On Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 11:08:12 -0400 (EDT), W. Warren Wagar
(wwagar@binghamton.edu) wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Jul 1996, Andrew W. Austin wrote:
>> In a one world government where do you flee to when your government is
>> oppressing you?
> You left out the adjective "socialist." A socialist
> world government, which would also be democratic (or it couldn't
> be socialist), is a government that can be replaced or reformed
> democratically. If there is oppression, the means are at hand
> to fight back--through opposition parties, through the courts,
> through ombudspersons (= tribunes), through the media, whatever
> it takes.
This argument relies on a presumption that would appear to be in
dispute. The presumption is that a one world government *can* be
authoritarian enough to impose itself on the world, and at the same time
democratic enough to permit individuals to successfully fight against
oppresion. So the response begs the question: in writing the Future
history, the government can be made sufficiently effective at preventing
opposition to establish itself, but sufficiently ineffective at preventing
opposition that it can be reformed or replaced democratically.
On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Andrew W. Austin wrote:
> The Soviet Union is not an example of socialist democracy gone astray. The
> Soviet Union was set up like one big corporation. It was a disaster
> precisely because it was a centralized, top-down, command state economy
> that tried to do the things that you espouse. ...
Since this was under a "McFarling on Wagar" subject line, it was
ambiguous who Andrew Austin was responding to. But in any event, notice
that we have an example here of a effort to establish a transnational
state. Would it have remained in place longer if it was less effective at
imposing top-down decisions upon the nations within the state; or would it
have fallen apart sooner; or would it never have been established?
Perhaps it could be compared to the West Indian Federation, which
incorporated sufficient freedom for inhabitants of individual islands to
express by democratic vote whether to pursue independence collectively or
to pursue indpendence individually -- and when Jamaica pulled out,
Trinidad and Tobago pulled out, and after a period of trying to put
together a small island WI Federation, even Barbados pulled out and went
it alone (see _The Agony of the Eight_). That's less than 5 million
people in the Federation, at the time: it would appear that a system that
only met a limited subset of the criteria for socialism still permitted
too much freedom of action to permit the establishment of a trans-
English-speaking Caribbean island governmnet.
Which is the question I posed: how is this party effective enough
to establish a one-world government in the face of organized opposition
from the states that will have to be incorporated by force, while at
the same time it remains open enough to opposition that it simply
surrenders power in the face of internal democratic opposition? Saying
that if it qualifies for labelling as socialist, it won't be oppressive,
is simply evading the question: in those terms, how is this party
effective enough to establish a one-world government while at the same
time it is socialist enough to establish a government that can be
overturned peacefully?
Virtually,
Bruce R. McFarling, Newcastle, NSW
ecbm@cc.newcastle.edu.au