Originally published on the CGS blog on January 30, 2017.
CGS was a robust participant in the historic Women’s March on Washington on January 21st, the day after the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45th American president.
CGS, of course, is a nonpartisan organization. But as President-Elect, Mr. Trump indicated that he intended to increase the American nuclear arsenal “until the world comes to its senses,” and even tweeted the words, “Let it be an arms race.”
Few things could be more contrary to the CGS vision of enduring world peace through enforceable world law. In the short term, we know that a renewed nuclear arms race will diminish American national security and everyone else’s as well. In the long term, our goal of something like a world republic would bring an end forever to perpetual arms competition, the forever arms race, Thomas Hobbes’s permanent “war of all against all.” Our dream is that China and America will interact tomorrow, in a Federal Republic of Earth, in much the same way that California and Texas relate today within the political community that is the United States of America. Californians and Texans can be quite different! But California and Texas don’t fight wars. And they don’t spend billions of dollars on weapons of death, every single year, on and on into the dim mists of perpetuity, to “deter” the other from starting one.
So CGS joined a coalition at the Women’s March spearheaded by our friends at Women’s Action for New Directions. We helped to craft the slogan adopted by this coalition: “Women for the Human Race, Not a New Arms Race.” https://m.facebook.com/events/283920202010752/
That first clause is as important as the second. Because if there’s anything that CGS is about, it’s that our global citizenship must become for each one of us every bit as important as our national citizenship. Our American patriotism must be enhanced and guided by our planetary patriotism. Our loyalty to the country where we happen to have been born must, in this century, be fiercely accompanied by our loyalty to our planetary human community.
At CGS, we know that we must care for our Mother Earth, today and tomorrow, in order for our beloved America to thrive. We insist that American national security can only be achieved by promoting common human security and the global public good. And we believe that Americans will never live in peace and tranquility unless we pursue justice for all of humanity.
“Whether we wish it or not, we may soon have to make a clear choice between the special nation to which we pledge our allegiance and the broad humanity of which we are born a part.” So said in 1946 the great American writer E. B. White, author of CHARLOTTE’S WEB and (with William Strunk) THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE. “In the United Nations of the World there will be no foreigner, no outsider. A citizen must take pride in the whole world, and pledge allegiance not only to a national flag but to a universal banner.”
As we stand at the dawn of a new era of political movement and citizen action, CGS asks you to join us on the ramparts, as we endeavor to transform these ideals into widespread conviction, political meaning, and historical reality.
