Part I - Background

1 The Challenges of the 21st Century

We have organizations for the preservation of almost everything in life that we want but no organization for the preservation of mankind. People seem to have decided that our collective will is too weak or flawed to rise to this occasion. They see the violence that has saturated human history and conclude that to practice violence is innate to our species. They find the perennial hope that peace can be brought to the earth once and for all a delusion of the well-meaning who have refused to face the “harsh realities” of international life – the realities of self-interest, fear, hatred, and aggression. They have concluded that these realities are eternal ones, and this conclusion defeats at the outset any hope of taking the actions necessary for survival.

Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth¹

Introduction

Most careful observers of our contemporary global landscape would have no difficulty in accepting the claim that we have entered a period in human evolution characterized by the “acceleration in the velocity of our history and the uncertainty of its trajectory.”² The current age is one of expectations and hope as well as deepening contradictions, uncertainties and emerging risks. The forces of globalization have brought about the elimination of many physical and psychological barriers, precipitating a massive transfer of power and influence away from traditional centers (mainly governments), and in turn contributing to the empowerment of civil society and the decentralization of decision-making. They have facilitated increasing connectedness but also alienation, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a narrower circle, higher expectations of continued improvements in living standards and growing concerns about the sustainability of our development path. We have celebrated the dramatic improvement in various indicators of human welfare that has taken place in the past half-century, including remarkable progress in average life expectancy, a sustained drop in infant mortality and a rise in literacy, against the background of a sharp reduction in the incidence of extreme poverty³; but we have also awakened to the realization that the high economic growth rates that fueled these favorable trends have in parallel led the planet to run up against binding environmental constraints and often resulted in social alienation and widening inequality. As we were already warned decades ago, there are limits to growth,⁴ and we are reaching them as predicted.⁵ Our current trajectory cannot continue without a collapse in one form or another, and the past is not a good guide to the future.

Our present epoch seems to be increasingly characterized by fear of the future with growing insecurity, social fragmentation and polarization, and a lack of hope, even among the young who often face a more uncertain future than that of their parents. The economic system favors profits for the rich over employment for the masses, with many in the middle seeing decades without improvement, if not falling backward, and half the world population still struggling to meet basic needs.⁶ Poverty, exclusion and neglect present fundamental social challenges, with no easy solutions in sight. The world economy is running on increasing debt, threatening a return to the financial chaos of a decade earlier, but with governments’ room for maneuver significantly reduced. The forces of disintegration are reflected in growing evidence of the failing institutions of governance, with often discredited leadership, widespread corruption, loss of public confidence, and the recent rise of populist, reactionary and autocratic movements rejecting multilateralism and diversity. Contributing to all this is a generalized loss of moral responsibility, higher ethics or values, even spirituality, able to fill the vacuum of any higher human purpose in a materialistic society.⁷

There are counterbalancing forces of integration, and many signs of progress, including at the global level in the United Nations (UN) and elsewhere, that need to be reinforced and extended if we are to avoid a collapse and make the necessary paradigm shift and fundamental transition to a more sustainable future as called for in the 2030 Agenda.⁸ In a globalized economy and society, improved global governance must play an important role at this crucial moment when change is increasingly urgent for environmental, social and economic reasons.

It is not easy to set priorities among the many challenges of today, as all are interrelated. Their complexity calls for new approaches suitable for dynamic, integrated systems evolving through constant innovation in technologies, forms of communications, patterns of organization and institutional frameworks. The challenge for mechanisms of governance at all scales of human organization is to accompany and steer these processes to ensure the common good, setting limits that prevent their being captured by the already rich and powerful for their own benefit, and ultimately ensuring a just society that guarantees the well-being of every person on the planet.

Environmental Challenges

In the scientific community, the major areas of urgent concern have been climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. To take just a few examples: global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels have grown at an average annual rate of 2 percent since 1990 and hit record levels in 2018,⁹ reflecting the continued growth of the global economy,¹⁰ and a sharp rise in energy consumption in China, accompanied by the weakening of natural carbon sinks, such as forests and seas. Not surprisingly, large volumes of Arctic ice have melted and accelerated flow in Greenland glaciers and now in the Antarctic is contributing to rising sea levels.

Even when world economic growth came to a halt in 2009 because of the global financial crisis, these perturbing trends were not reversed, as the present scale of human activity was only marginally and temporarily affected, and world economic growth again took off shortly thereafter. In the absence of other measures aimed directly at reducing emissions, only a sustained, deep economic depression such as that witnessed during the 1929–1933 period, or some other major crisis, might have an impact on the pace of accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However, expecting an economic depression to help temporarily mitigate the challenges of global warming is hardly a commendable solution, involving severe social costs.

While economic growth and technological innovation have led to a massive increase in global wealth, this has resulted in serious degradation of the planet’s natural resources, now accelerated by climate change, and is leading to emerging supply constraints. It is estimated, for instance, that by 2025 the number of people living in regions with absolute water scarcity will have risen to some 1.8 billion. Climate change, soil erosion, and overfishing are expected to reduce food production and are likely to put upward pressure on food prices in coming years. Climate change also is limiting energy options. The quantity of carbon in oil wells, gas fields and coal mines presently producing, not counting less conventional sources of fossil energy such as fracking and tar sands, is already about five times the remaining capacity of the atmosphere to absorb carbon without passing 2°C of global warming, meaning that we must leave 80 percent of existing fossil fuel reserves in the ground and stop developing new resources.¹¹ The latest science says we must not exceed 1.5°C and have only about 12 years to turn the corner in the energy transition to renewable resources,¹² requiring unprecedented efforts at all levels. A recent study identifies the requirements decade by decade to phase out the use of fossil fuels and to make the transition to renewable sources of energy if the commitments made in the Paris Agreement in 2015 are to be met.¹³ Yet there is no mechanism to push countries to abandon lucrative sources of revenue or companies to write off 80 percent of their assets, or to determine how to share the burden of such a fundamental transition in which there will be winners and losers.

Human impacts on the planet now exceed many natural processes, to the point that the modern era is increasingly being labeled as the Anthropocene. Homo sapiens has become an invasive species, degrading the environment and pushing beyond planetary boundaries.¹⁴ Science is beginning to determine the survivability of human civilization at the planetary level. The more we degrade planetary carrying capacity now, the lower will be the standard of living in a sustainable world society, at least in the short term.¹⁵

These environmental challenges are at the interface of science and policy-making. As much as some decision-makers may want to deny it, there is an objective reality to environmental characteristics and processes that can be measured and monitored with the tools of science. Science can determine past and present impacts, and increasingly can predict and model future consequences. Action can be postponed, generally increasing the costs and negative consequences over time, but it cannot be avoided. Fortunately, new information technologies that make data and knowledge widely available also strengthen our ability to use that knowledge to improve decision-making at all levels if there is the political will to do so.

While much more needs to be done to refine and extend research on future trajectories for human society, the issues requiring governance at the global level are already defined. This in itself is one of the strongest justifications for global governance, since many of the environmental systems being impacted (climate, ozone layer, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, etc.)¹⁶ can only be managed through concerted action by all nations.

Yet there is no global environmental authority. Policy in this area is currently done via ad hoc approaches involving elements of international cooperation, voluntary compliance, and large doses of hope. In the absence of a body having jurisdiction over the global environment with corresponding legal enforcement authority, the international community has, de facto, abdicated management of the world’s environment to chance and the actions of a few well-meaning states. Even the 2015 Paris Agreement ratified by 185 countries pledging reductions in emissions,¹⁷ if implemented in full, will not prevent a warming in excess of 1.5°C, the threshold recognized by climate scientists as necessary to avoid “potentially devastating consequences.”¹⁸

Social Challenges

While environmental challenges represent the outer boundaries to a sustainable planetary society, there are also a number of inner social boundaries below which no just and equitable society with adequate wealth and resources should descend, with poverty as the most central issue. The failure of the present economic system to distribute its increasing wealth more equitably has led to growing inequality and the consequent social instability.

Alongside the pursuit of economic growth without regard to environmental and social costs, there are other forces at work that are already having a major impact on our system’s institutional underpinnings which have been crucial to the progress achieved during the past half-century. Key among these are population growth and the corresponding pressures on resources. According to the World Energy Outlook published by the International Energy Agency, global energy demand is expected to grow by more than 25 percent by 2040,¹⁹ reflecting the addition of some 1.7 billion people to the world’s population and the corresponding need for housing, transportation, heating, illumination, food production, waste disposal, and the push for sustained increases in standards of living. Because many of the mothers who will bear these close to 2 billion children are already alive today, this expected increase in the world’s population – barring some unexpected calamity – will materialize and will be largely concentrated in urban environments in developing countries.

Beyond the inevitable pressures on resources, rapid population growth in the poorest parts of the world in the next several decades will lead to growing imbalances and a broad range of challenges for governments, businesses, and civil society. For instance, in the Middle East and North Africa, high fertility rates and the highest rates of population growth in the world will put an enormous strain on labor markets. These countries already suffer from the highest rates of unemployment in the world. To simply prevent these rates from rising further, it will be necessary to create well over 100 million new jobs within the next decade and a half – an extremely tall order. The job creation needs of these countries are nothing new and were present already at the outset of this century; the failure to do so has led to major political and social instability in the region in recent years.²⁰

Unemployment is in fact one of our most important social challenges, as it is a driver for exclusion and marginalization, with consequences including increasing crime, drug trafficking and use, juvenile delinquency, family breakdown, domestic violence, and migration in search of better opportunities. Meaningful employment is essential for human dignity and a place in the community, and work in a spirit of service to the community has important benefits including refining human character and empowering individuals to develop their human potential. No one should be deprived of the opportunity to work, and one purpose of good governance should be to guarantee this opportunity. Neither governments nor private actors have found a solution to this challenge at present. Some have proposed a guaranteed minimum income. While this could be an effective tool to alleviate poverty and provide a safety net for vulnerable groups, it does not address the problem of unemployment and the associated waste of resources. Work is necessary for individual and social health.

In sharp contrast to poor regions with rapid population growth, the populations of countries such as Italy, Japan, Russia and others in the industrial world will continue to shrink; a demographic trend which, in turn, will put huge pressure on public finances as states attempt to cope with growing numbers of pensioners and related social and health expenditures.

Many of today’s social problems are the consequence of the globalization of finance and commerce, against the background of a refusal to accept social globalization, the free movement of people, as well as the global implementation of civil and human rights, among other things, in order to ensure a “humane” global governance.²¹ Some countries have an excess of unemployed youth, while others lack young workers to support an aging population. Some countries lack the basic means to support their present or anticipated population, while others have large underpopulated areas and lack the people to develop their resources. Yet the idea that natural movements of populations could rebalance these disparities is politically anathema, in contrast to the nineteenth century when immigration built economies. Obviously, much must be done at the level of public education, trust in institutions, just and equitable distribution of resources, and infrastructure development before such adjustments can become reasonable possibilities, but improvements to international governance can lay the foundation for the gradual elimination of this inconsistency and associated imbalances.

The social challenges of globalization have also grown far beyond the capacity of the present system. While human rights have long been a central concern of the international community, violations of basic rights continue to be persistent and widespread. Migration has become a new issue of planetary scale and is anticipated to accelerate as climate change displaces increasing numbers in the years ahead. The global community will face a mixing of populations for which it is presently totally unprepared. Yet there is no international body charged with giving binding legal effect to the noble principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent international human rights instruments building on its principles, to hold states to account for these international obligations (see Chapter 11).

Economic Challenges

In our globalized world, powerful demonstration effects are at work as everyone can now see how the wealthy live. The spread of instant communication and the Internet have led billions of people in China, India, Latin America, and other parts of the developing world to aspire to lifestyles and patterns of consumption similar to those prevailing in the advanced economies. Furthermore, these populations are often unwilling to postpone such aspirations and increasingly expect their governments to deliver rising levels of prosperity, implicitly pushing for a more equitable distribution of the world’s resources. Yet between 1988 and 2008 over 60 percent of the gains in global income were concentrated in the top 5 percent of the global income distribution.²²

Thus, a fundamental development question that we face today is how to reconcile the legitimate aspirations of citizens in the developing world for the high economic growth rates that in the post-war period led to such remarkable improvements in global standards of living, with the challenges of a planet and an economic system under severe stress as a result of the pressures put on it by that very economic growth.²³ The only way to make resources available for the half of the world population struggling to make ends meet will be for those in wealthy countries to reduce their own resource consumption and adopt simpler, more sustainable lifestyles supported by a circular economy to eliminate waste. Justice and sustainability both require that we re-think the consumer society on which the present economy is largely built, and that we sensibly address some of the short-term dislocations that this might entail, while ensuring development to meet the basic needs and ensure the security of the poor. Driving this transition and minimizing its negative effects will have to be a government responsibility, since there is bound to be significant inertia within the private sector.

Another challenge is the growing risk of a global financial collapse when the present debt bubble bursts. The global economy has no lender of last resort. There is no reliable, depoliticized mechanism to deal with financial crises. Whether a country receives or is refused an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout in the middle of a financial meltdown is a function not of a transparent set of internationally agreed rules, but rather of several other factors, including whether the IMF’s largest shareholders consider the country to be a strategic ally worth supporting. There is also no effective international legal framework to ensure that global business enterprises are socially, environmentally and economically responsible.

Security Challenges

Unfortunately, environmental, social and economic challenges are not by any means the only sources of risk to humankind’s global outlook. Noted political thinkers have periodically argued that major war between sovereign states may be on its way to obsolescence.²⁴ There has been a dramatic increase in recent decades in the price of war and “diminishing expectations of victory’s benefits.”²⁵ Close international interdependence and the emergence of an integrated global economy, the growing sophistication and destructive power of weapons systems (including nuclear weapons) have drastically expanded the scale of the losses in human lives and property associated with the kinds of conflict which, on two occasions, were witnessed in the 20th century. The global economy has never had higher levels of productive capacity, and average life expectancy is at an all-time high; hence the potential costs of global war are also at an all-time high. Furthermore, the rewards of war among states – loot, land, glory, honor – which for many centuries propelled nations to war, have given way to populations in search of growing prosperity, social security and various forms of protection. Military conscription is on its way out in most countries and is no longer regarded as an obligation of citizenship; in many parts of the world, war is increasingly seen as a form of criminal enterprise. Yet there are ongoing military conflicts around the globe, with the highest level of refugees fleeing war since the end of World War II, and – at the time of writing of this book – a seeming resurgence in “great power” contests and threats of using weapons of mass destruction.

Nevertheless, a range of national governments, despite the clear restrictions on the international use of force set out in the United Nations Charter, have seemingly not given up their perceived right to wage war, or at least to prepare for the same;²⁶ there is a vast military industrial complex that underpins today’s system of sovereign states, and arms races are again accelerating. Indeed, in the view of some experts a “sovereign state is a state that enjoys the right and the power to go to war in defense or pursuit of its interests” and these states are ready “to employ war as the final arbiter for settling the disputes that arise among them.”²⁷ So, war in fact has not become obsolete; the calculus of war has shifted but the risks have not gone away.²⁸ According to the Arms Control Association, the world’s nine nuclear powers have about 9,600 nuclear warheads in military service among them.²⁹ And there are several dozen nations with the capacity to build nuclear weapons. Nuclear proliferation thus remains yet another example of global institutional failure.³⁰ The recent withdrawal of the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty is just the latest example of the systemic failure and precariousness of arms control agreements as currently constituted.

Recent prominent warnings, issuing from members of the US foreign policy establishment, among others, have underlined the grave danger the world still faces with the current approach to nuclear weapons and nuclear “security,” for example.³¹ In Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? Graham Allison quotes the Greek historian’s explanation that “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable” and notes that “when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, the resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule, not the exception.”³² In 12 of the 16 cases over the past five hundred years when a major rising power threatened to displace a ruling power the result was war; a sobering observation against the background of an escalating trade war between China and the US at the time of writing.

These risks are aggravated by the poor quality of political leadership in so many countries today, with narcissistic personalities and authoritarian instincts, and all the signs of leaders corrupted by power, disregarding reasoned advice and expert opinion, and often isolated from the realities around them.³³ It would be all too easy in such circumstances to stumble unwittingly into a war that could then not be controlled.

Inadequacy of Existing Mechanisms

Faced with such a complex set of threats to human civilization, if not the survival of the human species, how do we find a way forward? A central element of a strategy aimed at generating a sustainable development path in the context of a peaceful world will have to be a significant new capacity to enforce international law, and the reform of legal institutions and current mechanisms of international cooperation, which have turned out to be largely inadequate to manage the global challenges that we face. While there has been considerable progress within the limitations of the present system, its fundamental failings have become increasingly evident. The process of globalization is unfolding in the absence of equivalent progress in the creation of an international institutional infrastructure that can support it and enhance its potential for good. Whether we focus our attention on climate change and the broad range of associated environmental calamities, nuclear proliferation, the workings of the world’s financial system, or growing income disparities, the fact is that major planetary problems are being neglected because we do not have effective problem-solving mechanisms and institutions strong enough to deal with them. Or, put differently, a range of inherently global crises cannot be solved outside the framework of global collective action involving supranational cooperation and a fundamental rethinking of the meaning of “national interest.”³⁴

The reality is that existing institutions are incapable of rising to the challenges of a rapidly changing world because they were designed for another era. Indeed, the United Nations itself and the associated infrastructure of specialized agencies, which were created to attend to a variety of global problems, find themselves increasingly unable to respond to crises, sometimes because these agencies lack the appropriate jurisdiction or mandate to act, sometimes because they are inadequately endowed with resources, and often because, within the limits of existing conceptual frameworks, they simply do not know what to do.

The concept of the nation state is in deep crisis. At its core, the nation state is defined by a geographical border, with governments elected – at least in the context of democracy – to safeguard the interests of citizens, to improve the quality of available services, to manage scarce resources, and to promote a gradual rise in living standards. However, as made abundantly clear during the 2008–2009 global financial crisis, the economic system is now no longer confined to national borders but straddles them in a way that is gradually forcing governments to relinquish or share control in a growing number of areas. Indeed, one of the main lessons to emerge from the financial crisis, as noted by former EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson, is that “a global economy needs global economic governance.”³⁵ The same can be said for the environment and a range of other matters.³⁶

Alongside the stresses put on institutions by the accelerating pace of global change, publics everywhere are showing growing dissatisfaction with the inability of national politics and politicians to find solutions to a whole range of global problems. This trend is likely to intensify and has given rise to a “crisis of governance,” the sense that nobody is in charge; that while we live in a fully integrated world, we do not have an institutional infrastructure that can respond to the multiple challenges that we face.³⁷

Efforts in the United Nations and in International Law

Indeed, existing mechanisms to tackle global issues are woefully inadequate. The current practice of international law, including through treaties, conventions and other international agreements – very much at the core of how the international community has confronted global challenges in the past – have proven generally ineffective to address urgent problems. Becoming a party to these treaties is voluntary, and countries can usually withdraw when they wish. The international norms negotiated and set out in international treaties are, however, enormously valuable, often representing extraordinary efforts to achieve consensus on shared global values and legal principles; what is generally missing is effective implementation, monitoring, and enforcement of these international principles.

For example, the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was negotiated in 1997, but only entered into force in 2005. The United States, until 2008 the largest emitter of global warming gases in the world – now overtaken by China – never ratified the Protocol, and Canada withdrew in 2012. It was, therefore, a foregone conclusion that the goals it set for global emissions by 2012, already admittedly inadequate, would not be reached. The Kyoto Protocol was intended primarily to build trust between nations so that they would make the necessary efforts to address a global challenge, starting with those who primarily caused the problem, but several of the key players proved to be largely untrustworthy. Where enforcement mechanisms exist at all, monitoring and enforcement of such treaties is lax and painfully slow.

During the 1990s the United Nations took a lead role in organizing a series of major intergovernmental conferences, beginning with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.³⁸ This was followed by conferences on social and economic development (Copenhagen), women (Beijing), population (Cairo), human rights (Vienna), and so on. These conferences, however, while generally good for raising awareness of the underlying problems, have proven to be inadequate for concrete problem-solving. Long on declarations and in some cases deteriorating into circus-like chaos (e.g., the 2001 Durban conference on race), they have not shown themselves to be reliable mechanisms for effective cooperation on the urgent problems confronting humanity. The Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012³⁹ was intended to reaffirm government commitments, to define a green economy that would alleviate poverty and work for sustainability, and to agree to new international institutional arrangements, but it only succeeded in making minor adjustments to existing institutions, and to propose a high-level political forum whose function is still being defined. It demonstrated once again that governments are incapable of addressing urgent global problems effectively within the present system.

However, Rio+20 did launch a wide consultative process of governments with inputs from civil society that led in 2015 to a UN General Assembly Summit approving the 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets.⁴⁰ This provides a useful framework to consider what mechanisms of governance, and at which levels, will be necessary to achieve the SDGs by 2030 and to continue beyond toward planetary sustainability. The goals and targets are aspirational and global, with each nation expected to determine its national contribution toward meeting the goals, and to measure its progress using national indicators adapted from those proposed by the UN Statistical Commission.⁴¹

Some multilateral agencies, including those associated with the United Nations system, have acquired a critically important role in recent decades. They are repositories of knowledge and expertise and, in some cases, have essentially taken over important functions in central areas of economic governance: for instance, international trade and the dispute settlement mechanism in the case of the World Trade Organization. However, they remain hampered in many other ways, including lack of access to adequate resources to finance their activities and the reluctance of many of the larger countries to cede national sovereignty in particular areas. In this respect, the European Union has, without doubt, gone further than any other country grouping in creating a supranational institutional infrastructure to support an ambitious process of economic and political integration (see Chapter 3).

The G7 and G20

Yet another attempt at reinforcing existing mechanisms of international cooperation was the creation in the mid-1970s of the G7, a “club” made up of the world’s seven largest economies. The motivation was to create a high-level body to discuss “major economic and political issues facing their domestic societies and the international community as a whole.”⁴² The G7 has been a good forum for open debate about global problems, but not a particularly effective problem-solving body. In the public imagination, its semi-annual meetings are largely perceived rather as excellent photo opportunities, not as brainstorming sessions focused on particular problems requiring urgent solutions. Unlike, for instance, the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference which lasted three weeks and resulted in the creation of a new world financial system, G7 meetings are actually intended to preserve the status quo.⁴³

Its communiqués are negotiated by deputies ahead of the Summit itself and much time is spent in getting the wording of these declarations just right. In time, critics have pointed out some obvious deficiencies, the first being, of course, that by now, the G7 are no longer the world’s seven largest economies. In 1999, recognizing that the global economy had evolved, a broader grouping was created – the G20 – but neither the Swiss nor the Dutch nor the Spanish were particularly happy to be excluded. Switzerland is one of the world’s most competitive economies and its financial institutions manage a significant share of private wealth; the Netherlands is one of the most generous international donors, and, according to the Center for Global Development, one of the countries with the most development-friendly policies.⁴⁴ Spain is a country whose economy is more than twice that of Argentina (a member of the G20). One can also question whether such self-selected and rather arbitrary bodies of powerful countries should determine global policies.

Moreover, the G7 (and to a lesser extent the G20) remain, in fact, official and formalistic bodies focused on representatives from the executive branches of national governments. Their deliberations bring to the table heads of state and a small coterie of civil servants. There is no formal representation from the business community, nor do civil society representatives participate. Given the global nature of the problems we face and the increasingly shared perception that solutions to these will require broad-based collaboration across various stakeholder groups, these groups suffer from a deficit in legitimacy.⁴⁵ They are not a fair representation of humanity and, as such, cannot be expected to make important, informed decisions on its behalf.

Increasing International Cooperation

Effective, credible mechanisms of international cooperation – which are perceived to be legitimate and capable of acting on behalf of the interests of humanity, rather than those of a particular set of countries – are absolutely essential if the world is to meet the challenge of striking the correct balance between concern for the environment and the policies that must underpin such concern and the need to ensure that the global economy develops in a way that it provides opportunities for all, particularly the poor and the disadvantaged, in a context of peace and security. It is our view that the existing intergovernmental system is not capable of achieving this level of cooperation; what is required is a more fundamental strengthening of the relationships between countries and peoples.

An examination of one specific aspect of the broader question of interdependence is useful. The world has been transformed during the last several decades by technological progress, which, in turn, has had a dramatic impact on the nature of economic and political phenomena and in the way nations relate to each other. Greater economic integration made possible by rapid developments in transport and communications in particular have made evident the need for greater international cooperation. Jean Monnet, the father of the European Union, observed perceptively that economic integration was forcing nations to accept voluntarily the same rules and the same institutions and that, as a result, their behavior toward each other was also changing. This, he said, was permanently modifying relations between nations and could be seen as part of the “process of civilization itself.”⁴⁶

Jürgen Habermas has recently offered similar commentary as to the nature of and the need for the essentially “civilizing process” underway in the development of supranational law and institutions.⁴⁷ But greater interdependence has also created tensions arising out of the potential conflict between national sovereignty and efforts to solve common problems. Indeed, it is not inaccurate to say that at present most countries’ commitment to integration and increased international cooperation coexists with a reluctance to confer some traditional aspects of sovereign prerogative to supranational institutions, stemming from a desire to safeguard (real or perceived) national interests. Therefore, one key question in the years immediately ahead is whether greater economic integration – fueled by further technological change, no longer under the control of any single sovereign state – will inevitably lead countries to seek yet more common ground across a range of areas traditionally considered as matters exclusively within the national domain. Will the ongoing abdication of some national sovereignty in the economic sphere also lead to similar processes of significantly increased international cooperation in the sphere of collective security and environmental governance, for example?

Globally, most people have come to recognize the need for the existence of a certain number of institutions at the national level to guarantee the effective working of society.⁴⁸ Everyone understands the need for a legislature to pass laws, for an executive branch to implement the law, and for a judicial branch to interpret the law and to pass judgment whenever differences of interpretation arise. Most would agree with the notion that a central bank and other financial institutions are needed to regulate different aspects of the economic life of a nation. Indeed, it is not inaccurate to say that a sign of general social progress is the extent to which such institutions in a particular nation have been allowed to develop and, in the process, managed to bring stability and a measure of prosperity to the life of a nation.⁴⁹

Conversely, the absence of such institutional progress undermines the creative energies and the vitality of a nation and holds back its development. Indeed, when experts gather together to discuss the terrible plight of the most troubled parts of the developing world and to analyze the factors as to why the quality of life has stagnated to such an extent during the past several decades, a central topic of the debate is institutional failure and the reasons behind this failure. At the same time, it is also clear that national institutions and governments, in an increasingly interdependent world, are less and less able to address key problems, many of which have acquired unavoidable international dimensions.

First, governments are increasingly unable to do the kinds of things that they used to be able to do in the past and that, in people’s minds, came to be identified with the very essence of government. Richard Cooper, one of our most insightful international economists, states that “the increasing internationalization of the economy has led to an erosion of our government’s capacity to do things the way it used to.”⁵⁰ This, in turn, can and sometimes has led to a kind of paralysis on the part of governments, a sense that since the world has changed and it is no longer under their control – or at least they have less control over it than used to be case – the optimal policy response is to do nothing. Yet publics have vastly higher expectations about economic policy and are unlikely to be placated by their leaders telling them that there is very little that can be done because the effectiveness of traditional policies and instruments has been greatly reduced by processes outside of their control. The result is a profound sense of public dissatisfaction and/or apathy and a rise in populism that one can perceive in many countries.⁵¹

The failings of the present international institutional arrangements in the political sphere are even more obvious. From earlier crises in Rwanda, Yugoslavia and Sudan, to the myriad crises unfolding in the Middle East, one can see increasing evidences of the failure of the international community to address urgent and sometimes tragic problems because of the absence of international institutions charged with the power, jurisdiction and vision to act in instances or situations within nations that lie beyond their jurisdiction. When close to a million people in Rwanda are murdered within a brief span of time, and the images of the carnage are relayed to every corner of the world, there seems very little that the international community can do, other than wring its hands, express regret, and helplessly stand by lamenting its impotence. This is an eloquent indictment of the tragic shortcomings of the present international political system. It had been this kind of insight that led two Harvard intellectuals, Grenville Clark and Louis. B. Sohn, in the 1950s to write about the need for the establishment of institutions “on a world scale corresponding to those which have been found essential for the maintenance of law and order in local communities and nations.”⁵²

A Need for Concrete Proposals

The above considerations lead to the following question: What is the most adequate response to the erosion of policy effectiveness? One obvious starting point is realizing that much of the ineffectiveness of government action (and the accompanying paralysis) stems from the fact that actions are being carried out by individual sovereign states, acting alone, in full use of their (rapidly diminishing) powers, whereas joint, coordinated actions, based upon clear and legitimate common goals, can restore (sometimes to a great extent) the utility of the previously ineffective policy. The realization is that, in an increasingly interdependent world, national institutions are less and less able to address problems that are fundamentally international in character. The implications that this realization carries for the exercise of political authority, are the motivating forces behind many of the present experiments in various parts of the world, which seek integrative processes and the building of supranational institutions to support and direct such processes. Chief among these experiments one must note the economic, political, and institutional developments in the context of the European Union.⁵³

Albert Einstein – who together with Bertrand Russell and others gave a great deal of thought to the political requirements in the new climate created by the arrival of nuclear weapons – believed that one way to address the evident failings of the international institutional framework was to create a new breed of truly supranational organizations. In 1946, soon after the creation of the United Nations and very much aware of this organization’s limitations, he wrote:

The development of technology and of the implements of war has brought about something akin to a shrinking of our planet. Economic interlinking has made the destinies of nations interdependent to a degree far greater than in previous years… . The only hope for protection lies in the securing of peace in a supranational way. A world government must be created which is able to solve conflicts between nations by judicial decision. This government must be based on a clear‑cut constitution which is approved by the governments and the nations and which gives it the sole disposition of offensive weapons. A person or a nation can be considered peace loving only if it is ready to cede its military force to the international authorities and to renounce every attempt or even the means of achieving its interests abroad by the use of force.⁵⁴

Russell held similar views:

A much more desirable way of securing world peace would be by a voluntary agreement among nations to pool their armed forces and submit to an agreed international authority. This may seem, at present, a distant and Utopian prospect, but there are practical politicians who think otherwise. A World Authority, if it is to fulfill its function, must have a legislature and an executive and irresistible military power. All nations would have to agree to reduce national armed forces to the level necessary for internal police action. No nation should be allowed to retain nuclear weapons or any other means of wholesale destruction… In a world where separate nations were disarmed, the military forces of the World Authority would not need to be very large and would not constitute an onerous burden upon the various constituent nations.⁵⁵

In the aftermath of the chaos and destruction unleashed by World War II, Einstein, Russell, Clark and others laid out an important argument in favor of the creation of an international authority, explaining that the time had passed when military conflicts and their associated damage could be reasonably contained. In the nuclear age, war had become unthinkable and its consequences universal. A conception of national sovereignty, which had always been understood to mean the right of a country to defend its interests by the use of force if necessary, but the exercise of which had assumed that conflicts would remain largely confined to given geographic areas, no longer served the interests of anyone.⁵⁶ On the contrary, thus understood, traditional or narrow conceptions of national sovereignty cast a dark shadow over the future of everyone. Hence the notion eventually emerged that lasting international peace will be feasible only in the context of the creation of effective global institutions based on the principle of collective security. Or, as put by Schell: “I would suggest that the ultimate requirements are in essence the two that I have mentioned: global disarmament, both nuclear and conventional, and the invention of political means by which the world can peacefully settle the means that throughout history it has settled by war.”⁵⁷

The Urgency of Action

Given the compelling circumstances with which humanity is currently confronted, a substantial and carefully-thought-through reform effort is needed to enhance dramatically the basic architecture of our global governance system. Such a reform should be grounded in key ideas that have motivated those of past generations who have risen to the difficult challenge of providing practical leadership and vision in the international sphere. Indeed, the proposals described in this book in many respects build upon the worthwhile suggestions of clear-sighted thinkers who have come previously.⁵⁸

Moreover, the suggested significant steps forward to enhance global governance are consciously “incremental” in the sense that they are grounded on fundamental points of law already agreed by states worldwide, and upon foundational principles “baked into” the DNA of the existing international order. An organic process of growth has occurred within the current United Nations and international governance institutions. This has included the building of levels of trust and an understanding of the practical importance of international cooperation, which would have been unimaginable in past decades; an enhanced architecture is now required to implement this learning and awareness.

The cost of inaction is high, and the inhibitions to action come rather from our own flawed thinking rather than a realistic estimation of human will and capacity. In the words of Jonathan Schell:

Our present system and the institutions that make it up are the debris of history. They have become inimical to life… They constitute a noose around the neck of mankind, threatening to choke off the human future, but we can cut the noose and break free. To suppose otherwise would be to set up a false, fictitious fate, molded out of our own weaknesses and our own alterable decisions.⁵⁹

The risk of the catastrophic collapse of the present system is not negligible. The rise of autocratic leaders, public disillusionment with partisan politics, and the general decline in the quality of leadership in government are all increasing the risks of fundamental instabilities that could precipitate major crises. If we do not act now to strengthen the international order, we may be forced to rebuild a global institutional framework after a major war, the collapse of the global financial system, a pandemic wiping out a significant part of the world’s population, or extreme climate change producing famines and mass migrations, any of which would overwhelm existing institutions at the national and global levels (see Chapter 17). Planning to strengthen international governance should include both the possibility of rapid progress through acts of consultative will, and, if necessary, reconstruction once a major calamity has forced countries to see that there is no alternative, as previously occurred after World Wars I and II.

The set of proposals presented in this book explicitly builds upon current international structures put in place in 1944–1945 with the adoption of the UN Charter and the creation of the United Nations and its various specialized agencies. Despite its flaws, it would be politically unrealistic to follow a path that did not focus on the reform and the very substantial strengthening of the current UN system, which, remarkably, already involves the participation of virtually all nations of the world and has developed, over the last decades, a range of significant mechanisms of consultation and cooperation. Building upon and fundamentally improving existing structures seems the sensible way to proceed. Moreover, certain basic Charter features enshrined at the time of its adoption remain largely or wholly unimplemented or insufficiently utilized (e.g., Chapter VI on the Pacific Settlement of Disputes and Art. 43 related to collective security operations); focusing on the further realization of such Charter attributes has the benefit of consolidating upon existing points of universal agreement.

The UN was built upon progressively developed, precursor attempts to solve key issues of global governance, including core problems of international conflict/interstate war (e.g., the 1899 and 1907 Hague Peace Conferences, The League of Nations, the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact or the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy). The Charter itself contains a formula for reform (Chapter XVIII), and informal mechanisms in practice without a Charter amendment have developed to enhance significantly or to extrapolate from its provisions (e.g., to enable peace-keeping operations). A general Charter review conference was anticipated to be held within ten years of its adoption, under Charter Art. 109(3), but was never held; the clear mechanism for general Charter review and reform is one important attribute that has remained largely unrealized.

A challenge in proposals to address our multiple current predicaments is striking the right balance between proposals that are so ambitious as to have negligible chances of being seriously considered and proposals that are seen as more “politically feasible.” The latter involve tweaking at the edges of our current UN-based systems of governance, but that would fail to find meaningful solutions to urgent contemporary problems, and additional global risks that are now on the horizon. A further complicating factor is that what may not be politically feasible today may be so judged a few years later, particularly after a severe crisis, such as occurred with the founding of the EU and the current UN system in the aftermath of World War II.⁶⁰

This proposal envisages a range of revisions to the UN Charter, which would provide the legal basis for enhanced mechanisms of international cooperation and global governance, supplemented by other reforms not requiring formal Charter amendment. Parts of this proposal build on the monumental work on Charter revision done by Clark and Sohn in the late 1950s and early 1960s,⁶¹ which remains the most detailed and thorough despite many contributions since their time.⁶² All these proposals need to be adapted to the needs of a drastically changed world, facing a much broader set of global challenges than those originally addressed at that time.

Our proposals seek to go to the heart of the flaws purposely built in to the UN Charter at its inception to ensure its acceptance by the great powers at the time, fresh from a perilous and horrifying international conflict. They needed to be reassured that the new organization represented no threat to their notions of absolute national sovereignty; notions that are now retarding the effective management of global risks. We challenge the assumptions behind this traditional thinking and seek to provide a framework for innovative new proposals, while suggesting practical ways forward. Changes of this magnitude cannot be planned in detail in advance, and no one knows what future events might, of necessity, create opportunities to move forward. We hope that this book will stimulate new thinking and learning as we pursue a path to effective global governance.

Protecting National Autonomy

In fact, in a globalized world where many of the most cherished characteristics of national sovereignty in terms of security, economic management, social and cultural independence, and environmental protection have eroded – if not almost entirely escaped from – national control, national autonomy can best be protected by a new level of global governance. Arms races and threats of conflict, the economic crisis of 2008, increasing pressures from cross-border migrants and refugees, and climate change (among many other issues) demonstrate the contagion at the heart of global crises that can leave no nation untouched. International mechanisms to anticipate global risks, develop preventive measures where possible, increase resilience and reduce vulnerability, and – when necessary – assist with rescue and reconstruction, are the best insurance against impacts for which national sovereignty is no longer an adequate defense.

Just as the rule of law and social security at the national level are the best protection for the individual well-being of each citizen, similarly in today’s global system will the national autonomy of each state best be served by strong mechanisms for the international rule of law, collective security, and environmental management. As the threats from unmanaged global crises increase, rapid investment in the construction of a reinforced framework for global collaboration and preventive action must be a priority for any enlightened leadership looking after the progress and prosperity of their nation.

Opposition to Deep Reforms and an Evolving International Landscape

Some opposition to the reforms such as those proposed in this book can be anticipated, in particular from vested interests and also from those with versions of national identity who lack an awareness or understanding of the urgent and often complex nature of our shared global challenges. The veto of the permanent members of the Security Council is also a fundamental flaw in the UN Charter that has long prevented the implementation of some of its more important provisions, including Charter revision. The 1945 Charter was termed by the Prime Minister of New Zealand during negotiations as a “series of … petrified platitudes,” as it could only be amended with the consent of the great powers.⁶³

This historic blockage might be addressed in several ways: by the possibility of creating a new organization to replace the United Nations, as the UN replaced the League of Nations, if the great majority of governments decide to adopt this path as a consequence of the UN’s paralysis; and the unfortunate option to turn to proposals for significant reform after a catastrophic failure of the UN to prevent a third world war or some similar collapse of the global system with widespread suffering (see Chapter 21). There are also intermediate scenarios and incremental steps that we explore more generally throughout the book, as we suggest possible transition processes for the various reform proposals.

More generally, international policy-making processes and the maturation of aspects of global civil society campaigns and coordination mechanisms have made significant strides since the original framing of the Charter, particularly in the last 30 years or so (notably since the end of the Cold War), to overcome traditional resistances and blockages. Such changes open up a range of new opportunities and techniques to catalyze and sustain major international reform efforts. There are many lessons to be learned from dramatic achievements in modern international law that have come about as a result of global civil society coalitions joined with “middle power” states in what have been termed “smart coalitions.” Indeed, such coalitions were noted as a significant and quite singular hopeful trend in the 2015 report Confronting the Crisis of Global Governance, co-chaired by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Nigerian Foreign Minister and UN Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs Ibrahim Gambari.⁶⁴ The recent achievements of such smart coalitions include the International Criminal Court, the “Mine Ban Treaty,” the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the recently adopted Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Many of these projects seemed dramatically unrealistic at the outset and have defied (or side-stepped) geopolitical forces and the realities of superpower politics. A positive case can be made for how such techniques can be used for substantial but incremental aspects of the proposed UN reforms, short of the dramatic scenarios described in the preceding paragraph.

Moreover, this book more generally seeks to encourage a culture/paradigm shift (in fact exemplified by transnational civil society coalitions and their accomplishments) to a global governance model firmly anchored in global and human interest rather than in narrow – and often self-defeating – national interest (the proposed enhancement of the General Assembly and a possible advisory Civil Society Chamber are a clear institutionalization of this perspective; see Chapters 4–6). Such a shift is connected to our proposals for a transition to an international order genuinely based on the rule of law, including international human rights protections, support for which we have copious authoritative statements of UN bodies and heads of state (see Chapters 10 and 11). We see the enhancement of the juridical aspect of the international governance system (following on prominent jurists/philosophers such as Hans Kelsen and Immanuel Kant) – and a public intellectual argument for the same – as a key to addressing the global human interest and the “vertical” dimension of geopolitical inequality (e.g., all states should be held to account before the International Court of Justice, individuals should have recourse to more effective remedies for human rights violations than those provided by the nonbinding complaint procedures). We argue that concepts of social contract, legitimate governmental authority and rule of law, that are firmly established at the national level in many countries, should dominate the international arena, discursively and actually, and a (global) public case should be made for adhering to these values (see Chapter 20). The inevitability of superpower or great power dominance should be contested; our collective focus should rather shift to the difficult – but crucial and achievable – work of institution-building and to establishing processes that can earn the trust of all and hold powerful actors to account.

We call for a renewed public intellectual conversation, focusing on ambitious and systemic changes to our current global governance architectures, breaking the ice of dialogues that have remained frozen for far too long. We hope that this book, at the very least, will serve as a conversation starter, seeking also to break the vicious circle of “benign neglect and low expectations” – to paraphrase former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay – which has indeed quite consistently plagued UN reform discourse in political circles. Our collective energies should be focused on reinvigorating bold proposals and reform pathways to enable the UN to move from being simply a platform to debate competing national interests, to become one promoting the common global interest on a range of urgent matters. We ignore such conversations at our own peril.

What is Ahead

The book is organized as follows. Chapter 2 will present a historical overview of the concept of global governance. The idea of pooling aspects of national sovereignties as a way of establishing a stable framework for international peace, security, and prosperity has a distinguished lineage going back many centuries. It is useful to understand this history, not only to gain insights into the motivations of various proposals, but also the reasons for their success or lack of uptake at various junctures. The relevance of these lessons for the future is particularly important. The very ambitious proposals put forward by Clark and Sohn in the late 1950s, much admired in many circles at the time, did not go beyond generating an interesting debate among experts; the onset of the Cold War did much to stifle any meaningful action. We argue that much has changed in the last 60 years and that we no longer have the luxury of avoiding taking action on a number of fronts. In Chapter 3, we review the history of the gradual evolution of supranational institutions from the experience of the European Union; an interesting model to consider or draw from on the international plane. We then make specific proposals to enhance the collective security mechanisms of the Charter, as well as the legislative, executive/management and legal dimensions of the United Nations, as these constitute central institutional attributes for effective global governance. Chapters 4 and 5 will look in greater detail at some of our core proposals in respect of reforms of the UN General Assembly and will make the case for the creation of a Second Chamber attached to the General Assembly in the near term without the need for Charter amendment. Supporting advisory mechanisms to the legislative and policy-making processes, including a possible Civil Society Chamber, are proposed in Chapter 6.

Chapters 7 and 8 will discuss the replacement of the UN Security Council by a management-oriented Executive Council, and completing the collective security mechanism of the Charter through the creation of an International Peace Force. Chapter 9 will deal with the issue of disarmament as another essential dimension of collective security. Strengthening the international rule of law, ensuring the peaceful settlement of international disputes, the creation of an International Human Rights Tribunal and the need for a UN Bill of Rights will be the subject of Chapters 10 and 11. Chapter 12 will present some proposals for the creation of a new funding mechanism to finance the operations of a reformed UN system.

Our focus then shifts to the governance response to specific global threats to all nations and to human well-being. Chapter 13 will look at the UN specialized agencies, which we see as playing a growing and central role in managing and establishing the parameters for enhanced international cooperation in a number of areas. We then illustrate this with case studies in the economic, environmental and social areas, including the global economy, inequality, and the private sector in Chapter 14; financial governance through a reformed IMF in Chapter 15; global environmental governance for climate change and biosphere integrity in Chapter 16, and population and migration in Chapter 17. Chapters 18 and 19 address the cross-cutting and system-wide issues of confronting corruption and enhancing the power of education at the international level, while Chapter 20 offers some comments on the shared values and principles needed for significant global reform. Chapter 20 also offers an overview (“Operationalizing Key Attributes and Values of a New Global Governance System”) of how a key set of the proposed substantial global governance reforms could be operationalized, in a values-based governance environment. We wrap up our proposals in Chapter 21 with scenarios of possible futures and proposed concrete steps forward in coming years, and the concluding Chapter 22, which addresses some of the roots of present failures in our current system, and the seeds of success building on a higher vision of shared human purpose and potential to assemble positive forces for global governance.

2 A History of Global Governance

It is the sense of Congress that it should be a fundamental objective of the foreign policy of the United States to support and strengthen the United Nations and to seek its development into a world federation open to all nations with definite and limited powers adequate to preserve peace and prevent aggression through the enactment, interpretation and enforcement of world law.

House Concurrent Resolution 64, 1949, with 111 co-sponsors

There are causes, but only a very few, for which it is worthwhile to fight; but whatever the cause, and however justifiable the war, war brings about such great evils that it is of immense importance to find ways short of war in which the things worth fighting for can be secured. I think it is worthwhile to fight to prevent England and America being conquered by the Nazis, but it would be far better if this end could be secured without war. For this, two things are necessary. First, the creation of an international government, possessing a monopoly of armed force, and guaranteeing freedom from aggression to every country; second, that wars (other than civil wars) are justified when, and only when, they are fought in defense of the international law established by the international authority. Wars will cease when, and only when, it becomes evident beyond reasonable doubt that in any war the aggressor will be defeated.

Bertrand Russell, “The Future of Pacifism”¹

By the end of the 20th century, if not well before, humankind had come to accept the need for and the importance of various national institutions to secure political stability and economic prosperity. With some differences to reflect individual country histories and circumstances, most people today accept the need for a legislative body to enact laws, an executive to implement them and to run the government, a judiciary endowed with power to interpret the law when needed, a central bank to issue the currency and regulate the financial markets and safeguard financial stability, a police force to guarantee the safety of citizens, and so on. It is widely acknowledged that when such institutions are weak or do not function effectively, a country will not develop smoothly. Depending on the particular institutional shortcomings identified, countries may remain stuck in a poverty trap, may face political upheavals, civil strife, violence, and crime. Indeed, much of the practice of good governance today is concerned with strengthening the institutional underpinnings of society and buttressing the rule of law (see Chapter 20).

The notion that humanity might evolve to a stage where we would broaden our mental horizons and expand our loyalties to a wider circle is not a recent phenomenon. From the time of Jesus to the industrial revolution, life for most people has been tough and brutishly short. Economic historians have estimated that average economic growth over this period was virtually nonexistent; this meant that for a typical individual, there was very little change during their lifetime in the objective material circumstances surrounding daily life. Most people lived under what today we would characterize as an incredibly austere poverty line and famines were frequent, long and lethal. Disease and pandemics of various kinds kept population in check or, as in the case of the Black Death, reduced the population of Europe and parts of Asia by upwards of a hundred million people. Because there was virtually nothing to distribute, rulers were not in a position to grant benefits to some groups (e.g., the army) without taking away from others. This led to the proliferation of authoritarian regimes which, to survive, generally ruled with a combination of an iron hand and, where necessary, terror. This is not to say that the industrial revolution eliminated the incidence of poverty and violence, but the economic growth that it brought about did expand the range of opportunities for many people, some of whom could now pursue other interests beyond mere survival. This was surely a factor, for instance, in the development of our scientific and technological capacity.

Early Visions

It should not surprise us that, against the background of a limited and difficult material environment and rough social conditions, characterized by episodic phases of political instability and violence, there would be occasional calls for exploring alternative political arrangements or organizing human affairs in a way that was conducive to some semblance of the rule of law at the international level. In 1311 Dante Alighieri wrote a political tract under the title of De Monarchia,² which was translated into English and published in 1949 as On World Government. This is an extraordinary document, putting forward the notion of the unity of humanity, the role of the human mind as the epitome of perfection, the desirability of liberty under the rule of law, and the need for a supranational power, to resolve disputes between city or state governments. Dante wrote: “it is evident that mankind, too, is most free and easy to carry on its work when it enjoys the quiet and tranquility of peace. To achieve this state of universal well-being a single world government is necessary.”³

In his paper “An Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe” (1693), William Penn made the case for a federal European state to keep the peace. This state would govern relations between its members within a common legal framework, including a supranational parliament and respect for the sovereignty of members within their domestic territories.⁴ Again, Penn’s essay is an excellent example of the extent to which poverty and the prevalence of violence and war among states prompted leading thinkers to make proposals aimed at securing a more solid foundation for peace and prosperity. Twenty years later the French cleric Charles Castel de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743) in his “Plan for the Perpetual Peace in Europe” called for the creation of a European confederation. It was left to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however, who was the recipient of Saint-Pierre’s collected papers upon his death, to popularize his ideas and to quote from his writings in his own essay A Project of Perpetual Peace (1761), and to highlight that Saint-Pierre had indeed been eloquent in his condemnation of existing political arrangements in Europe, which he characterized as being laden with “perpetual dissensions, brigandage, usurpations, rebellions, wars and murders,” which distracted peoples from more productive pursuits and had led him to call for the creation of un gouvernement confédérative where “all its members must be placed in such a mutual state of dependence that not one of them alone may be in a position to resist all of the others.” This may well be one of the earliest calls for the establishment of a system of collective security.

Without doubt one of the most important experiments in international cooperation based on the rule of law were the initiatives taken in America in the 18th century, beginning with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Articles of Confederation ratified by the 13 states in 1781 and the subsequent adoption of the US Constitution of 1787. The motivation of the framers of the new constitutional order that emerged in the United States and as reflected, for instance, in the Federalist Papers written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, is very much in keeping with the concerns raised by Enlightenment thinkers in Europe around the same time. A loose confederation of states was not likely to provide a basis for meaningful cooperation across state borders and to ensure the peace.

What was necessary was a supranational form of governance that established a legal framework with binding rules on the citizenry. Hamilton had often said that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary,” that people must be brought under the “mild and salutary coercion” of the law, if they are to avoid the “destructive coercion of the sword.” What emerged out of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia was a system that sought to balance the interests of states with the need to have a strong central government that would operate under the rule of law and with clearly identified limitations on its powers, to guard against the dangers of authoritarianism and the infringement of individual civil liberties.

Benjamin Franklin, who had spent nine years in Paris as America’s first ambassador to the French Court wrote, soon after the Convention in 1787, the following to a friend back in France: “If the Constitution succeeds, I do not see why you might not in Europe carry the project of good Henry IV into execution, by forming a Federal Union and One Grand Republick of all its different States and Kingdoms by means of a like Convention, for we had many interests to reconcile.”⁵ Supporters of the idea of establishing a world federation have often pointed to the American experience as an example of the benefits of federalism under the rule of law. From an economic perspective, there is little doubt that creating an integrated single economic space, in time, provided many advantages to producers and consumers. The federal government was given powers to regulate interstate trade, to issue a single currency and regulate the financial system, to issue debt in an integrated market subject to the same rules, and to build a body of commercial law and other legislation that strengthened the cohesion of the internal market, protecting the US economy from the inefficiencies of varying and multiple local regulatory frameworks. By the early part of the 20th century the US was already emerging as the world’s largest and most dynamic economy, something that in turn was reflected in growing political power.

Henry Kissinger regards Immanuel Kant as the most accomplished philosopher of the Enlightenment period and makes a persuasive case that much of his greatness is a reflection of his political philosophy and the vision that he offered for peace in Europe.⁶

Humanity, Kant reasoned, was characterized by a distinctive “unsocial sociability,” the “tendency to come together in society, coupled however, with a continual resistance which constantly threatens to break this society up.” The problem of order, particularly international order, was “the most difficult and the last to be solved by the human race.” Men formed states to constrain their passions, but like individuals in the state of nature each state sought to preserve its absolute freedom, even at the cost of “a lawless state of savagery.” But the “devastations, upheaval and even complete inner exhaustion of their powers” arising from interstate clashes would in time oblige men to contemplate an alternative. Humanity faced either the peace of “the vast graveyard of the human race or peace by reasoned design.”⁷

Kant’s proposal for this “peace by reasoned design” was a voluntary federation of nations relating to each other within a framework of respect for agreed rules of conduct, in which governments would act in the public interest in peaceful ways because the citizens would no longer wish to face the rigors and consequences of armed conflicts. Kant’s “league of peace” would be a departure from the then prevailing order based on unenforceable treaties and alliances, which had resulted in centuries of instability and warfare, to one based on the rule of law (see Chapter 10). In time the system would evolve into a peaceful world order and “a perfect civil union of mankind.”

Kant was under no illusions about the current state of human society in his time; he perfectly understood the tensions between conceptions of national sovereignty and the need to seek common ground with other states also intent on providing security and prosperity to their peoples. But rather than argue that these tensions would coexist forever, occasionally erupting into episodes of killing, savagery and destruction, he thought that humankind had the capacity to learn and to evolve into a more peaceful social order. Kant, unfortunately, was ahead of his time. It would take the nations of Europe another 160 years or so and upwards of 50 million dead before his vision of a united Europe would coalesce in the Treaty of Rome in 1957. It is difficult to take issue with Kissinger’s admiration for Kant. Against the background of hundreds of years of hostilities, violence, and conflict, one cannot fault Kant for arguing that there was a better way to establish a more sensible political order in Europe, even though, in retrospect, it does seem that Europeans opted for a century and a half of graveyards before finally agreeing to “lay the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe” and to “ensure the economic and social progress of their countries by common action to eliminate the barriers which divide Europe (see Chapter 3).”⁸

The League of Nations

There are important lessons to be learned from earlier failures and successes in attempts to create international institutions to bring peace to the world, as many of the same issues will face our own proposals set out in this book. It is therefore instructive to review the creation of the League of Nations in some detail.

This was the next substantial initiative aimed at laying the groundwork for the kind of political vision earlier put forward by the likes of Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, and Kant. It came against the background of World War I and the efforts by President Woodrow Wilson to create a permanent international organization made up of the leading powers of the day, with the specific aim of preventing war. He sought to abandon a tradition of isolationism in favor of a more robust engagement with the world and, in particular, war-torn Europe. The United States had emerged as a global economic power, very much tied through bonds of industry, commerce, and finance with the rest of the world. Wilson argued for what he saw as an established American commitment to democracy and an aversion to the traditional European system of alliances; its ability to project its values upon other nations would be hampered by a policy of isolation and a continued aversion to what the Founding Fathers had called “foreign entanglements.”

In a speech delivered to the US Senate on January 22, 1917, President Wilson said:

The present war must first be ended; but we owe it to candor to say that, so far as our participation in guarantees of future peace is concerned, it makes a great deal of difference in what way and upon what terms it is ended. The treaties and agreements which bring it to an end must embody terms which will create a peace that is worth guaranteeing and preserving, a peace that will win the approval of mankind, not merely a peace that will serve the several interests and immediate aims of the nations engaged. The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this: is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? If it be only a struggle for a new balance of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee, the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement? Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organised rivalries, but an organised, common peace.

Kissinger notes that Wilson’s concept of “community of power” would in time reemerge as the principle of “collective security.” He adds that “the League of Nations … would be founded on a moral principle, the universal opposition to military aggression as such, whatever its source, its target, or its proclaimed justification.”⁹ One cannot fail to be impressed with the streak of idealism that runs through Wilson’s countless interventions in support of the establishment of the League. One senses the heavy burden of responsibility weighing on him because of the United States’ participation in the war. In a speech in 1919 he noted: “My clients are the children; my clients are the next generation. They do not know what promises and bonds I undertook when I ordered the armies of the United States to the soil of France, but I know, and I intend to redeem my pledges to the children; they shall not be sent upon a similar errand.”

Because the United States had had a long aversion to these “foreign entanglements” (in his Farewell address President George Washington had said “it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world” and in his inaugural speech Thomas Jefferson had echoed similar concerns: “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations – entangling alliances with none.”) President Wilson had moved cautiously, concerned not to awaken similar sentiments among the US political establishment. In a speech in New York City on September 27, 1918, he stated:

We still read Washington’s immortal warning against “entangling alliances” with full comprehension and an answering purpose. But only special and limited alliances entangle; and we recognize and accept the duty of a new day in which we are permitted to hope for a general alliance which will avoid entanglements and clear the air of the world for common understandings and the maintenance of common rights.¹⁰

In reviewing the key elements of this story one must mention the role played by the League to Enforce Peace, a civil society organization with 300,000 members, which counted as supporters some of the leading figures in the American peace movement as well as academia and the business community.¹¹ We have come to think of nongovernmental organization as being essentially a late 20th century phenomenon, and partly a response to the inability of governments to address fundamental problems of concern to citizens everywhere. In this respect, by tapping into a deep yearning for peace by multitudes of people appalled by the killing and savagery of the Great War (over a four-and-a-half month period from July to November of 1916 well over a million British, French, and German soldiers perished in the bloodiest and most senseless Battle of the Somme), the League to Enforce Peace played an instrumental role in creating the conditions for the emergence of the League of Nations.

The League to Enforce Peace put forth four proposals. First, that the United States should create a League of Nations in which nonpolitical questions of international law should be submitted to a judicial tribunal. Second, members of the League should “jointly use their military force to prevent any one of their number from going to war” before submitting the question to the tribunal. Third, political questions should be submitted to a council of conciliation before members took up arms and went to war. And, last, that efforts be made through international conferences to codify international law, tapping into the precedents set by the tribunal. As envisaged, the League of Nations would force countries to go through a process of negotiation and peaceful conflict resolution before implementing the decision to go to war.

The aims of the League to Enforce Peace were modest from the outset and some historians have argued that these modest goals were an important factor in defining the ultimate scope and reach of the League of Nations when it was created; in particular, the League’s emphasis on arbitration and the pledge to defend the territorial integrity and political independence of its members, a theme to which we return below in this section. In contrast with the UN Charter, which was drafted under the leadership of the US State Department, the drafting of the Covenant of the League of Nations began in mid-1917 and was carried out by an ad hoc committee that included President Wilson’s trusted advisor Edward M. House and the famous journalist Walter Lippman.¹² Whereas the UN Charter was drafted at a time when the outcome of World War II was clear and was the result of deliberate negotiations involving representatives from the Soviet Union, China, and Great Britain as well as the United States, the Covenant was the result of a much more hurried process, under huge pressure from momentous political events playing out in the world at large, such as the Bolshevik revolution.

The final stages of the negotiation on the Covenant took place during the Paris Peace conference in 1919 bringing World War I to an end. But the Covenant discussions, which lasted a grand total of 10 days in February of that year were peripheral, with the main drafting by now being done by a multinational group of 19 commissioners which, on the American side, included President Wilson and Colonel House. Meetings took place mostly in the evenings, after the arduous sessions of the peace conference. In his accounting of the proceedings, Joseph Baratta notes that at one point, “House produced a plan that Wilson later rather hastily modified by eliminating the court of justice, casting aside at a stroke the object of years of internationalists’ efforts, and adding military sanctions, in addition to economic sanctions, against states that resorted to war in defiance of an arbitral award or League recommendation.”¹³

There are several Covenant articles worth highlighting including. Article 5 states “Except where otherwise expressly provided in this Covenant or by the terms of the present Treaty, decisions at any meeting of the Assembly or of the Council shall require the agreement of all the Members of the League represented at the meeting,” effectively giving each member country veto power over any decisions of the Council, considerably weakening the League from its inception. Article 8 establishes a number of provisions for disarmament by stating that “members of the League recognise that the maintenance of peace requires the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations” and calls for plans for arms reductions by states to be reviewed by the Council at least every ten years. This was an important admission of the connection between war and the activities of the military industrial complex and must be regarded as a key innovation in the concept of international order, which the Covenant tried to bring into being.

Article 10, apparently the most important in Wilson’s view and outlining a key new principle in international relations, states: “The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League,” an early attempt at formulating the elements of a system of collective security. President Wilson characterized Article 10 at a famous speech in Pueblo, Colorado, on September 25, 1919, as follows:

Yet Article 10 strikes at the taproot of war. Article 10 is a statement that the very things that have always been sought in imperialistic wars are henceforth forgone by every ambitious nation in the world … You will see that international law is revolutionized by putting morals into it. Article 10 says that no member of the league, and that includes all these nations that have done these things unjustly to China, shall impair the territorial integrity or the political independence of any other member of the league.

A number of the articles provided for peaceful settlement of disputes and arbitration and conciliation (e.g., Articles 12, 13, and 15). Wilson was an ardent believer in the notion that nations would not so easily go to war if they had an opportunity to consult and, in the presence of disinterested parties, outline the thrust of their grievances and dispassionately explore ways to resolve them in peaceful ways. At a speech in the University of Paris on December 21, 1918, he had said:

My conception of the League of Nations is just this, that it shall operate as the organized moral force of men throughout the world, and that whenever or wherever wrong and aggression are planned or contemplated, this searching light of conscience will be turned upon them and men everywhere will ask, “What are the purposes that you hold in your heart against the fortunes of the world?” Just a little exposure will settle questions. If the Central powers had dared to discuss the purposes of this war for a single fortnight, it never would have happened, and if, as should be, they were forced to discuss it for a year, war would have been inconceivable.

In this respect, the “cooling off” periods embedded in the Covenant – lasting in some case up to nine months before war could be declared – were intended to avoid a repetition of the events of 1914, when the nations of Europe mindlessly stumbled upon the bloodiest and most violent war ever undertaken, largely because of the absence of mechanisms to consider the reasons for and the likely consequences of their actions.^{14, 15}

Nevertheless, the Covenant (Article 15) stated that failing arbitration/conciliation efforts the states reserved “to themselves the right to take such action as they shall consider necessary for the maintenance of right and justice,” meaning states reserved for themselves the right to go to war to defend national interests. So, the League most definitely did not eliminate war as an instrument of national policy. It would not be until the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928 (also known as the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy) that a basis in international law would be established for the elimination of war between sovereign states (see Chapter 10). These provisions regrettably had little success in practice at the time, though the Pact was ultimately ratified by the vast majority of the nations of the world, including the major powers, and the provisions would find their way into the UN Charter in 1945.

The League, as conceived in the Covenant, had very weak enforcement mechanisms for violation of its articles and thus was not an effective mechanism to restrain some of its signatories from violating some of its key provisions, as happened with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland and Mussolini’s incursions into Ethiopia. Unhappy with League resolutions, countries could simply opt to withdraw, as per Germany, Italy, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, among several others.

Opposition to the League within the US Senate was, broadly, of two types. Senator William Borah had problems with the enforcement mechanisms embedded within the Covenant. In the absence of successful arbitration or conciliation, war would be inevitable and members would be called upon to adopt aggressive measures against the offending party(ies), involving possible boycotts, blockades, and the like. For him the application of the principle of collective security would translate quickly into war, not peace, thereby negating the very purpose of the League. Additionally, it would undermine the United States’ image as a peaceful, democratic nation firmly committed to liberty for all. He also thought that, in practice, the burden of actions under Article 10 would overwhelming fall on the United States, Great Britain, France, and Japan, its four more powerful members, something that would inevitably put the United States in the role of world policeman or, worse, dictator, damaging the “soul of democracy.” While these objections were not without merit, his proposed solutions were perhaps somewhat impractical. He was of the view that a combination of world public opinion and voluntary compliance by countries with respect to the rulings of the League’s Council would suffice.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the majority leader and chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations had a far more fundamental set of objections. He proposed 14 reservations to the Covenant, many of which could be characterized as “killer” in nature, essentially intended to strengthen US power within the League or exempt it from many of its obligations. The US would have no obligations under Article 10, such as the ability to command troops and ships without Congressional approval; it would reserve for itself the right to take sides in a future conflict between China and Japan, thereby rendering Council decisions in that event largely redundant; it would accept no monetary obligations to the League, meaning that the cost of running the League would have to be borne by other countries; it would make no meaningful commitments on disarmament under Article 8, reserving for itself the right for a military build-up in the event of threats to its security; it would accept no obligations to join other organizations created as a result of League initiatives, among others. Senator Lodge was willing to endorse the Covenant and accept US membership in the League subject to his 14 reservations; President Wilson took an uncompromising stance, unwilling to accept conditions which, in his view, would render the League weaker than it already was. Regrettably, the drafting and ratification of the Covenant turned quickly into a partisan political issue within the US, made worse by President Wilson suffering a massive stroke in October 1919. Weakened physically and in poor health, he was not able to take the leadership role that would have been necessary to ensure victory on the Senate floor. On March 19, 1920, the Covenant was voted down by a margin of seven votes.

One fascinating question that has been discussed and debated in the decades following the demise of the League and the onset of World War II is the counterfactual: would history have taken a difference course if the United States had been a member of the League? To take one of several potential examples, when the League in 1935 was considering sanctions against Italy for its actions in Ethiopia, one question that came up during Council deliberations was: Would the United States, one of the world’s largest economies, honor such sanctions or would it otherwise seek to gain commercial advantage by undermining them? Would the presence of the United States in the League have prompted an early application of the Covenant’s Article 19, in principle allowing revisions to the Treaty of Versailles which, it is commonly acknowledged, imposed onerous terms on Germany? Such revisions might have gone some way to allay German grievances which fueled the rise of Hitler and his revanchist aspirations.

We are of the view that it is unreasonable to claim that the League failed because the United States was not a party to it, rather than from its own structural weaknesses, such as the need for unanimity in its decisions through the power of the veto, or the absence of effective enforcement mechanisms for its decisions, to take two examples. The United States was very much part of the creation of the United Nations and adopted the UN Charter without reservations. Its participation, however, as noted earlier, has not prevented decades of war, civil strife, human rights violations, large-scale killing and pillaging, and the emergence of a host of other problems that threaten global security and prosperity. This is partly because, as we will argue later, many of the flaws embedded in the League’s Covenant were transplanted to the UN Charter. A more likely interpretation is that the League, on the whole, failed because of the destructive power of lingering nationalism and militarism, deeply embedded in the national consciousness of its member countries; something that the League was too weak to reverse or cure on its own.¹⁶ Indeed, it would take yet another global conflagration and countless deaths, destruction, and economic collapse before the European members of the League sobered up and saw fit to create the European Union, as a more effective antidote to centuries of misguided nationalism – humankind’s primary “infantile disease,” to paraphrase Albert Einstein.

The League’s weaknesses notwithstanding, it did manage to generate considerable support and enthusiasm in various quarters. In Great Britain, membership in the League of Nations Union, yet another civil society organization created to promote the ideals of the League, reached 407,000 by 1931. Some of its leading members organized a Peace Ballot in 1934–1935 in which 11 million people voted for Great Britain to remain in the League and another 7 million people voted in support of the proposal that aggression should be confronted by international military force. These are extraordinary numbers, only a few percentage points lower, as a proportion of the population, of the share of people who voted during the Brexit referendum in June 2016; they reflect broad-based support for the vision of world order offered by its founders and partly embedded in the League’s Covenant.

A smaller but impressively influential organization established in Great Britain in 1932 was the New Commonwealth Society (NCS), with Winston Churchill as president. It had its own journal, many of its members were prolific writers and disseminators of internationalist ideals of cooperation. According to Baratta, the NCS urged the establishment within the League of a world equity tribunal “to settle political disputes beyond the capacity of the World Court and establishment of an international police force to enforce decisions of the League or equity tribunal.”¹⁷ Its proposals for the creation of an international police force found their way into Chapter VII of the UN Charter, whose Article 43.1 states: “All Members of the United Nations, in order to contribute to the maintenance of international peace and security, undertake to make available to the Security Council, on its call and in accordance with a special agreement or agreements, armed forces, assistance, and facilities, including rights of passage, necessary for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security.”

The significance of the League – its ultimate failure aside – may well lie in the fact that it was a first attempt to pool national sovereignties together to deal with the problem of armed conflicts and aggression. It was a distinctive milestone, a tenuous first step in a long process intended to strengthen and improve the effectiveness of mechanisms of international cooperation.¹⁸

A Federal Union of Democratic States

The 1930s were a difficult period. The early part of the decade witnessed the full global ramifications of the Great Depression, including job losses without parallel in recent economic history. The rise of protectionism and economic nationalism exacerbated international tensions and, against the background of a struggling League, highlighted the weaknesses of existing arrangements to ensure peace and economic stability. Japanese aggression, the rise of German militarism under Hitler and the country’s multiple territorial claims on other parts of Europe, the ineffectiveness of the League to deal with Mussolini’s abuses in Ethiopia, all contributed to create a climate of pessimism in some circles but also led to a range of initiatives intended to deal in some way with these crises. Just as the League to Enforce Peace had played a central role in the United States in promoting the creation of the League of Nations, a similar civil society organization bearing the name of Federal Union was created in Great Britain in 1938 with the express purpose of promoting a federation of democratic states. Federal Union advocated a multistage process, to be initially focused on the unification of Europe, and followed by an Atlantic union that would include the United States and Canada and to evolve, in due course, into a world federal union.

One is impressed not only by the scope of its ambitions but also by the high caliber of the intellectuals and politicians it was able to attract as strong supporters, including Arnold Toynbee, Lionel Curtis, William Beveridge, Lionel Robbins, Clement Attlee (who would succeed Winston Churchill as Prime Minister in 1945) and Ernest Bevin, a future foreign minister. The organization grew quickly after Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and played an instrumental role in Winston Churchill’s offer to France to form a union with Great Britain in June 1940 (see below). According to Baratta, Federal Union’s main argument was that:

to secure the peace, humanity had to move beyond a league of sovereign states to a federation of states and peoples based on common citizenship, for the league principle was a proven failure; moreover, such a federation could not rely on mere sentiment against war but had to organize power superior to that of national states that so far had been established in history.¹⁹

Winston Churchill’s Proposal to France to Create an Anglo-French Union

One of the more fascinating (and little known) episodes during the early part of World War II was the offer made by Winston Churchill to the French government to create an Anglo-French union. With the strong possibility of a German invasion of France on the horizon, French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud came to London to discuss avenues of collaboration to reinvigorate the war effort. A Supreme War Council had been set up in September of 1939 bringing together the top echelons of the British and French governments to coordinate and collaborate on various facets of the conduct of the war.

Similar machinery had been established for joint economic planning under the leadership of Jean Monnet as a result of which trade agreements were signed in early 1940 and an Anglo-French Industrial Council was formed to strengthen economic cooperation between both countries. Monnet saw these early efforts at economic and security cooperation between Great Britain and France as an opportunity to leverage greater cooperation on a Europe-wide basis. He was not alone in these efforts; he was joined by his deputy Rene Pleven (then working at the French embassy in London and who would later on become a French Prime Minister) and Sir Arthur Salter on the British side, both of whom felt that closer links between Great Britain and France would be an antidote to German militarism. Other officials on both sides saw these efforts aimed at fortifying Anglo-French links as extremely important from a strategic perspective; they would boost French morale at a time of mortal danger associated with Germany’s early military successes, they could discourage Nazi designs on France, given the combined size of Anglo-French forces and economic power, and might also crystallize ideas for a new Europe and offer an alternative to several countries standing on the fence, at times lured by the power and ideologies of the Third Reich.

Reynaud and several of his ministers met in London as members of the Supreme War Council on March 28, 1940, and both governments issued a joint declaration pledging never to seek a separate armistice with the Germans²⁰ and their support for “an international order which will ensure the liberty of peoples, respect for law and the maintenance of peace in Europe.”²¹ The next several weeks witnessed the German invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium, the collapse of the Chamberlain government in Great Britain and the installation of Winston Churchill as the new prime minister heading a national coalition government, the evacuation of British (and some French and Belgian) troops from Dunkirk and Italy’s declaration of war on France and Britain. A meeting of Churchill’s War Cabinet on June 15 considered and approved a proposal drafted by Jean Monnet and others²² to create a union of the United Kingdom and France. The Declaration of Union stated in part:

The two Governments declare that France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations, but one Franco-British Union. The Constitution of the Union will provide for joint organs of defence, foreign, financial and economic policies. Every citizen of France will enjoy immediately citizenship of Great Britain, every British subject will become a citizen of France…During the war there shall be a single War Cabinet, and all the forces of Britain and France, whether on land, sea or in the air, will be placed under its direction.²³

De Gaulle (who was in London at the time) and Pleven read the French translation of the Declaration to Prime Minister Reynaud over the telephone who, in his memoirs would later say that “this sensational turn of events could only fill me with joy since it was to give me a new argument for keeping France in the alliance.”²⁴ In his own account of the war, Churchill admits that he was under no illusions about the difficulties of implementing the Union, but that he was encouraged by the enthusiasm of those around him (including of those on the French side who were representing Prime Minister Reynaud) and that “in this crisis we must not let ourselves be accused of lack of imagination.”²⁵ Paul Reynaud took the Declaration to his Conseil Superieur but found himself in a minority. His Deputy Premier Camille Chautemps thought that the proposed union would turn France into a British province. Several members of the Council expected a British defeat within weeks and agreed with Marshall Petain who stated that the Union would, in practice, mean “fusion with a corpse.” At least one member (Jean Ybarnegaray) thought that it would be better to be a Nazi province. Shlaim refers to statements made by de Gaulle and Charles Roux, the Secretary General of the French Foreign Ministry, which suggest “acute Anglophobe feelings” in the upper echelons of the French political establishment “in the wake of his country’s military defeat.”²⁶ By now, in any case, the focus of those around Reynaud was how to secure favorable terms in an armistice with Germany, something that was achieved several days later, signed by Hitler at Compiegne, in exactly the same railroad car used for the signing of Germany’s surrender in 1918.

Historians are divided on the significance of the Declaration. Some have argued that the motivation for the Declaration was largely tactical;²⁷ it was a last-minute attempt to prop-up France’s flagging determination to keep the fight and win the war rather than to quickly abdicate to Germany’s military might. Shlaim persuasively argues that efforts to strengthen Anglo-French economic and security links at the outset of the war were genuine and enjoyed strong support on both sides but were initially seen in a medium-term context; part of a broader effort to redefine and deepen economic and political cooperation in Europe, using an Anglo-French Axis as the basis. They were not initially intended to result in a proposal envisaging “reciprocal rights of citizenship, a customs union, a single currency and the joint financing of post-war reconstruction, as well as a single War Cabinet and a unified supreme command.”²⁸ Whereas Churchill had stated in no uncertain terms that Britain would never surrender and had galvanized public opinion in his country to support the war effort, Marshall Petain had made it clear to Churchill that turning Paris into rubble would not affect the ultimate outcome: French defeat at the hands of the superior German armies.²⁹

Others, however, have taken a broader view, arguing that the Declaration was the main inspiration, after the war, for French initiatives to create the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and the more ambitious European Community in 1957, under the leadership of Jean Monnet (see Chapter 3). Churchill’s private secretary Sir John Colville made it clear that although everyone understood the great difficulties to overcome to make the Union possible, there was also a view that “we had before us the bridge to a new world, the first elements of European or even World Federation.”³⁰ The Declaration was significant in other ways as well. The consequences of French refusal were immediate and catastrophic. Prime Minister Reynaud, who only a few months before had committed his country not to sign a separate armistice with Germany resigned and Marshall Petain was installed at the head of a new government. Churchill’s concerns that the French navy would be captured by the Nazis and used against Britain and others in the war effort led him to order its destruction which in turn led Petain to sever diplomatic relations with Great Britain, abolish the Constitution and set up an authoritarian regime with fascist overtones and at times keen to collaborate with the German occupiers.

Petain did not have a happy ending. He was tried for treason and sentenced to death in 1945; his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Paul Reynaud was arrested by the Petain administration, surrendered to German forces and was imprisoned until the end of the war but had a distinguished political career thereafter. In 1951 he wrote:

I have continued to think that a Franco-British Union, as Churchill proposed it, could have served as the basis for the unification of all Europe. And I became more and more convinced, during my years of enforced reflection, that after the Allied victory, it would be necessary, in order to win the peace, to take up again the offer Churchill made to win the war.³¹

One can speculate as to what might have happened if Prime Minister Reynaud had, in fact, persuaded his Council to endorse the Declaration which, beyond the immediate objectives of creating a brand-new federal structure with common policies across the entire spectrum of government, was fundamentally intended to ensure France’s presence in the alliance against Nazi Germany. One can surmise that France would have initially borne the brunt of German aggression and witnessed, as was feared, considerable destruction and fatalities and perhaps, in any case, ultimate military defeat. On the other hand, it is not clear what might have been the consequences for the prosecution of the war of stiff French military resistance and, one assumes in keeping with the contents of the Declaration, a much stronger level of British support and commitment to the survival of France, now a part of a Franco-British Union. Monnet admitted that “the whole business ended in failure, but think what it would have meant if the political offer of union had succeeded. There would have been no way of going back on it. The course of the war, the course of the world might have been different. We should have had the true beginnings of a Union of Europe.”³² Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi made a persuasive case that the exiled governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Norway “would certainly have acceded to an Anglo-French Union.”³³

How might the United States have reacted in the face of the destruction of France? Perhaps those members of the Council who did not support the Union were also aware that building up the institutions of a new federal structure in the middle of a war against a powerful aggressor, was a close to hopeless cause, difficult in any case under peacetime conditions but nearly impossible under the threat of German bombs and artillery. More important, whereas by 1940, as noted above, there was broad-based support in Great Britain for federal causes and other internationalist initiatives – such as the 1934–1935 Peace Ballot – there were very few comparable experiences in France, where the notion of “common citizenship” might have appeared quaintly premature to most members of the public and the ruling elite. Federalist initiatives cannot flourish in a political vacuum; if citizens are to be asked to accept a vision of shared government and shared institutions, they need to be persuaded of the benefits and that these will outweigh the costs.

There is a final irony in the story of the Declaration of Union. After the war, France was very much a leader in the effort to secure a lasting basis for peace and prosperity through the creation of supranational institutions. The transformation of the European Community into the European Union in the 1990s would have been impossible without the strong partnership of Chancellor Kohl and President Mitterrand. To this day, France remains largely committed to a vision of a stronger Europe and an ever-closer union as called for in the Treaty or Rome. Marine Le Pen’s alternative vision for France within Europe – closed borders, protectionism, a rejection of ethnic and cultural diversity – was roundly defeated during the 2017 elections. It is Great Britain, a late entrant into the European Community in 1973, that remains much more conflicted about the vision implicit in a united Europe, as made abundantly clear during the past three years by the Brexit saga, not to say tragicomedy.

Early Thinking on the United Nations

With the League in profound disrepair by the time Germany invaded Poland and with the entry of the United States into the war following the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, efforts were set in motion for the creation of a new organization that might provide a more secure basis for peace and prosperity. The organization that emerged from these efforts at the San Francisco conference in 1945 was the United Nations, but the work program leading to this outcome had begun several years before and was the result of long and delicate negotiations.

Within three weeks of the United States entering the war, President Roosevelt set up an Advisory Committee on Post-War Foreign Policy under the direction of then Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Undersecretary Sumner Welles. The aim of the Committee and, in particular, its Permanent International Organization subcommittee, was to work on the design of an organization that would secure global peace and security while avoiding some of the weaknesses associated with the League of Nations. On January 1, 1942, the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China plus 22 nations then involved in the war effort against the Axis powers set up an alliance in which members pledged to fight until victory, not to make a separate peace with the enemy, and to work for the establishment of a broad-based and effective system of international security as outlined in the August 14, 1941, Atlantic Charter. The name adopted for this alliance was the United Nations, suggested by President Roosevelt himself.³⁴ By 1945 it included 51 nation states as members. The establishment of the Committee – made up of senior State Department Officials, some leading academics and several civil society representatives – was no small act of imagination. In early 1942 the war effort was not going well for the United States and its allies; Japan had made major territorial gains in Asia and Germany had largely brought Europe, other than Great Britain, under its control and was intent on conquering Russia as well.

One of the Committee members has left an invaluable record of the proceedings from which it is possible to glean the evolving nature of the debate and thinking about the sort of organization that was to be created.³⁵ It is noteworthy that up to October 1943 much of the focus centered on the future establishment of some type of international entity founded on federalist principles, not unlike in conception to the model adopted by the United States during its Constitutional Convention in 1787. This would have implied the creation of a legislative body with substantial powers to enact laws that would be binding on member states. Because this legislature – even under a fairly narrow vision of the areas in which it would have jurisdiction – might be tempted to assume a broader mandate, there were discussions on a draft Bill of Rights to guarantee basic freedoms and protections for citizens, such as those identified by President Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union address, including freedom of speech and worship. Roosevelt pointed out that two other freedoms – from want and fear – implied the establishment of arrangements that would “secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world” and also meant “a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor – anywhere in the world.” These concepts found their way into the final version of the UN Charter, which, in the case of freedom from want contains what is perhaps the first explicit commitment on the part of the international community to promote economic and social development.^{36, 37}

These broader, more ambitious visions for future international cooperation were confronted with a strong dose of reality in October 1943 at a conference in Moscow to discuss the vision of global order then being embedded in the draft UN Charter. The Soviet authorities were more concerned with the war effort. In particular, they were keen to obtain Allied support for the opening in 1944 of a second front, which might divert German military resources away from Russian territory. In reviewing the content of the discussions at this point one cannot avoid getting the sense that the Russians would not object to some form of collective security mechanism, provided it was based on great power (meaning the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China) unanimity through the exercise of the veto. As long as the United Nations was founded on the principle of the sovereign prerogatives of certain privileged members (e.g. including the USSR) and was, thus, rendered into a largely harmless organization, the Soviets would not object.³⁸ For their part, within the Committee, there were growing concerns about avoiding the fate of the League and ensuring that the UN Charter would ultimately secure Senate approval. Undersecretary Welles, a strong advocate of a more federalist vision for the United Nations, had left the State Department shortly before the Moscow conference and there was a shift in the focus of the discussion away from what might be desirable to what might be politically feasible, particularly in light of the presence of powerful strains of isolationist sentiments within the US Congress. In this respect, it is of some interest to highlight the content of Senate Resolution 192 dated October 14, 1943 – sponsored by Senator Thomas Connally of Texas – in which, by a vote of 85 to 5 “the Senate recognize the necessity of there being established at the earliest practicable date a general international organization, based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states.”

Beyond these purely domestic political considerations, it is also clear that, against the background of an ongoing military conflict of global proportions, there would be scarce resources and time to promote, on a global scale, a vision of world order that might receive the endorsement of large segments of the public, to ensure an adequate degree of democratic legitimacy for the new body being created. Instead, to prevent creating an organization that would have the same flaws of the League of Nations, an effort was made to embed within the UN Charter clauses that would allow for the strengthening of mechanisms of international cooperation in the future, as circumstances evolved.

The UN Charter would give the veto power to the four great powers only, not to every member as had been the case with the League. The Charter would ultimately introduce strong language on the promotion of human rights, in a way that the League had not done. Once it was clear that the idea of a world legislature with binding powers on member states was premature, the proposal for attaching a Bill of Rights to the UN Charter was abandoned. Since the draft Bill of Rights had included the possibility of the right of petition by private citizens to the International Court of Justice, there was, apparently, some concern among the US authorities about what the implications of this might be against the background of widespread discrimination against African Americans and members of other minorities. The US civil rights movement would, after all, still be several years in the future.³⁹

The abandonment of the Bill of Rights notwithstanding, the final version of the Charter adopted in San Francisco did contain a number of provisions on human rights that were not insubstantial in their scope and character (see Chapter 11). The Preamble reaffirms “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” Article 55c endorses: “universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.” And Article 56 pledges all members “to take joint and separate action in co-operation with the Organisation for the achievement of the purposes set forth in Article 55.” These undertakings would result in the adoption, in 1966, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both of which significantly strengthened the legal underpinnings of the Charter’s commitments to the defense of human rights.

A Compromised United Nations

Two other issues that were present in the deliberations around the design and scope of the United Nations concerned the voting mechanisms and the distribution of power within the organization. Some experts – most notably Grenville Clark – had argued for a system of weighted voting, with voting power linked to some objective criteria, such as population size, trade flows, levels of defense spending, and the like, to accommodate the huge disparities in the size and economic heft of the membership. This was not accepted and as is well known, in the end the General Assembly was established on the basis of the principle of one-country-one-vote. Weighted voting, however, was adopted at the Bretton Woods institutions – the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development – the two organizations that were created at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference held in July 1944 in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.

Not unrelated to this, one concern with the establishment of a Security Council in which the five major powers (France was included as a permanent member of the Council in 1945) had veto power was the perception of the creation of an imperialistic organization in which the permanent members of the Council would, de facto, be running the world (see Chapter 7). To start with, the veto itself was perceived by many as undermining the democratic legitimacy of the organization; it was seen as a practice that could not be defended on the basis of any principle of just governance. Nonpermanent members of the Security Council accepted to be bound by the limitations of a two-thirds majority whereas the permanent members accepted no such constraints. More important – and with huge practical and political implications – some argued that a system was being created in which the organization would not be able to deal with problems and/or conflicts between the major powers or between a major power and a smaller country. Since, it was to be expected, many if not most major security problems in the future were likely to involve directly or indirectly one of the major powers (given their strategic importance, their economic size, their large geographic footprint in the case of the Soviet Union, China, the United States and, of course, the British Commonwealth) the United Nations, as conceived, would be largely useless to do what it was set out to do, namely,

“To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace.” (Article 1.1)

The kinds of collective security interventions envisaged in Article 42 would inevitably be hamstrung by challenges of collective action and the national interests of those with permanent seats on the Security Council, as opposed to following an order based on international law and an impartial, principled approach to international intervention.

E.B. White, one of the most prolific contributors to The New Yorker magazine at the time, gave voice to these concerns thus:

Sir Alexander Cadogan, head of the British group at the conference (Dumbarton Oaks), said that “the nations of the world should maintain, according to their capacities, sufficient forces available for joint action when necessary to prevent breaches of the peace.” A good point. A good point but an old story. The peace of the world was breached when Fascism began to spread its crimes against society in the nineteen-twenties, but although there was at that time among the nations of the world plenty of force available to prevent the breach, there was no tendency toward joint action. Nor will there be any tendency toward joint action as long as the world is run on the principle of national sovereignty, by a system of agreements between sovereign nations. There will never by any tendency toward joint action until it is too late. Therefore, the problem is not how to make force available for joint action but how to make world government available so that action won’t have to be joint.⁴⁰

These concerns were more than amply justified by the experience in the decades that followed the adoption of the UN Charter and the creation of the United Nations. In particular, the tens of millions of fatalities associated to more than 200 armed conflicts, with the predictable consequences for delayed economic and social development. As noted earlier, the Korean war in 1950 and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 remain the sole examples of interventions supported by the collective security mechanisms put in place when the organization was created.

It is of some historical significance that during the deliberations in San Francisco (April to June 1945) leading to the adoption of the Charter, the Chinese representative, Dr. T.V. Soong, the foreign minister, stated on April 26: “We must not hesitate to delegate a part of our sovereignty to the new International Organization in the interests of collective security.”⁴¹ Several days later, on May 1, he made available to the press a statement in which he expressed his government’s willingness to give up the unilateral veto in the Security Council provided the other veto-wielding countries did the same. He was not alone. Colombia joined Poland, Mexico, and eight other Latin American nations in expressing opposition to the veto. As a concession to Australia, which voiced similar concerns, the final version of the Charter included Article 109 allowing for the possibility that “a General Conference of the Members of the United Nations for the purpose of reviewing the present Charter may be held at a date and place to be fixed by a two-thirds vote of the members of the General Assembly and by a vote of any nine members of the Security Council.” Such a conference has never been held.

A Broader Vision for the United Nations

The above notwithstanding, there were strong strains of thought within the United States establishment arguing for a broader vision of world order that would go beyond an entrenched and regressive principle of national sovereignty called for by the Soviet Union and the likes of Senator Connally. Representative William Fulbright, for instance, had given a speech in New York in September of 1943 in which he hinted that rigid sovereignty may be largely illusory:

The oft-repeated objection to any system of collective security, that we must never sacrifice our sovereignty, is, in my opinion, a very red herring. If sovereignty means anything, and resides anywhere, it means control over our own affairs and resides in the people … They may delegate all, or any part of the power to manage their affairs to any agency they please. So far they have delegated part to their city government, part to the county, part to the State, and part to the Federal Government. Certainly it cannot be denied that twice within twenty-five years we have been forced, against our will, into wars which have seriously threatened our free existence. To this extent, the supreme control over our affairs, over our destiny, is at present imperfect. Therefore, if we can remedy this defect, by a delegation of limited power to an agency designed to prevent war, to establish law and order, in which we participate fully and equally with others, how can this be called a sacrifice, a giving up of anything?⁴²

Grenville Clark, deeply disappointed with the outlines of what was being put together by the major powers during the Dumbarton Oaks conference, which he viewed as no more than an attempt to revive the League of Nations, and not particularly concerned about finding himself in a minority, proposed a set of general principles that should guide the establishment of any organization that would have the maintenance of peace and security as its principal mandate.⁴³ He argued that “to be effective in the maintenance of peace the ‘general international organization’ must have some definite and substantial powers to make decisions binding upon the member countries in matters of war and peace” (emphasis in the original). He thought that if member countries could not agree “upon well-defined powers of an effective nature that they are willing to yield, and upon the terms in respect of representation upon which these powers are to be granted, it seems clear that no world authority really adequate to maintain peace, will arise in our time.”⁴⁴

In respect of these powers Clark thought that a unicameral World Congress should be granted narrowly limited jurisdiction on matters pertaining to the maintenance of peace and that these powers should be supplemented by the creation of a court with the “authority to make ‘final and binding’ adjudication of all unsettled disputes between member countries” (italics in the original). On all other issues concerning internal political, economic, and social aspects of governance, powers would be retained by individual member states. He proposed majority voting within this world legislature to guard against the “fatal defect” of the veto which the League had granted to its members. To ensure fairness, Clark put forward a detailed proposal for a system of weighted voting that, while giving effective control in the chamber to the four major powers (on account of their population and overall geopolitical importance),⁴⁵ it would still give a voice to all countries who wished to join; membership would be open to all since it was important for “the whole world to share fully and fairly in the maintenance of world order.”⁴⁶ Clark added a sense of urgency to his proposals, aware of the unique opportunity provided by the war and the desire of the public to create a stable foundation for a permanent peace.

Clark followed this up with a full-page article in the October 15, 1944, edition of the New York Times, making a number of important additional points.⁴⁷ He observed that the proposed one-nation-one-vote principle then being discussed for the General Assembly was a not very carefully disguised attempt to make the Assembly wholly subordinate to the Security Council, to turn in fact the Assembly into a powerless body and to exclude it deliberately from discussions about war and aggression. Since the UN would be founded on the principle of “sovereign equality,” giving each member in the Assembly an equal vote would satisfy the principle but would then end up sidelining the General Assembly, since it would not be acceptable for “Panama and Luxembourg (to) have an equal vote with the United States and the Soviet Union.” Furthermore, the granting of the veto would mean that “any of the Big Five may, by its sole fiat, paralyze the whole world organization.” The combination of a powerless Assembly and a Security Council hampered by the veto would “be a weak reed to support the peace of the world.” He then proposed to give the Assembly adequate but narrowly defined powers to “matters directly and plainly concerned with the forestalling or suppression of aggression.” The Security Council “would function under delegated powers from the Assembly and purely as its agent.” Clark expressed concern that the drafting of the UN Charter might fall victim to the otherwise understandable “human tendency for the American participants to defend their handiwork” and argued that other countries should be allowed to join in in the deliberations leading to the final draft. Thinking about the future conference where the draft would be agreed and voted on he said that the big powers should take time to weigh in on all proposals and that country representatives to such a gathering should draw from a wider pool of talent, and not be limited to professional diplomats and military men. No doubt thinking about the Senate vote that, a quarter century earlier, had doomed United States participation in the League of Nations, he argued that the time had come for the United States to consider moving to a system where ratification of treaties would be determined by a majority vote in the US Congress. He regarded the requirement of a two-thirds majority in the Senate as “an anachronism which is not only unfair to ourselves but capable also of vast damage to the whole world.” In his view, the treaty provision of the US Constitution “has already done deadly work in trimming down what might have come out of Dumbarton Oaks.”

Clark would come back to the general principles outlined in “A New World Order” in World Peace through World Law in the late 1950s; he (and his co-author Louis Sohn) would focus instead on reforming the UN Charter that came out of the San Francisco conference. By the time Clark made some of these arguments in mid-1944, the consensus – at least among those participating in the Dumbarton Oaks conference that worked on the UN Charter during the period of August 21–October 9, 1944 – had moved on to a far more restrained vision of what would likely secure sufficient support from members. Those assembled at Dumbarton Oaks were simply not ready to contemplate the creation of an organization with binding enforcement powers over its member states, in which nationals would in some way become citizens of a larger global polity, in which a legislature would presumably have the authority to tax and promulgate other binding legislation, and in which an international security or police force would provide a measure of collective security. Cord Meyer, who was an important member of the US delegation to the San Francisco conference claims that the delegates at the conference had fairly narrow margins of freedom, not only because of the need to ensure US Senate ratification but also because the broad outlines of the United Nations had been agreed by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin during their meeting in Yalta in February of that year, where the post-war order was discussed and broadly agreed upon.⁴⁸

While Clark may not have had official opinion behind him there were many others in the federalist movements who shared his concern that an essentially revived League based on the principle of sovereign equality and with a veto that would make the organization largely impotent to deal with crises, was all that we would have to show after the devastation of the war. The New Yorker’s E.B. White put it very well when he wrote:

The name of the new peace organization is to be the United Nations. It is a misnomer and will mislead the people. The name of the organization should be the League of Free and Independent Nations Pledged to Enforce Peace, or the Fifty Sovereign Nations of the World Solemnly Sworn to Prevent Each Other from Committing Aggression. These titles are clumsy, candid, and damning. They are exact, however. The phrase ‘United Nations’ is inexact, because it implies union, and there is no union suggested or contemplated in the world of Dumbarton Oaks. The nations of the world league will be united only as fifty marbles in a dish are united. Put your toe on the dish and the marbles will scatter, each to its own corner.⁴⁹

Cord Meyer’s account in The Atlantic Monthly of what emerged from the San Francisco conference is of particular interest not only because of his role as a member of the US delegation but also because, as a wounded veteran of the war effort, perhaps more than most delegates, he was fully aware of the war’s most immediate consequences. “It is the men in the front line who must kill and then discover on the still-warm body letters and pictures much like those they own themselves, the disturbing proof of a mutual humanity.” Meyer thought that the fundamental problem in San Francisco was the unwillingness of the major powers to move to a world in which they might have to give up any of the attributes of sovereign power, in particular the freedom “from any interference by others in its internal affairs and equally free in its external affairs to make any decisions that it wishes.”⁵⁰

Given the large number of sovereign players, the growing degree of international interdependence and the increased destructive power of available weapons, such a system was not only unstable but would be characterized by chaos and anarchy. Peace, security, and prosperity within the United States were guaranteed by a law-based system in which powers of the states were circumscribed in some areas and subordinated to those of the federal government in others, and where there was an unshakable and legally based commitment to resolve conflicts in a peaceful way. At the international level, under the system created in San Francisco:

any disagreement is a potential source of armed conflict, and each nation must rely, for the protection of its interests, on the amount of armed force it is able and willing to bring to bear in a given situation. We should frankly recognize this lawless condition as anarchy, where brute force is the price of survival. As long as it continues to exist, war is not only possible but inevitable … . The cycle of increasingly destructive wars in which we are caught is the direct and inevitable result of the attempt to prolong the political system of absolute national independence under changing conditions that make it increasingly unworkable.⁵¹

Meyer was particularly harsh in his characterization of the veto power seized by the major powers for themselves. Among the consequences of the veto he noted that: (1) “a major power can violate every principle and purpose set forth in the Charter and yet remain a member of the Organization by the lawful use of the veto power expressly granted to it”;⁵² (2) amendments to the Charter required ratification by the five veto-wielding powers, a feature that gave them the power to permanently prevent any change or reform whatsoever; (3) if one of the Big Five was not a party to a dispute, it could “prevent even the investigation of the case by the Security Council.” The veto power would also have consequences for the application of the provisions included in the Charter allowing the use of force in certain circumstances. He cautioned against the “popular misconception” that the weaknesses embedded in the League of Nations Covenant in this area had somehow been addressed in the UN Charter. This was not the case. All that the Charter envisaged was an agreement by members to voluntarily make available to the Security Council a portion of their military forces when the Council saw fit to take military action. But the veto granted to the five major powers meant in practice that they would be exempt from such actions being taken against them or against any smaller state that they wished to protect.

He thought that such a system, exempting the major powers in its most fundamental provisions from the application of force in the interests of international peace and security, could not be characterized as being law-based in any meaningful sense of the word. Instead, it bordered “on hypocrisy or self-delusion” since the use of violence could be justified as police action only in a system in which the same rules applied to all participants in an even-handed way. He also noted the sharp limitations imposed on the International Court of Justice whose jurisdiction would be limited to “the interpretation of treaties, to fact-finding, and to the determination of reparations” but only in cases where both parties to the dispute agreed to give the court the ability to do so. Furthermore, the Charter made no provisions nor established a mechanism “through which the restless inhabitants of the colonial areas can find their way to political freedom.”⁵³ Absent such machinery, the likely outcome would be bloody conflicts, a prediction fully borne out by events over the next several decades. In summary “the International Organization is, at present, as incapable of dealing with the probable causes of another war as a fire extinguisher is of quenching a forest fire.”⁵⁴

Meyer was sympathetic with the views voiced by New Zealand Prime Minister Fraser during the San Francisco conference who, speaking on behalf of smaller nations “upset the monotonous ritual of empty oratory and petty disagreement into which the Conference often subsided” by referring to the Charter as “a series of platitudes – and petrified platitudes at that.”⁵⁵ Touching upon the same points raised by Clark the previous year on the watering down of the Charter to ensure US Senate approval, Meyer wrote that:

the final price paid for Senate approval is an Organization that the United States can join and still retain intact every attribute of independence. The record of the hearings in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are a tragi-comic commentary on what was achieved at San Francisco. To allay the fears of even the most unregenerate isolationist, every impotent inadequacy of the Charter was stressed as a positive assurance that in ratifying it we were committing ourselves to nothing.⁵⁶

We have dwelt at length on the views of Clark and Meyer because they were both extremely well-connected observers of the process and the thinking that went into the design of the current UN Charter and associated UN institutions, and also because they were inordinately prescient in the identification of the consequences for international peace and security resulting from the weaknesses and flaws that were embedded in the organization, as the price for its creation.

Kissinger makes the argument that the transition from a world of alliances and balance of power practices to one of collective security was never expected to be an easy one. Part of the problem stems from the fact that alliances are concrete undertakings; countries make commitments in respect of particular interests which can be fulfilled. Collective security, on the other hand, “is a legal construct addressed to no specific contingency. It defines no particular obligations except joint action of some kind when the rules of peaceful international order are violated. In practice action must be negotiated from case to case.”⁵⁷ He notes that in the post-UN Charter world there are only two cases of “successful” interventions based on the principle of collective security but that in both cases the UN endorsed intervention only after the United States had made it clear that in the absence of such endorsement it would act unilaterally; the United Nations thus merely ratified a decision already made unilaterally by the United States.⁵⁸ Such intervention was more an attempt at ex post control by the UN of the American intervention rather than the result of internal deliberations within the UN reflecting a moral commitment to the ideals of the UN Charter and the principles of justice embedded therein.

We do not share Kissinger’s pessimism. The UN was and remains limited in its ability to take a leadership role in meaningfully addressing, for instance, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 because it does not have an enforcement mechanism to give operational meaning to whatever moral outrage it may feel in the presence of grave violations of the Charter. With an International Peace Force at its disposal, the implementation of the principle of collective security would not be such an insurmountable undertaking. One cannot analyze such a principle in isolation of the circumstances in which the principle is being implemented or, more to the point, not being implemented. We will come back to the issue of an International Peace Force in Chapter 8.

The Draft of a World Constitution and the Dublin Conference

It is worthwhile to describe a fascinating initiative undertaken by the Committee to Frame a World Constitution, a group of (mainly) University of Chicago intellectuals who, dissatisfied with the UN Charter and against the background of the destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, began meeting from November 1945 to July 1947 to discuss what a Federal Republic of the World might look like, whether following a global conflagration or in the absence of one. Its Preamble is a definite improvement over the UN Charter’s. It says:

The people of the earth having agreed that the advancement of man in spiritual excellence and physical welfare is the common goal of mankind; that universal peace is the prerequisite for the pursuit of that goal; that justice in turn is the prerequisite of peace, and peace and justice stand or fall together; that iniquity and war inseparably spring from the competitive anarchy of the national states; that therefore the age of nations must end, and the era of humanity begin; the governments of the nations have decided to order their separate sovereignties in one government of justice, to which they surrender their arms; and to establish, as they do establish, this Constitution as the Covenant and fundamental law of the Federal Republic of the World.

A section on declaration of duties and rights states that:

it shall be the right of everyone everywhere to claim and maintain for himself and his fellowmen: release from the bondage of poverty and from the servitude and exploitation of labor, with rewards and security according to merit and needs;⁵⁹ freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, in any creed or party or craft, within the pluralistic unity and purpose of the World Republic; protection of individuals and groups against subjugation and tyrannical rule, racial or national, doctrinal or cultural, with safeguards for the self-determination of minorities and dissenters.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the World Constitution is the identification of powers that are attributed to this new world government. As will be remembered, Clark and Sohn’s own revisions to the UN Charter were intended to strike a balance between the need to have appropriate powers, to ensure that the UN would be able to actually deliver peace and security on the one hand, and the need to retain responsibilities at the national level in those areas where it made sense to preserve a large measure of national control, to safeguard diversity and local preferences, on the other. The framers of the World Constitution endeavored to achieve the same middle ground sought by Clark and Sohn though, in the end, the granting of powers given to the world government is definitely more ambitious. In particular, jurisdiction is mainly extended to: the maintenance of peace and the enactment and promulgation of laws to that effect binding upon member states and individuals; the judgment and settlement of international disputes and the prohibition of interstate violence; the supervision and final adjudication on border disputes between member states or on the creation of new states; the administration of territories not yet ready for political independence; the organization and management of the federal armed forces; arms control, including the establishment of limitations on national armies; the establishment of whatever agencies may be necessary to promote economic and human development; the collecting of taxes and the preparation of a federal budget; the creation of a world central bank to issue money and regulate the financial sector;⁶⁰ the regulation of international trade; and the supervision and formulation of the legal basis for the movement of peoples across international borders.

The work of the Committee is significant not because it was taken up for debate at the higher echelons of government in the United States and other among major powers – it was not. By the end of the San Francisco conference, President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and many of their allies were largely satisfied with what had been brought into being, namely a weak-by-design organization that would not threaten in any significant way the unfettered sovereignty of its founding members. It was significant partly because of the intellectual heft and credibility of many of the Committee’s members, but mainly because the hundreds of hours of open debate and consultation that took place over a period of 20 months forced these distinguished gentlemen to grapple with the whole range of issues and principles that underpin the creation of new mechanisms of global governance.⁶¹

The Committee was part of a much larger group of intellectuals mainly in the United States and Europe, who felt strongly that with the arrival of nuclear weapons, the context for warfare had changed in fundamental ways. In his contribution to the first appeal of the Emergency Committee of the Atomic Scientists, Albert Einstein spoke for many when he said: “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” In an editorial titled “Modern Man is Obsolete” in the Saturday Review of Literature, Norman Cousins, the editor, had lamented that “on August 6, 1945 a parachute containing a small object floated to earth over Japan [and] marked the violent death of one stage in man’s history and the beginning of another” with humanity discovering the means for its destruction but not the means for its preservation and survival. Cousins was part of the 48 luminaries who participated in the Dublin conference organized by Grenville Clark in October 1945 “to explore how best to remedy the weaknesses of the United Nations Organization and to seek agreement upon and to formulate definite amendments to the Charter or other proposals to remedy these weaknesses.”⁶² Indeed, it is not unfair to say that the Dublin conference, which preceded the work of the Committee, was the main inspiration for the latter’s work.

In her excellent biography of Grenville Clark, Nancy Peterson Hill notes that the Dublin conference was hosted by Clark and US Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts and attracted a constellation of leading educators, attorneys, journalists and business leaders including Stringfellow Barr, Norman Cousins, Alan Cranston (a future US Senator from California), Cord Meyer (who had been present at the San Francisco conference as part of the US delegation and was later to be the first president of the United World Federalists), Kingsman Brewster (a future president of Yale University), and Clarence Streit (author of Union Now – A Proposal for a Federal Union of the Leading Democracies, an international best-seller published on the eve of World War II).⁶³

Over a period of five days this eminent group met at the Dublin Inn in New Hampshire and consulted on how best to respond to the perceived inadequacies of the United Nations. An early point of contention at the conference was whether to advocate for, as had been done so compellingly by Clarence Streit, a union of the world’s 15 leading democracies that would develop joint institutions and policies based on a common citizenship, and thus create a huge economic and military power, far exceeding that of the Axis powers, or to advocate a world order that would be all-inclusive and bring in the Soviet Union and other nondemocratic regimes. Clark was on the inclusive camp and, not without difficulty, he spearheaded the majority in this direction. The Declaration issued by the conference is of great historical interest, not only because it would find echo two years later in the work of the Committee that offered the draft World Constitution, but also because it would establish an intellectual framework for the proposals made by Clark and Sohn in 1958 in World Peace through World Law.⁶⁴

In its eight resolutions the Declaration of the 1945 Dublin Conference states:

1. 1. That the implications of the atomic bomb are appalling; that upon the basis of evidence before this conference there is no presently known adequate defense against the bomb and that there is no time to lose in creating effective international institutions to prevent war by exclusive control of the bomb and other major weapons.

2. 2. That the United Nations Charter, despite the hopes millions of people placed in it, is inadequate and behind the times as a means to promote peace and world order.

3. 3. That in place of the present United Nations organization there must be substituted a World Federal Government with limited but definite and adequate powers to prevent war, including power to control the atomic bomb and other major weapons and to maintain world inspection and police force.

4. 4. That a principal instrument of the World Federal Government must be a World Legislative Assembly, whose members shall be chosen on the principle of weighted representation, taking account of natural and industrial resources and other relevant factors as well as population.

5. 5. That the World Federal Government should be responsible to the World Legislative Assembly.

6. 6. That the Legislative Assembly should be empowered to enact laws within the scope of the limited powers conferred upon the World Federal Government, to establish adequate tribunals and to provide means to enforce the judgments of such tribunals.

7. 7. That in order to make certain the constitutional capacity of the United States to join such a World Federal Government steps should be taken promptly to obtain a Constitutional Amendment definitely permitting such action.

8. 8. That the American people should urge their government to promote the formation of the World Federal Government, after consultation with the other members of the United Nations, either by proposing drastic amendments of the present United Nations Charter or by calling a new world Constitutional Convention.

As with the work of the Committee two years later, the Dublin Declaration had no major immediate effect on public opinion, with many seeing it as an act of disloyalty against the background of the recent founding of the United Nations. Others were either turned off or intimidated by its call for the creation of a world government, with the associated images of an Orwellian superstate controlling every aspect of planetary life, choosing to ignore the Declaration’s clear statement that laws would be enacted within the scope of the limited powers conferred upon the government. The Declaration is significant because it was prescient in its anticipation of the problems which an ineffective United Nations would bring about over the ensuing decades. With the onset of the Cold War the world entered into an arms race and nuclear weapons continue to threaten humankind’s future, except that we now have over 9,000 nuclear warheads in the hands of nine nuclear powers (and many others with aspirations to join the club), with enough destructive power to make the world uninhabitable. The United Nations was singularly ineffective in ensuring peace and security for its members and a vast range of other global problems emerged due to the absence of mechanisms for meaningful international cooperation. Were Clark alive today (two minutes before midnight, in the view of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock) and were he to summon to Dublin some of the world’s leading thinkers to explore solutions to our current global challenges, he might well wish to get started where he and his colleagues left off on October 16, 1945, the day the Declaration was issued.

So, the Committee to Frame a World Constitution’s deliberations were part of a much larger effort taking place in various locations and led by various people, across both sides of the Atlantic. What was exceptional about it was its systematic character and the huge time commitment made to the project by its members. This is what was done in Philadelphia from May to September in 1787 during the Constitutional Convention that gave birth to the United States of America and one can imagine a similar future gathering aimed at confronting the growing recognition that our present order is lamentably defective and will need to be reformed to address our widening governance gap.

3 European Integration: Building Supranational Institutions

There is a remedy which … would in a few years make all Europe … free and … happy. It is to re-create the European family, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe. In this way only will hundreds of millions of toilers be able to regain the simple joys and hopes which make life worth living. The process is simple. All that is needed is the resolve of hundreds of millions of men and women to do right instead of wrong and to gain as their reward blessing instead of cursing.

Our constant aim must be to build and fortify the United Nations Organisation. Under and within that world concept we must recreate the European family in a regional structure called, it may be, the United States of Europe, and the first practical step will be to form a Council of Europe. If at first all the States of Europe are not willing or able to join a union we must nevertheless proceed to assemble and combine those who will and who can. The salvation of the common people of every race and every land from war and servitude must be established on solid foundations, and must be created by the readiness of all men and women to die rather than to submit to tyranny.¹

Winston Churchill

As moving beyond a UN system founded on traditional concepts of national sovereignty to a system with significantly strengthened supranational institutions is such a challenge, it is worth looking in some detail at the best recent example of such a process in the creation of the institutions of the European Union. While the nations of Europe may share many characteristics because of their proximity and historical, religious and cultural heritage, they also speak diverse languages, used and use different currencies, and had a long history of conflict and war to overcome. The lessons from the process of European integration can serve as one useful model for the greater challenges of building an enhanced institutional architecture at the global level.

It is generally accepted that World War II, with all the terrible destruction and economic upheavals it unleashed, provided the initial impetus to the European nations’ desire for greater economic cooperation. Jean Monnet, the father of the European Community, once said that:

Over the centuries, one after another each of the principal nations of Europe tried to dominate the others. Each believed in its own superiority, each acted for a time in the illusion that superiority could be affirmed and maintained by force. Each in turn was defeated and ended the conflict weaker than before. Attempts to escape this vicious circle by sole reliance on a balance of power failed repeatedly – because they were based on force and unrestricted national sovereignty. For national sovereignty to be effective, in an expanding world, it needs to be transferred to larger spheres, where it can be merged with the sovereignty of others who are subject to the same pressures. In this process, no one loses; on the contrary, all gain new strength.²

As one studies early attempts at various forms of economic cooperation in Europe, it becomes clear that the ultimate and most important goals were always political stability and unity. For example, the 1951 Treaty, signed by six governments, that created the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) set out “to substitute for age-old rivalries the merging of their essential interests; to create, by establishing an economic community, the basis for a broader and deeper community among peoples long divided by bloody conflicts, and lay the foundations for institutions which will give directions to a destiny henceforward shared.”³ The establishment of the ECSC was not seen as an end in itself but, rather, as a first step in a lengthy process that had the potential to lead toward greater economic and political integration. At about the time that the ECSC Treaty was signed, for example, France proposed the creation of a European defense community to bring the armed forces of Europe under the control of a federal authority. As this would have entailed the existence of a common foreign policy, a proposal was considered by the members to create a new community with powers in the areas of foreign affairs, defense, economic and social integration, and human rights. But the ensuing debate showed that there were significant differences among member states in the degree of commitment to the principle of integration and in the extent to which each was willing to transfer authority in specific areas. The failure to establish a viable European defense community, however, convinced the ECSC countries that European integration would have to proceed with less ambitious objectives. To this end the foreign ministers of the ECSC countries appointed a committee – under the chairmanship of Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian foreign minister – to look into the issue of further integration. In mid-1956, the committee’s proposals were approved and intergovernmental negotiations set in motion with the aim of establishing the European Atomic Energy Commission (EAEC) and the European Economic Community (EEC). The treaties of Rome establishing these two institutions were signed by the six founding members (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany) on March 25, 1957; together with the earlier ECSC Treaty they formed at the time the constitution of the European Communities.

Following the successful economic opening up of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which had greatly expanded European trade, by the early 1980s the prevailing feeling in Europe was that the enthusiasm had tapered off for fulfilling the objectives of the Treaty of Rome that had launched the EEC – which called for the creation of a common market, free of trade barriers, in which goods, services, labor, and capital would move without hindrance across national boundaries. Instead, Europe found itself in the midst of economic stagnation, witnessing the recovery of the American and Japanese economies, worried about the emergence of the newly industrialized countries of East Asia, and increasingly aware that the so-called Common Market was perhaps not that “common.” While existing tariffs had been removed, they were sometimes replaced by hidden barriers: Germans would not allow imports of beer from other countries for “health reasons”; Italians would not allow imports of pasta because these were not done with the “right” kind of flour. The impetus for attempts at reinvigorating the process of economic integration during the second half of the 1980s, especially in the context of the now famous Europe 1992 program (see below), did not come from fears of renewed armed conflict. Rather, in an interesting innovation quite unlike anything we have seen in the history of the United Nations, it came from businesses and from entrepreneurs who realized that Europe could not be competitive with the United States, Japan and the newly industrialized countries if it did not put an end to economic divisions.

The fear of being left behind economically is what galvanized the European Community into action. The strategy eventually adopted by European leaders consisted of three main components. First, they would identify a comprehensive list of barriers that needed to be eliminated to create a wholly unified, efficiently integrated European market; in the end the list came to include some 300 items. Second, they would lay out a clear timetable to be followed to get those measures (or “directives” as they were called in European Community jargon) adopted by the end of 1992. Third, they would amend the Treaty of Rome to make it possible for the 300 directives to be adopted by “qualified majority voting” among ministers rather than by unanimity; this was the heart of the so-called Single European Act.⁴

Given the desire to act to stem further decline, why was this particular set of proposals appealing to European Community members? One can point to at least three factors. First, “Europe 1992” (as the program was eventually called) was perceived as a practical goal with clearly defined objectives and a magic date attached at the end as a powerful symbol. Second, an absence of priorities (which would favor one country’s interests over another’s) and an emphasis on practical ends was thought to be an advantage. Rather than focus, for example, on the political consequences of a common immigration policy, it was decided that it would be desirable to have a community with “no security controls at frontiers”; the two are equivalent but the latter was more politically palatable. Third, Europe 1992 was also perceived as a massive process of deregulation; the mood in Europe was ripe for this, given the increasing emphasis on market-oriented economic policies and the removal of rigidities and economic distortions. Many consider that if Monnet had been alive he would have approved of the entire project as being in harmony with his own thinking about economic and social progress. He once noted that:

There will be no peace in Europe if states are reconstructed on the basis of national sovereignty, with all that that implies in terms of prestige politics and economic protectionism. The nations of Europe are too circumscribed to give their people the prosperity made possible and hence necessary by modern conditions. Prosperity and vital social progress will remain elusive until the nations of Europe form a federation or a “European entity” which will forge them into a single economic unit.⁵

Monnet may have been more of a diplomat than an academic economist, but it is evident that he instinctively understood the importance of creating a large unified economic space – a key driving force in the rise of the United States as a global economic power – for economic efficiency and prosperity.

Mutual Recognition

A central feature of the Single European Act, eventually ratified by European parliaments in 1987, was the incorporation of a novel and singularly important concept: mutual recognition. Throughout much of the 1970s the road to a common market was thought to lie in “harmonization.” The European Community would pass norms on such things as taxes, banking licenses, insurance, public health standards, professional qualifications, and so on. These would need to be approved unanimously by the member states; then the barrier in question would be removed. Understandably, the process was extremely slow and frustrating, with community interests often sacrificed to national interests, and the principle of unanimity often abused. But in 1979 the European Court of Justice, one of the founding institutions of the Community, examined a case and established an important precedent.

The case involved a then-West German company that wanted to import a French liqueur but found it could not do so because the liqueur’s alcohol content was lower than that required by German law. This resulted in a lawsuit, and the European Court of Justice eventually decided that West Germany was discriminating against foreign competitors and that it could not block the import of a product sold in France unless it could prove that the import should be banned on health, consumer protection, or similar grounds. This, of course, West Germany was unable to do.

The case turned out to have vast implications; it became the most effective weapon in demolishing previously hidden barriers to economic change. As a result of the gradual application of the principle of mutual recognition, which this case established, commercial banks in one country could establish themselves in all countries; insurance policies could be sold across borders; and a Spanish physician could go to Germany and claim recognition for his or her professional credentials, to name but a few examples.

Border Controls

The entire Europe 1992 program was initially predicated on the notion of a Europe without frontiers, given public perceptions of these as powerful symbols of division separating sovereign states. The issue has several aspects. First, there was the aspect of customs posts themselves and their impact on trade flows. By the mid-1980s, the direct annual cost to firms of customs formalities for intra-European Community trade was thought to be in the tens of billions US dollars. There was, however, more to the elimination of customs controls than finding jobs for more than 50,000 customs officials who would no longer be needed in a frontier-free Europe. Customs posts have much to do with taxes: they protect a country’s indirect taxes from relative tax advantages available in other countries; and, they allow governments to collect the value added tax (VAT) that is due to them. A sudden elimination of customs controls would result in large diversions of tax revenue as businesses and consumers made purchases across state borders to benefit from sometimes sharply different VAT rates. It had been established, for example, that in the United States sales tax differentials of up to 5 percentage points were possible between contiguous states before incentives were created for large cross-border purchases. In this area the European Community Commission decided to work for greater tax harmonization. The idea was to narrow substantially differences in tax rates.⁶

But a Europe without frontiers also meant the elimination of passport controls, which in turn had implications for gun control, immigration laws, visas for non-European Community residents, and so on. The difficulties were numerous. Some countries had strict gun controls; others less so. Denmark has passport-free arrangements with Scandinavian countries; hence an airplane arriving in Madrid from Copenhagen, from the perspective of a Spanish immigration official, could have as many Norwegian as Danish citizens, thus requiring some degree of monitoring and control, since Norway is not a member.

Notwithstanding the technical difficulties, considerable progress was made once the Europe 1992 program was launched. Border controls were significantly streamlined in the late 1980s with the introduction of a Single Administration Document (SAD) that replaced more than 30 documents required by trucks crossing European Community frontiers. On January 1, 1993, the SAD itself was eliminated and replaced by a system that shifted tax control away from the borders to the producing firm. This was facilitated by a Council of Ministers’ decision in 1991 significantly narrowing the range of variation for VAT rates. From the outset there was universal consensus that it would be extremely important for the European Community to succeed in this area. It would be difficult, indeed, to claim victory for the goal of a Europe without frontiers in the presence of continued border controls. One of the authors was working at that time as an economist in the Southern European division of the International Monetary Fund and remembers a highly symbolic meeting between the Prime Ministers of Spain and Portugal, Felipe Gonzalez and Anibal Cavaco Silva, at the Spanish–Portuguese border, to remove and permanently erase any physical indication of the existence of a border between both countries. An unthinkable gesture when both countries joined the United Nations in 1955; a highly popular move in the Europe that was emerging by the second half of the 1980s.

The single-market program involved many other elements and projects, dealing with such issues as the freedom of individuals and enterprises to move money across borders, including the right to open bank accounts in any other European Community member states; the right of individuals and enterprises to sell financial services across borders; the opening of public procurement to previously exempt sectors, and, more importantly, to firms in other member countries; measurements and quality control standards (e.g., so that light bulbs made in any European country could be used all over Europe, computers made compatible, etc.); air and road transport coordination, eliminating a number of existing restrictions; and so on.

A Historical Perspective

The European Union’s first 60 years may best be characterized as a series of achievements tempered by setbacks and innovations in the wake of stagnation. The member states’ commitment to integration and increased cooperation has coexisted with a reluctance, stemming from a desire to safeguard national interests or identity, to transfer aspects of governmental authority to European Union institutions. The extent and the speed of progress has thus been largely determined by the relative strength of these two forces. Overly ambitious initiatives – like some that preceded the creation of the European Community – have been discouraged, and ways have been found to keep the pace of change attuned to domestic political realities. The unanimity rule adopted in 1966, which effectively gave members veto power over Community decisions on the grounds that they might wish to defend vital interests, is a good example of the latter force gaining the upper hand. In time it led to segmentation in the decision-making process, weakening the chances for consistency between different policies, and the ability to implement worthwhile pan-European policy goals generally.

In spite of the setbacks, the last several decades have been significant progress in a number of key areas. The European Monetary System succeeded at first in creating stability in exchange rates through a greater coordination of financial policies, and led subsequently to the creation of a monetary union, the establishment of the European Central Bank and the launch of the euro.⁷ While the evolution of this institution has not been trouble free, with the system coming under heavy strains in the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2008–2009, it has gained new members (19 as of early 2019) and practical experiences to date have resulted in a number of initiatives to strengthen its institutional underpinnings. One of the most significant developments in the history of the EU – and one that has had a profound influence upon the evolution of the Union – is the unanimous ratification in 1987 by the member states of the Single European Act, an amendment of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. In addition to providing for the completion of the single market by restricting the rights of members to veto decisions in many key areas, particularly those pertaining to the elimination of barriers to the free flow of goods, services, labor, and capital, the Single European Act provided for a significant streamlining of the decision-making process. It became the legal instrument that permitted the speedy implementation of the legislative agenda set out for the completion of the single market. The Act also brought under the jurisdiction of the Treaties new fields of concern – for example, the environment – and set up a permanent Secretariat for political cooperation on foreign policy matters. Furthermore, it recognized the competence of the Community in the area of monetary policy and enhanced the consultative rights of the European Parliament.

More recently, the Treaty of Lisbon, which entered into force on December 1, 2009, amending the 1993 Maastricht Treaty and the 1957 Treaty of Rome, introduced a number of major reforms, significantly expanding many functions of the European Union. In particular, it broadened the use of qualified majority voting to some 45 new policy areas in the Council of Ministers, it strengthened the powers and jurisdiction of the European Parliament, it created the posts of President of the European Council and a High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, and made the EU’s bill of rights, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, legally binding. It also gave countries the right to leave the EU – the now famous Article 50 being used by the United Kingdom to negotiate the terms of Brexit.

The above is not to suggest that EU developments and reforms have been smooth and linear. At times they have been shrouded in controversy and soul searching, such as that which took place following Ireland’s initial rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in 2008. There were those who thought that the problem with the EU is that it is too diverse to expect that all member states will ratify any given treaty or wholeheartedly approve any given policy. It was pointed out that the United Kingdom and Denmark obtained a number of opt-outs out of the Maastricht Treaty, that the Schengen open-border area included Iceland, Norway and Switzerland, but excludes the United Kingdom, Ireland, Bulgaria and Romania, that the eurozone had at the time 18 members, not 28, that the Lisbon Treaty would partially exempt Britain and Poland from the Charter of Fundamental Rights, and so on. So, from this perspective, the way forward would be to accept a process of integration that allows for different speeds. All members must be democracies, there must be respect for human rights and countries must participate in the single market, but, beyond this, countries may choose which policies they are able to participate in, depending on their individual circumstances. Others argued that the Lisbon Treaty was a sideshow, distracting from key practical concerns of the Union.

A core problem connected with the seeming European malaise was likely that, notwithstanding the impressive achievements during the past several decades, its influence in the world was waning because it had failed to implement the sorts of reforms that would make it the most competitive economy in the world. All the hand-wringing about the Lisbon Treaty missed the point that the EU continued to be saddled with inefficient economic policies – the Common Agricultural Policy, obsolete regulatory regimes, a system of higher education which, long ago, abdicated leadership to the United States, among other things. From this perspective the focus should shift from Treaty negotiations to ensuring, for example, that EU members stopped spending more on declining industries than in research and development, and that the EU makes it easier to facilitate cross-border mergers to build world champions instead of capitulating to national interests. In other words, some would argue that the seemingly more glamorous work of treaties and constitutions should be downplayed, and priorities shifted to concrete and important work on the nuts and bolts of economic and institutional reforms.⁸ Others would say that the problem with the EU is not that its citizens are confused – such as the Irish during the Lisbon Treaty debates – rather that they are cynical and the leadership is to be blamed because they themselves are cynical. EU policies do not comprehensively address citizen’s concerns (and/or many citizens within EU countries remain unaware of the benefits of EU policies). “There is now a widespread impression across Europe – and especially among the young – that it is in danger of offering pseudo-democracy, remote bureaucratic government thinly disguised by a European parliament,” is how one Oxford professor put it.⁹ So, the problem is framed as one of political legitimacy and engagement. Some of these arguments (as well as several others put forth on the basis of false narratives) were embraced in the United Kingdom in 2016 by those pushing for Brexit, especially by older voters.

None of these observations is without merit; they all reflect the diversity of opinion that is to be expected in the context of mature democracies, where the business community, civil society organizations and the media are free to voice concerns and opinions, and to propose new policy priorities and initiatives. The business of bringing 28 nations to work effectively together, against the background of centuries of deeply engrained nationalisms and the defense of the “national interest” above everything else is a challenging undertaking. That the process sometimes encounters setbacks is fully to be expected. Few would deny, however, that viewed against the starting point of 1957 (or, perhaps more appropriately, the chaos and devastation of 1945), the progress has been immense and the EU remains by far the most comprehensive experiment in supranational economic and political integration, with potentially significant lessons for the rest of the world, including in respect of the establishment of international peace.¹⁰ Moreover, a recent “Eurobarometer” survey has found the highest levels of support for the Union in 35 years, with two-thirds of Europeans believing that their nation has benefited from membership in the EU, and 60 percent considering EU membership a good thing.¹¹

Economic versus “Political” Union

If one begins with the idea that the ultimate aim of greater economic integration was always political stability and cohesion, it is well worth asking what are likely to be the further political transformations of an economically unified Europe. Will the mighty forces pushing nations in the direction of greater economic cooperation inevitably lead to yet greater degrees of political integration? Will there eventually be an entity which could be considered a United States of Europe, as envisioned by Churchill? Monnet believed passionately that the process of economic integration he had helped launch in the 1950s would lead to a United States of Europe. He did not know what form the government would take, but he thought that a united Europe would create a new political model for the world.

There are several lines of thinking on this subject. Some see greater economic integration as an ongoing process, as a stepping stone toward a European Federation, one in which countries would become member states, having further ceded aspects of national sovereignty to European federal institutions in important areas. Others view a united, more integrated regional economy as an end in itself, not necessarily involving a delegation of authority in other areas, particularly on issues traditionally considered most sensitive, such as common defense, aspects of foreign policy (e.g., relations with third countries, such as China), deeper cooperation on taxation issues, among other things.

Those in the first group argue that increasing economic unity will give way eventually to a single foreign policy, for example, as Europeans begin to speak with a single European voice on issues affecting the welfare of the world. Political unity is thus seen as a gradual and evolutionary, but largely inevitable, organic historical process. A noted European businessman captured the feeling when he observed in a US National Public Radio broadcast that “[t]he question of national sovereignty and its abdication to a greater body is something in the hands of the young. It will come through increasing trust and increasing travel, as the memories of the bitterness of the past, particularly the last 30 to 40 years, gradually fade away.”

Such bitterness is to be replaced gradually by a growing European consciousness: The idea that there is no contradiction between being a good German or Italian and a good European. The evidence seems to suggest that this broadening of loyalties, what Bertrand Russell used to call “the expansion of one’s mental universe,” is rapidly taking root in Europe as survey after survey has consistently revealed strong popular support for the ideals that gave rise to the birth of the EU, if not always the bureaucratic forms that these ideals have given rise to. Others, however, show considerably less enthusiasm for a veritable “United States of Europe”; a long history of nationalism and conflict seems sometimes to weigh heavily on their minds.¹²

It is important not to confuse “unity” with “uniformity.” One must guard against the latter and would wish to preserve the diversity and distinctiveness of various cultures and national traditions – in the case of Europe as it manifests itself in different languages, customs, food, music, and other expressions of a given culture. Unity with diversity has been a fundamental goal of the European project, and has been a successfully implemented goal of other complex federated projects, such as those of Canada and Switzerland.¹³ At the international level, the emergence of stronger global institutions should indeed embrace such a principle as a key value.¹⁴ Moreover, obstacles commonly raised to closer federation, include, indeed, the “language problem” and the issue of “different stages of development” – it is not clear why these should be seen as insurmountable barriers. German and Portuguese businesspeople, for example, have meaningful interchanges all the time; they speak in English (the current de facto global commercial and diplomatic language). Preserving the diversity of language does not mean, for example, that one cannot learn additional, common languages to communicate across countries and cultures, as indeed, it is more and more commonplace in Europe to find youth speaking three or four European languages. Learning an additional common language is not a betrayal of one’s cultural or national identity. On the contrary, to the extent that it allows one to learn about other peoples, their hopes, desires, fears, it will likely enhance understanding of one’s own background.

Regarding the “different stages of development,” these exist between countries and can be a challenge to deal with. This was evident, for instance, in recent years in the context of the euro crisis, as different approaches to fiscal policy – Germany’s cautious management of its public accounts versus more “liberal,” not to say unsustainable, tendencies in some Southern European members – put pressures on the EU’s institutional architecture. But there is evidence that rather than leading to political fragmentation and disunion, they may have shown the advantages – actually, the need – for greater coordination.

On many occasions over the past several decades there have been sentiments that European integration might be slowed as a result of changes in the international political environment, including the process of German reunification, processes of economic and political transformation in eastern Europe and among the former members of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the aftershocks of the 2008–2009 global financial crisis, the impact of migratory flows from troubled countries in the Middle East in the more recent past, and so on. These developments have generally been followed by a renewed commitment on the part of EU states to whatever aspect of the integration agenda is perceived to be under threat. So, to take an example, on February 7, 1992, the 12 member states signed the Maastricht Treaty on the European Union, which called for the introduction of a common European currency by 1999 and significantly expanded the power and spheres of influence of European institutions. It also gave legal meaning to the concept of union citizenship and associated civil rights. The Treaty entered into force on November 1, 1993, following ratification by the member states.¹⁵ These initiatives were considerably strengthened in the period 2004–2007 with the entry of 12 additional countries into the European Union, thereby bringing membership in the Union to a total of 28 countries (with a combined population of 512 million) and thus creating the largest trading bloc in the world.¹⁶

Implications for the Future

The present processes of European integration have a significance that transcends their immediate stated objectives. Beyond the eminently technical and occasionally dry nature of the issues underlying these processes, the European countries may find in the end not just increased material prosperity but something far more enduring – the forging of a shared identity and a durable peace among European nations.¹⁷ Three things may be said in this respect.

First, a case can be made that the tragic experiences of the 20th century may have led to fundamental changes in European consciousness; in particular the willingness of its citizens to permanently set aside warfare as a way to settle differences and resolve conflicts. It is a triumph not just for the citizens of France and Germany but for all of humankind to state with certainty, despite a long history of conflict and bloodshed, that the two countries will never again be at war with each other – as a consequence, in large measure, of over 60 years of economic integration.¹⁸ It says that, in the long run, reasoned cooperation will prevail, signifying a maturity of vision and in statecraft. We can only hope that such maturity and vision will be seen in leadership at the international level.

Second, in the coming together of previously warring nations, one can see a reaffirmation of the universality of certain human values. Two frequent arguments put forward by those opposed to the creation of supranational institutions as a way of addressing the complexities of an increasingly interdependent world are that the world is, in fact, too large and too diverse to be united. The first observation has been made largely irrelevant by the swift progress in the fields of transport and communications, which in the last decades have brought human beings much closer to each other, if not always in spirit, at least physically – a process that has also forced increasingly more of the planet’s population to reexamine many long-held prejudices (although there is still a great deal of work to do in this respect). But, more important, in the post-World War II period more than in any previous era, human beings have begun to find that there is much more that unites them than separates them. Skins may have different shades, different languages may be spoken, and worship may take different forms, but the majority of humankind desires a peaceful world, economic well-being and security, social justice, and a stable environment.¹⁹ The recognition of this sharing of aspirations and values by increasingly greater numbers of people holds great promise for our future and may well be the driving force of further processes of globalization, the occasional setbacks notwithstanding (see Chapter 20 for a discussion of shared global values).²⁰

Third, in some sense, to the extent that the present European experiment has already succeeded, and may move toward further integration in the future, one of the more important implications for the rest of the world may not necessarily be the increased benefits resulting from the recognition of common economic interests, but rather the model it exhibits for the setting up of a yet more secure supranational institutional basis for a lasting peace. What started out in 1957 as a seemingly unambitious project to reduce barriers to trade among six trading nations may, in retrospect, come to be regarded as a significant step toward laying the foundations – and modeling the possible processes – of also establishing a durable international peace. The slow, sometimes frustrating, but steady process of consultation, of finding common ground, of giving and taking, may have enhanced the sensitivity of European leaders to broader concerns. The European Council, the heads of state of Europe, has been meeting two to three times a year since 1975.²¹ Is it a surprise that, ever so slowly and tentatively, they would have come up with some truly constructive initiatives, such as that embodied in the successful Europe 1992 program? Similarly, at the international level, much dialogue has already occurred, and the international community would do well to forge stronger common institutions with progressively enhanced decision-making capacities (as we suggest in this book), and to focus its energy on forging workable common policies to address the pressing, multiple global challenges we face.