10/02/97, Warren Wagar wrote:
> World government is essential for at least three reasons:
>
> 1. To ensure the equitable distribution of wealth and
> natural resources among the world's peoples. ...
> 2. To protect the biosphere. ...
> 3. To safeguard world peace. ...
I see. The vision is that an enlightened global state _somehow_ comes into
existence, _somehow_ remains stable forever, _somehow_ is never subverted
by special interests, and _somehow_ always adapts benignly and successfully
to changing conditions.
I dispute every one of these implicit assumptions, and suggest that the
historical record agrees with me. I'd frame my own argument along two
lines: (1) long term system stability, and (2) the creation scenario.
(1) As regards stability - monoculture is inherently maladaptive; it is
inferior to diversity. Just as the single-strain Irish potato crop all
failed at once from a single blight, so would a single world government be
all-at-once vulnerable to a special-interest takeover or to any other
serious system perturbation (natural, economic, or political). Voluntary
mutual cooperation among enlightened sovereign states would be considerably
more robust over time, and would be no less difficult to achieve than a
single enlightened hierarchical government.
It is instructive to note here that voluntary cooperation among
major European powers has been achieved _in advance_ of the upcoming (and
retrograde) European federal state.
(2) As regards the creation scenario - one must have a plan/scenario by
which the goals are to be achieved, by which the future system is to come
about. As argued in the response to Adam Webb, I believe "salvation
through apocalypse" is demonstrably a dead end - is jumping from the fying
pan into the fire. The best hope for enlightened governance of _any_
variety is through orderly change with ongoing stability preserved. And
with democratic institutions being rapidly and systematically dismantled on
a global scale, there is an historical necessity to organize for peaceful
revolution with extreme urgency and singleness of purpose.
International brotherhood and mutual solidarity have a critical
_supporting_ role to play, but the only productive focus of _primary_
effort, under existing circumstances, is the achievement of democratic
revolution within each sovereign state. And the West _must_ take the lead
- if the West remains elite-capitalist dominated the rest of the world is
doomed, given the West's many-times-over military hegemony. And an
enlightened West - Can you imagine it? - could be ever-so effective in
_guiding_ (not coercing) the rest of the world to a similar enlightened
state.
At every stage the MEANS IS THE END: (1) the organizing and popular
"uprising" required to achieve democratic revolution is in fact the
creation of the popular infrastructures necessary to support enlightened
governance in a modern Western state; (2) the unfolding mutual cooperation
of revolutionary democratic Western states, and the collective experience
of supporting the rest of the world in joining, is in fact the creation of
the very collaborative paradigm that is needed to enable ongoing world
peace and cooperation.
---In closing, I dispute one of Warren's goals: "equitable distribution of wealth and natural resources among the world's peoples".
For _many_ reasons - even though world trade should certainly be encouraged - an emphasis on local self-sufficiency is called for. It should be recognized here, as Michael Parenti develops in "The Sword and the Dollar", that the Third World is by no means poor - the problem is that the West has been stealing (by force) its resources for the past several centuries. A simple cessation of imperialism (including national expropriation of resources and repudiation of debts, with Western cooperation) would immediately achieve a major shift of wealth from the First to Third Worlds. Forced redistribution beyond that is inadvisable.
I contend that "equitable distribution of resources" is ecologically unsound - if what you mean, for example, is that desert dwellers should have the same access to water as, say, a Norwegian. If you want to live in the desert, you'd better know how to get by with what's available there, or what you can trade for. Otherwise we'd be creating ecologically unsustainable economies all over the world, based on the centrally-planned massive re-distribution of global resources. This would be a capitalist-developers dream scenario, not the dream of one seeking a sustainable world.
rkm