Civilization and Beyond: Learning from HistoryNearing, Scott
History
Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History
Nearing, Scott
Civilization -- History
Step 2. Delegate to the United Nations authority to levy taxes
or otherwise provide its own income.
Step 3. Call a planet-wide convention of delegates from all
nations, authorized to draft a world federal constitution
and submit it for ratification by all member
states.
Step 4. When approved by two thirds of the states represented
at the constitutional convention the constitution
so adopted would became the basis for world
law and the administration of world affairs.
Step 5. Inaugurate a world government that would be responsible
for maintaining and promoting peace, order,
stability, justice, equality of opportunity and general
welfare at the international level.
Heretofore, the nearest approach to a universal state has been an
empire like that of Egypt or Rome built by conquest and maintained by
military authority exercised by the imperial nucleus over its associated
and subordinated territories. The universal state described above would
be an association of sovereign states, each delegating a sufficient
measure of its sovereignty to enable the World Federation to act as a
responsible planet-wide government.
The probable consequences of these five forward steps have been
summarized by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos (_Only One World_ N.Y. Nostrom
1972 pages 28-29). "In every case the needed steps take us away from
division, from single shot interventions, separatist tendencies and
driving ambitions and greeds. We have to grasp and foster more fully the
truly integrative aspects of science. We have to revise our economic
management of incomes, of environments, of cities. We have to place what
is useable in nationalism within the framework of a political world
order that is morally and socially responsible as well as physically
one."
Up to this point in social history, critical situations have usually
been dealt with on the battlefield. Might measured right. The victors
carried the day, won the right to exploit their defeated rivals and
weaker neighbors. The result was planet-wide political chaos, and an
economic free-for-all, in which political power and economic superiority
bestowed upon their possessors the right to plunder and exploit
geographic areas limited only by existing means of communication and
transportation. At no known point in social history were conquerors and
exploiters able to unify the earth politically and exploit its total
economic resources.
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