How to check off "Save the World" on your bucket list?
Welcome to the Planet Republyk project!
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The series of eight episodes on the history of the planetarist movement being finished, we resume for the 9 final episodes, the argument, the ''Why''; before presenting the ''How'' of the project.
We are entering the third and final part of the Planet Republyk project.
If you were to read only one part, it would be this one.
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Episode 14: The State of Play Today
There is a link to be invented between humanity in the process of creating its unity and this new object that is the planet earth... that I call the natural contract.
Michel Serres
In the light of what we have just seen, the last century has seen the emergence or strengthening of three major currents of thought among those who wish to see the advent of a democratic world government; among those who are known as federalists.
The first is the traditional first-wave "federalists" who call, according to different models, for a world government through a federal union of the world's states.
The second, actually a subgroup of the first, unites those who can be called "UNsians". They aspire to world government through the democratization of the UN General Assembly or the addition of an elected assembly to it.
The third, which could be called "planetarist", brings together those who wish to create a supranational world parliament from a blank canvas; elected by universal suffrage and free as much as possible from nationalist reflexes. Although also federalist, this movement, as seen in Chapter 4, nevertheless advocates a strategy of "end-of-the-pipe federalism".
The Planet Republyk movement, as its name suggests, is part of the planetarian school of thought. In its view, whatever its nature, a federation of states, like the transformation of the UN and its eventual evolution into a real world parliament with the power to legislate, would not alter the mandate of the delegates, which would remain, fundamentally, that of defending the interests of the nations, even if this were to go against the universal good.
Without a mechanism of representation foreign to the national frameworks, (such as the one proposed by Planet Republyk) the election of the representatives of this world parliament by the national parliaments and, in the long run, by universal suffrage of the peoples of these nations would not modify, either, anything to this fundamental vice.
The "strict federalism" type of world organizations, of "governments of governments" such as the League of Nations or the United Nations system, have already demonstrated their impotence.
These proposals also preserve the inequitable weight of states within the UN system (or at best open a Pandora's box that will be very difficult to close in terms of rebalancing).
It is high time to envisage a true government of the citizens of the world and it is, according to the planetarist movement, from a blank page that the World Republic should be conceived.
Are we fit to have a global consciousness?
We must then come up with a global answer, but we don't know what it is. Hence the urgent need for more education.
Jean-Marie Cavada
There is among the lovers of conspiracy theories, often among the most libertarian and nationalist among them, a fringe that is very resistant to the UN and even more so to all ideas of world governance; to all ideas of a world parliament, whether democratic or not. The terms New World Order, Bilderberg Group, Protocol of the Elders of Zion, Illuminati Sect or Freemasonry, are often evoked as repulsive and the Rothchild, Windsor, Rockefeller, Gates or Clinton families are often associated with these theories.
These conspiracy theorists denounce the federalists, the planetaryists, the UN and all those who wish a political reform of the United Nations system.
I would like someone to explain to me why the status quo is a better thing. How letting these powers, if they exist and if we give them the intentions we think they have, continue to work in the shadows, corrupting the elites, playing states off against each other, without being accountable to anyone, is a better option. I consider that these famous powers have everything to gain from the propagation of such theories so that absolutely nothing changes and everything remains, for them, the "Brave New World".
The COVID-19 pandemic eloquently illustrates that we are all linked and interdependent in this same sphere. That the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Siberia will lead to a hurricane in Brazil or, in this case, that the sneeze of a Chinese man in Wuhan will lead to a hospitalization in Chile.
But the globalist movement has been stagnating since its peak in the late 1940s. This is in contrast to the globalization of trade, which is progressing at full speed thanks, among other things, to the multiplication of free trade agreements, the ultimate objective of which is to limit the capacity of states to hinder the insatiable thirst for profit of multinationals. This disinhibition of trade orthodoxy has accelerated since the early 1990s, when the scarecrow of communism withered away with the breakup of the USSR.
One of the only real advances in recent decades towards a universal rule of law is the creation, in 1998, of the International Criminal Court (ICC). And here again, we are very far from perfection. The ICC is a permanent international criminal court, based in The Hague, the Netherlands, with the power to try people accused of crimes against humanity. Twenty years after its creation, it now has jurisdiction in 124 out of 193 states, excluding, not least, Russia, the United States, China, India and Syria... which, wary of an encroachment on their sovereignty, have not ratified the treaty.
The ICC could not therefore try citizens accused of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. However, there is little to fear, because the major flaw of the ICC is that the initiative to investigate and try these crimes is left to the States. One can imagine that the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad (Syria is not a member anyway) is not very keen on the idea of asking the ICC to initiate proceedings against its president... And that, in general, nations, out of pride, prefer to wash (or leave to others the task of washing) their dirty laundry within their own families in order to preserve their international image (or even their international economic relations).
The recent acquittal, after eight years of proceedings, of the former head of state of the Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, accused of crimes against humanity, adds to a growing list of incapacities of the ICC. Luc Côté, a former lawyer with the ICC's Office of the Prosecutor, commented on this latest acquittal in these terms:
It forces us to lower our expectations of an institution like the ICC. The ICC is not an organization that will bring peace to conflicts. It is an organization that is very limited. States have made sure, through its statutes, to lock it down so that it cannot do them any harm. [Since the Nuremberg trials, we have seen that States will participate in international justice if it serves their interests. If it does not serve their interests, they will do nothing or they will harm it[i].
Another example of the ineptitude of our international institutions, if any:
In 2013, the Philippines asked the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague to look into China's territorial claims over a large part of the South China Sea.
The Philippines believes the Chinese claims are in violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). In 2016, the PCA ruled in favor of the Philippines. Despite this, Beijing in a reaction resembling: ''I am the strongest, I do what I want'' decrees, although it has ratified the UNCLOS, that it will not respect any decision of other courts of justice than its own.
Yet, in principle, all PCA decisions are binding and must be implemented without delay. But who will force China to respect the decision of the international institution?
These paradoxes demonstrate, once again, how weak our international institutions are.
In recent decades, the only new supranational authority that has been recognized by all the major powers is the World Trade Organization (WTO), created in 1995. By 2019, 164 nations and 98% of world trade were subject to its rules. And unlike the international climate agreements, the coercive mechanisms for those who do not respect their commitments are very restrictive. But even here, all is not rosy, as the Doha Round of negotiations, which began in 2001, has still not been concluded.
All the same, democracy does not follow business. It lags far behind. Karl Marx wrote that when there is a significant disparity between the political structure and its socio-economic content, revolution is in sight. Humanity has never known such a disproportion between its globalized economy and the obsolescence of the political tools to curb it...
Whether we like it or not, the time has come either to be a citizen of the world, or to see all civilization perish
Anatole France
Around the world, at the beginning of this millennium, nearly a thousand organizations are working to promote the establishment of some form of global democracy, of cosmocracy. From Argentina (Democracia Global) to Japan (World Federalist Movement of Japan) to Uganda (Students for Global Democracy Uganda) to Israel (One World - Movement for Global Democracy) to India (The Global Trust). It is therefore extremely difficult to give a comprehensive history of the vast and disparate globalist movement over more than 2000 years.
It is all the more impossible to do so in a short essay whose primary vocation is not to do so.
I have, moreover, the cultural bias of a citizen of Western European and other countries...[ii] (one of the very arbitrary five unofficial regional groups voting at the United Nations. ii] (one of the very arbitrary five unofficial regional groups voting at the United Nations. ''Very arbitrary'', because after all Iceland has no more in common with Turkey than Algeria has with South Africa or North Korea with Kuwait).
The anthropologist, Daniel Fabre, sums up my bias more poetically: "there is no naive eye, no neutral ear, no innocent observation."[iii]
In other words, the countries bordering the North Atlantic region are overrepresented in this research.
On the other hand, I am not a historian, although in fact I am becoming one every day due to the fact that I have recently started a university course in international history. Nevertheless, I have tried to trace the history of the movement with all the rigor of the discipline.
In this portion of the manifesto, I only wished to paint a rough picture of the history of the mundialist movement in order to demonstrate that the Planet Republyk project is part of a continuity. I also wished to show you, and this contrary to what our elites try to make us believe, that the current model is not immutable. That idealists have come very close in other times to change the paradigm. And that therefore, you can also aspire to it, if you feel the inclination.
The historical statements, of which I have just shared with you, unless you are already interested in the subject, are, for the most part, as you may have noticed, unknown. The history of the UN, itself, is, in general, little or not addressed in national curricula. This is unfortunate.
National curricula should give more space to international history, to the globalist movement. And it should be UNESCO's task to produce a global civics textbook introducing cosmopolitan culture as proposed by the Group of Friends of Gary Davis.
Unfortunately, a UN body cannot be counted on to promote ideas that could ultimately threaten its continued existence. This "History of Humanist Impetus for Global Democracy" helps define us as much as national and regional history.
The slow but inexorable journey of humanity towards its unification definitely deserves a better place in the sun.
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That's it for chapter 14!
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[i] Excerpt from the interview given by Luc Côté to Michel Désautels on the program Désautels le dimanche on the Première chaîne de Radio-Canada, January 27, 2019.
[ii]United Nations web site, Department for General Assembly and Conference Management, United Nations Regional Groups of Member States. Accessed May 29, 2020. https://www.un.org/depts/DGACM/RegionalGroups.shtml
[iii]Daniel Fabre, quoted in Roland Viau, Amerindia: Essays in Aboriginal Ethnohistory, Montreal, Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 2015, p.29.