World State

Introduction to the United Federation of the World

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Contents

Transient Forms of Government and the Drift towards a World State

There are many histories of the 193 individual nation-states that are members of the United Nations. There are few histories that show the rise and fall of all civilizations and consider how a World State might emerge. (Toynbee's A Study of History and my own The Rise and Fall of Civilizations are two of these.) There are no histories that show humankind as a whole drifting in one direction from the primitive to globalisation like a river flowing towards the open sea: humankind advancing from simple family groupings to tribal states, to more complex city-states, to feudal baronial states, to nation-states with national governments to colonial empires and colonies, to confederations and federations, to regional organisations and eventually widening into a World State.

Transient Old Forms of Government

Homo sapiens sapiens emerged from Africa less than 100,000 years ago and probably between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago (after 13 previous species of Homo and a previous 9 intermediate forms), and co-existed with Cro-Magnon man who occupied the Dordogne until c.10,000BC.

Tribal states

In Neolithic times (c.10,200–4500/2000BC) there were groups of families, and from at least c.10,000BC the tribe emerged, a loose association of families who were nomadic. They wandered the steppes seeking new pastures for their domesticated animals, and they fought other tribes and conquered their territories. A conquering tribe imposed its leadership on the tribes it subjugated, and the first primitive government was within the tribe.

Subjugated tribes could continue as they were, so long as they acknowledged the victorious tribe's leadership. Tribes therefore exercised loose control over their subjects, and in some tribal states tribes negotiated how they would be governed. At some stage nomads began to settle in villages as farmers.

The Celtic tribes emerged. In the UK there were Celtic tribal states: the Trinovantes, the Catuvellauni and the Iceni (who resisted the Roman occupation under Boudicca).

City-states

Primitive government had become enmeshed in primitive religion, which had expressed itself in shamanism and the painting of animals in dark caves. This can be traced back to c.40,000BC. Tribal leaders encouraged primitive religion as it strengthened their control of their tribes.

A more sophisticated form of government came into being within city-states. Tribes had been brought together round religious buildings as in early Sumer. The Sumerians appeared c.3500BC and by 2500BC built ziggurats, stepped towers surmounted by a temple, man-made mountains from which they practised their religion. Tribes came from far and wide and camped round these religious buildings, and primitive cities were formed that were really enlarged villages. Their tribal leader turned himself into a monarch and ruled by one-man rule.

Over time he became a priest-king who led religious rites that brought rain and guaranteed good crops and harvests. Village councils practised division of labour, and tribal villagers specialised as warriors, farmers, tax collectors and priests who protected their city from attacks and natural disasters. Fields were cultivated and agriculture was settled round the city-states. In Sumerian cities there were arguments as to which city owned the nearby water of the river Tigris and the river Euphrates. Nomads envied the wealth of the new cities and stormed their walls.

The Greek city-states had monarchies ruled by tribal kings. Over time they developed into military aristocracies and plutocracies, and democracies. There were conflicts between the aristocratic, plutocratic and democratic factions within city-states, and different Greek city-states had different emphases. Athens became a democratic power whereas Sparta remained an aristocratic power, and the Peloponnesian Wars of 431–404BC between Athens and Sparta represented a collision between these two rival forms of government that weakened the Athenian Empire and Greek power.

Rome's city-state also had conflicts between aristocratic, plutocratic and democratic factions. It was referred to as res publica, a "public thing", and its legislative Senate was at first drawn from the aristocratic classes, but eventually from all classes of citizens. The unity of the city-state's factions was advertised in letters on Rome's buildings and battle standards: "SPQR", Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and the People of Rome. The city-state's executive power was invested in two consuls, and after the end of the Republic it was headed by divine Caesar, who commanded the legions, the military. By the 3rd century AD Italian city-states were heavily taxed by the imperial administration, and many were eventually bankrupted. The Roman State and the Church, brought together under Constantine, were eventually separated in Roman law. The Caesars who ruled the Roman Empire became tyrants and the Roman Empire eventually fell to barbarian Visigoths from the steppes.

Baronial states

Now the baronial states came into existence. After the collapse of the Roman Empire barons became crucial to government. There were uprisings by landless peasants and attacks by invaders from neighbouring lands, and day-to-day living was often dangerous. A feudal system evolved in the Frankish kingdom of the 8th century and spread with the Frankish conquests. It came to France, and the Normans brought the system to England.

Under this system all lands were owned by the king. Feudal lords or barons held lands from the king, for which they paid scutage, a tax to the king. A baron "held lands or property from the sovereign or a powerful overlord" (Concise Oxford Dictionary). Barons gave protection in their territory. All had a role in feudal society, and the lord provided safe living conditions. In peacetime landless freemen and small landowners went to the most powerful lord in their neighbourhood and were granted protected shelter. In return their services were required in times of war.

A feudal lord, or baron, had financial, juridical and military sovereignty over his subject's land, and he had power to tax, try and arm his subjects. A subject gave himself and his land to a lord and received food, shelter and protection; and equipment in times of war. In return he tilled the baron's soil, paid taxes and fought his battles. Both vassal and lord were bound by their contractual relationship, and the lord, or baron, was a vassal of the king and an aristocrat.

The medieval and Renaissance baronial states were run by kings and their military aristocrats, the barons or feudal armoured lords – warlords – who provided standing armies for kings. The kings were unable to tax for wars like Roman emperors and could not afford armies. There were strong monarchies in England, France and Spain. Trade brought wealth to cities that could be spent on fortifying walls, and the city-state revived in Italy, the Rhineland and Low Countries.

Nation-states

The nation-state was born in West Europe in the 16th–18th centuries. The concepts of the 'nation' and 'state' were strengthened by the writings of Machiavelli, Bodin and Hobbes, who supported the authority of secular governments against that of the Church. Monarchies became territorial, and kings sought to impose uniformity on their peoples. The English kings fought the Welsh, Scots and Irish to bring them under their sovereign rule. The French kings drove into the Alps, Pyrenees and Rhine valley. The Spanish kings forced Christianity on their Jewish and Moorish subjects. Absolute monarchs made royal decrees that were administered by a class of bookkeepers, letter-writers and analysts, a new bureaucracy.

In the 17th and 18th centuries absolutist monarchies fell. In England the absolutist monarchy became a constitutional monarchy with an executive, legislature and judiciary and eventually an electorate. In France the absolutist monarchy became a republic whose monarch-free structure brought the nation-state to maturity. In America the Constitution opened the way to liberal democracy. In all three countries the idea of the sovereign nation-state was reinforced. Nation-states received their power from their peoples to protect their citizens, guarantee their safety and maintain law and order.

Nation-states have been able to develop societies and economies in which democracies can grow. A state is unified, there is national self-assertion and a constitution is established that gives control over the government. Nation-states tend not to increase their territory and so their trade, industries and capital investment lead to economic prosperity in which a civil and cultural identity becomes nationality. The source of the legitimacy of a nation-state's political system is its nationality. A list of the 193 nation-states is in Appendix C4.

Colonial empires and colonies

Twelve of the European nation-states developed colonial empires whose colonies were a new form of government. The British, French, German, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Russian and Ottoman nation-states all set up colonies and empires in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Oceania and many other parts of the world. These started in the 16th century in Latin America and continued in the 17th century in America and in the 18th and 19th centuries, when India became an empire. These colonial territories were throwbacks to the early Phoenician and Greek colonies and the Roman coloniae. In all these colonies, the colonial power pumped money to a colony's leadership and in return transferred its natural resources for use in its own country. The benefits colonies acquired from the arrangement varied, but in some colonies and empires the people lived in poverty and derived little or no benefit from the colonial contract, which merely enriched the few who surrounded the leadership.

The colonialist and imperialist nation-state was nationalist. It asserted its nation-statehood against other nations in imperial competition, and its competing ambitions led to war. While these colonialist and imperialist constitutional monarchies and republics vied for empire, some European nation-states turned totalitarian. The 20th-century totalitarian dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler embodied government by constraint of largely unconsenting peoples. Such dictatorships were copied in smaller states, especially during the Cold War between the USSR and the West.

In the 20th century clashes between nation-states led to the First and Second World Wars, and to the Cold War, and similar clashes may be taking place in our own time. There are fears that collisions in Syria between Russia, Iran and Turkey on the one hand, and Saudi Arabia, Britain, France, the EU, the US, Qatar and Jordan, with Israel in the background, on the other hand may lead to a wider war, and that, having absorbed Georgia, Crimea and East Ukraine, Russia will re-invade Baltic states such as Estonia. There are fears that incompatibility between the ambitions of nation-states may lead to a Third World War just as incompatible claims of city-states ruined ancient Greece.

New Forms of Regional and Global Governance

During the rise of the nation-states new forms of government have emerged: federations, regional organisations and the functional organisations of global governance, all of which, collectively, indicate a drift towards a World State.

Confederations and federations

A confederation (or confederacy or league) is a union of sovereign states for the purpose of common action in relation to other states. It is an organisation that consists of a number of groups that are united in an alliance or league. One of the first confederations in the West was the Hanseatic League, which was formed in the time of the city-states of the Middle Ages and lasted from the 13th to the 17th centuries. Confederations formed during the rise of nation-states, for example the seven United Provinces of the Netherlands from 1581 to 1795 and the US under the Articles of Confederation from 1781 to 1789. For a full list of confederations see Appendix A1.

A federation is a union of partially-self-governing states or regions under a central (federal) government. A federation unites distinct ethnic, cultural and lingual regions under a common government. Federations began with the US states in 1776 and the US Constitution which was drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788. The US federation was followed by Switzerland in 1848 and Canada in 1867, both of which began as 'confederations' with sovereign provinces (Canada) and cantons (Switzerland) – reflecting the first US Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union between the States (1777), which was replaced by the second US Constitution in 1787–1788 – and became 'federations' when their provinces and cantons lost their sovereign status. Brazil followed in 1889, Australia in 1901 and Austria in 1920. Since then another 20 federations have been formed. The total federations in chronological order of formation are in Appendix A2.

Devolved states are a kind of 'federation in reverse'. In federal systems the powers of the subunits of states cannot be withdrawn unilaterally by the central federal government. In devolved states the powers delegated from the central government to a subnational, regional or local level may be temporary and are reversible, and can be withdrawn by the central government. Devolution began with Denmark in 1849. Finland followed in 1919 and the United Kingdom in 1922. Now three of the four constituent countries of the United Kingdom (excluding England) have devolved governments. Since 1922 another 31 devolved states have been formed. The total devolved states in chronological order of formation are in Appendix A3.

Regional organisations

In our time the flow of government has widened into regional organisations. Regional organisations foster co-operation and political and economic integration. They have international memberships with boundaries and have unique geography that confines them to continents or geopolitical economic blocs, and they operate in ways that transcend single nation-states.

Regional organisations began with the Commonwealth of Nations in 1931, followed by the Organization of American States in 1948 and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. The European Union or EU, the regional organisation that most immediately comes to mind, began in an earlier form in 1957.

Competing European nation-states had led to two world wars, and the aim of the EU was to prevent yet another European war by enmeshing Germany, France and the other warring European nation-states within peaceful institutions. Following the Monnet Plan, which was developed in conjunction with the US Council on Foreign Relations and announced on 4 December 1945, Winston Churchill in his speech at the University of Zurich on 19 September 1946 called for "a kind of United States of Europe" and declared that the first step was to form "a Council of Europe".

Amid the chaos of post-war Europe these moves led to a European Economic Community of six members, and now the EU region has its own legal personality and 28 member states (from which the UK has decided to withdraw), with 20 more European nation-states ultimately eligible for membership; potentially 48 member states. The regional European Union has kept peace in Europe since 1945 along with NATO, and has reunified Eastern and Western Europe following the collapse of the USSR. It is the only union recognised as being a fully supranational union.

A full list of the world's 34 regional organisations that, though not supranational unions like the EU, have policies that will lead to similar integration is as follows:

• the African Union (AU): established in 2001, consisting of all 55 nation-states on the African continent totalling 0.85 billion, formerly the Organisation of African Unity (OAU);

• the Arab League (AL): established in 1945, formerly the League of Arab States, consisting of 8 nation-states in North Africa and Arabia totalling 0.423 billion, set to become an Arab Union;

• the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC): established in 1989, consisting of 21 Pacific Rim member nation-states totalling 2.7 billion, growing into an Asian Economic Community and set to pass into an Asia-Pacific Union;

• the Association of Caribbean States (ACS): established in 1994, consisting of 25 member nation-states and 12 associate members totalling 0.237 billion;

• the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): established in 1967, consisting of 10 nation-states in South-East Asia totalling 0.625 billion;

• the Caribbean Community (CARICOM): established in 1973, having grown out of the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA), consisting of 15 Caribbean nation-states and dependencies totalling 0.016 billion, set to become a Caribbean Federation;

• the Central-American Integration System (SICA): established in 1993, consisting of 8 nation-states in Central America totalling 0.51 billion;