organized according to the same principles. An executive. A legislature. A judiciary. [An ombudsman to guard against corruption.] And police to enforce the laws.

It is the idea that just as we elect particular individuals to represent us on the local, regional, and national levels, someday we might elect particular individuals to represent us at the global level as well. In a Parliament of Humanity.

It is the idea that “Thou Shalt Not Kill” cannot really mean that if you kill a single citizen of your own country you are called a murderer, but that if you kill 100 citizens of some other country on something someone decides to call a “battlefield,” you are called not a murderer, but a war hero.

It is the idea that someday, there can be a next step in the social evolution of the human species.

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“A day will come when the cannon will be a museum piece.” — Victor Hugo

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If the notion of a world without war is almost completely unknown today, even less contemplated is the vision of a world without armies. Nevertheless, that is at the very core of what the idea of a world republic is about. (Indeed, one of the “preliminary articles” of Immanuel Kant’s 1795 book Perpetual Peace reads: “Standing Armies Shall in Time be Totally Abolished.”) No armies. No navies. No air forces. Only police.

The biggest component of the Big Idea is that at some point in the human future there will be no Chinese army, no Russian navy, no American military establishment of any kind. We refuse to concede that permanent military forces must be a permanent feature of human history. We aspire to a world where the notion that nations must maintain military power to protect themselves from other nations will be as preposterous as the notion today that the states inside Mexico or Germany or the USA must “defend themselves” against the other states inside [the federal republics of] Mexico or Germany or the USA. We intend to make the cannon purely a museum piece. Then we can devote our talents and our treasures, our sweat and our genius and our hopes, not to the capacity to inflict violence on our fellow women and men, but to the fulfillment of our dreams for all of humankind.

My good friend and longtime colleague David Lionel emphasizes, over and over again in his work, that that is where the money is … to solve virtually all of the transnational challenges facing the human race in the 21^st century. It is NOT the case that “we cannot afford it.” It is that we choose not to spend money on it, and divert trillions of dollars every single year instead to “defending our national security” – against all the various cataclysmic scenarios that loom precisely BECAUSE we choose not to spend money on it! I very much hope that you will pay close and careful attention to the videos that David has produced about these matters, which I trust will screen as part of your proceedings. They vividly convey just how much human possibility can be unleashed by a transformation of the United Nations system, and beginning to march down the road to a world republic.

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“The moral development of a civilization is measured by the breadth of its sense of community.” –Anatol Rapoport

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It seems to me that you all have no less than four tasks before you during your proceedings.

The first task is for you to consider reinventing the United Nations, not for the world of 1945 but for the world of the 21st Century. You must envision creating new and improved global policymaking tools for addressing climate change, other environmental degradations, migration, crimes against humanity within the boundaries of a single country, outer space (and space warfare), cyberspace (and cyberwarfare), resource management in newly emerging transnational regions like the melting Arctic, the chasm both within and among states between the rich and the poor, transnational regulation of both borderless flows of finance and transnational corporations, and failed states where national governments essentially disintegrate and disappear.

This exercise could do a great deal, right now, to expand the contemporary political debate. Many fine minds, for example, have devoted a great deal of brainpower in recent years to the challenge of global climate change. But how many have spent any time at all considering the question, “How might we better address global climate change if we had something like a Parliament of Humanity, that could enact universal and enforceable world law?”

I know you are all well familiar with many of the longstanding proposals in these arenas.

# Like reforming both the permanent membership of the UN Security Council and the great power veto, so that collective global policymaking for the 21st Century will not forever be dominated by the five winners of a war that ended before the halfway point of the 20th Century.

# Like converting the UN General Assembly to some kind of a weighted voting system similar to that already used in the European Union and the International Monetary Fund – and giving it the same kind of formal international lawmaking authority the UNSC now possesses.

# Like the idea that former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and many others have advocated, of creating a directly elected “People’s Assembly” to stand alongside the General Assembly. (A much-discussed variant might be a “Parliamentary Assembly,” consisting of individuals already elected to, e.g., the British parliament or the Japanese Diet or the Mexican Congresso de la Union.) Some have suggested that developments like these could lead to the emergence of transnational political parties, and truly collaborative transnational political action.

# Like the proposal to create some kind of “House of Councilors,” whose members would not represent any country, but would instead be formally tasked with discerning our common human security, our transnational vital interests, and the global public good.

# Like the broad body of proposals regarding alternative schemes for financing the UN system and other worthy transnational activities. The most well known of these is the “Tobin Tax,” that would impose a trivial levy on large international currency speculations. Other proposals include similar levies on national defense expenditures, international arms sales, or national carbon emissions.

I urge you to think hard about which of these might be both most optimal and most politically achievable (those are probably two separate questions, of course). Moreover, I urge you to contemplate which of these might best actually alleviate real human suffering, and promote genuine human possibility.

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“I am not a citizen of Athens. I am not a citizen of Greece. I am a citizen of the world.” – Socrates, circa 400 BCE

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The second task is for you to remember – and for you to teach others — that our aspirations involve more than concrete proposals regarding our structures of global governance. Our Big Idea is about not only tangible ideas, but also intangible ideals.

We believe – and I count every single one of you in attendance in Guadalajara in that “we” – we believe that the 21st Century may just see our national citizenship transcended by our global citizenship, our allegiance to our nations transcended by our allegiance to humanity, our national patriotism transcended by our planetary patriotism.

We perceive the reality of our shared destiny. We insist that the pursuit of national interests must be accompanied by some conception of common human interests. We possess an intuition that we are all in the same boat here on Spaceship Earth. And we want all the citizens of the world to recognize, with us, that the Whole Earth – first seen by the Apollo 8 astronauts on Christmas Eve 1968, and captured in their immortal photograph – is something greater than the sum of its parts.

These intangible ideals — just like the tangible idea of a world republic — have been promulgated and endorsed by some of the greatest minds the human race has ever produced. We march in the tradition of what the great psychologist Erik Erikson called “all-human solidarity.” We see the first glimmerings of what the great political scientist Robert C. Tucker called an “ethic of specieshood.” We intend to serve as the vanguard of what the great philosopher Voltaire called “the party of humanity.” And we stand in solidarity with the great astronomer Carl Sagan, who said, “Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to … bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, and nations. … If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole of the human community … We speak for Earth.”

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“Civilization is a process … whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of humankind.” –Sigmund Freud

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The third task for you to undertake is to consider plausible future pathways to our future goals. Most especially, the provisions that already exist for amending and indeed for completely rewriting the UN Charter itself. The framers in San Francisco in 1945 did not intend for their Charter to be the end of history. That is why they included Article 108, a provision for making specific amendments to the Charter, and Article 109, a provision for calling a world conference to review and rewrite the whole of what they called “the present Charter.”

In addition, Article 109(3) indicates that the framers hoped that such a comprehensive review conference would be called no later than “the tenth annual session” — 1955! A full 2/3 of a century later, such a comprehensive review conference still has yet to be convened. It is difficult not to conclude that the San Francisco framers would enthusiastically agree that an organization invented before the Second World War had even come to an end (and before the atomic bomb had even been revealed to the world) might not today be optimally constituted for the challenges of the 21st Century.

The most promising route for at least moving in the direction of our ultimate destination may well be Article 109. Indeed, this was the central call to action of a small but determined NGO called “The Campaign for a New United Nations Charter” (CNUNC), which I led between 1994 and 1999. (David Lionel was one of my closest collaborators in CNUNC – ask him to   tell you about our many misadventures!) Our singular activist idea was not to put forward any particular “new UN Charter” of our own, but instead to advocate that the governments of the world “Activate Article 109.”

We believed that singular call to action could bring together a broad, diverse, and potentially enormous coalition of supporters, who might possess a wide variety of world order visions, but who could all come together behind a focused initiative to launch an official UN process to discern the most appropriate vision for the world we live in today, and the world we anticipate tomorrow.

This is why it is so wonderful that my compadre Francisco Plancarte decided to launch not just another, dull, been-there-done-that Model UN (which simulates the operations of the United Nations of today), but instead a Model UN Charter Review Conference (which simulates you all inventing a new United Nations for tomorrow). The latter strikes me as both immensely more interesting, and infinitely more likely to capture the imagination of the kind of young people who believe that the burdens of today do not have to define the promise of tomorrow.

So I will confess to you my hope that many of you will consider BOTH convening other Model UN Charter Review Conferences to engage and mobilize other young people just like you, AND building a real civil society movement that advocates that governments soon convene a REAL Charter Review Conference – under Article 109.

I still believe that to be an activist idea with immense potential. Perhaps some of you will consider picking up that ball, and continue marching down the field toward that goal line. And begin to grow a movement that politicians, all around the world, will find impossible to ignore.

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Therefore, I will end this missive by returning to the beginning of this missive. Because the fourth task for you to undertake is to keep your eye on the ball. (For this American that’s a beisbol, but for you perhaps a futbol!)

I urge you all, throughout your weekend together and thereafter, to free your minds from the chains of considering only what might be “politically realistic” at the present hour. Ask instead, what might be humanity’s optimal structures of global governance? How might a hypothetical Federal Republic of the World actually be constituted, and organized, and operate? What tools would we like ideally to employ to tackle challenges like global climate change and nuclear terror and economic globalization? What kind of world political order would we most like to see at, oh, the very end of the present century?

Such ideal states may well be wildly politically unrealistic in the short-term, perhaps even ever. But does that mean we should not even aspire to them, should not even define them, should not even talk about the world as we want it to be? Surely, the only way to offer our ideals at least the opportunity, someday, to begin to blossom, is to tell the world what those ideals might be. If politics, as every undergraduate knows, is the art of the possible, then our work can serve as the catalyst for expanding the parameters of political possibility.

I believe it is just possible that in the year 2099, the historians of the day will look back, and conclude that the Great Story of the 21st Century was first, the fusion of our many national patriotisms into a single planetary patriotism; second, the permanent disbanding of all national military forces and the abolition of war through the world rule of law; and third, the dawn for the first time of a politically unified human race, and the birth of a Federal Republic of the World.

Share that vision, with consistency and conviction, to anyone who will listen. Tell them that there is a destination to our upward journey, different from the desolate canyons in which the human race now dwells, a high peak, glorious and radiant and wonderful, a summit of infinite possibility. Tell them, as Victor Hugo would tell them, that “no army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”

I look forward to marching with you on the road to that mountaintop, my sister and brother Ciudadanos del Mundo.

Come see me in Washington, DC!

tad

Author, APOCALYPSE NEVER: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World (Rutgers University Press 2010 and in Paperback Spring 2012)

Former Founder and President, THE CAMPAIGN FOR A NEW UN CHARTER

tad@daleyplanet.org

www.apocalypsenever.org

     The boldly stated plan announced by the Project for the New American Century document (for all to see on the internet) is moving ahead on schedule. Signed by a coterie of major US right wing chicken hawks such as Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, this plan details the solidifying of a global American empire for the 21st century. The plan required “an attack on U.S. soil,” comparable to Pearl Harbor, and this has now been accomplished.

The plan required launching major wars and establishing new military bases throughout Asia in order to encircle Russia and China, and this has now been accomplished. It required vast increases in the American military budget at the expense of the budget for schools, healthcare, and civilian infrastructure, and this has now been accomplished. It required converting the thinking of the American people from the idea that wars have a beginning and end and are fought against a determinant enemy to the idea that wars are endless and everywhere with enemies who may be anywhere and anyone, and this has now been accomplished.

This plan for global empire required putting the American people on a permanent war-footing, which entails, as do all wars, the elimination of civil liberties, with the institution of virtual military rule at home and abroad. As Naomi Wolf and others have pointed out, this has been systematically accomplished since 9/11 through manufacture of fake security threats, the use of secret prisons where torture takes place, use of paramilitary forces (like Blackwater) outside the rule of law, massive surveillance of ordinary citizens, arbitrary detentions of citizens, the targeting of key high visibility resisters (e.g., Julian Assange), restricting the press (and criminalizing press investigation of government secrets), and the criminalizing of non-violent protest and dissent in general.

On March 1st 2012 the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) went into effect, officially denying the right of habeas corpus to everyone on Earth including American citizens at home and abroad. The US military can now disappear anyone, anywhere, and hold them forever in secret prisons, without any right to a trial, counsel, or being charged with a crime. Civil society no longer controls the military, and the laws of civil democracy no longer trump military totalitarianism. The Project for the New American Century here takes another giant step forward in its vision of global domination by the US military and their multinational corporate backers.

The rapidly increasing use of computer controlled, weaponized drones expresses this same phenomena. The weapons, run by computer over foreign skies from locations within “the homeland,” embody the absolute denial of human rights and dignity as this dignity is manifested in the right to habeas corpus and a fair trial if suspected of a crime. From computer terminals inside the US, people worldwide are being summarily executed, along with whomever happens to be with them, a matter of mere “collateral damage.” Where drones are not engaged, US assassination teams operate with impunity, murdering whomever is thought to oppose the global system of domination by the world’s superpower. It is not that there are a multiplicity of assaults against liberty going on coincidentally. All these phenomena are aspects of a unified attack on human freedom and dignity in the name of the soulless drive to power and domination.

There are many courageous people within the US who are raising the cry and resisting the coming darkness of tyranny. But they are often naïve about both the causes of the nightmare and how to defeat its satanic drive toward the crushing of human freedom and dignity everywhere on Earth. Naomi Wolf, for example, writes concerning NDAA that “here is only one solution: organize votes loudly and publicly to defeat every single signer of this bill in November’s general election. Then, once we have our Republic back and the rule of law, we can deal with the actual treason that this law represents” (Guardian, UK, 1 March 12).

But the assumption that freedom can be defended and/or secured within one nation-state is false, because it fails to realize that it is the system of militarized nation-states itself that is the cause of this worldwide destruction of human dignity and liberty. Every nation assumes the right to militarize itself, which necessarily means that every nation assumes that the world exists in a state of perpetual war and that human rights, defended by the rule of law, do not exist, in the final analysis, on planet Earth. If the United States (and its imperial lackeys such as Great Britain) was not the global aggressor and hegemon, it would be some other nation that happens to fill the role of superpower.

The system of fragmentation (of the planet into some 200 sovereign nation-states) that inherently refuses to recognize the universality of human rights and dignity is the cause of this totalitarian assault on the human spirit. It is not simply bad leaders, whether George Bush or Barack Obama. They are mere instruments of an inhuman system of global capital accumulation that works within a system of sovereign nation-states: dividing and conquering, exploiting, destroying all human values in the service of private wealth and nation-state fragmentation.

Capitalism turns all things and people into commodities to be used in the service of private profit, inherently stripping people of their dignity. The nation-state system, which is intrinsically a war system, turns all people into potential enemies, stripping everyone on Earth of their universal human rights. In war, all people lose their rights and dignity, since war precisely means the absence of civilized respect for the due process of law. And since the system of sovereign nation-states is intrinsically a war system, human rights become a meaningless impediment to the rule of unrelenting force and violence.

As much as we admire the courage of those living within the belly of the beast who struggle for freedom and dignity under the rule of national laws, we must not be fooled by their naïve assumption that you can establish freedom within the absolute borders of a sovereign nation-state. For the very act of recognizing absolute borders implies that the rule of law does not apply to those beyond these borders. What do apply are power relationships, not democratic relationships, but war. The destruction of freedom within the United States is logically inseparable from the destruction of freedom worldwide. Both are intrinsic consequences of a system of autonomous, militarized nation-states intertwined with global capitalist dehumanization and exploitation.

The system of states that claim the right to militarize to fight external enemies inevitably impacts the internal governing of these same states. External war and mistrust destroy democratic relationships both externally and internally. Militarization requires that freedom be sacrificed in defense of the homeland. The situation of economic domination by big capital worldwide penetrates all 200 militarized, supposedly independent, national fragments, subjecting them to non-democratic forces beyond national control. In a globalized situation that is inherently one of economic exploitation protected by imperial wars, there can be no freedom. This generalized world disorder prevents and distorts order within the fragments. The global war system distorts the possibilities for the rule of democratic laws protecting freedom. In no nation on Earth can citizens create freedom for themselves under the rule of democratically legislated laws within this world system that distorts all human relationships, both internal to nations and externally.

The death of the human spirit appears historically immanent. It is immanent not because of evil persons who may or may not be assassinated by the equally evil, totalitarian institutions of our planet. The death of the human spirit is immanent because we lack the vision and courage to unite together with human beings everywhere to demand an end to the sovereign nation-state and global capitalism. There is no true freedom unless all are free. There are no protected human rights unless all are protected. There is no respected human dignity unless all are respected.

This can only mean uniting together under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth that is sponsored by the World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA) and establishing the rule of democratically legislated law for all humankind. The “broad functions” of the Earth Federation, expressed in Article One of the Earth Constitution, state exactly what can only be done by the federation government: eliminate war, protect human rights everywhere, end poverty and create prosperity for all, protect the planetary environment, conserve the essential natural resources of the Earth, and address all those problems that are beyond the scope of the nations.

Only enforceable democratic world law can eliminate militarism and, therefore, the present-day working assumption that human rights do not exist beyond national borders. Only world law can institutionalize human dignity so that every person on Earth enjoys habeas corpus and civil liberties. Only enforceable world law can effectively regulate the global economic system in the service of reasonable prosperity for all. Only world law can protect the global environment and begin to restore the integrity of the planetary ecosystem. Only world law can protect the Earth’s resources and address all other global problems.

Our fragmented and myopic thought patterns give us the illusion that these problems can be handled at the level of nations. None of them can. It is sovereign nation-state system, penetrated and manipulated by a global economic system far beyond the control of any nation, that is at the root of all these problems. Today’s immanent global totalitarianism is a consequence of this world system, and cannot be effectively overcome without changing the system itself. Either human beings unite or we die. This option is still before us. Soon it may be too late.

(Glen T. Martin is Professor of Philosophy at Radford University in Virginia. He is President of the World Constitution and Parliament Association and also President of the Institute on World Problems (IOWP).)

The Republican Brain: Why Even Educated Conservatives Deny Science — and Reality

       by Chris Mooney, AlterNet, February 22, 2012

I can still remember when I first realized how naïve I was in thinking—hoping—that laying out the “facts” would suffice to change politicized minds, and especially Republican ones. It was a typically wonkish, liberal revelation: One based on statistics and data. Only this time, the data were showing, rather awkwardly, that people ignore data and evidence—and often, knowledge and education only make the problem worse.

Someone had sent me a 2008 Pew report documenting the intense partisan divide in the U.S. over the reality of global warming.^. It’s a divide that, maddeningly for scientists, has shown a paradoxical tendency to widen even as the basic facts about global warming have become more firmly established.

Those facts are these: Humans, since the industrial revolution, have been burning more and more fossil fuels to power their societies, and this has led to a steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists refer to as the “radiative” properties of carbon dioxide molecules (which trap infrared heat radiation that would otherwise escape to space), to have a warming planet. Since about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed that this warming is taking place, but have also grown confident that it has, like the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural fluctuations, although they exist, can’t explain what we’re seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with their cars and their smokestacks.

Such is what is known to science–what is true (no matter what Rick Santorum might say). But the Pew data showed that humans aren’t as predictable as carbon dioxide molecules. Despite a growing scientific consensus about global warming, as of 2008 Democrats and Republicans had cleaved over the facts stated above, like a divorcing couple. One side bought into them, one side didn’t—and if anything, knowledge and intelligence seemed to be worsening matters.

Buried in the Pew report was a little chart showing the relationship between one’s political party affiliation, one’s acceptance that humans are causing global warming, and one’s level of education. And here’s the mind-blowing surprise: For Republicans, having a college degree didn’t appear to make one any more open to what scientists have to say. On the contrary, better-educated Republicans were more skeptical of modern climate science than their less educated brethren. Only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college-educated Republicans.

For Democrats and Independents, the opposite was the case. More education correlated with being more accepting of climate science—among Democrats, dramatically so. The difference in acceptance between more and less educated Democrats was 23 percentage points.

This was my first encounter with what I now like to call the “smart idiots” effect: The fact that politically sophisticated or knowledgeable people are often more biased, and less persuadable, than the ignorant. It’s a reality that generates endless frustration for many scientists—and indeed, for many well-educated, reasonable people.

And most of all, for many liberals.

Let’s face it: We liberals and progressives are absolutely outraged by partisan misinformation. Lies about “death panels.” People seriously thinking that President Obama is a Muslim, not born in the United States. Climate-change denial. Debt ceiling denial. These things drive us crazy, in large part because we can’t comprehend how such intellectual abominations could possibly exist.

And not only are we enraged by lies and misinformation; we want to refute them—to argue, argue, argue about why we’re right and Republicans are wrong. Indeed, we often act as though right-wing misinformation’s defeat is nigh, if we could only make people wiser and more educated (just like us) and get them the medicine that is correct information.

No less than President Obama’s science adviser John Holdren (a man whom I greatly admire, but disagree with in this instance) has stated, when asked how to get Republicans in Congress to accept our mainstream scientific understanding of climate change, that it’s an “education problem.”

But the facts, the scientific data, say otherwise.

Indeed, the rapidly growing social scientific literature on the resistance to global warming (see for examples here and here) says so pretty unequivocally. Again and again, Republicans or conservatives who say they know more about the topic, or are more educated, are shown to be more in denial, and often more sure of themselves as well—and are confident they don’t need any more information on the issue.

Tea Party members appear to be the worst of all. In a recent survey by Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, they rejected the science of global warming even more strongly than average Republicans did. For instance, considerably more Tea Party members than Republicans incorrectly thought there was a lot of scientific disagreement about global warming (69 percent to 56 percent). Most strikingly, the Tea Party members were very sure of themselves—they considered themselves “very well-informed” about global warming and were more likely than other groups to say they “do not need any more information” to make up their minds on the issue.

But it’s not just global warming where the “smart idiot” effect occurs. It also emerges on nonscientific but factually contested issues, like the claim that President Obama is a Muslim. Belief in this falsehood actually increased more among better-educated Republicans from 2009 to 2010 than it did among less-educated Republicans, according to research by George Washington University political scientist John Sides.

The same effect has also been captured in relation to the myth that the healthcare reform bill empowered government “death panels.” According to research by Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, Republicans who thought they knew more about the Obama healthcare plan were “paradoxically more likely to endorse the misperception than those who did not.” Well-informed Democrats were the opposite—quite certain there were no “death panels” in the bill.

The Democrats also happened to be right, by the way.

The idealistic, liberal, Enlightenment notion that knowledge will save us, or unite us, was even put to a scientific test last year—and it failed badly.

Yale researcher Dan Kahan and his colleagues set out to study the relationship between political views, scientific knowledge or reasoning abilities, and opinions on contested scientific issues like global warming. In their study, more than 1,500 randomly selected Americans were asked about their political worldviews and their opinions about how dangerous global warming and nuclear power are. But that’s not all: They were also asked standard questions to determine their degree of scientific literacy (e.g, “Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria—true or false?”) as well as their numeracy or capacity for mathematical reasoning (e.g., “If Person A’s chance of getting a disease is 1 in 100 in 10 years, and person B’s risk is double that of A, what is B’s risk?”).

The result was stunning and alarming. The standard view that knowing more science, or being better at mathematical reasoning, ought to make you more accepting of mainstream climate science simply crashed and burned.

Instead, here was the result. If you were already part of a cultural group predisposed to distrust climate science—e.g., a political conservative or “hierarchical-individualist”—then more science knowledge and more skill in mathematical reasoning tended to make you even more dismissive. Precisely the opposite happened with the other group—“egalitarian-communitarians” or liberals—who tended to worry more as they knew more science and math. The result was that, overall, more scientific literacy and mathematical ability led to greater political polarization over climate change—which, of course, is precisely what we see in the polls.

So much for education serving as an antidote to politically biased reasoning.

What accounts for the “smart idiot” effect?

For one thing, well-informed or well-educated conservatives probably consume more conservative news and opinion, such as by watching Fox News. Thus, they are more likely to know what they’re supposed to think about the issues—what people like them think—and to be familiar with the arguments or reasons for holding these views. If challenged, they can then recall and reiterate these arguments. They’ve made them a part of their identities, a part of their brains, and in doing so, they’ve drawn a strong emotional connection between certain “facts” or claims, and their deeply held political values. And they’re ready to argue.

What this suggests, critically, is that sophisticated conservatives may be very different from unsophisticated or less-informed ones. Paradoxically, we would expect less informed conservatives to be easier to persuade, and more responsive to new and challenging information.

In fact, there is even research suggesting that the most rigid and inflexible breed of conservatives—so-called authoritarians—do not really become their ideological selves until they actually learn something about politics first. A kind of “authoritarian activation” needs to occur, and it happens through the development of political “expertise.” Consuming a lot of political information seems to help authoritarians feel who they are—whereupon they become more accepting of inequality, more dogmatically traditionalist, and more resistant to change.

So now the big question: Are liberals also “smart idiots”?

There’s no doubt that more knowledge—or more political engagement—can produce more bias on either side of the aisle. That’s because it forges a stronger bond between our emotions and identities on the one hand, and a particular body of facts on the other.

But there are also reason to think that, with liberals, there is something else going on. Liberals, to quote George Lakoff, subscribe to a view that might be dubbed “Old Enlightenment reason.” They really do seem to like facts; it seems to be part of who they are. And fascinatingly, in Kahan’s study liberals did not act like smart idiots when the question posed was about the safety of nuclear power.

Nuclear power is a classic test case for liberal biases—kind of the flipside of the global warming issue–for the following reason. It’s well known that liberals tend to start out distrustful of nuclear energy: There’s a long history of this on the left. But this impulse puts them at odds with the views of the scientific community on the matter (scientists tend to think nuclear power risks are overblown, especially in light of the dangers of other energy sources, like coal).

So are liberals “smart idiots” on nukes? Not in Kahan’s study. As members of the “egalitarian communitarian” group in the study—people with more liberal values–knew more science and math, they did not become more worried, overall, about the risks of nuclear power. Rather, they moved in the opposite direction from where these initial impulses would have taken them. They become less worried—and, I might add, closer to the opinion of the scientific community on the matter.

You may or may not support nuclear power personally, but let’s face it: This is not the “smart idiot” effect. It looks a lot more like open-mindedness.

What does all of this mean?

First, these findings are just one small slice an emerging body of science on liberal and conservative psychological differences, which I discuss in detail in my forthcoming book. An overall result is definitely that liberals tend to be more flexible and open to new ideas—so that’s a possible factor lying behind these data. In fact, recent evidence suggests that wanting to explore the world and try new things, as opposed to viewing the world as threatening, may subtly push people towards liberal ideologies (and vice versa).

Politically and strategically, meanwhile, the evidence presented here leaves liberals and progressives in a rather awkward situation. We like evidence—but evidence also suggests that politics doesn’t work in the way we want it to work, or think it should. We may be the children of the Enlightenment—convinced that you need good facts to make good policies—but that doesn’t mean this is equally true for all of humanity, or that it is as true of our political opponents as it is of us.

Nevertheless, this knowledge ought to be welcomed, for it offers a learning opportunity and, frankly, a better way of understanding politics and our opponents alike. For instance, it can help us see through the scientific-sounding arguments of someone like Rick Santorum, who has been talking a lot about climate science lately—if only in order to bash it.

On global warming, Santorum definitely has an argument, and he has “facts” to cite. And he is obviously intelligent and capable—but not, apparently, able to see past his ideological biases. Santorum’s argument ultimately comes down to a dismissal of climate science and climate scientists, and even the embrace of a conspiracy theory, one in which the scientists of the world are conspiring to subvert economic growth (yeah, right).

Viewing all this as an ideologically defensive maneuver not only explains a lot, it helps us realize that refuting Santorum probably serves little purpose. He’d just come up with another argument and response, probably even cleverer than the last, and certainly just as appealing to his audience. We’d be much better concentrating our energies elsewhere, where people are more persuadable.

A more scientific understanding of persuasion, then, should not be seen as threatening. It’s actually an opportunity to do better—to be more effective and politically successful.

Indeed, if we believe in evidence then we should also welcome the evidence showing its limited power to persuade–especially in politicized areas where deep emotions are involved. Before you start off your next argument with a fact, then, first think about what the facts say about that strategy. If you’re a liberal who is emotionally wedded to the idea that rationality wins the day—well, then, it’s high time to listen to reason.

Chris Mooney is the author of four books, including “The Republican War on Science” (2005).  This essay is from his next book, “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality,” is due out in April 2012 from Wiley.

                        MANIFESTO FOR A GLOBAL DEMOCRACY

• Politics is behind the facts. We live in an era of deep technological and economic changes, which have not been matched to a similar evolution in public institutions of regulation and control. Everything has been globalized except politics and democracy. In spite of their many differences and peculiarities, and of their limitations, the protests that are growing in many countries and regions of the world show an increasing discontent with the decision-making system and its lack of capacity of defending common goods, a gradual erosion of the existing forms of political representation and a demand for more and better democracy.

• Global welfare and security are being threatened. The national/international order that emerged from the end of World War II, first, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, later, has not been able to manage the great advances in technology and productive systems for the benefit of all humanity. On the contrary, we are witnessing the emergence of regressive and destructive processes resulting from the economic-financial crisis, global warming and nuclear proliferation. These phenomena have already affected negatively the lives of billions of human beings, and their continuity and mutual reinforcement menace the peace of the world and threaten the survival of the human civilization.

• Global crises demand global solutions. Within a universe determined by globalization, the democratic capabilities of national states and inter-national institutions are increasingly restricted by the development of powerful global processes, organizations and systems whose nature is not democratic. In recent years, the main national and inter-national leaders of the world have been running behind the global events. Their repeated failures show that occasional summits, inter-governmental treaties, alleged multilateralism, international cooperation and all the existing forms of global governance are insufficient. Global crises demand global solutions that the national/inter-national political system is — by definition — incapable to elaborate, approve and implement.

• We need to move forward to new, more extensive and deeper forms of democracy. The globalization of finance, production chains and communication systems, as well as the planetary power reached by destructive technologies, require the globalization of the political institutions responsible for their regulation and control. Because of its one-dimensionality and dangerousness, this techno-economic model of globalization must be overcome by a new one which put techno-economic instruments at the service of a fairer, peaceful and humane world, and promote a new paradigm of world development that benefits the helpless and poorest half of humanity. In order to avoid the deepening of global crises and find viable solutions to the enormous challenges posed by globalization we need to move forward to new and more extensive and deeper forms of democracy. The existing national-state organizations have to be part of a wider, more open and better coordinated structure, which should include democratized regional and international parliaments and institutions, a fair and balanced International Criminal Court and a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly. Yet, this institutional change will not be successful if it comes from the initiative and actions of a self-designed enlightened elite. It must come from a socio-political participative process open to all human beings, which goal is the progressive construction of a global democratic order.

• Globalizing democracy is the only way to democratize globalization. Beyond our human divergences about the content and appropriate methods to move towards a fairer and more democratic world order, we the signatories share a strong commitment to global democracy. On behalf of Peace, Justice and Human Rights, we do not want to be worldwide governed by those who have only been elected to do it nationally, neither by inter-ational organizations which do not represent us. We demand political spaces and claim for supranational –- regional, international and global — institutions adapted to the XXI Century; institutions that express the different views and defend the common interests of the seven billion people who shape humankind today.

• We convoke every democratic human being to participate in the constitution of a global democratic order. We share with the world social movements the appeal to “unite for global change” and for “real democracy”. Both postulates express the growing reject to be globally governed by the current political and economical powers and its agents. We want to be citizens of the world and not its mere inhabitants. Therefore we demand a global democracy, commit to work for its development and call on all democratic men and women of the world to actively participate in its constitution.

The daughter of a professor of political science at the University of Redlands, Thesil graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Mt. Holyoke College and subsequently became an intellectual, author and artist in her own right. She was the consummately skilled editor of all 39 numbers of the semi-annual magazine, Minerva, now an official publication of both CGS and WFI. At this writing, it is not known whether anyone else will try to replace her in that capacity. Readers would do well to access past numbers of Minerva on line. (Just Google Minerva and you’ll get it.) Writing of Thesil and Minerva, Tad Daley had this to say: “We just devoured Minerva …. I really read a lot and… try to absorb a great deal of the contemporary policy debate. Yet, each time I received Minerva, it contained stuff that I had not seen anywhere else. Important stuff. Insightful stuff. Imaginative stuff. Beyond the parameters of the mainstream stuff.” We respectfully dedicate to Thesil this number of the Newsletter of the Minnesota Chapter of CGS and honor her memory by including in it the following three excerpts (prefixed by M:) from Minerva, 39, November 2011.

– Joe Schwartzberg, President, Minnesota Chapter, Citizens for Global Solutions