Donald Trump ran as an outsider to the Republican party, as Bernie Sanders did to the Democrats. Both parties must recover their roots in the people. It's possible that a social democratic third party will gain strength in America. Trump’s “party” seems to be becoming a Fascist party along the lines of Mussolini's or Hitler's corporatist, anti-union, racist, church-tolerant, and nationalist parties. The Republican party may survive as a traditional conservative party. The Democrats are struggling to survive as the liberal party of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The vote was such an upheaval that the American political system may develop a four party system more like Europe’s in response to the new global realities.
It is impossible to predict where Trump will take the United States of America. His pronouncements, mostly on Twitter feeds, are threatening but contradictory. His appointees to his administration are better indicators, but these are not reassuring. General Michael Flynn, his choice for national security advisor, has said that Islam is a political ideology, not a religion; and Scott Pruitt, at the Environmental Protection Agency, denies global warming — he could lead the U.S. out of the Paris Accord.
The paranoid response would be to look forward to economic disaster and war. An immanent crisis seems all but certain, but a crisis can be an opportunity. What will we do if American warplanes destroy Raqqa as the Russians did Aleppo? If Trump eliminates the North Korean nuclear threat with a few well placed nuclear weapons? The times could not be more hostile to enlightened projects of European and world federation. We are at a moment like that in 1950, when the Korean War made people realize that the Cold War had come. Cord Meyer, the first president of United World Federalists, quietly joined the CIA to defend the country. Similarly now, responsible citizens feel that they must lower their sights and aim to save the United States. In Europe, the task ahead is to save democracy and union.
In this crisis of the Trump presidency, can the world federalists help the European federalists? We can continue to speak truth to power. The history of the movement can shed some light on the problem. When the Cold War destroyed every initiative to reform the United Nations along the lines of a popularly representative, limited world government in order to secure the peace in the atomic age, Grenville Clark and Louis B. Sohn retreated to Clark’s estate in Dublin, NH, where they wrote a systematic plan for U.N. reform, published as World Peace through World Law (1958). This work is still the place to go to understand what world federalists propose. Similarly, Robert M. Hutchins at the University of Chicago, where a maximal plan to both secure the peace and establish justice was published as The Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution (1948), had to close down the journal, Common Cause, after the Korean War. G.A. Borgese, the moving spirit of the Chicago committee, returned home to Italy, despairing that “the worlds are two.” But Hutchins later, with Ford Foundation money, established in Santa Barbara, CA, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, where for twenty years he led discussions on preserving democracy in America.
World federalists could follow the example of Clark and Sohn, Hutchins and Borgese. Finding their popular support all but gone, they could hunker down, write profound analyses, keep the faith, and await a better day. That is what I do. Our only power is to discover and publish the truth. We are not guilty of Julien Benda’s La Trahison des clercs, that cowardice of intellectuals in the 1920s and ’30s to the coming of totalitarianism. The logic of our case would seem to favor this course.
But the only group with any connection to government policy makers is now the Commission on Global Security, Justice, and Governance, supported by the Stimson Center in Washington and the Institute for Global Justice in The Hague. The two NGOs have produced a serious study on “Confronting the Crisis of Global Governance” (June 2015). It surveys very objectively all the foreign policy issues facing the United States, particularly fragile states, environmental degradation, and the hyper-connected global economy. It calls for a U.N. general conference to amend the Charter in accordance with Article 109 by 2020. Former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright supports it. So does what survives as the World Federalist Movement under Bill Pace in New York.
In another view, going back to the split between the WMWFG and the UEF, European federalists might help the world federalists. European federalists in the Trump era would be better advised not to await the Stimson Center’s U.N. Charter amendment conference. What is happening in Europe, it seems to me from the distant perspective across the Atlantic, is the consequence of the Council of Ministers' rejection of Altiero Spinelli's Draft Treaty for the Establishment of the European Union — which passed the European Parliament in 1984, after it was made directly elected by the people in 1979 (vote of 237 to 31, with 43 abstentions). That was a lost historical opportunity. Today, the public is disappointed with the postponement of real democracy in Europe. Without a common government to maintain the euro or to keep member states within the original standards for the union (inflation < 1.5% of the Deutsche mark rate; budget deficit < 3% of GDP; national debt < 60% GDP), the euro crisis cannot really be solved. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's draft constitution for Europe in 2005 was on the right track, but its narrow rejection by the French and the Dutch set back the cause of the E.U. perhaps forever. Europe needs bold, new leaders and a public in dialectical solidarity to turn away from the drift back to nationalism. In America, when our leaders go wrong, we like to say, with Jefferson and Lincoln, that the wisdom of the people will save the country.
The European Union may suffer a general exit in 2017, but that does not have to mean a repeat of the nationalism of the ’30s and the rise of another Hitler. History repeats itself, but not exactly. People do learn from national mistakes. European federalists, I think, should see that what the public, who march behind signs saying, “Vote Leave: Say No to EU Dictatorship,” are expressing is their frustration with the lack of powers in the elected European Parliament, as remedied in the Spinelli plan. After the treaties are shredded in 2017, Europe will descend toward a state of nature. It will look like a region of little Trumps! That will be an opportunity for leaders with political calculation to direct the people back to the necessities of European union, if it were truly democratic. The elites must give way. Europe must trust its people.
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