Ideas for the future by Joseph Preston Baratta, Ph.D.

Why a party? Real peace is not the interval between wars but the presence of justice. Efforts to establish lasting peace are still failing. The end of the Cold War provided an historic opportunity to return to the great work of building international organizations to keep the peace, but the opportunity seems to be slipping away. The idea of United Nations reform is in the air, but it means much more than streamlining the U.N. bureaucracy and managing a budget less than that of the New York fire department.

The historic method by which world federalists tried to strengthen the U.N. was lobbying the state and federal legislatures to pass a non-binding concurrent resolution urging the president to call a general conference in accordance with Article 109 of the U.N. Charter. When that failed, the resolution was watered down to declare only that the sense of Congress was that the
“fundamental objective” of U.S. foreign policy should be to seek the development of the U.N. into a “world federation, open to all nations, with defined and limited powers adequate to preserve peace and prevent aggression through the enactment, interpretation, and enforcement of world law.” This resolution was supported by 111 cosponsors in the House and 21 in the Senate by 1949, but the Korean War next year marked the indisputable coming of the Cold War and the eclipse of the world federalist movement.

The movement basically failed because its roots were shallow in the mass of the people. The idea of remedying the international anarchy by taking the next step after a league of sovereign states to a government of states and peoples was not mistaken, if it was untimely by 1950, but a lobbying organization proved to be inadequate. Most of the movement retreated into a tax–exempt 501(c)3 educational association.

But how could any movement work effectively to establish a world federation competent to enact world law reaching to individuals without becoming political? There were calls in the old days, as by young Harris Wofford, to try the alternative of a trans-national world federalist political party, and the attempt was actually made in working with Henry Wallace’s Progressive party in the elections of 1948, but charges of Communist sympathies were enough to squelch such dissent. There was one lone British Parliamentarian, Henry Usborne, who led a popular movement to convene a “peoples’ convention” to draft a world constitution, but his effort fizzled in late 1950. Later in Europe, Jean Monnet formed and led the Action Committee for a United States of Europe, composed of national labor union leaders and politicians temporarily out of office like Helmut Schmidt, and that group had enough political prestige to contribute substantially to the Rome treaty establishing the European Communities in 1957. But world federation languished to the end of the Cold War in 1990 and after.

Conditions now have changed. The great struggle between the Western democracies, which championed civil and political rights, and the Communist party states, which upheld economic, social, and cultural rights, has been decided in favor of the former. The peoples of Communist bloc countries refused to sacrifice political liberty for economic equality. Multi–party democracy and liberal capitalism have overcome the socialist challenge from the self–styled revolutionary vanguard. Nuclear weapons are still a threat, but most internationalists, who have quietly been working for the last fifty years wherever there was scope for some progress, have become in principle maximalists, in the sense that they believe that world peace cannot be achieved without attention to international security and economic development, social justice, environmental preservation, human rights, and democratic participation. We live, after the Cold War, in an age of globalization; technologies of communications and transportation, in addition to machine industry and democracy under the rule of law, are knitting our world together. World community is near ready for world government.

The World Citizens Party, Massachusetts Branch, envisions itself as a transnational political party. It aims to inform and mobilize popular will as the proper basis of new departures in government. Call it consent of the governed. The party does not merely aim to convince the élite. The party aims to think through a program, find and support candidates for elective and appointive office, and in short acquire the power to guide the United States of America toward systemic U.N. reform, which eventually should be some form of world federal government. One possible next step would be to support the movement to create a popularly representative house in the United Nations, as in the plan relaunched most recently by Andrew Strauss and Richard Falk to create a “second chamber” in the U.N. This could be done by exercise of the U.N. Charter’s Article 22 to form a “subsidiary organ” to the General Assembly or by amendment under Article 108 or 109, assuming U.S. leadership.

Beyond such a reform, the World Citizens Party proposes to leave the rest open. It will not engage in contentious debate about the structure and powers—membership, representation, powers, and transition—of the envisioned world federal government. In the past, all such differences were basically matters of timing. Those who favored a union of democracies first admitted that the ultimate goal was a universal union; those who favored a grant of minimal powers first included a liberal amendment procedure to acquire in time maximal powers.
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The strategy, then, is to appeal to the sovereignty of the people by speeches, writing, referenda, legislative resolutions, campaigning for office, and eventual service in Congress and in executive office. The goal is to place professed World Citizens into official negotiations for novel interpretations of or amendments to the U.N. Charter. We cannot do this without the approbation of the people. Before elections, the best way to reach the people is by entering into public controversy in the press and now on TV. Another is by house–to–house canvassing of the voters and entering into conversation with them to win their votes, as was attempted in Massachusetts in 1946.


My view is that until there is a crisis the opportunity for world federalist action will be stillborn. As Jean Monnet used to say, for the hard work of uniting sovereignties, people will act only when faced by a crisis. Thomas Jefferson said much the same when he wrote, “All experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than they are to right themselves by changing the forms to which they are accustomed.” The world now is faced by a massive crisis, symbolized by the threat of nuclear war, economic depression, ecological collapse, new pandemics, terrorism from the global South, and all the problems of the global problématique. At the moment it is only a crisis of the mind. But even during an Obama administration, there may be such a crisis—perhaps war spreading from Afghanistan into Pakistan, or deepening global depression, or another Arab–Israeli war—demonstrating that the U.S. cannot continue to go it alone. If we are poised with alternative ideas, the World Citizens Party might grow by leaps and bounds. Sometimes history moves with astonishing swiftness when accumulated forces break through the dam long restraining them (like the end of the Cold War). At that moment the World Citizens Party could emerge as a serious third party in American history.

But even if our proposed action is again set back, it seems to me that, like the Progressive movement in the early 20th century, World Citizens could leave behind fertile ideas for the future. The Progressives brought us the regulation of business and protections for the working class; World Citizens could leave behind such notions as the necessity for a government of the world and its practicality. The essential notion is the replacement of international anarchy with the rule of world law reaching to individuals. “Law,” Mark Van Doren once explained, “is merely what enables us to live together in peace without having to love one another.”