The Rational Manifesto for One World

Barry Desborough·Thursday 2 June 2016

Introduction

For the first time in history, we have the means with which to form communities that span the globe. This initiative can use those means to make our world better, and it is up to all of us to participate. There are many “One World” groups and loosely connected grass-roots political movements. What is different about the Rational Manifesto is that it puts forward policies and coordinates activities in pursuit of those policies. It is an inclusive movement that is open to policy development by discussion and membership voting.

We face problems on a global scale. Nothing but vastly improved world government will let us profit from opportunities and deal with our problems. This manifesto is a continually evolving document. Please feel free to comment, criticize and make suggestions by joining this FaceBook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/509991359202667/) and posting your comments to it.

What does it cost us not to have a world government?

It doesn’t take much googling to appreciate the scale of avoidable deaths, from war, genocide, starvation and disease in our disunited world. Military expenditure, worldwide, is over 2.44 trillion US dollars in 2023 while the root cause of so much suffering and conflict is - a lack of non-military investment!

Apart from the above, threats to human survival include climate change and ecological breakdown, cheap yet powerful technologies that will need policing on a global scale, and the need to protect life and humanity from extinction-level natural causes.

But isn’t it impractical?

Humanity has lived in small bands for most of its history, but that history is one of larger and larger groups joining together, mostly successfully. The European Union is far from perfect, but it has kept the peace in Western Europe for over 70 years, following two devastating wars in the first half of the 20th century. Modern nation states such as Germany and Italy were, until recently, patchworks of mini-states often in conflict with one another. The United States of America, for all that anyone might want to criticize it, is a nation forged from many territorial components, cultures and ethnicities. There is nothing inherent in human nature that mandates that we live in separate nations with no effective international government.
As to whether this initiative stands a chance of making things better, consider the fact that all political parties, philosophies and movements started with, at most, a handful of like-minded individuals, finding one another and forging a plan. Most of these movements began well before the advent of free, richly featured and powerful means of global communication. Never has there been such an opportunity to make an initiative like this succeed. The main limiting factor would be an unjustified lack of belief that it could succeed.

But we seem to keep electing a-holes with no compassion, courage or vision.
That’s up to us. Winston Churchill famously said, “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…” We have the power to elect enlightened leaders of moral virtue, and this manifesto calls on people to do so.

Can democracy be improved upon? It can. A more informed and aware electorate can avoid the charms of the sociopath, and the bumbling incompetent. Indeed there is much to be said for demanding that candidates are not pathological, and have attained a certain level of mastery of essential areas of knowledge - including history, politics and science, especially the science of human nature. Nobody would give an unqualified person the responsibility for the conservation of any other endangered species, but we do it when it comes to us.

Don’t we have the United Nations already?

In “One World: The Ethics of Globalization”, * https://www.amazon.com/One-World-Et... moral philosopher Peter Singer sets out a number of proposed reforms of the U.N. Many people will disagree with Singer’s position on various topics, but his ideas on U.N. reform are well worth paying attention to. I hope to obtain his permission to reproduce his proposals soon, but basically, it means the abolition of the power of veto enjoyed by the victors of WWII, strengthening its power to enforce agreed international law and providing incentives for states to conform to the principles of secular democracy and the guaranteeing of human rights.

In the chapter “One Law”, Singer notes that our ideas of what constitutes state sovereignty have changed over recent decades. The causes of these changes include a more integrated world economy, ecological issues, and our ideas about prohibiting genocide and crimes against humanity.

Singer points out that genocides have occurred throughout history, and he echoes others in thinking that humans, as a part of our natures, have a tendency to indulge in genocide in certain circumstances. Examining recent international law that tries to address the problem, he begins with the charter of the International Military Tribunal which tried leading Nazis for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This established the principle that certain acts are so horrific that they are crimes no matter what the law of the particular country at the place and time the crimes occur. The 1984 Convention against Torture accepts this principle. It has been signed by 130 countries. The principle of universal jurisdiction is now established by many countries and the International Criminal Court has the jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

Given that it is justifiable to override state sovereignty in dealing with the above types of crimes, it should also be justifiable, Singer says, to intervene to prevent or stop such crimes taking place. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty identified two criteria for justifiable military action,

A. large-scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which is the product either of state action, or state neglect or inability to act, or a failed state situation; or,

B. large-scale “ethnic cleansing”, actual or apprehended, whether carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts terror or rape.
The commission said that, when the above criteria are met, It is not just a right for the international community to intervene, but a responsibility to do so.
There is only one body that could authorize intervention, and that would be the
United Nations.

In the section “Avoiding Cultural Imperialism”, Singer asks what right would a world government have to impose on various peoples a particular view of what is acceptable in a society, and what is not? What about moral relativism? Well, he says, if you take relativism seriously, both the impulse to promote a moral view, and an impulse to resist are relative to one’s own society. There is no way of expressing a “transcultural or objective moral judgement about anything, including respect for the cultures of different peoples.” Allowing for the “possibility of moral argument beyond one’s own cultural boundaries” can actually help justify the preservation of diversity, and can help us recognise that our own values are not necessarily superior. But it is not imperialist to say that acts of genocide and extreme oppression, the denial of education to women, and genital mutilation “lack the element of consideration for others that is required for any justifiable ethic.”

The full text of Singer’s “One Law” chapter is reproduced here. I urge you to read it.