Introduction
I would like to dedicate my remarks this morning to the memory of another Canadian world federalist, Hanna Newcombe, who passed away earlier this year. Hanna was a quietly inspiring figure for me personally and, I’m sure, for many others in the Canadian peace movement. She twice served as National President of the Canadian World Federalists.

With her husband Alan she co-founded the Dundas Peace Research Institute and published numerous Peace Research Review monographs as well as the Peace Research Abstracts Journal. She received the Pearson Peace Medal in 1997 and was awarded the Order of Canada in 2007. In 2006 WFM – Canada inaugurated an award in her honor, the “Hanna Newcombe Lifetime Achievement Award”, recognizing the outstanding contributions made by individuals from within our movement.

Along with Dr Norman Alcock (Canadian Peace Research Institute) the Newcombes were pioneers in the Peace Research field, at a time when peace research and peace studies were not widely recognized among mainstream academia. In the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s and into the 80’s, the strategic studies community dominated mainstream academic thinking on questions of war and peace. The prevailing view was that “war will always be with us” and that the best we could do if we wanted peace was to prepare for war.

Hanna was also instrumental in establishing, the Canadian Peace Research and Education Association. For many years Hanna and Alan organized summer study retreats at Grindstone Island with international experts and UN officials. These few Canadian peace researchers were also active in an international network, the International Peace Research Association. The Bouldings (Ken and Elise) in the U.S. and of course Johann Galtung were key figures in the international peace research community.

Today in universities around the world there are opportunities to study topics such as peace studies, conflict resolution and analysis, mediation, post-conflict peace-building and development, global studies, human security, etc. – disciplines that did not exist a few decades ago. Peace researchers like Hanna Newcombe were attracted to world federalism. They recognized that an enduring peace requires not only the absence of war, but also adequate political and judicial structures for the mediation of human relations and representative, equitable decision-making.

Approaches to world federalism and peace
In the early days of our federalist movement there was a tendency to approach world federalism in grand terms. After the Second World War the United Nations was created to “maintain international peace and security”. But the victorious powers were given special powers, particularly the power of veto in the Security Council. These weaknesses that were built into the United Nations led world federalists and others to call for a new world organization, some form of world government.

There was considerable sympathy for this view. The U.S. world federalist organization numbered over 50,000 supporters in the post-war period. Many members of Congress, and parliaments from a number of other countries joined parliamentary associations for world government.

But gradually, as the Cold War set in, the prospects for achieving world federalist objectives faded.
The tensions over appropriate political objectives also existed within the federalist movement. At times in the past there has been less unity among world federalists and European federalist movements than we enjoy today. In those early post-war days there were federalists who believed that if world peace is an objective, then one must be a world federalist; others, more realistic, suggested that federalism for Europe was a first priority. In hindsight, we can see the merit in both of these approaches. But, unfortunately, in the early days, these debates were polarizing. What’s important from all of this, as we consider in 2011 the topic of “peace in a globalized world”, is that, for practicing federalists, the perennial challenge is picking your spots, deciding where and how to engage current politics, to apply the principles of democratic federalism to international relations and create a more peaceful world.

Federalism is a big idea. Our challenge is to recognize the particular opportunities to move the present order in the direction of a more integrated and peaceful future. In the time remaining, I’ll discuss a few of the ways that world federalists have gone about this work.

The International Criminal Court
I think we are all familiar with the present work of the ICC. It is now an important international institution, playing a key role in many of the world’s major conflicts. The World Federalist Movement offices in New York and The Hague provide the administrative home for a global civil society coalition that has been instrumental in the formation of the court, and is still an essential partner in the ongoing work of the ICC.

For World Federalists, a criminal court has always made sense. Far better to make individuals, political and military leaders accountable for the worst excesses of war than to punish an entire state. We are among the few organizations that kept alive the idea of a criminal court. A court was intended to follow the post-World-War tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo. But Cold War politics prevented this. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that the idea re-surfaced at the UN, ironically following a proposal from the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, who wanted a court to help with the problem of drug trafficking. When the UN’s International Law Commission recommended a court initially to address the three gravest crimes of international concern, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, negotiations began on a treaty to create the ICC. The World Federalists mobilized an NGO coalition that helped ensure that the ICC would be an independent and effective court, one that is not controlled by the Security Council. We can see today the role of the court, and the broader system of international justice that is evolving, in slowly bringing one of the essential pillars of peace to our world.

Responsibility to Protect
The ICC is a part of a more profound development in international affairs, which is the development, the strengthening of international humanitarian law, and the building up of legal norms that are slowly encircling and transforming war and conflict. It’s almost as if there is a quiet conspiracy, a turning in humanity’s collective consciousness. It’s hard to pin down, but the developments are unmistakable.

Another way that this quiet conspiracy gets expressed internationally is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). The Responsibility to Protect doctrine rests on three pillars:
- the primary responsibility of states to protect their own populations from the four crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity;
- the international community’s responsibility to assist a state to fulfil its protection obligations;
- the international community’s responsibility to take timely and decisive action, in accordance with the UN Charter, in cases where the state has manifestly failed to protect its population from one or more of the four crimes.

This “three-pillared” approach, reflected in recent reports of the UN Secretary-General, is adapted from the language of the 2005 UN reform World Summit, which is the only legal text codifying R2P. The concept is still controversial (as we have seen with recent conflicts in Libya and Cote D’Ivoire). The 2005 World Summit language reflected an effort to put into practice recommendations from an international panel of experts, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. That experts panel was initiated by a Canadian foreign minister, Lloyd Axworthy. Lloyd is now an international Co-President of the World Federalist Movement.

Perhaps we can explore the application of R2P in the question period. As I said, it’s controversial. The essential aspect for federalists is the transformative impact on the notion of national sovereignty. R2P transforms sovereignty and changes the role of the individual in the modern world. National sovereignty becomes a sovereign “responsibility” to protect civilians. And if governments fail in this task, then the ultimate responsibility to protect civilians defaults to the international community. So, the individual citizen has legitimate expectations of the global polity, not just their own national government. It’s a political norm that’s evolving slowly, but it’s really quite revolutionary.

At the UN, one of the organizations that has done the most to support R2P is the World Federalist Movement. Today the International Coalition for R2P is a project of WFM. Some world federalist national organizations are also active participants in this coalition, including WFM – Canada and the U.S. Citizens for Global Solutions.

A UN Emergency Peace Service
If the International Criminal Court is an idea whose time finally arrived after four decades, a UN Emergency Peace Service is another quintessentially world federalist good idea whose time has not yet arrived. For nearly as long as the UN has been doing peacekeeping there have been proposals for improvements to overcome such challenges as the slow or incomplete mission deployments that accompany the present standby arrangements.

Earlier formulations calling for a UN “standing army” or permanent “rapid reaction force” have given way to the idea of a more integrated “peace service”, mirroring the evolution in UN peace operations that now brings military personnel together with a wider range of civilian police, judicial, governance, humanitarian, development and human rights actors. [And by the way we should note these developments in UN peacekeeping doctrine, and post-conflict interventions are among the principal reasons that researchers now cite as contributing to the downward trend in armed conflict in the past two decades].
The current growing support for the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) normative framework has led to renewed interest in a UN Emergency Peace Service, particularly insofar as a UNEPS would provide complementary capacity toward the prevention of mass atrocity crimes.

This year, in the weeks leading to the UN General Assembly annual debate on R2P, world federalists in Canada partnered with another NGO, Global Action to Prevent War, to initiate a global civil society sign-on letter to lobby governments at the UN on the need for a UNEPS. The UN’s DPKO, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, now deploys more military abroad than any other entity other than the U.S. government. With pressure in the UN’s peacekeeping system to keep up with the demand for peacekeepers (civilian and military), support for a UNEPS is growing.

A political consensus in favor of the creation of a UN Emergency Peace Service remains elusive. The UNEPS proposal raises important political questions regarding the efficacy of the Responsibility to Protect, Security Council reliability, the UN’s capacity to meet the demand for more peace operations, collaboration with regional organizations, and the need for a legitimate multilateral on-call capacity to deal with humanitarian crises or natural disasters. Once again, we’re dealing with an idea that is an evolution, even if also a revolution.

In these examples – the ICC, R2P and UNEPS – I want to stress two points. Firstly, one needs to exercise political judgment, to know when, and how, and how much we can insert our lofty world federalist principles for a world governed by the rule of law. Secondly, as a matter of strategy, one needs to build alliances. Notice that in all the examples I have mentioned, we work with others, through civil society networks. Sometimes they are small strategic networks; sometimes large coalitions. But we are not a large movement and are not likely to be. It is essential that we join the mainstream political debates, using language that wide cross-sections of the public and NGOs can also adopt and call their own. These are just three examples of how world federalists engage questions of international peace. There are others. Indeed, the relevance of world federalism to questions of peace and security has never been greater.

Things have changed since Hanna Newcombe’s time. And mostly they have changed for the better, for the world as well as for world federalists.