TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/072092/0720unk.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 11.2 KB | 234 lines

                                                                                AMERICA ABROAD, Page 70

The Birth of the Global Nation


By Strobe Talbott


    The human drama, whether played out in history books or
headlines, is often not just a confusing spectacle but a
spectacle about confusion. The big question these days is, Which
political forces will prevail, those stitching nations together
or those tearing them apart?

    Here is one optimist's reason for believing unity will
prevail over disunity, integration over disintegration. In fact,
I'll bet that within the next hundred years (I'm giving the
world time for setbacks and myself time to be out of the betting
game, just in case I lose this one), nationhood as we know it
will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global
authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century
-- "citizen of the world" -- will have assumed real meaning by
the end of the 21st.

    All countries are basically social arrangements,
accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how
permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact
they are all artificial and temporary. Through the ages, there
has been an overall trend toward larger units claiming
sovereignty and, paradoxically, a gradual diminution of how much
true sovereignty any one country actually has.

    The forerunner of the nation was a prehistoric band
clustered around a fire beside a river in a valley. Its members
had a language, a set of supernatural beliefs and a repertoire
of legends about their ancestors. Eventually they forged
primitive weapons and set off over the mountain, mumbling
phrases that could be loosely translated as having something to
do with "vital national interests" and "manifest destiny." When
they reached the next valley, they massacred and enslaved some
weaker band of people they found clustered around some smaller
fire and thus became the world's first imperialists.

    Empires were a powerful force for obliterating natural and
demographic barriers and forging connections among far-flung
parts of the world. The British left their system of civil
service in India, Kenya and Guyana, while the Spaniards,
Portuguese and French spread Roman Catholicism to almost every
continent.

    Empire eventually yielded to the nation-state, made up
primarily of a single tribe. China, France, Germany and Japan
are surviving examples. Yet each of them too is the consequence
of a centuries-long process of accretion. It took the shedding
of much blood in many valleys for Normandy, Brittany and Gascony
to become part of France.

    Today fewer than 10% of the 186 countries on earth are
ethnically homogeneous. The rest are multinational states. Most
of them have pushed their boundaries outward, often until they
reached the sea. That's how California became part of the U.S.
and the Kamchatka Peninsula part of Russia.

    The main goal driving the process of political expansion
and consolidation was conquest. The big absorbed the small, the
strong the weak. National might made international right. Such a
world was in a more or less constant state of war.

    From time to time the best minds wondered whether this
wasn't a hell of a way to run a planet; perhaps national
sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all. Dante in the
14th century, Erasmus in the 16th and Grotius in the 17th all
envisioned international law as a means of overcoming the
natural tendency of states to settle their differences by force.

    In the 18th century the Enlightenment -- represented by
Rousseau in France, Hume in Scotland, Kant in Germany, Paine and
Jefferson in the U.S. -- gave rise to the idea that all human
beings are born equal and should, as citizens, enjoy certain
basic liberties and rights, including that of choosing their
leaders. Once there was a universal ideology to govern the
conduct of nations toward their own people, it was more
reasonable to imagine a compact governing nations' behavior
toward one another. In 1795 Kant advocated a "peaceful league
of democracies."

    But it has taken the events in our own wondrous and
terrible century to clinch the case for world government. With
the advent of electricity, radio and air travel, the planet has
become smaller than ever, its commercial life freer, its nations
more interdependent and its conflicts bloodier. The price of
settling international disputes by force was rapidly becoming
too high for the victors, not to mention the vanquished. That
conclusion should have been clear enough at the battle of the
Somme in 1916; by the destruction of Hiroshima in 1945, it was
unavoidable.

    Once again great minds thought alike: Einstein, Gandhi,
Toynbee and Camus all favored giving primacy to interests higher
than those of the nation. So, finally, did many statesmen. Each
world war inspired the creation of an international
organization, the League of Nations in the 1920s and the United
Nations in the '40s.

    The plot thickened with the heavy-breathing arrival on the
scene of a new species of ideology -- expansionist
totalitarianism -- as perpetrated by the Nazis and the Soviets.
It threatened the very idea of democracy and divided the world.
The advocacy of any kind of world government became highly
suspect. By 1950 "one-worlder" was a term of derision for those
suspected of being woolly-headed naifs, if not
crypto-communists.

    At the same time, however, Stalin's conquest of Eastern
Europe spurred the Western democracies to form NATO, history's
most ambitious, enduring and successful exercise in collective
security. The U.S. and the Soviet Union also scared each other
into negotiating nuclear-arms-control treaties that set in place
two vital principles: adversary states have a mutual interest
in eliminating the danger of strategic surprise, and each
legitimately has a say in the composition of the other's arsenal
of last resort. The result was further dilution of national
sovereignty and a useful precedent for the management of
relations between nuclear-armed rivals in the future.

    The cold war also saw the European Community pioneer the
kind of regional cohesion that may pave the way for globalism.
Meanwhile, the free world formed multilateral financial
institutions that depend on member states' willingness to give
up a degree of sovereignty. The International Monetary Fund can
virtually dictate fiscal policies, even including how much tax
a government should levy on its citizens. The General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade regulates how much duty a nation can charge
on imports. These organizations can be seen as the
protoministries of trade, finance and development for a united
world.

    The internal affairs of a nation used to be off limits to
the world community. Now the principle of "humanitarian
intervention" is gaining acceptance. A turning point came in
April 1991, shortly after Saddam Hussein's withdrawal from
Kuwait, when the U.N. Security Council authorized allied troops
to assist starving Kurds in northern Iraq.

    Globalization has also contributed to the spread of
terrorism, drug trafficking, AIDS and environmental degradation.
But because those threats are more than any one nation can cope
with on its own, they constitute an incentive for international
cooperation.

    However limited its accomplishments, last month's Earth
Summit in Rio signified the participants' acceptance of what
Maurice Strong, the main impresario of the event, called "the
transcending sovereignty of nature": since the by-products of
industrial civilization cross borders, so must the authority to
deal with them.

    Collective action on a global scale will be easier to
achieve in a world already knit together by cables and airwaves.
The fax machine had much to do with the downfall of tyrants in
Eastern Europe. Two years ago, I was assigned an interpreter in
Estonia who spoke with a slight Southern accent because she had
learned her English watching Dallas, courtesy of TV signals
beamed over the border from neighboring Finland. The Cosby Show,
aired on South African television, has no doubt helped erode
apartheid.

    This ideological and cultural blending strikes some
observers as too much of a good thing. Writing in the Atlantic,
Rutgers political scientist Benjamin Barber laments what he
calls "McWorld." He also identifies the countertrend, the
re-emergence of nationalism in its ugliest, most divisive and
violent form.

    Yet Azerbaijan, Moldova and Czechoslovakia were part of
the world's last, now deceased empire. Their breakup may turn
out to be the old business of history, not the wave of the
future. National self-assertiveness in the West can be mighty
ugly, especially in its more extreme Irish and Basque versions.
But when Scots, Quebecois, Catalans and Bretons talk
separatism, they are, in the main, actually renegotiating their
ties to London, Ottawa, Madrid and Paris.

    They are the disputatious representatives of a larger,
basically positive phenomenon: a devolution of power not only
upward toward supranational bodies and outward toward
commonwealths and common markets but also downward toward freer,
more autonomous units of administration that permit distinct
societies to preserve their cultural identities and govern
themselves as much as possible. That American buzz word
empowerment -- and the European one, subsidiarity -- is being
defined locally, regionally and globally all at the same time.

    Humanity has discovered, through much trial and horrendous
error, that differences need not divide. Switzerland is made up
of four nationalities crammed into an area considerably smaller
than what used to be Yugoslavia. The air in the Alps is no more
conducive to comity than the air in the Balkans. Switzerland has
thrived, while Yugoslavia has failed because of what Kant
realized 200 years ago: to be in peaceful league with one
another, people -- and peoples -- must have the benefits of
democracy.

    The best mechanism for democracy, whether at the level of
the multinational state or that of the planet as a whole, is
not an all-powerful Leviathan or centralized superstate, but a
federation, a union of separate states that allocate certain
powers to a central government while retaining many others for
themselves.

    Federalism has already proved the most successful of all
political experiments, and organizations like the World
Federalist Association have for decades advocated it as the
basis for global government. Federalism is largely an American
invention. For all its troubles, including its own serious bout
of secessionism 130 years ago and the persistence of various
forms of tribalism today, the U.S. is still the best example of
a multinational federal state. If that model does indeed work
globally, it would be the logical extension of the Founding
Fathers' wisdom, therefore a special source of pride for a world
government's American constituents.

    As for humanity as a whole, if federally united, we won't
really be so very far from those much earlier ancestors, the
ones huddled around that primeval fire beside the river; it's
just that by then the whole world will be our valley.