climate change
17 Nov 2009
In Defence Of One World Government
Are climate talks a Left-wing power grab? Er, no, writes Aron Paul. Actually there's a global system in place already, and now is when we really need it to do its job
Climate Change "sceptics" have found a new purpose for an old conspiracy theory.
Recently the pages of the Australian newspaper and members of the Liberal Party like "fruit-loop" Senator Nick Minchin have taken their cue from American Republicans once again by erupting into indignation over what they are calling the threat of "One World Government". The Copenhagen process that aims to forge an international treaty to limit carbon pollution is, according to this narrative, a vast Left-wing plot to institute a global government. This global government will, accordingly, undermine national sovereignty and individual freedoms and, most shockingly of all, redistribute wealth from richer to poorer countries. It will even, to Janet Albrechtsen's horror, place government "control over once free markets".
Environmental campaigners, and campaigners for science and reason generally, do not really know how to respond to accusations from the warriors of the Right that they want One World Government. This is partly because the accusation is framed in such a way that it pretends there is not already a global system of governance. The accusation has no bearing whatsoever on reality. Having denied the science of climate change, the Right slips easily into denying the existence or necessity of governance at the highest level of human activity.
The fact that there is already a weak global governance structure in place is due to the foresight and vision of the founders of the United Nations who wished to avoid another world war. Yet if the United Nations did not exist, it would still be necessary to invent it. This is because so much of human economic activity now takes place on a global scale and even our local activity can have global effects. At whatever scale sustained human activity takes place, organisation and law are needed. Wherever interests need representation and moderation and wherever both justice and law need dispensing, institutions of government are necessary.
The primary function of all such governing institutions throughout history is to provide stability. It is stability that allows for human freedom and endevour and thus economic growth and social progress.
Recently the global financial crisis demonstrated the necessity for regulation to underpin economic growth. Governments around the world threw out neo-liberal laissez-faire policies as soon as it became clear that another Great Depression could undermine social and political stability. John Maynard Keynes, whose economic ideas made such a comeback, similarly saw that stability in economic systems needed to come first, as the wild fluctuations of the laissez-faire system had delivered to humanity not only great depressions but a catastrophic world war arising out of the political collapse that comes with sustained instability. Governments and global institutions of governance reacted swiftly and decisively this time around because of the clear historical precedent. It was perhaps the first time humanity had been rescued by its knowledge of history.
For the current carbon pollution crisis there is no such precedent and the competing interests from states at vastly uneven levels of economic development combine to make individual state action much more difficult. It is a clear case where legitimate and effective institutions of global governance are required to dispense and enforce law and justice. Concerted, regulated action enforced by a legitimate and effective global authority is the only way, ironically, to maintain the stability and hence legitimacy of every sovereign state on the planet.
What the Right are effectively doing in attacking "world government" is arguing not that we should have no world government, because such a thing is impossible, but rather that global government should continue to be ineffective and unrepresentative. The Right's loss of power in the world's governments, particularly in their former power base in the United States, means that former neoconservatives are now left playing the role of spoilers on the global stage.
Repeatedly in the democracies, citizens have elected governments on platforms of action on climate change because citizens believe the state's primary function is to protect them from such uncertainty. Even many non-democratic states, like China, also recognise that their legitimacy depends on stability and the progress this makes possible. It is the hope of all humanity that the individual states recognise the need for concerted action and the constitution of an effective system to govern it in the same way that those states have come together in the past to meet common challenges.
In classical political terms what is needed is a covenant between states. A covenant is a formal contract between states binding them not merely to unity, but to a common course of action. That is what is needed from the leaders of the world at Copenhagen and beyond. It is the very origin of the word "federation". Such an international federation is the next step in human progress and the evolution of our politics to the highest level of human activity.
By mobilising against global government, the Right have essentially dealt themselves into the game as nothing less than global anarchists. This is the strange tragedy of "conservatism" today: there is nothing more inherently conservative than seeking to preserve stability and the maintenance of human civilisation as we know it, but they're acting against it. Ironically this is the cause the progressive factions have taken up, while the self-styled conservatives pray for its failure and destruction.
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I should have guessed that, in the lead up to Copenhagen, New Matilda would be really, really fast off the mark to start promoting the ‘New World Order’ or, in other words World Government.
If you want to read all 180 boring pages of it (perfect for a dull weekend) you can get it right here:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/copenhagen_climate_treaty_fram…
Here’s the text from page 18, paragraph 38 and 38a of the draft treaty:
"The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism… The government will be ruled by the COP with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. The current Convention secretariat will operate as such, as appropriate."
The ‘COP’ (love that acronym) is the Conference of the Parties. The COP are the nations who attend the meeting. So on first impressions, the COP will be in charge of the ‘government.’
Of course, that’s how all these things start until they realize it is too cumbersome. That, dare I say it, is where the ‘Executive Board’ comes in. And doubtless the COP will delegate their powers to the Executive Board in order ‘streamline’ processes.
So, we can now ask the question. Is this the beginning of a global government?
It depends on how you picture a government, but it’s looking pretty compelling.
If you think of a government with a parliament or congress with a prime minister or president leading it, then the answer is probably, no.
But if you think of government as a commission or a ‘panel of experts’ which will gradually assume more power over time then that’s exactly what we’re looking at here.
You only have to look at the European Union for the blue print of how these things develop.
I can’t wait.
As the above poster points out, these larger and larger organisations always follow a same template. Some co-operation on a new scale is required, so political units form a tentative executive-run covenant, which then slowly reforms itself into a lumbering unrepresentative wasteful corrupt institution until it either receives democratic reform or is discredited and dissolves.
Why can’t we go straight to the end result? A liberal democratic institution with adequate safeguards?
Vote 1 a bicameral solution for the UN!!!
bravo, support democratic world government:
http://www.worldcitizens.org.au/
Perhaps Izaac Asimov’s Foundation is no longer science fiction.
David Booth
Bywong NSW
The Liberals as Conservatives have long since abandoned anything liberal, but what is it exactly are they trying to preserve? Certainly there’s their pretense that ‘in the beginning’, there was government, not lawless chaos, that stopped anyone from being free. Until the freedom-loving types came along to rescue the oppressed - ‘governed’ that is.
But as George Soros insisted, the latest crisis of free capital has finished forever the notion of the market’s inherent capacity to self-correct. Like anything else in a state of perfect freedom, it moves inexorably towards chaos. Humans just seem to do better in organised systems, and if those systems might just as well be governments. And I don’t know what’s so terrifying about those governments being advised by panels of experts.
But I guess I’m not fearing hard enough?
I don’t have much opinion on this particular issue but I, for one, tend to liken international co-ops to a million monkeys trying to recreate the works of Shakespeares’.
Rwanda, Somalia, Afghanistan… Well, you get the picture anyway.
Devil’s advocate. I NEED A DEVIL’S ADVOCATE OVER HERE.
Right at the moment the article looks like the stuff an over eager teen might write for a Politics 101 class. Can someone do what the writer failed to do and make a case for this? Anyone?
Do we really want to hand over our government to one that includes Italians? Has anyone seen Italian politics recently? And they’re one of the better countries out there!
Perhaps instead of a world government we should set up a Democracy Union first, for all the democratic countries to federate. Of course, that still doesn’t solve the problem of the Italians…
I’d like to see a world government just so it would annoy right-wingers.
Nothing more enjoyable than annoying the right, and nothing easier (except scaring them).
Er, no, the concern of the right is that any such system of world governance over climate, or other matters, will inevitably see power to make decisions about our fate put in the hands of dictatorships, totalitarian states, and failed states - and that they will inevitably have a quite different set of objectives for world government than established democracies.
We’ve seen this happening in the UN, with Gadaffi and other dictators gaining the human rights chair; and more pertinently, it’s happened in the climate change negotiations, which are deliberately designed to favour nations such as China and Russia.
As usual, World Government is at best a useless addition to the governance structures we have, and at worst a tool to diminish the power and influence of liberal democracies.
We should perhaps look at establishing a democratic world government after we’ve gotten rid of all dictatorships and replaced them with fully functioning democracies. But then - why bother? If all the nations function perfectly well as autonomous entities, then there’s no obvious need to establish a further layer of governnance on top of that. TimT
And I would have expected ecoeng to be dead set against the NWO.
I cannot see anything wrong with Aron Paul’s suggestion of a covenant (although I don’t like the word as it sounds so biblical - but that should be easily fixed).
Planet Earth operates as "Gaia", in a holistic way, and does not care about individual groups of human staking out their own turf.
Humankind has created this mess collectively, so we now have to solve it collectively. We have to take the negativity out of the words "world government". It has connotations of international communism or of one country practising hegemony over others, imposing values and morals (just like religions do). That is not the covetted One World. The One World we have to embrace is the realization that we share this planet with fellow humans and millions of other species and we have to live in balance and environmental harmony with the limited natural resources, after all there is nowhere else to go (even if they have found water on the Moon!).
ecoeng, I looked through a good bit of the document some time ago - it’s poorly written, poorly organised and has so many alternative texts as to render it almost impossible to read. I venture, though, that the ‘government’ in the passage you refer to, as I said to someone else, is actually ‘governance’. It makes much more sense in that context. (Also remember English might not have been the first language of some of the drafters.)
Anyway, it’s either that or we’re emerging from the conference with a rubber stamp for world government where powerful states hand over their sovereignty and wealth to the weak. Er …
http://philannetta.blogspot.com
"Concerted, regulated action enforced by a legitimate and effective global authority is the only way, ironically, to maintain the stability and hence legitimacy of every sovereign state on the planet."
Sounds like the United Nations. It has not worked to citizens satisfaction because member governments do not believe the principles and have little interest in consensus.
And some bully always reaches for the veto for self-aggrandisement.
Thanks for the interesting comments and discussion. I think democratisation of global governance institutions could be a vital step in the right direction in terms of improving their accountability, representativeness and above all their legitimacy. However, it would not necessarily improve its effectiveness, for which an ‘expert’ bureaucracy, and above all the agency of state governments and elites and local institutions will always be necessary.
The Right says it is about individualism, when it’s really about joint exploitation of the environment with its common capitalistic cry of ‘growth at all costs’, as it continues on its merry way destroying life and ecosystems through over development of our precious planet.
A world governing body that could monitor and grade ALL land use and help reduce and control predicted population growth could be life saving for earth, including all the other life forms with which we share this planet.
My vision of a World Government would put the environment before the economy.
Because what’s most frightening about this world (other than terrorists) is the Right’s push for increased population growth because it means more development and capital growth.
This development inevitably leads to an increase in land clearing, something a World Government would hopefully ban or severely limit in the current climate.
You want a good reason why a global government based on the UN would be a bad idea? Because the number of nations in the UN to have a majority only accounts for 10% of the world population. Sound very fair to you? Whatever happened to the right of national self-determination? If the UN became a global government voting for what we want to do would be like Tibet voting for independence against everyone in China.
Oh and Aron if you think social democracy is ever the answer than your number one refuting fact is the Rudd government stimulus plan. We spent more money as a proportion of GDP - 9% - than any other nation in the world and by the treasury’s own calculations it only contributed to 0.6% economic growth. Wow, all that money and that’s all we got? Government really is the answer! How else could we waste billions of dollars so efficiently?
Timhtrain,
"Er, no, the concern of the right is that any such system of world governance over climate, or other matters, will inevitably see power to make decisions about our fate put in the hands of dictatorships, totalitarian states, and failed states - and that they will inevitably have a quite different set of objectives for world government than established democracies."
So according to this logic we should be *more* worried about dictators in Europe now rather than back when they were a bunch of individual states? Just look at the history of Europe over the 20th Century. The individual nations scenario didn’t work out so well for them then. I for one feel safer with the EU as a stonger, more transparent example of international government. The passing of the recent Lisbon treaty shows nations willing to sacrifice *some* sovereignty for the overall good and prosperity of their citizens, and solving problems common to all.
Global warming, global peak oil, global food production crisis, global freshwater crisis, global ecosystem destruction and resource constraints and disease vectors and OVERPOPULATION are all bearing down upon us. Surely if Australia’s Federation could be formed (back in the 1900’s) to consolidate the various colonies under a unified Federal government across Australiasia, and surely if the EU can be formed to solve problems at the European level, then surely in this time of GLOBAL threats and challenges we need truly effective GLOBAL mechanisms for solving them?
I would feel safer if an EU styled World Federation were enacted. The UN is all we have for now, where diplomats often do dirty deals behind closed doors.
If Tim is REALLY worried about dictactors, then surely he’d like to see a World Federation where we all get to vote for members of the World Parliament, and where international & democratic deals are done in the open scrutiny of the world’s media.
When even free-market publications like "The Economist" are raising the need for international governance mechanisms and legal frameworks in line with the new multinational, globalised economy we have, then one knows that Tim’s paranoid view and suspicious ilk are outdated and longing for the good old wars of yesteryear.
Actually Eclipse Tim makes the point that dictatorships will have an equal say in creating laws that effect us. It also raises the worry that when you concentrate too much power in a centralized body there will be no-one to turn to against it if it becomes undemocratic.
Eclipse, Australia trying to have its voice heard in a global government regarding matters that effect us is like Tibet having a vote on being free against the whole of china.