Year XLI, 1999, Number 2, Page 111
THE FINANCIAL CRISIS OF THE UNITED NATIONS AND THE FEDERALISTS
1. The United Nations and their financing rules. I wish to make an analysis of the functioning of the United Nations and its financing not as an expert, but as a federalist. It is worthwhile going into some detail on this problem and on the current crisis, the most serious which the UN has ever had to face.
In their book Renewing the United Nations System, published in 1994, Erskine Childers and Brian Urquhart[1] list eight proposals to reform the financing mechanism advanced by governments and three advanced by the Secretary-General. On average this means one proposal for every five years since the UN’s foundation in San Francisco, generally put forward at moments of acute financial crisis.
These crises have one constant: they are due in the vast majority of cases to the refusal of member states to pay their quotas, and not to administrative errors. As we shall see, these quotas must be paid to the UN on the basis of commitments undertaken. While the UN certainly requires structural reforms, which the federalists have called for since its creation, it is also true that endemic financial crisis has not facilitated its tasks.
For many years the countries which have contributed most to its financing have asked for zero increase on spending. I will merely quote some data to squash the accusations of waste, financial frauds and uncontrolled growth in spending, made by the more reactionary and nationalist side of the political classes, in particular in the American Congress, or by the multinationals which in recent years have organised press campaigns against the UN to impede its efforts in the area of labour and environmental legislation.
When the UN was established, the Charter laid down in article 17-2 a single source of funds. In practice the General Assembly saddled each member state with a contribution which takes account of the ten-year average of its gross domestic product, adjusted on the basis of its foreign debt and its pro-capite income. The expenditure of the Organisation was planned by the General Assembly, but the payment of state contributions was obligatory on the basis of law and international treaties.
At that time all participating states had accepted the principle of paying quotas proportional to their capacity to contribute. It is the same principle as that on which the fiscal systems of the western democracies are based. In theory at least, none of these countries would tolerate it if citizens and companies, particularly those which contribute most to the public purse, should use blackmail to obtain particular advantages, or should suspend their payments with impunity until the political and economic decisions adopted by the majority are changed.
We can clearly see the hypocrisy of governments which call themselves “democratic” and speak of the sacred nature of the law and international treaties, but then — and this concerns primarily the United States — take the liberty of not paying the amounts which they owe to the United Nations. These states and their governments are “outlaws”. Those who pay late are in the same position.
In 1946 the working budget of the UN was 21.5 million dollars and in 1992 this reached 1,181.2 million. A 55-fold growth over a period of 46 years is by no means scandalous for an organisation which started from nothing, and taking account of the fact that in the meantime the value of the dollar has diminished considerably. In real terms, the UN budget has only increased tenfold, as has also happened for its specialised agencies (the FAO, UNESCO, ILO etc.). During the same period the UN has gone from 51 to 185 member countries (which include almost all of mankind) and has developed programmes which at the time of its foundation were not foreseen. It can therefore be said that the growth in the UN’s financial needs has been very modest, particularly if one takes into account that in 1986 the request to diminish functional expenditure froze the level of outgoings and reduced staff by 13 per cent.
In 1992, as Erskine Childers and Brian Urquhart further observe, the expenditure of all organisations under the umbrella of the United Nations reached only 0.0005 per cent of world GDP and only 0.0007 per cent of that of the 24 most industrialised countries according to the OSCE classification.
When the UN was first set up, the United States contributed around 50 per cent of the regular budget and the poor countries joining the United Nations were very few, since among Third World states only those of Latin America were independent. Since then the United States quota has progressively diminished, by common agreement, to 25 per cent (310 million dollars in 1994), as against the 12.45 per cent from Japan, 8.95 per cent from Germany, 6.71 per cent from Russia, 6 per cent from France, 5 per cent from Great Britain, 4.29 per cent from Italy and 3.11 per cent from Canada. The contribution of the 87 poorest countries cannot go below 0.01 per cent of the total budget. Other countries find themselves in an intermediate position: Brazil contributes 1.59 per cent of the budget, China 0.77 per cent, India 0.36 per cent, Nigeria 0.2 per cent and Indonesia 0.16 per cent.
For the other activities — like peacekeeping for example — the criteria for calculating contributions is slightly different. The five countries of the Security Council must pay 22 per cent more than the contribution calculated on the basis of the criteria adopted for the regular budget; other countries pay a sum equal to those resulting from the normal criteria, and a third group pay less. The most serious problem in this connection springs from the fact that the Secretary-General only has available a permanent fund of 150 million dollars and that all peacekeeping operations decided by the Security Council require the General Assembly’s approval of an ad hoc budget, which considerably slows down the possibility of intervention.
One of the more recent proposals to regulate the UN’s financial problems in the short term was advanced in February 1993 by group of international financiers (the Volker-Ojima Report), which suggested making quota-payments quarterly; penalising late-payers by charging interest; doubling the permanent capital fund (200 million dollars); and creating a complementary reserve fund of 400 million dollars for peacekeeping operations.
In 1993 Bill Clinton again asked for a reduction of the American contribution to the global funding of the United Nations, observing that the US quota “should be reduced to reflect the rise of other nations that now can bear more of the financial burden”.[2] In his first speech to the General Assembly he declared that American participation in the peacekeeping budget should be reduced, thus signalling an important change in US policy with regard to the international organisation. This highlighted the problem of UN financing and the need to avoid excessive financial dependency on anyone member state.
It was not the first time that the United States had asked for a drop in their contributions. They had already done so in 1957 when they obtained a reduction in their quota from 49 per cent to 37 per cent of the total budget, and then again in 1974 when they wrung a further reduction from the UN to 25 per cent. In 1985 the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, immediately supported in Italy, had suggested a new reduction of 10 per cent, sharing out the smaller amounts among the countries able to sustain an extra financial effort. In 1986, right in the middle of a crisis provoked by the United States, an informal document (written by the Aga Khan and Maurice Strong) advanced several proposals, including some similar to those mentioned above. None of these proposals was accepted favourably and some industrialised countries officially rejected them, at least until the United States had settled their arrears, something which the American government has declared it can only do through annual instalments.
2. The current data on the financial crisis. The delay of payments, unsanctioned by the addition of interest or other penalties, is a serious problem which has lasted for decades now. The data presented here gives an idea of their importance.
At 31 July 1988: a) the arrears accumulated over the years amounted to 2.4 billion dollars, including around 900 billion for variable expenses, 1.5 billion for peacekeeping and 26 million for the ad hoc tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda; b) the United States debt came to 1.5 billion dollars, i.e. more than half the total (569 million for variable expenses and around one billion for peacekeeping costs). The United States is therefore the main “outlaw” of the international community, and their situation is made still more unacceptable by the conditions which they unilaterally place on their payment of arrears, which go so far at times as the adoption of political orientations contrary to the decisions of the majority of the other member countries; c) the other principal debtors are Russia, Ukraine and Brazil; some countries like Japan, Germany and Great Britain pay late, while others have unilaterally reduced the voluntary quotas for population and development funds.
At 5 August 1998 only 85 countries out of 135 were up-to-date with payments. Up to now the budget relating to variable expenses for the two years in progress is very limited. It banks on zero which means the Secretary-General has to make the organisation function on a of 2.5 billion dollars, in other words with l00 million less than in the previous two-year period, despite the fact that all around are demanding an increase in UN activities. Moreover, from the mid-eighties, the UN staff dropped from 12,000 to 9,000, while the states which imposed these severe cuts have not yet fulfilled their own obligations.
It is therefore misleading to speak of UN bureaucracy since its staff, including that of the specialised agencies, is smaller than that of a city like Stockholm or of a company like McDonalds, and since in 1992 the variable expenses were equivalent to 0.5 per cent of the American budget, or the cost of two strategic bombers.
It is necessary to add here a few more detailed remarks which will help give a proper understanding of the phenomenon: article 19 of the United Nations Charter specifies only that a state in arrears with of at least two years loses the right to vote in the General Assembly. Each state can therefore work on a knife-edge, keeping just below this fatal threshold, because the authors of the Charter would never have imagined that some of the principal contributors would be years late in paying; the permanent members of the Security Council cannot lose their rights within this institution even if they exceed the threshold; article 19 says nothing about the widespread and recurrent practice of paying as late as possible in the year, and in recent years the UN has, to avoid financial collapse, been obliged to perform real feats of acrobatics in shifting funds temporarily available in the peacekeeping budget to other items; the cost of peacekeeping operations in very unstable situations is difficult to foresee and the UN can suddenly find itself in grave financial difficulty if the member states do not respond immediately to the request for founds on the basis of estimated costs. The countries participating in these operations can be reimbursed late, which makes it harder for them to pay their contributions on time.
All these facts and situations which have repeated themselves for at least thirty years can certainly not be attributed merely to administrative errors.
Other points must be noted too: the governments have accepted the principle of penalties in some sectors of UN activity. So far, however, the General Assembly has been rather reticent in adopting this system as regards the organisation’s working budget; the requirement that member states make their payments in dollars sometimes makes the task difficult for developing countries, and for this reason proposals have been advanced over the years aiming to replace the dollar, currently unstable, with a basket of currencies.
What is to be done? The financial crisis is such that, as Childers and Urquhart suggest, a global review of the whole thing should be undertaken by a Commission of economists extraneous to the UN with a mandate from the General Assembly.
The Ogata-Volker Report of February 1993, written under the auspices of the Ford Foundation,[3] had not ruled out the possibility, in the proposals addressed to the Secretary-General, that it would one day be necessary to find new financial resources for the United Nations. However it considered that the current method of funding was still logical and appropriate because “it encourages the member countries to maintain effective control over the budget and agenda of the UN”.[4]
An alternative and more divergent point of view maintains that the financing of the UN is too serious a matter to be left to the national governments alone, as the experience of the last three decades shows. Alternative proposals have therefore been advanced, such as that whereby individual citizens are authorised to make donations to specialised UN funds. Other sources of funding have been identified, but it is hard to see how they can become effective without the intervention of civil society.
Thus various types of world tax have been proposed; on the sale of arms or on anti-personnel mines; on international movements of capital;[5] on international trade, or on the production of pollutants such as oil and hydrocarbons, or on the extraction of certain raw materials; on air and sea transport, with the justification that the UN is responsible for their functioning in a peaceful world climate; one day a year of “United Nations communication” in which all postal and telephone expenses, publicity and other means of communication are taxed with a surtax specifically for UN financing (this tax would have to be accompanied a campaign of public information).
The problem is considered in the report Our Global Neighbourhood published in 1995.[6] It was written by the Commission on Global Governance (composed of public figures such as Ingvar Carlsson, former Swedish Prime Minister, Shridath Ramphal, former Secretary of the Commonwealth and Jacques Delors, former President of the European Commission), created in 1992 to take up the mantle of the independent Commission on problems of international development led by Willy Brandt. Its task was to recommend the means to improve global security and governability, thanks to the possibility of increasing co-operation after the end of the Cold War. In the chapter “Financing Global Governance” the Report made the following proposal: “A start should be made in establishing practical, if initially small-scale, schemes of global financing to support specific UN operations”. The Commission underlined the complexity of the problem by means of a comparison with the European Union which, despite a higher level of integration, has not been able to make much progress in the way of taxation. In very diplomatic language the report considered that “The time could be right, however, for a fresh look and a breakthrough in this area. The idea of safeguarding and managing the global commons — particularly those related to the physical environment — is now widely accepted; this cannot happen with a drip-feed approach to financing. And the notion of expanding the role of the United Nations is now accepted in relation to military security”.
The Commission proposed a few basic principles: a) to tax the exploitation of certain common resources; b) to share out the financial burden not only among certain industrialised countries, but among the entire community of the international players, adopting a progressive approach; c) to consider these new sources of income as additional and not as replacing the national taxes.
The Commission also suggested that the proposals “can be initiated in the UN system — in the Economic Security Council, when established — and negotiated and approved by the General Assembly before being embodied in an international agreement to be approved and ratified”. The Commission considered that such proposals “do not involve major elements of supranationality”. It also considered that “any system of global taxation requires the identification of a tax base that is politically acceptable to governments but also reflects global processes”. Finally it summed up the projects under study, namely: 1) the Tobin tax, from the name of the American economist James Tobin, Nobel prize-winner, which concerns international commercial transactions; 2) a solidarity tax on multinational companies; 3) a tax on exploitation of common resources; 4) other taxes on air and sea transport, on fishing in the high seas, on the use of the Antarctic as part of the common heritage of the human race, on geo-stationary satellites, on the electromagnetic spectrum, etc.
The Commission concluded that while some of these measures have primarily symbolic meaning, others, like the tax on carbon dioxide emissions, could have “colossal implications”.
As regards the Tobin tax the Commission notes that this levy on capital movements is intended not only to affect financial revenue, but also to improve the functioning of the wider world market.
This project, proposed by its author in 1978, is still under discussion. It was taken up again recently in France during a meeting of the Conseil d’analyse économique (created a year ago by the Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, it groups around forty economists of all tendencies) which confirmed that any important reform — and in particular if it concerns the democratisation of international life, i.e. the overcoming of the exclusive sovereignty of the nation state — is all the more acceptable if one is in opposition.
The Tobin project was also at the centre of a long debate in the French National Assembly when the national budget for 1999 was being examined, in the course of which the Minister for the Economy and Finance, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, responding to numerous questions and comments, emphasised the difficulty of realising such a project after the coming into force of the European currency because “in the context of the euro it is even more difficult for one country to be subjected to a tax and another not. It is as if a tax were imposed on allowances in Brittany but not in the rest of France”. In this way Strauss-Kahn implicitly recognised the essential role which the European Union could, or rather should have in all projects for reforming the United Nations and democratising international political life, as the federalists demand.
Finally, at the first national meeting of the Attac Movement (Action pour une tax Tobin d’aide aux citoyens — Action for a Tobin tax to help the citizens) which took place at La Ciotat on 17 October 1998, it was decided to submit a series of proposals to Strauss-Kahn including “the application of the Tobin tax” which “even reduced to 0.05 percent, could make a contribution to the struggle against inequality” at world level.
The Commission on Global Governance, which, as we have seen, comprises political and economic personalities who are among those most conscious of the challenges ahead in the next century and of the unavoidable need to organise international life to democratise and regulate globalisation, did, for its part, recognise the interest of the Tobin tax. It concluded the part of its Report concerning UN financing[7] calling on “the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions to explore the feasibility of such a system in consultation with the regulatory authorities of the leading financial markets”.
“The financial crisis which began some months ago in the markets of South East Asia risks assuming global dimensions. It has affected Russia and Latin America and exposed the total inertia and impotence of Japan. It is sowing fear in the American and European financial markets”.[8] In the face of this hard reality, the moment has come to draw the political conclusions from the analyses undertaken by the more enlightened exponents of the ruling classes, like Raymond Barre, who declared that “good global governability must no longer be a utopia, it must be an ideal”.[9]
3. The role of civil society, of the NGOs and of the federalists. All of these new means of financing taken as a whole would still be to the control of the member states, which would have to their assent to levy new taxes, to collect them and to transfer the proceeds to the UN. They would keep their power of blackmail and would hold the United Nations under the permanent threat of financial crisis. It is therefore evident that any significant reform of UN financing must go hand-in-hand with thorough reflection on the democratisation of the United Nations and of international political life.
The federalists consider that the democratisation of international political life is too serious a matter to be left to the governments and diplomats. It is obvious that the national governments will never take any initiative in this direction. At the most they will propose, as Mikhail Gorbachev and the Commission on Global Governance did, a reinforcement of the UN.
After the Rio Conference of June 1992, it became clear which are the two principal actors who will tend to promote the process of world unification, the only way to control the globalisation imposed by the evolution of the mode of production.
These are on the one side, the governments, “the diplomatic expression of the process”, and, on the other, “the ecologist and pacifist movement, which expresses itself through the Non-Governmental Organisations and represents the democratic aspect of the process”. The avant-garde role of the federalist movement is to make these forces aware of the means — i.e. the political institutions — which mankind needs to realise peace, democracy and international justice.[10] This movement is continually spreading, as Strauss-Kahn recently acknowledged: in connection with the French rejection of the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAl), Strauss-Kahn said that “After MAl people will not negotiate as before. From a certain point of view the defeat of MAl is a victory of globalisation… It will be necessary to bear in mind the new constraints when negotiating. The peoples no longer accept being governed as in the past”.[11] This is the significance which the World Federalist Movement assigns to its participation as co-ordinator of various groupings of NGOs: in the struggle for the affirmation of the International Criminal Court; as promoter, on the occasion of the Rio Conference, of the International NGO Task Group on Legal and Institutional Matters (INTGLIM);[12] for the organisation of the Peace Conference which was held at The Hague in May 1999 within the international collective Hague Appeal for Peace 1999;[13] and in the ambit of the Forum of NGO’s which is being organised under the auspices of the UN on the occasion of the Summit for the new millennium which, according to Kofi Annan, is to propose how the United Nations should meet the challenges of the next century.
The federalists attach the same significance to their participation, along with other international organisations, in the third universal vigil of protest against the financial crisis ofthe United Nations, while emphasising that the UN is very far from being the appropriate instrument for international democracy. Indeed, only the federalists demonstrated during the San Francisco Conference of 1945 to denounce the confederal nature of the organisation, and they do not deny any of the criticisms advanced since then of the inefficiency of the United Nations and of its non-democratic nature.
In conclusion I would like to mention briefly the issues currently occupying the attention of the European and world federalists, for whom democracy can be fully realised only if it is affirmed at all levels from local district, through continental region, to the world; in which Europe is a crucial stage.
In the European Union the federalists are conducting a Campaign for the European Constitution, gathering signatures among citizens and political and social forces and “asking the governments and parliaments of the Union, and indeed the European Parliament, to start a democratic process”.[14]
At world level, the WFM is in favour of a radical reform of the United Nations system, and in particular indicates the following objectives:
1) The ratification of the Treaty on the International Criminal Court. This was adopted in Rome thanks to the pressure of civil society and of the Coalition of NGOs for the ICC, of which Bill Pace, executive director of the World Federalist Movement, was the co-ordinator for three years in New York. The action of this coalition has been exemplary because, as Pierre Blanc noted in October 1998, “who could have believed” at the time of the G7, that their demands for the setting up of the ICC or their calls for the banning of anti-personnel mines would lead to the establishment of the former and the signing of the Ottawa Treaty against the latter?[15]
2) The creation of a World Environmental Authority, appointed to supervise the application of a model of development compatible with safeguarding mankind’s heritage, to put an end to the tragedy of the exploitation of common resources. The second Earth Summit — which met in New York from 23 to 27 June 1997 as a special session of the UN General Assembly — had inflicted a heavy blow on the proposals and prospects advanced five years previously at the Rio Summit.[16] On the occasion of this second Summit the WFM, together with Earth Action, a coalition of 1,800 NGOs, and Globe, an international group of parliamentarians interested in ecological matters and in the democratisation of international political life, joined the plenary session of NGO’s in which a few hundred organisations participated, in parallel with the UN General Assembly, and called for the “creation of a democratic Chamber within the United Nations”.
3) The constitution of an Economic Security Council, already suggested in some governmental circles and more recently invoked by Dominique Strauss-Kahn. This claim shows clearly how, before unbridled globalisation, the only effective solutions are supranational, and how the abandonment of sovereignty, when chased out of the window, generally turns up again at the door. To “save democracy in the process of globalisation”, the alternative does not lie between national independence on the one hand and supranationality on the other, as is the view of the ATTAC movement, which gravitates around the monthly newspaper Le Monde diplomatique.[17] It lies rather between ineffective, non-democratic confederal collaboration, and effective democratic federal supranationality. The true distinction between the forces of reaction and those of progress is therefore that — defined by Altiero Spinelli and Emesto Rossi, European militants of the Resistance to Nazi-fascism, during their internment on Ventotene — that separates those whose goal is the conquest of national power and those who aim for the creation of a “solid international state”[18].
4) The reform of the Security Council, by removing the right of veto and creating a single permanent seat for a finally united Europe. This would take account of changes in the world balance of power since the end of the Cold War, and prefigure the transformation of the Council into a Senate of the great regions and continents, by degrees as other democratic processes of regional integration develop. Despite its imperfections, the European Union, which represents the most advanced frontier in current processes of political unification, could even now become the centre of initiative for the reform of the Security Council.
5) Finally, the reinforcement of the financial means of the international community (and of the UN in particular) and the adoption of initial measures towards a world fiscal system. For the federalists these cannot be taken into consideration unless they are accompanied by a procedure for their democratic control and the creation, alongside the Security Council and the General Assembly, which represents the member states, of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA), which represents all the world’s citizens. This project is currently supported, outside federalist circles, by the Canadian Parliament, the European Parliament, and the Interparliamentary Union (IPU), which in 1996 made a commitment to join the World Federalist Movement in supporting it; each case underlines the importance of the involvement of civil society to achieve it. It was mentioned during the proceedings of the Commission on Global Governance (together with the reinforcement of the General Assembly and the creation of a forum of NGOs and of civil society) and by the General Assembly group which since 1996 has had the remit of working for the reinforcement of the United Nations. Finally, it is taken into consideration in the later proposals of the former Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali (Agenda for Democratisation) and of the current Secretary-General Kofi Annan (Renewing the United Nations System. A Program for Reform) published in July 1997.[19]
Jean-Francis Billion
[1] Erskine Childers was a United Nations official and Secretary-General of the World Federation of UN Associations (WFUNA); Brian Urquhart as been Under-Secretary-General to the United Nations, a researcher with the Ford Foundation and later member of the Commission on Global Governance, of which more later.
[2] Erskine Childers and Brian Urquhart, op. cit., p. 153.
[3] Financing an Effective United Nations. Report of the Advisory Group on UN Financing, New York, The Ford Foundation, 1993.
[4] Op. cit., p. 24.
[5] Martin Walker, (“Global Taxation”, in World Policy Journal, calculated that a levy of 0.003 per cent on the 900 billion dollars traded daily would correspond sum of 8 billion dollars a year.
[6] Our Global Neighborhood. The Report of the Commission on Global Governance, New York, Oxford University Press, 1995.
[7] Our Global Neighbourhood, cit., pp. 217-24.
[8] Publius, European Letter, October 1998.
[9] Quoted in Erik Izraelewicz, “Chronique du Monde de l’économie. Sur l’Etat du monde”, in Le Monde économie, 27 October 1998, concerning two recent conventions, Carrefour des sciences et de la culture, organised in Lyons from 14 to 27 October 1998 by the European Commission forecasting group, and the Centre d’Etudes prospectives et d’informations internationales (CESPI) conference, organised on 21 October on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary.
[10] Cf. Lucio Levi’s introduction to Dieter Heinrich, The Case for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, New York, World Federalist Movement, 1998.
[11] Dominique Strauss-Kahn, quoted in “La défaite de l’AMI est une victoire de mondialisation”, in Libération, 22 October 1998.
[12] INTGLIM was set up at the end of the second meeting of the preparatory Committee for the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) 1991. It is co-ordinated by the World Federalist Movement and by the Center for Development of International Law, and it helped set up the coalition of NGOs for the International Criminal Court.
[13] See Appel de la Haye pour la paix, drawn up in October 1996 by the promoting Committee, led by, in addition to the WFM, the International Association against Nuclear Arms, the International Peace Bureau, and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (Fédéchoses pour le fédéralisme, Lyons, 1996, n. 97.
[14] See “Appel pour une Union européenne démocratique. Pour une constitution européenne”, in Fédéchoses pour le fédéralisme, Lyons, n. 99. See also Lucio Levi, “C’est seulement avec la constituante que la citoyenneté européenne verra le jour” (ibidem, 1997, n. 98); Francesco Rossolillo, “Réflexions sur la constitution europeenne” (ibidem, 1998, n. 100); Dominique Rousseau and other constitutionalists, “Pour une constitution européenne”, in Le Monde, 5 May 1998. Finally, see the issues so far of European Letter, published by “Fondazione Europea Luciano Bolis” in support of the UEF Campaign.
[15] Cf. Bill Pace, “Intervention de William Pace à la table ronde sur le Tribunal pénal international”, Lyons, 28 June 1998, in Fédéchoses pour le fédéralisme, Lyons, 1996, n. 93, and “Mondialiser la justice. Trois ans d’action des ONG pour le Tribunal pénal international”, in Fédéchoses pour le fédéralisme, 1998, n. 101. In the same issue see also “Thèses fédéralistes à propos du TPI. Pas de justice sans paix, pas de paix sans gouvernement mondial démocratique”. Finally, cf. Lucio Levi, “Tribunal permanent de l’ONU et justice internationale”, in Fédéchoses pour le fédéralisme, 1988, n. 100.
[16] Franco Spoltore, “Sommet de la terre: un nouvel échec” in Fédéchoses pour le fédéralisme, 1997, n. 97.
[17] Cf. Le Monde, 20 October 1998.
[18] Altiero Spinelli, Il Manifesto di Ventotene, with an essay by Norberto Bobbio, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1991, p. 50 (Eng. ed., The Ventotene Manifesto, The Altiero Spinelli Institute for Federalist Studies, Ventotene 1988).
[19] Dieter Heinrich, op. cit. For the latest developments cf. the latest edition, currently being printed (Lyons, Presse fédéraliste).
