Citizens of the World

 

editorial

 

Where are the citizens of the world?

In story after story, science-fiction writers tacitly assume that this entire planet will eventually be united into a single world government. Many stories see this happening before the end of this century—certainly within the next hundred years.

If this is true, then we should be able to identify some trends at work today leading toward a unified world government. There should be at least a few people alive today who consider themselves citizens of the world, rather than citizens of a single nation.

With the exception of a very few idealists, every human being on this planet gives his political allegiance to nothing "higher" than a nation-state. There are even some primitive societies here and there in which the individual's highest allegiance goes to his tribe or clan. In many areas, such as Southeast Asia, the true allegiance of most of the people is to their village; the only relationship they have with a national government is an occasional tax-collector, or soldiers who turn their rice paddies into battlefields.

For us sophisticated Westerners, the strongest political allegiance we profess is to our nation. We consider ourselves to be Americans, or Englishmen, or Germans, Canadians, Russians, Israelis, Australians, et cetera. No more than a handful of the 3.8 billion of us think of ourselves as Terrans, or world-citizens. And even so, we may say that we think of ourselves as human beings first and national citizens second, but we act as if the citizens of other nations are something less than truly human. Our policies of trade and commerce, finance, politics, even our attitudes toward the Olympic Games, show the force of nationalism, Buy American! See America first! Don't sell America short! America, love it or leave it!

Nor is nationalistic zeal an especial curse of the industrialized West. The emerging nations of Africa and Asia burn with fierce nationalistic ambition. How else can an educated elite bring a gaggle of villagers and tribesmen into the Twentieth Century in one culture-spanning leapfrog bound? Just as the Tudors of England and the Bourbons of France built nations out of medieval patchworks of baronies, the leaders of the emerging nations are trying to turn loosely-confederated tribes into unified nations, and using the power, prestige and pride of nationalism to do it.

What about the next step? How can a world divided into nations become a unified apolitical entity? Would a nation such as the US, or USSR, or Zaire (for that matter) surrender any of its sovereignty to a world government?

Alexander Hamilton had the answer to that question some two hundred years ago: "Do not expect nations to take the initiative in imposing restrictions upon themselves," he said.

In other words, no national government is going to voluntarily give up any of its power to a supranational instrumentality. People have complained for a generation or more that the United Nations is little more than a debating society: it has no real power in the arena of international politics. Right on. But this is true because the nations that created the UN built powerlessness into its very foundations. How well would the US Government work if one state in the Union could nullify any piece of Federal legislation simply by casting a veto? We fought a bloody Civil War to ensure the supremacy of the Federal Government over the states' rights, and we still have legal wrangles about the subject. The UN is effectively powerless because any member of the Security Council can veto almost any action. And it was precisely the most powerful nations, including the US, that wrote the veto power into the UN Charter.

The few idealistic persons who have proclaimed themselves "citizens of the world" haven't brought about a step forward in international cooperation. In fact, by renouncing their citizenship in any particular nation, they became legally stateless persons. This means that they have no citizenship anywhere on the planet! They have no legal residence, no voting privilege, no passport, no civil rights. They are literally exiles from every nation on Earth. Without citizenship in a nation, an individual human being has no legal protection or rights anywhere. He is as helpless as a Paleolithic hunter who belonged to no tribe: a single, frail human being all alone in a cold and dangerous world.

Momentarily leaving aside the question of whether or not it's desirable to have a unified world government, let's examine world political trends to see if there are any motions in that direction identifiable today.

Clearly, the influence of modern technology has been to unite the peoples of the world socially and culturally. Electronic communications, in McLuhan's phrase, has turned the world into a "global village." Diplomats can fly at trans-sonic speeds from one capital to another, shuttling back and forth over more mileage in a single day than Talleyrand covered in a lifetime. Rock singers are instantly known all over the world. Western-clothing styles, business methods, and social attitudes can be found from Tokyo to Timbuktu.

Spearheaded by our science-based technology, Western culture has homogenized most of the world. All the industrialized nations and most of the emerging ones have adopted a Westernized form of society.

But what is happening politically? There was some movement toward supranational groupings, spurred by the Cold War. The West's NATO and the East's Warsaw Pact were more than military alliances, in theory, although the confrontation between the US and USSR was the driving force behind these supranational groupings, and military considerations have always been foremost in both organizations.

The Western European nations have established the European Economic Community, the so-called Common Market. And the Warsaw Pact nations have made similar economic arrangements among themselves. While this started off with impressive momentum and was greeted (mainly in the US) as a step toward a United States of Europe, the EEC and similar international organizations have done very little to bring the nations of Europe together politically. In fact, viewed strictly from an American viewpoint, the Common Market has been a step toward European provincialism, a technique by which the European nations have reduced their economic dependence on the US.

Even if a United States of Europe eventually did come about, it would still be much less than the true North Atlantic community originally envisioned in the founding of NATO.

Most science-fiction writers have predicted that political union among nations will come eventually, but only after modern technology has paved the way by firmly uniting the nations economically and socially. "First the scientists, then the engineers, the financiers, the businessmen, and finally—'way behind—the politicians." That has been the standard wisdom.

How far behind are the politicians? A decade? A generation? A century? How far behind can we afford to have them, when they have their fingers on the buttons of H-bomb-armed ICBMs? In a world simmering with wars, with vast armaments, with growing economic gaps between the rich and poor, with steadily rising population and steadily dwindling resources, how much longer can we afford to remain separated into nation-states?

Most historians agree that the most brilliant civilization on Earth, prior to our modern age, was that of ancient Greece. Many feel that the Greeks, especially the Athenians, produced the highest civilization humankind has yet seen.

Yet that beautiful culture was submerged by relative barbarians. The Macedonians, and later the Romans, conquered all of Greece and ended the glory of Athens and the other Greek city-states. True, Greek culture permeated the conquerors, and Greek learning was the epitome of Roman civility. Yet the wisdom of the Greeks never advanced any further than it had reached at the time of Aristotle. And Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander of Macedon, who was the son of Philip, the Macedonian king who conquered Athens and all the other Greek city-states. The brilliant and beautiful Greek culture stagnated under Macedonian and Roman rule. Would it have advanced further if left free? Would there have been a scientific revolution fifteen hundred years before Copernicus and Galileo? Impossible to say.

But this much we do know for certain. No citizen of Athens thought of himself as a Greek. He was an Athenian. There were no Greeks. There were Spartans and Thebans and Corinthians. No citizen of the Greek city-states had a political allegiance higher than that to his city. They could band together temporarily to fight off invaders. But when a handful of Athenians, Spartans, et al. threw the full might of the Persian Empire back into Asia, the victors never realized that—united—they were the most powerful force in the world. They went back to their separate cities, and resumed squabbling among themselves. They destroyed themselves with internecine strife. The Macedonians conquered an exhausted Athens.

To paraphrase Santayana, those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the mistakes.

The civilization of ancient Greece disappeared in large part because the Greek people never developed a loyalty to any political entity higher than their cities. Much of Greek culture was preserved in Asia and Rome, but it was a stagnant, dead culture that was preserved. Not until the Copernican Revolution and the development of the modern scientific method of thought, some fifteen hundred years after Aristotle, did human civilization truly move forward again.

Today we live in a world where loyalty to nation-states is the highest political allegiance we can achieve. Yet it is clear that the problems of nationalism now outweigh the advantages. How can Americans, Russians, Danes, Chinese, Brazilians, and all the rest begin to work together as citizens of the world?

Make no mistake about it. Nationalism has been one of the most powerful forces in human affairs for the past several centuries. It has served us well. It has provided a framework for the development of societies on continental scales, and empires of global proportions. But today, in an age threatened with nuclear war, overpopulation, and resource depletion, nationalism worsens our most dangerous problems.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the situation is that there is literally no code of ethics for nations. Despite fine words about international law, justice, world opinion, the UN, the World Court—the truth is that Uruguay can declare war on Iceland, if their government decides to, and nobody can stop them with anything short of military force, if the Uruguayans are truly determined to have their war.

That example seems farfetched? Then look at the nation of Rhodesia. This former British colony practices a form of racial discrimination against blacks that has been condemned by Great Britain, the United Nations, and most of the nations of Africa and Asia. Economic sanctions have been used against Rhodesia to try to force its Government to change its policies. Yet Rhodesia maintains its course, despite all the pressures put upon it. For there is no legal way to make a national government do anything that it doesn't want to do. Military force is the only method that works for sure, and then it works only if you win, and it wins only if you kill many of the people you're trying to change.

Perhaps this is good. It might be frightening if a world government could meddle in the affairs of every nation. Of course, we know we're right about Rhodesia. But suppose a world government decided to straighten out America's educational system and achieve true racial balance in all of this nation's schools? As John Campbell put it, whose ox would be getting gored then?

Biological forces are extremely conservative. The basic motivating force among living creatures seems to be: do it today exactly as you did it yesterday, if it worked then it should work now. Human societies are very complex biological entities, but they follow this basic conservative rule. They change slowly, and very reluctantly.

Yet the human race is the result of an amoeba trying to reproduce itself exactly. Biological organisms do change. And so do societies. Sooner or later there will be a world government, and the seeds exist today, in our technology, in our growing interdependence with all the peoples of this globe.

The energy crisis shows that world government is necessary. And that it is being formed, before our eyes.

The basic facts of the energy crisis seem clear:

1. There are enormous resources of fossil fuels still available: a century's worth of oil, at least, in the Middle East alone, for example.

2. There are many, many new technological developments available to decrease our dependence on dwindling fossil fuel supplies and open the door to limitless, clean sources of energy such as solar power and thermonuclear fusion.

3. The social and political structures governing our use of natural resources and development of new technologies are faltering long before there is any real physical shortage of the resources themselves.

In other words, there is not yet a true shortage of oil. But the international political arena has been manipulated in such a way that the oil of the Middle East has been denied to the consumers of the industrialized nations.

There are many Americans who feel that the manipulations were made, in part or in whole, by the managements of the major international oil companies. Either they took advantage of the Arab-Israeli war, or fomented it, to help drive up the price of oil—and their profits.

Heinous. Yet the barons of Merrie Olde England thought rather poorly of King John, too. While Richard Coeur de Lion was a good old buddy of theirs, nasty John was doing nothing less than taking the first steps in creating a nation out of a gaggle of petty baronies. For this they forced him to sign the Magna Charta, which the barons believed would ensure their privileges forever.

Could it be that the nasty oil companies, and nasty ITT, and the other multinational corporations are taking the first painful steps toward a world community? For reasons that are no more exalted than simple greed?

It certainly looks as if the oil companies have scored a decisive victory over the Government of the United States. They are getting their way, while we the people pay their price and our Government flounders. Of course, this may be a special situation that won't repeat itself, but if you hold the situation up in a certain light, you can see that Aramco and friends have done something that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were never able to do: the oil companies have dictated their will to our Government.

There may be many more citizens of the world than we imagine. And they are sitting in the board rooms of the multinational cofporations. It's not a pleasant thought, perhaps. But what will next century's history books have to say about it? Or next year's science-fiction stories?

THE EDITOR