Year LXIV, 2022, Single Issue, Page 93
THE WORLD FEDERALIST MOVEMENT’S STRATEGY
TO BRING ABOUT A “WORLD CONSTITUENT MOMENT”
During 2022, the World Federalist Movement (WFM) held a series of twice-weekly online meetings with the aim of outlining a new strategic plan ahead of its next world congress. The “Theory of Change” (TOC) method used by the United Nations to organise internal debates was also used in this setting. It is an apparently neutral mechanism in which all participants are placed on the same level, although proceedings are directed by a member of the Executive Council, who naturally introduces and guides the debate. I joined this working group with the aim of comparing the strategy adopted by the European Federalist Movement for the construction of a European federation with that adopted by world federalists. My aim was to identify a common goal for an action that might unite the forces of European and world federalists. At present, the strategy of the WFM is based mainly on proposals to amend the United Nations Charter. One of these is the formation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA), and it is supported by Andreas Bummel (and his organisation Democracy Without Borders), whose goal is to create, with the backing of a coalition of favourable governments (a “coalition of the willing”), a world parliamentary assembly.
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The discussion in the TOC meeting of 4 October was devoted to Andreas Bummel’s UNPA proposal. There was no time for an open and in-depth debate. I am sceptical about the idea of a “coalition of the willing”. In an international situation in which a war between great powers is under way and in which the US defends the ideology of an inevitable clash between democracy and authoritarianism (a variant of the “clash of civilisations”), such a coalition is unattainable. A world constituent moment can manifest itself only in the face of a common danger that forces all the parties involved to engage in dialogue and take joint decisions. In our century, this danger is the looming threat of an irreversible environmental crisis. My aim is to promote the introduction of a joint UEF-WFM campaign for a Global Green Deal.
The United Nations is in crisis, and it is a deep crisis that will continue to worsen unless we can stop the trend that is seeing international politics increasingly dominated by conflict and tensions between the world’s major powers. After the collapse of the USSR, a prosperous and peaceful world seemed within reach. But now, in the twenty-first century, we have to acknowledge that hopes of this kind were only illusions. Today we are witnessing the unfolding of a fierce war in Europe, which is in danger of degenerating into a nuclear war, and the United Nations, an organisation created to preserve peace, does not have the necessary powers to act. Many have denounced its failure; I cite as an example an article by Branko Milanovich,[2] who asks if the UN still exists. Federalists should recognise that “international law” is an artificial construction: nothing more than a set of international agreements of norms and procedures that can be violated by nation states, and therefore have no binding value. Immanuel Kant, in Perpetual Peace, perfectly encapsulates the falsity of “law” that carries no sanctions: “One cannot conceive of international right as a right to war, since this would be a presumptive right to determine what is right…”.[3]
I am in favour of campaigning for a World Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA) because national democracy is in danger. The system of international relations is increasingly conditioned by the ideology of nationalism. Hamachandra Basappa[4] rightly denounces the abuses of nationalism in India (“this happens due to some incentives or a threat of investigations against some of the legislators. To contest an election, politicians and political parties spend millions of rupees [...] those with a national footprint join regional parties and contest the election”). The nationalism of the twenty-first century uses different tools from those of the last century, but the results are the same: national democracy is progressively suffocated until the political system falls into the hands of an autocrat. Mussolini and Hitler did not seize national power by force, but exploited an international crisis — fear of communism and social unrest — to gather the votes of a population frightened and eager for order. The institutions of national democracy — the rule of law, the popular vote, etc. — are not sufficient. National democracy collapses when the system of international relations is dominated by power politics and threats of war. We find ourselves in this situation now, and our enemy is nationalism. A world parliament is an alternative, but is it possible?
Even the United States, the beacon of democracy in the world, is today threatened by the danger of nationalism. If Donald Trump wins the next presidential election, US nationalism — “America First” in foreign policy and white supremacism at home — will become a model imitated in other countries: international anarchy will increase. US domestic policy is conditioned by the country’s foreign policy, and Biden’s is not that different from the “America First” variety. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gave Biden an opportunity to further enlarge NATO, thus filling the power vacuum in Europe caused by the lack of a European defence. While this strengthening of NATO was certainly necessary to curb Russia’s aggression, it has handed ammunition to those, primarily Russia and China, who attack the West’s foreign policy as neo-colonial. NATO is a military alliance, and it is also a form of nationalism because it divides the world into friends and enemies.
In the coming years, the European Union may manage to equip itself with its own means of defence and define a foreign policy of its own that will give it political independence without requiring it to renege on its pact of friendship and cooperation with the USA. Without its own foreign policy, the EU risks disintegration. The war in Ukraine, when it ends, will leave behind a further painful division in Europe: the Iron Curtain created during the Cold War will move from Berlin to Kyiv. Russia is a Euro-Asian country, and Europe and Russia must succeed in overcoming their divisions and find a way to break down the borders between them. While I cannot discuss this next point in depth here,[5] I would remark that US foreign policy, to the extent that it exacerbates the contrast between “democracy” and “authoritarianism”, constitutes an obstacle to a serious policy of détente and peaceful international cooperation. What the United States, together with Europe, should instead seek to do is engage all countries, including the “authoritarian” ones, in serious discussion of how the major world emergencies, from military disarmament to the environmental crisis, can be addressed through peaceful and democratic procedures.
Samuel Huntington’s teaching on “the clash of civilisations”[6] is misleading. Peaceful dialogue between different civilisations is both necessary and possible. Consider the case of China. The political scientist Zhao Tingyang recently described in great historical detail the theory of the Tianxia system, which developed in ancient China about 2,800 years ago.[7] Tianxia means “all under heaven” and it refers to a political ideology whose purpose was to maintain unity and peaceful cooperation between different political communities in the central plains of China. The use of the word “all” indicates that beyond these peoples, there were not believed to be others: it was therefore a cosmopolitical vision. At the heart of this thought was the notion of “compatibility” which “refers to the capacity to transform enemies into friends within a pluralistically inclusive order of political security and peace”.[8] Zhao Tingyang does not confine himself to historical reconstruction of the concept of Tianxia, but instead goes on to propose it as a crucial idea for contemporary politics — a strategy to overcome the dangerous conflicts and tensions between major world powers. Here is his concluding proposal, in which he refers to: “the destructive forces unleashed by advanced technology which is far more likely to lead to the end of the world. Facing this problem, the only possible deliverance is to be establishing world institutions that can secure the flourishing of all persons and all states. And this would require the creation of new rules of the game that alter a logic of competition in order to bring about a world system based on universal compatibility and peaceful coexistence”.[9] Ultimately, all the cultures that have grown up in all the continents contain a humanistic core that can be traced back to their very roots, given that they were born to unite human communities. A twenty-first-century humanistic and cosmopolitical culture is not a utopia, but a goal that can be achieved, with tenacity and courage. Humanity can become a political subject, and eventually the world will unite thanks to a new cosmopolitical humanism. Russia and China are not democratic countries — the first is an autocratic regime, and the second a one-party regime —, but dialogue with their citizens is possible. The WFM should try to open new sections in Russia and China. The debate for a cosmopolitical culture must start from the bottom, without prejudice and with mutual respect.
These considerations on Chinese political culture and on cosmopolitical humanism allow me to conclude with some proposals on the strategy necessary for the WFM to initiate a constituent moment. As I wrote in a previous paper,[10] it is worth bearing in mind that constitutions are written by constituent assemblies only at the end of a constituent process. The difficult task facing the WFM now is to identify how the constituent moment might begin. As I remarked in my paper, the most promising way forward is an initiative for a Global Green Deal, to be implemented through a reform of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) based on the Triffin Plan, which would allow China to be involved and the dollar (as an international reserve currency) to be replaced with SDRs based on baskets of world currencies, and also through a Constitution of the Earth, a pact between humanity and nature serving to define universal environmental legislation and give the International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction to punish crimes of “ecocide”. Many ecologists support such reforms,[11] which do not create the world federation (for example, they do not propose universal military disarmament), but do represent a step towards that goal; in other words, they provide governance of environmental sustainability policies, not global governance in the sense of a world federal government. This kind of partial approach to the constituent problem dates back to the start of my experience in the MFE, when European federalists, following the 1971 collapse of the Bretton Woods system, began to discuss a campaign for a European currency. The problem though, they knew, was that a European currency is not the same as a European federation. And so, Mario Albertini proposed the concept of “constitutional gradualism”, meaning building a state piece by piece. On this basis, we launched the campaign for the European currency and for the direct election of the European Parliament. In 1979, European governments initiated the EMS (European Monetary System) and European citizens elected the European Parliament by universal suffrage. We have not yet reached a European federation, but a European Union, with its own currency, does exist and the struggle to overcome its institutional shortcomings is ongoing.
Since, in the context of the pursuit of a world constituent moment, the term “pre-conditions” has probably generated misunderstandings, I propose replacing it with “constitutional gradualism”, in reference to the institutional steps forward that are necessary in order to reach the world federation. I hope that the WFM, viewing the UNPA and Global Green Deal campaigns from this perspective, will have no problems promoting them. The one proposal complements the other, the first indicating that a step must be taken towards international democracy, the second that a system of “global governance for the environment” has to be created. These are objectives that the European Union, in particular the European Parliament, could support as a central chapter of its foreign policy. In developing this policy, the federalists — both European and World federalists — would find many allies in the NGOs and beyond. The EU is the first example of a supranational union that has abolished the borders between its member countries, and can act to abolish national borders beyond Europe. The campaign for a Global Green Deal and a world parliament would be a first, perhaps decisive, step towards a world constituent moment.
Guido Montani
[1] This text first appeared in Bulletin no. 33, entitled All Together, of the World Federalist Movement/Institute for Global Policy (WFM/IGP); we reproduce it with the permission of the publisher.
[2] B. Milanovic Does the United Nations Still Exist?, Social Europe, 3 October 2022, https://www.socialeurope.eu/does-the-united-nations-still-exist.
[3] I. Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, edited by P. Kleingeld, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 81.
[4] The quote is taken from a comment on my article by Hamachandra Basappa, circulated within the WFM. My article was published in New Federalist Papers and in Bulletin no. 33, entitled All Together, of the World Federalist Movement/Institute for Global Policy (WFM/IGP).
[5] I refer to: A new Atlantic Charter, Social Europe, 8 June 2022 https://socialeurope.eu/a-new-atlantic-charter.
[6] S.P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1996.
[7] Zhao Tingyang All Under Heaven. The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order, University of California Press, Oakland, 2021, https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520325029/all-under-heaven.
[8] Ibidem, p. 18.
[9] Ibidem, p. 192.
[10] G. Montani, Coesistenza pacifica e momento costituzionale, L’Unità Europea, n. 4, July-August 2022, p. 15; Eng. Translation, “Peaceful Coexistence and Constitutional Moment”, in WFM Bulletin, 17 August, 2022.
[11] V. Cabanes, Un Nouveau Droit pour la Terre. Pour en finir avec l’écocide, Paris, Seuil, 2015, https://www.seuil.com/ouvrage/un-nouveau-droit-pour-la-terre-valerie-cabanes/9782021328615.
