Sovereignty is worshiped like a god, and as little understood.

It is the cause of untold strife and bloodshed. Genocide is perpetrated in its sacred name.

It is at once a source of power and of power's abuse, of order and of anarchy. It can be noble and it can be shameful.

Sovereignty is thought in our time to mean national sovereignty with every nation supposedly supreme inside its own borders and acknowledging no master outside them, restrained --but not necessarily much-- by international laws, treaties and codes of civilized behavior, all of which are breakable and none of which are enforceable.

Wars waged and violence perpetrated in pursuit of both newfound and ancient unfulfilled claims of sovereignty now appear almost everywhere on this crowded planet, an ugly legacy of the Cold War's end and the accompanying shattering of the old order. The fires of these eruptions light up the skies of our time, like some giant, uncontrolled forest fire raging all over the world.

Passionate crusades to avenge some alleged breach of sovereignty, or to achieve, assert or defend sovereignty for one purpose or another, today sweep at will across old, once-established boundaries of time, geographic space, custom, habit, economics and human thought itself

.Iraq's violation of the sovereignty of Kuwait led to the Gulf War. Iraq's blocking of the U.N.'s search for weapons of mass destruction --on grounds of its own sovereignty--led to the bombing if Iraq. A conflict between Serbs and Albanians over sovereignty in Kosovo led to ethnic cleansing, mass murder, and the bombing of Yugoslavia

.Issues of sovereignty lie at the root of all the 35 wars raging today. Issues of sovereignty have been an important factor in most, if not all, of the countless wars fought in this fading, blood-drenched century.

It would be an enormous over-simplification, of course, to suggest that sovereignty was the only cause of all these past and present conflicts. In a few, it was, but other causes were involved in most --causes related to ideology, doctrine, race, ethnicity, justice, ambition, power, greed, resources, booty.

Yet in every instance an assertion of sovereignty in the service of one or another of these or some other purpose was a vital element.

Wars fought in the past with all their unimaginable horror and destruction still had their limits. The capacity to extinguish all human life was not yet possible. That capacity is the new, sobering reality of our own and all future times. Survival for everyone is now at stake.

And it is actually more likely now that nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction will be used than it was during the more stable era of the Cold War. The danger of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear exchange between Russia and the West has increased, as has the threat of war between India and Pakistan. So has the danger that terrorists will acquire and use weapons of mass destruction.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Bill Perry says: "It isn't a question of whether but of where and when these weapons will be used."

Former U.S. Ambassador Robert Galluci, who engaged in nuclear weapon negotiations with both Iraq and North Korea, warns that the odds are that an American city will be destroyed by a nuclear weapon within 10 years. He describes how it could happen:   

 "One of these (rogue) governments fabricates one or two nuclear weapons, and gives them to a terrorist group. The terrorists bring one of these bombs into Baltimore by boat, and drive another one up to Pittsburg. And then the message comes in to the White House:
     'Adjust your policy in the Middle East, or on Tuesday you lose Baltimore, and on Wednesday you lose Pittsburgh.'   

 "Tuesday comes, and we lose Baltimore.    "What does the U.S. do?

"What does any nation facing this threat do?What we choose to call "civilization" may be totally disrupted and possibly destroyed --all in the name of assertions of a rightful claim to sovereignty felt to have been denied by history, or another ethnic group, or a different religion, or a hegemonic power, or something else.

Nation after nation is disintegrating.When the U.N.was born, there were 50 nations. Now there are almost 200. Mikhail Gorbachev recently remarked to me that today's 200-odd nations may be 800 tomorrow. He was only half joking.

David Fromkin has observed that there are between 5,000 and 10,000 groups claiming to be nations. He was not joking.Paradoxically, while fragmenting forces are propelling people apart, globalization is propelling all of us together.

Apoplectic, red-faced debates rage now in country after country over a claimed, presumed, or humiliating national "loss" of sovereignty to this faceless, dreaded, homogenizing, global force widely feared or felt to be overpowering our identities and our freedoms. We live in a world that despite all the violence prides itself on the progress of democracy as one by one authoritarian regimes have been replaced by governments more responsive to the will of the people. Yet democratic processes play almost no part in all the mayhem over separatism and sovereignty, and they likewise play little part in the march to globalization. Globalization, driven and shaped by market forces, is led by transnational corporations, banks, and speculators who are capitalizing on the modern miracles of science and technology.

Meanwhile, the people of the world, slumbering, preoccupied, angry, or consumed by a sense of individual powerlessness, helplessness or irrelevance, can't make decisions for, against, or about globalization.

Their governments find it almost equally difficult to do so. Borders are less and less meaningful. Vast sums flash across them in nanoseconds in private transactions. National currencies rise and fall at the incomprehensible whims of invisible others.

Information, ideas, and everything else can be bought, sold or traded and can flow anywhere and everywhere on the wildly free phantom of the Internet.

The sovereign capacity of nations to exercise command and control over such matters is increasingly in doubt.

No sovereignty is winding up in the hands of corporations that are creating this brave new world, however. They have their own master: the billions of individuals who as consumers make the final desicions of the global marketplace.

But even these consumers derive from their vast purchasing power no sovereign capacity to shape the emerging global community. Their power is too amorphous, too far flung, too uncoordinated.

For many, the spread of capitalism through globalization has led to a significant improvement in living standards. But more than a billion bitter and impoverished people, uneducated, untrained, unemployed, unhealthy, ill fed, ill clad, ill housed, are left out, falling further and further behind.

If their essential needs are ignored, these forgotten people are not likely to stay forgotten. They are apt to demand drastic change with increasing insistence. The triumph of capitalism in the world after the collapse of Marxism may then prove to have been only a prelude to further sweeping change and mounting strife. Violent revolt against globalism and the governments of nations that seem impotent in its face could then match, perhaps exceed, the violence of the sovereignty struggles.

Leaders of many developed and underdeveloped nations search desperately for a "third way," pledging allegiance to a market economy but not to a market society.

Dangerously unexamined in the midst of all this is the true meaning of sovereignty. Few of the combatants pursuing this Holy Grail that they proclaim as the rightful reason and holy purpose justifying their often unholy exertions, few of those contemplating violence to right the perceived wrongs of globalism, and few of the rest of us have given much if any consideration to the real nature of sovereignty, its history, and its explosive implications for the human condition. This is a failure on our part and an absence of thought which promises only the gravest of consequences.

When the first humans appeared on earth, their individual sovereignty was virtually absolute. They were truly free. They could climb trees and walk beside the rivers and make their way across the plains and through the jungles unchallenged by other humans. They had to cope with harsh forces of nature and ferocious beasts and bugs, but not with any government.

This state of "original sovereignty" slowly vanished through the unnumbered generations in the ever-enlarging scale of human social development. The primitive decision-making of individuals came to be shared with or seized by mates, families, tribes, clans, chiefs, councils of elders, and the first dim glimmering of something akin to government slowly emerged over the eons and took on some of the substance of sovereign authority. People gravitated together in villages. Villages grew into towns, towns into cities, and these also had their leaders. Feudal states developed, covering larger territories. Vast empires arose, ruled by emperors, empresses, kings, queens, khans and others recognized as "sovereigns." Popular revolutions then deposed and replaced sovereigns with nation-states. Some of these became colonial powers that were in turn compelled to relinquish their distant authority to new nation-states. The great 20th Century conflicts over who gets to exercise sovereignty pitted democracies, where the people do, against tyrannies, where Hitlers and Stalins do.

Over these millions of years of human and social development, as consciousness and capacity slowly evolved over the interminable ages, countless forms of human relationships were tried, discarded, and tried again. Religions, superstitions, ideololgies and ambitions were born and died, drew people together, drove them apart. Civilizations rose and fell, but through it all, issues of sovereignty often told the tale.

Two great and significant experiments in the uses of sovereignty have occurred in recent history. One began two centuries ago in America and is still evolving. One started half a century ago in Europe and is still unfolding.

The founding fathers of the United States believed that sovereignty belongs to the people, not to the government. Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed." Hamilton declared that "A sovereignty over sovereigns" --a more powerful sovereign government wielding authority over less powerful sovereign individuals-- was "subversive of the order and ends of civil polity.

"The founding fathers brought about a limited transfer of sovereignty from the original 13 nation-states born after the American Revolution, and from the loose and weak Confederation of States in which they had first banded together, to a new federal government: the United States. But they by no means transferred all their sovereignty to Washington. Parts of it were lodged more or less automatically close at hand in towns, cities and counties, part remained more distantly in the states, and only part was transferred still further away to the federal government.

The most significant experiment in the merging and expanding of sovereignties that has occurred since the birth of the United States is now underway in Western Europe. Its founding father, Monnet of France, had a grand vision. "We are not forming coalitions between states," he said, "but union among people.

"Uniquely, delegates to the European Parliament are apportioned according to the population of the member states, rather than being alloted on the basis of one delegate to each nation. Even more uniquely, the delegates are elected by the people of each country rather than appointed by their governments. These two features constitute at least a bow to the dawning realization that the sovereignty of European individuals just might be superior to the sovereignty of the European nations.

Meanwhile, however, important roles for the nations are carefully preserved and are presently protected in other powerful union institutions. Pascal Fontaine, a French scholar, states in an official document describing the union, "Member states relinquish a measure of sovereignty to independent institutions representing national and shared interests but the institutions complement one another, each having a part to play in the decision-making process.

"The foundation has already been created for what could evolve into analogous institutions for global decision-making. It is to be found in the International Court of Justice and the United Nations.

The court has rendered some important decisions, and the U.N. has contributed significantly to the well-being of the citizens of the world, but concerns about putting national sovereignty in jeopardy have thus far prevented us from following globally the course chosen regionally by the United States and the European Union. We have endowed the court with no real jurisdiction, and the U.N. with no real authority, and in neither have we invested any of our sovereignty. The concerns that prevented us from doing so have in a perverse way led to the very withering of national sovereignty that we sought to avoid and put in jeopardy our individual sovereignty, our lives, even --in this nuclear age-- all humanity.

The first responsibility of the government of a nation is to protect the people it represents from external threats, but it is ever more evident that the national governments of today cannot be relied upon to fulfill this fundamental obligation: there have been 170 wars since the end of War World II, killing an estimated 35 million people.

It is not only in matters of war and peace that citizens cannot count upon their national governments for protection. If the widely expressed doubts over the sustainability of our current economic, environmental and social practices prove to be even half-way valid, there are other looming global threats with which national governments show few signs of being able to cope. These include over-population, shortages of food and water, depletion of resources, global warming, and, of course, poverty --despite the fact that at long last humanity seems to have in its hands the knowledge and the economic and technological capacity to surmount most major vicissitudes.

The nations of the world do demonstrate concerns about these global problems. Treaties and agreements now allow unprecedented intrusions into the most sensitive sovereign and secret security affairs of nations --intrusions that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago but that are becoming commonplace in connection with verification of arms treaties. Increasingly nations are recognizing the right and need to intervene within a pariah nation when it seeks to acquire weapons of mass destruction or resorts to genocide.

There is, however, a small problem. There is no effective, reliable and generally acceptable way in any of these circumstances for the world to decide whether and how to intervene and who should do it.

The present leading role of the U.S. in forceful interventions, with and without U.N. approval and NATO participation, produces mixed results and in the long run may not be either sustainable by the U.S. or acceptable to others who fear U.S. hegemony. The need to find a better way to manage affairs is increasingly obvious in our shrinking strife-torn world, where separate nations cannot realistically be expected to perform satisfactorily because the causes and cures of so many problems are either local or global.

Former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of Germany is fond of quoting a remark of Daniel Bell of Harvard who summed up in these words the rapidly mounting plight of nations: "The nation-state is too big for the small problems and too small for the big problems.

"Certainly it is conceivable that the global community now acquiring its form and shape haphazardly as the product of random market forces will somehow turn out to be workable. Certainly, too, the bloody struggles over separatism may somehow subside.

We may muddle through. But we may not. The prospects for humanity would surely be brighter if, looking to the lessons of history for guidance, we were to set out consciously and deliberately to build a world community based upon the rule of law and serving the cause of freedom and justice.

We await the appearance of leaders capable of undertaking in the world the task undertaken in America by Jefferson and Hamilton and others in their day and in Europe by Monnet and his cohorts in their day. If no giants appear, then it will fall to civil society to demand more of the leaders it has --if need be transforming leaders into followers who are made to understand that common people will accept nothing less than uncommon actions from them.

The challenge is to create understanding and acceptance of the fact that national sovereignty is not the be-all and end-all of sovereignty. A widening acceptance of the shrinking significance of national sovereignty could open the way to a sufficient transfer of sovereignty to global institutions to make effective global decision-making possible.

It could reduce the tribal compulsion to demand nothing less than nationhood, and the nationalistic compulsion of existing governments to oppose those who seek to break away.

It could make it possible to establish a standing, well paid, well trained volunteer peace-keeping force ready to intervene promptly when violence nonetheless erupts

.History reveals no other way consistent with freedom to reduce chaos and conflict and to replace it with a reasonable way to conduct human affairs.

This deliberate merging of strictly limited and carefully defined portions of the sovereignty of individuals so as to obtain what cannot otherwise be had is the basic operational principle of lawful human society. It is the way society actually functions wherever people live together in freedom.

It is the only alternative that we humans have found to the savage disorder of anarchy or the stifling order of authoritarianism.

This seems to be as fixed and inexorable a law of nature as the laws of gravity or thermodynamics or relativity --or of what components must be assembled just right to create the sort of nuclear explosions that lurk in our future if we fail to master our fate.

Alan Cranston, member of the WFA, had served as President of the California World Federalists, and from 1949 to 1952 as National President of the United World Federalists. From 1969 to 1993 he served as U.S. Senator (D-CA)