Piia-Noora Kauppi, Jo Leinen, Graham Watson, Gérard Onesta The Case for Global Democracy - Advocating a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly Somerset...

Piia-Noora Kauppi, Jo Leinen, Graham Watson, Gérard Onesta
The Case for Global Democracy - Advocating a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly
Somerset, Bagehot Publishing, 2007

The campaign for the establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA) seems to be taking off. Hundreds of political leaders, academics and civil society activists from all over the world have already signed the UNPA appeal launched last year by a group of parliamentarians and NGOs, while the initiatives in its support are multiplying. Among them, the publication of this pamphlet called The Case for Global Democracy - Advocating a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly¹.
The initiative has been taken by the renowned MEP Graham Watson (ALDE, UK), who has co-authored the pamphlet together with three MEPs: Pia-Noora Kauppi (EPP-ED, Finland); Jo Leinen (Socialist, Germany, currently Honorary President of the UEF and member of the steering committee of the European Movement); Gérard Onesta (Greens, France). The introduction has been written by Boutros Boutros Ghali, former Secretary-General of the United Nations (1992-1996).
The four essays included in the brochure express the urgency of "democratizing globalization" by effectively integrating civil society (or rather, "the individual human person, the one irreducible entity in world affairs and the logical source of all human rights", as Boutros Ghali states) into the development of global cooperation and international law. So far, according to Kauppi, free markets and globalization have been able to reduce poverty and solve numerous problems. Nevertheless, they could be made to work better, and that could be achieved by rendering more democratic and open to the public that "hallowed meeting-ground of states" which is the United Nations. As both Leinen and Watson point out, organizations such as the WTO, the IMF or even NATO have dramatically broadened their power and influence, without any parallel development in global democracy to counteract the progressive curtailment of the power of the nation state - the entity around which the international system is based ("an entity mainly formed in the 19th century and, on some continents, the main driver for incessant fighting and bloodshed", using Leinen's words). The result is that not only are individual citizens scarcely represented in international organizations due to the centrality of national governments (instead of representative institutions) in those contexts, but they are also less and less represented even by their own governments.
It is time to make some serious "efforts to create a world Parliamentary Assembly, which would allow people from all countries to become involved in the global decision-making process", Watson writes. Such an assembly would strengthen the UN's capacity to tackle military conflicts, population explosion, famine, water shortages and so on, adding legitimacy to an organization that already "enjoy[s] high levels of trust from the world's citizens".
Not surprisingly, the model for the UNPA is the European Parliament. The four authors praise the EP's progressive acquisition of status and its impact on the EU's development and integration. For the first time, Onesta observes, "in that nascent European Parliament delegates chose to band together not under their national flags" but "under the ideological banners of their respective political families", in a dynamics which "has much to teach to the world".

As far as its election, composition and political role are concerned, a few hypotheses are taken into consideration. To sum them up, initially the UNPA could be composed of representatives from each national parliament (but also of members of NGOs and other non-state actors, as Boutros Ghali warmly suggests) and could act as a small consultative body under the UN General Assembly. With time, direct universal suffrage could be introduced (with a distribution of delegates proportional to population size, in Watson's opinion), and the UNPA could become an essential part of the UN decision-making process. The assembly could even "evolve into a world parliament". The impact of a direct universal election would be enormous, because on that day - a day which every democratic person "can only dream of", in Onesta's words - "humanity will have learned to let go of the petty nationalisms that have caused so much bloodshed in years past". To make this dream less unrealistic, we can start by subscribing the appeal of the UNPA campaign².

1 The whole text is accessible on the web at http://www.unpacampaign.org/documents/en/MEPBROCHURE.pdf.
2 See http://en.unpacampaign.org/appeal/support/index.php.