Reinventing International Institutions

By Dr. Tad Daley

  "What kind of United Nations system would we create if we were designing it from scratch today?" How might our structures of global governance be redesigned to better address the major issues facing the human community today? During the next 2-3 years, the Burkle Center for International Relations (BCIR) of the University of California Los Angeles wants to invite some of the greatest minds of our age to grapple with these Big Questions.

We want both opinion leaders and ordinary citizens to begin to grasp that the 1945 UN Charter is not the only possible kind of UN Charter. We want to elaborate and bring attention to the many tangible proposals already in circulation about new institutional tools for preventing genocide, getting a grip on global climate change, managing economic globalization, bridging the growing chasm between rich and poor both within and among states, and many other transnational issues beyond the capacities of individual states to address. We want to generate new ideas, new approaches, new and imaginative thinking about such issues. And we want to motivate government policymakers around the world to address our Big Questions as well, and ultimately to enact changes in the United Nations system to better equip humanity’s structures of global governance for the challenges of the 21st Century.

Most of the architecture of the "United Nations system" was created at the end of World War II in a dramatically different international environment. Much of their design was directed at addressing the political and economic dislocations of the immediate post-war world. Indeed, the collective security mechanism at the heart of the UN Charter was arguably directed not even at the world of 1945, but the world of the 1930s. By far the central issue on the minds of the framers who met in San Francisco in April, May, and June of 1945 was "How do we prevent another Adolf Hitler?" But long-term issues like global environmental degradation are infinitely different from a Panzer blitzkrieg across the Polish border. We want to consider what kinds of global governance structures might be appropriate not for the world of the 1930s, but for the world of the 21st Century.

Aristotle, in his Ethics, said: "In practical matters the end is the first principle." Structures and institutional arrangements must be preceded by principles and ends. We want to ask the most basic questions possible about the United Nations system and our structures of world order. What is the United Nations system for? What is the goal of global governance? What is the state of humanity that we would optimally aspire to create? What is the ultimate destination of world politics?

In pursuing this project, we act unambiguously in the spirit of the San Francisco framers themselves. Their UN Charter includes both an Article 108 for making particular Charter revisions, and an Article 109 for convening "a General Conference . . .for the purpose of reviewing the present Charter." Moreover, such a general conference is one of the very few things in the Charter not subject to the great power veto, and can be called by a vote of 2/3 of the General Assembly and any 9 of the 15 Security Council members. In addition, both the language of Article 109 (3) and the record of the San Francisco deliberations indicate that they wanted the UN Charter to be comprehensively reviewed and reconsidered every ten years! Fifty-six years on, it hasn’t been even once.

One of our greatest hopes is that our project will stimulate a broad public debate on the same broad questions. We want to open up the UN policy debate, expand our sociopolitical imagination, and inject into the public square some heretofore excluded alternatives. And although we will pay close attention to near-term political realities, we also want to envision some optimal world order aspirations for the 21st Century as well. By doing so, we may even serve to affect those realities themselves. If politics, as every undergraduate knows, is the art of the possible, then this new BCIR project can serve as a powerful catalyst for expanding the parameters of political possibility.

If you drive from San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge and turn left, before long you will arrive at Muir Woods, home of the oldest living things on Planet Earth. If you walk along the path back into the redwood forest for a few miles, you will come across a heavy metal and stone plaque set squarely into the earth. It’s dated April 29, 1945 -- ten days before the surrender of Nazi Germany, more than three months before the atomic devastation of Japan, and less than three weeks since the death of probably the greatest statesman of the age. The plaque says this: "Here in this grove of enduring redwoods, preserved for posterity, members of the United Nations Conference on International Organizations met on April 29, 1945, to honor the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Thirty-First President of the United States, Chief Architect of the United Nations, and Apostle of Lasting Peace for all Mankind."

We believe the framers of the United Nations system did a pretty good job of designing structures of global governance for the challenges of their own age. And we have little doubt that the spirit of FDR, out there in Muir Woods, is looking today for the architects of new global structures to face the quite different challenges of the dawning new millennium. If the League of Nations was the first generation and the United Nations system the second,
we believe it’s time to begin considering how we might design and bring into being humanity’s Third Generation World Organization.

Is This Project About World Government?
This project is certainly not about consciously advocating world government as a desired outcome. But it just as certainly will not consciously exclude world government from our global governance conversation.

The idea of a world state or world government or world federation is unquestionably one of the great ideas in the human heritage -- dating back at least to Augustine’s City of God over 1500 years ago. World federation advocates maintain that it is within the power of the human imagination to envision abolishing war. They argue that adequate governance at the world level requires what almost everyone agrees is required at every other level -- something like a legislative branch, an executive branch, a judicial branch, and police. They believe that the destiny of humankind is what Robert Maynard Hutchins called a "Federal Republic of the World," H.G. Wells called a "world state," Victor Hugo called a "United States of the World," Alfred Lord Tennyson called a "Parliament of Man," Immanuel Kant called "Perpetual Peace," and Albert Einstein, E.B. White, Norman Cousins, Arnold Toynbee, Oscar Hammerstein II, Henry Fonda, Justice William O. Douglas, Bertrand Russell and many others called "world government." Former U.S. Senator Alan Cranston, one of the core founders in 1947 of the United World Federalists (today the World Federalist Association, led by 1980 U.S. presidential candidate John B. Anderson), called it "enduring world peace through enforceable world law."

Instead of "black helicopter" conspiracy theories, we want to convene an open conversation about just how we might define "world government" in the 21st Century, what might be the dangers and risks and net costs and benefits (for the United States and for the world) of consciously moving toward something we could legitimately call a world state, and whether or not world government is a desirable (and achievable) long-term destination. Such a serious conversation about the merits of the idea of world government is almost wholly non-existent in today’s public policy arena. We believe that world federation should be part of this project, and part of the broader public policy debate.

One mechanism by which to pursue this objective is simply to conduct a thorough review of the literature on this venerable idea. Has anyone in recent years sat down and read Dante’s On World Government (in De Monarchia), Kant’s Perpetual Peace, Rousseau’s Lasting Peace Through the Federation of Europe, H.G. Wells’s Man at the End of His Tether, Emery Reves’s The Anatomy of Peace, Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Think About War and Peace, Grenville Clark and Louis Sohn’s World Peace Through World Law (Grenville Clark was Alan Cranston’s mentor), or the outcome of the group of intellectuals assembled by Robert Maynard Hutchins described above, the Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution? It is inconceivable that these, the products of some of the greatest minds in human history, have nothing to teach us about the world order dilemmas of the 21st Century.

(A visiting scholar at BCIR and World Federalist activist, Dr. Daley had founded the Campaign for a New United Nations Charter (CNUC) and served as Vice President of Alan Cranston’s Global Security Institute. )