Originally published on the CGS blog on April 24, 2015.
The people of the earth [have] agreed that the advancement of man in spiritual excellence and physical welfare is the common goal of mankind…that therefore the age of nations must end, and the era of humanity begin.
—Preamble to the Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution
Elisabeth Mann Borgese (24 April 1918 – 8 February 2002) was a strong-willed woman. She had to come out from under the shadow of both her father, the German writer and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, and her husband, Italian literary critic and political analyst Giuseppe Antonio Borgese.
Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain was a monument of world literature between the two World Wars, and Mann felt that he represented the best of German culture against the uncultured hordes of the Nazis. He took himself and his role very seriously, believing that his family existed basically to facilitate his thinking and writing.
G.A. Borgese regularly lectured at various universities on the evils of Mussolini. A leading literary critic and professor in Milan, he left Italy for the United States in 1931 when Mussolini announced that an oath of allegiance to the Fascist State would be required of all Italian professors. For Borgese, with a vast culture including the classic Greeks, the Renaissance Italians, and the 19th-century nationalist writers, Mussolini was an evil caricature which too few Americans recognized as a destructive force in his own right, and not just as the fifth wheel of Hitler’s armed car.
G.A. Borgese met Elisabeth Mann on a lecture tour at Princeton, and despite being close to Thomas Mann in age, the couple married very quickly. Elisabeth moved to the University of Chicago and was soon caught up in Borgese’s efforts to help the transition from the Age of Nations to the Age of Humanity.
For Borgese, the world was at a watershed period. The Age of Nations—with nationalism that could be a liberating force in the 19th century, as with the unification of Italy—had come to a close with the First World War. From then on, nationalism became only the symbol of death. However, the Age of Humanity, which was the next step in human evolution, had not yet come into being, in part because too many people were still caught in the shadows of the previous age.
Since University of Chicago scientists had played an important role in the coming of the Atomic Age, G.A. Borgese and Richard McKeon, a cultural anthropologist and Dean of the University felt that the University should take a major role in drafting a world constitution for the Atomic Age. Thus, the Committee to Frame a World Constitution was created in 1946. To re-capture the hopes and fears of this period, it is useful to read Rexford Tugwell’s A Chronicle of Jeopardy. The book contains Tugwell’s reflections on the years 1946-1954, written each year in August to mark the A-bombing of Hiroshima.
Elisabeth had become the secretary of the Committee and the editor of its journal Common Cause. G.A. Borgese published a commentary on the Constitution, dealing especially with his ideas on the nature of justice. It was the last thing he wrote, and the book Foundations of the World Republic was published shortly after his death. In 1950, the Korean War started. Hope for a radical transformation of the UN faded. Weary and disappointed, Borgese and his wife went to live in Florence, where he died in 1952.
The drafters of the World Constitution went on to other tasks. Robert Hutchins left the University of Chicao to head a “think tank”—Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions—taking some of the drafters, including Elisabeth, with him. She edited a booklet on the Preliminary Draft with a useful introduction, A Constitution for the World. However, much of the energy of the Center went into the protection of freedom of thought and expression in the US, at the time under attack by the primitive anti-communism of then-Senator Joe McCarthy.
In the mid-1950s, from world federalists and world citizens came various proposals for UN control of areas not under national control. Elisabeth Mann Borgese thus turned her attention and energy to the law of the sea.
In 1967, Ambassador Arvid Pardo of Malta proposed at the UN General Assembly that the seabed be internationalized as the Common Heritage of Mankind, so as to put it outside the control of the technologically-advanced States. The seabed was to be exploited for the benefit of the entire world, the common heritage requiring a system of autonomous management. The Malta proposal led to the 1974 start of the Law of the Sea conference.
As the UN Law of the Sea Conference continued through the 1970s (sometimes in New York, sometimes in Geneva), Elisabeth was active in seminars and conferences with the delegates, showing that a strong treaty on the law of the sea would be a big step forward for humanity. Many of the issues raised during the negotiations leading to the Convention, especially the concept of the Exclusive Economic Zone—fought by Elisabeth but championed by Ambassador Alan Beesley of Canada—are with us today in the China sea disputes.
While the resulting Convention on the Law of the Sea has not revolutionized world politics as some of us hoped in the early 1970s, it is an important building block in the development of world law. We are grateful for the values and the energy that Elisabeth Mann Borgese embodied.
