The meeting began with a seated dinner at the Holiday Inn Metrodome. There 4th district Congresswoman Betty McCollum , delivered the keynote address, touching on many of CGS’ short-term concerns. This was followed by a presentation by the evening’s honoree, long-time WFA/CGS member and supporter, Harlan Smith. His remarks were partly autobiographical, laying a background for the long-term vision that formed the heart of his message. Mr. Smith was the originator and principal funder of the annual Builders of a Better World student competition. Originally an essay contest, its focus was subsequently changed to flash video and rap poetry; and impressive videos were shown of winning entries in both categories.

Saturday’s program was devoted mainly to panels on substantive issues. It commenced with a short film focused on Richard Hudson’s Binding Triad proposal for reform of the UN General Assembly and Minnesota Board member Joe Schwartzberg ’s proposal for weighted voting in the Security Council. Narrated by Myron (Mike) Kronisch , Vice-Chair of the Center for War/Peace Studies, the film also included relevant messages from Walter Cronkite, widely regarded as the “most trusted man in America,” and UN guru, Professor Ed Luck. The film provided an excellent segue to a panel on “Weighted Voting at the United Nations ” at which Prof. Schwartzberg and Mr. Kronisch were the principal speakers. For those who were interested, free copies of the CW/PS DVD on weighted voting and of two of Prof. Schwartzberg's relevant publications were available.

Two more members of our state Board, Bharat Parekh and Gail Hughes, were the presenters in the panel, “Building a Just and Lasting Peace from a Global South Perspective .” Bharat, a physicist and development consultant, made a powerful case for supporting a Global Marshall Plan that would go beyond the modest goals set for achieving the UN’s modest Millennium Development Goals. Ms. Hughes, a professor of sociology, laid out two contrasting visions of the global context for development of the global South, one identified as modernization theory and the other, which she favored, as dependency theory.

A panel on the “International Criminal Court & a United Nations Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS)” featured two of the most prominent figures in the promotion of global solutions, William (Bill) Pace , Executive Director of the World Federalist Movement and Chair of the International NGO Coalition for the ICC, and Don Kraus , Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of CGS. The creation of the ICC has been hailed as the most important institutional reform in global governance since the establishment of the UN; while support for UNEPS – an internationally recruited, highly trained, rapid deployment force under direct UN command – has gained sufficient momentum to find a place on the Congressional agenda.

In a session entitled “Thinking Ahead ” the audience was treated to a memorable bravura address by Tad Daley , a Writing Fellow for International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Focusing on what the world might be like in the year 2057, Mr. Daley debunked the realpolitik argument that war was an inescapable condition of human existence and made a persuasive case that it was within human power to abolish major armed conflict and bring about the unification of our planet within the next half-century.

A session on “Creating a Nuclear Weapons-Free World ” provided a novel and lively departure from a lecture format. Didier Jacobs , Special Advisor to Oxfam America, led the audience – simulating the US Senate – in an interactive exercise in which individuals were asked to discuss the pros and cons in respect to a number of thorny nuclear issues likely to come before the Senate in the years ahead, especially relating to the arguably anachronistic 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty.

On Saturday evening we watched and then discussed the heart-rending, gut-wrenching film, The Devil Came on Horseback , a powerful documentary on the on-going Darfur genocide, by former US Marine Captain Brian Steidle. For commentary, see Prof. Schwartzberg's op-ed .

Sunday morning’s program consisted mainly of book discussions by the authors of two new books, Global Democracy: The Struggle for Political and Civil Rights in the 21st Century , by Didier Jacobs ; and Political Globalization: A New Vision of Federal World Government , by James Yunker , a professor of Economics at Western Illinois University. Both are highly original works and merit study by individuals searching for new paths for major global reform.

Text of Thinking Ahead Coming Soon!

When I was working for the WFA of New England in eastern Massachusetts during the late 80s, I had a mini-epiphany one evening at a traffic light on a busy highway. I felt amazed that a puny electric light could bring huge trucks to a halt and let mothers cross the street with baby carriages. I sensed that what the world does not have as a whole is that feeling of easy regulation and accommodation you find in a well-ordered community. At least between nations, and within nations where government is weak or corrupt, people violate each other’s space in all kinds of ways. In places like Iraq and Darfur, babies and mothers are not safe. Even in relatively safe places, we can run roughshod over our common environments and wreak havoc on other species.

My friend Bill Wells in New England said that government does not exist to make people love each other but to keep us from each other’s throats. What we need on the world level to begin to live together and take care of our planet is the kind of relative order you see over huge territories like the European Union – which was still fighting World War II just 65 years ago – and North America, which in Cromwell’s day was divided among warring Indian tribes and warring European colonies.

Today’s speakers have shown us the outline of a pathway to this saner and more humane world. It does not take transformation of human nature but more institutions like that traffic light. Ron/Mike/Joe showed us the potential of the UN to become a global legislature, Don/Bill the beginning of a global judiciary and police force, Bharat/Gail what the affluent and poorer halves of the world must do together to make global peace possible on economic grounds. Didier in his discussion with you asked how to make the world safer from apocalyptic war, Tad asked what that world might look like with war abolished and how to start moving there.

As we go back to our communities after this meeting with resources like the weighted voting DVD and with a national election on the horizon, let’s think how we can generate dialogue in our communities and with politicians and candidates. Let’s work on finding ways to move the US back from dependence on war as a solution and from selfish, short-sighted economics toward a larger, longer-term vision that accepts responsibility for all those baby carriages on our vulnerable and very finite planet.

Thank you for coming today.

How, one wonders, could the so-called “civilized” people of the world, whoever they may be, allow genocide to occur anywhere on our planet? Time after time – following the Holocaust during Hitler’s reign in Germany, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, the 100-day 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and several genocidal wars in the former Yugoslavia – we uttered the words, “Never again!” But it meant little. When faced with the choice of acting effectively or joining in a collective wringing one’s hands on the sidelines, the UN, which could have asserted its legal right to intervene, failed to do so, rationalizing inaction by citing considerations of national sovereignty. But the failure of the UN, properly seen, was the failure of its members, especially the United States and the four other permanent members of the Security Council. Such inaction was and remains inexcusable. It is doubly inexcusable in the case of Darfur and the little reported, drawn out genocidal activity in the Congo because it continues in the wake of the adoption by the world’s leaders of the Responsibility to Protect (“R2P”) resolution at the UN summit conference in 2005 and the reaffirmation of that resolution by the SC in April 2006. R2P states that all states have a primary obligation to protect their own populations; but, if they fail to do so, the international community has the responsibility to act to do so.

The American media and most diplomats conveniently put the blame on China for UN inaction on Darfur, not recognizing the fact that China abstained, rather than exercising its veto power, when a vote authorizing intervention in Sudan was taken in the Security Council. This is simply a way of avoiding responsibility. Sadly, our government gets away with this tactic because it is not pressured to do the right thing by a significant segment of the American people. The silence of American citizens is no less blameworthy than the dilatory actions of our government. Both are complicity in evil. Unless our representatives in Congress hear from us, the savaging of Darfur will continue unabated. Do your part. Call or write your representatives in both houses of Congress and call for urgent action on Darfur, and on the Congo as well. It’s a matter of life or death.

Alas, Darfur is not the only urgent problem facing our planet. There are so many that one is tempted to throw up one’s hands in despair at the sheer magnitude of the tasks before us. “How much can a single person do?” one might ask. The answer almost always is “more.” Few of us, this writer included, are doing as much as we are capable of doing. And it is a mistake to suppose that we are acting alone. There are coalitions of citizens to address every one of the problems that confront them, among them our own organization, Citizens for Global Solutions. Become active. Silence and inaction amount to complicity. The world needs you.

Thank you Scott for the kind introduction.

I initially came to the United States for graduate studies in public policy. I recall that it was in my second class that I learned about the concept of framing an issue.

Framing a policy issue is to communicate about it from the perspective that is most attractive to the people you try to convince. The arguments that are most persuasive to you are not necessarily the most persuasive to others. Reframing an issue is therefore like talking about it in a foreign language: it is the same subject, but it sounds very different. Reframing an issue is like wearing tainted glasses: you look at the same thing, but it has different colors.

Well, one could say that this book… is all about reframing world federalism in a way that is most relevant to Americans today.

The title is Global Democracy. It could have been World Federalism instead, but I chose not to use that title for the same reasons as the World Federalist Association changed its name.

The sub-title gives the new frame through which I write about world federalism. It is: The Struggle for Political and Civil Rights in the 21st Century. World federalism is a civil rights issue.

The usual frame for world federalism is the creation of a world government. But who wants a world government? Most people in this room. But very few people beyond that door over there. To most people, world government sounds scary, overbearing, authoritarian.

On the other hand, who supports civil rights? Well, everybody supports civil rights. Nobody is going to argue against them. So if we manage to frame world federalism as a civil rights issue, we have made a major breakthrough.

How do I manage to frame world federalism as a civil rights issue? It is very easy. I just need to resort to one little trick. And that is: I assert that we already have world government.

World government is not utopia. It is reality. World government is not futuristic. It is history; it is a part of our historical heritage…

Waaoow! How come we have not noticed? We have not noticed the existence of our world government because the United Nations system does not quite look like other governments we are familiar with. There are many kinds of governments.

Our world government is not a communist regime like Cuba. It is not an absolute monarchy cum theocracy like Saudi Arabia.

It is not a medieval empire, although it has some resemblance to that: It has a Byzantine structure. Its authority is contested in many parts of the world. And its geographic boundaries are not clear as some countries are members of one international institution but not the other.

Our world government is not a liberal democracy either, although again it has some resemblance to it: The UN system respects freedom of speech and association. It consists of modern bureaucracies.

The United Nations system is none of the above and yet it is a government in the simple sense that it is an organization that does public policy. That is my definition of a government anyway: an organization that does public policy.

Take the World Trade Organization, for instance. The WTO has adopted 30,000 pages of legal text, which its member-states must respect in their entirety. These pages contain very precise economic regulations that greatly influence national economies. The WTO even has a quasi-judicial body to arbitrate disputes of implementation, and can take sanctions against states that do not respect the rules. Why on earth don’t we call that a federal world government? Or a branch of it, anyway.

I invite you to make the following thought experiment. Let us imagine a moment that the United Nations General Assembly was directly elected by the people. And let’s assume that it had co-decision power on all matters currently dealt with by the UN Security Council, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank. So all the decisions that these bodies now make would also need to be approved by the directly-elected General Assembly.

Well, I think that if that were the case most people in the streets would agree that, of course, we have a world government, and Joe Blogh is my representative. Everything else in the UN system could remain the same. If only there were elections, people would recognize their world government, because the concept of elections is very closely associated with the concept of government.

But of course, not all governments are elected. What we have is a world government that is not democratic. It is an apartheid regime. We live under global apartheid. Americans and Europeans make decisions, and the rest of the world must follow the rules, without voice. That is plainly unfair, and here is where the civil and political rights frame comes into the picture.

So my book is about the struggle for political equality in the 21st century. The struggle for nationals of poor nations to have equal say in decisions that affect all humankind. There are global policies on trade, on climate change, on nuclear proliferation and so on and so forth. I claim that these policies should be decided according to the “one person, one vote” rule. And I argue that it is realistic to expect that to happen by the end of this century.

I compare this struggle with previous civil rights struggle, like the movements for women’s suffrage in the 19th and early 20th centuries, or the working class movement for suffrage around the same period, or the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa.

In the first part of the book, I criticize current political science on the subject of global governance. I discuss concepts like governance and government, democracy, federalism and confederalism, or sovereignty, and define them in ways that allow us to view the world through a whole new frame, the frame of global democracy.

In the second part, I present a picture of:

• how our world government could democratize incrementally in the coming century,
  
• how that would improve its effectiveness to cope withck in 1983 this century’s global challenges,
• and last but not least, what political forces could drive the democratization process.

I liked Tad Daley’s story of the East Berliners who, back in 1983, imagined a future without wall a hundred years later. Back in 1983, it was impossible to discern the political forces that would lead to the collapse of the Berlin Wall only six years later. But today, it is possible to discern the political forces that might bring about global democracy, and that is the story I tell in the book.

I do not have time to say much more about the book itself right now. Of course, I invite you to read it.

Instead, I would like to use the second half of my speech to draw some lessons from the book for Citizens for Global Solutions.

A first lesson is that we can congratulate ourselves!

For sixty years, the goals of the world federalist movement have been the creation of a democratic and federal world government. We are half-way there: we have a federal world government, albeit not a democratic one. We can be proud of being half-way in our journey. Let’s pat ourselves on the back...

A second lesson is that we should be careful about how we communicate.

We should not talk about world government in the future tense. We should talk about it in the present tense. That way, we will no longer be perceived as utopians, as we too often are. We will be perceived as relevant.

Here is another thought experiment I invite you to do. Let’s imagine that CGS convinced many other NGOs to call the UN, the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank etc. “our global government”. Then, soon enough, journalists will pick up that phrase. And then people will start reading about their global government in the daily paper. “Today, our global government decided X on climate change.” “Today, our global government failed to make any decision on Darfur.” Then people will start asking: “Wait a minute, did I vote for these guys?”... And the idea of global democracy will take root.

The third lesson is that it is easier to mobilize people against an actual and current harm than in favor of some benefits that they may get in the future.

It is easier to mobilize people against the global apartheid than in favor of a stronger global government.

Because of the “creation of a world government frame”, CGS has so far focused its energy on extending the reach of our global government. It focuses on “more global government” rather than on “fairer global government”.

The CGS priorities we talked about yesterday: the Law of the Sea, the International Criminal Court, and UNEPS, are all examples of “more global government”. (However, some issues are relevant to both “more” and “fairer” global government.)

By contrast, there is a bog movement out there – the so-called anti-globalization movement – that puts more emphasis on “fairer” global government. They challenge the legitimacy of the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank rather than trying to extend their reach.

There is also the peace movement, which mobilizes people against the injustice in Iraq.

Some Americans lose their jobs because of WTO rules.

Some Americans lose their sons because of the American veto in the Security Council, without which the Security Council might have explicitly outlawed the war against Iraq, which might have prevented that war.

Our global government does affect the lives of Americans a lot. In some cases, it hurts them. And they do take notice.

No wonder then, that trade unions, environmental organizations, and NGOs like the one I work for, Oxfam, have managed to mobilize millions of Americans against unfair trade agreements.

No wonder then, that the peace movement has mobilized millions of Americans against the war in Iraq, and has managed to have a real impact on Congressional elections.

By contrast, it is very hard to mobilize Americans in favor of the Law of the Sea or UNEPS, or other good causes to expand the reach of our global government.

I know that CGS’ resources are very limited. And working on issues like the ICC or UNEPS is a niche for our small organization. UNEPS is an issue for which CGS can actually exercise leadership within the NGO community. By contrast, CGS’ voice would be barely audible in the debate between free traders and protectionists.

But think about it in this way.

The organization I am working for, Oxfam, is one of the largest global campaigning group. We advocate on international trade, international finance, climate change, human rights issues, and on many conflicts around the world. And yet, we do not havea vision for global governance in the 21st century.

We try to influence scores of global public policies. And yet, we barely try to influence global decision-making processes.

Amnesty International, Greenpeace, the AFL-CIO, Peace Action, you name it: many large US or global advocacy organizations work daily on important global public policy issues, without a vision for our global government.

It is hard to convince the Senate to ratify the Law of the Sea.

But it could be easier to convince other progressive organizations that they ought to pay attention to global decision-making processes as well as to global public policies.

CGS is at a critical strategic juncture. I know that we have very scarce resources. And yet I take this opportunity to propose devoting some of these resources to a program that would specifically target big, progressive campaigning organizations to:

• teach them how to talk about our global government,
  
• help them analyze how their current advocacy is likely to affect our global government,
  
• encourage them to develop a vision for our global government in the 21st century.

I believe NGOs ought to challenge the World Bank or the WTO. But the way they do it can be either constructive or destructive. It can point to global democracy or to a reversal to global anarchy. CGS could play a very positive role of bringing along other organizations to consider how advocacy on their pet issue can impact the broader project of building global democracy.

And of course, my book provides the intellectual framework necessary to do this… this is a self-serving recommendation.

The fourth and last lesson I propose for CGS is that we ought to be more critical and aggressive toward our world government.

So far, CGS has always adopted a quite ambiguous attitude toward the UN system. On the one hand, we are very supportive of the UN. On the other, we call for lots of reforms to strengthen both its legitimacy and effectiveness.

In theory, there is no contradiction here. We support global solutions to global problems. So we support the current global institutions that can deliver such solutions, and at the same time, we call for reform, or for new institutions to promote solutions where current institutions fail.

In practice, however, there often is a contradiction. It is hard to call for reform of an institution, and at the same time shield it and cocoon it. If you want to reform an institution, it is better to create a sense of crisis around it.

For example, yesterday morning, Joe Schwartzberg presented his ideas to reform the UN Security Council. The rationale was that today’s voting structure is blatantly unfair. In the afternoon, however, there was a strong sense among this group that the US should follow the UN’s lead on the issue of nuclear proliferation by Iran and other nations.

Am I the only one who spots a contradiction here? In the morning, we call the Security Council unfair; in the afternoon, we say we should follow its lead?

I say, if Joe’s proposals are ever to be adopted, that will happen only after the Security Council faces a few more crises like the Iraq crisis.

We should not fear another showdown at the Security Council. We should look forward to it.

Instead, whenever the UN is seriously challenged by nationalists like Jesse Helms or John Bolton, we run to the rescue.

The point I would like to impress on you is that not only we already have a world government, but also that world government is here to stay. For it is backed by very powerful interests.

The Helms and Boltons of this world have been very assertive, and they have scared us. But they are a minority. They are reactionaries. They are not the mainstream.

Both Helms and Bolton are now retired. Their friends have much less sway on the second Bush Administration than they had on the first one. And they are likely to be even more marginalized or completely absent in the next administration. They will keep a blocking minority in the Senate for some time. But they are not powerful enough to bring the UN system down.

There are very powerful forces supporting the status quo in the UN system. I talked about the 30,000 pages of legal text of the WTO earlier. Well, global business stands squarely behind them. Think of more powerful interests than that!

The United Nations is not about to collapse. Most if not all national governments want it to continue to play the roles it plays. The US public is also pro-UN by large margins. The next President of the United States just cannot ignore that. Even Bush no longer ignores it.

So the UN system does not need CGS to run to its rescue. To the contrary, it needs reform. And for that, CGS should join other political forces, like Oxfam and many other organizations that are part of the global movement for social justice. Together, we must challenge the legitimacy of the system, and challenge it hard.

As long as the world federalist frame was to create a world government, it made sense to cocoon the global institutions that did exist. But if the world federalist frame becomes civil rights, we should challenge that government vigorously.

If the powers that be eventually faced the choice between reforming the UN or letting it collapse, I bet they would reform it, because they need it, and know it. So let’s bring on the crisis that will force that choice!

I will end with that provocative proposition, and now welcome a vibrant debate.

Thank you very much for your attention.