Fernando A. Iglesias
Globalizar la Democracia. Por un Parlamento Mundial
[Globalizing Democracy. The Stand for a World Parliament]
Buenos Aires, Manantial, 2006
World Federalists have been saying so all along: the real problem of today's world is to "govern" economic globalization, endowing it with democratic institutions, and not to stubbornly oppose it. This book by Fernando Iglesias deals with that issue in depth, trying to provide concrete and constructive answers, historical and theoretical evidence, pitiless but not catastrophic analyses of the state of world relations and institutions. The thesis that he expounds in an extremely clear and convincing way in the book is summarized thus in the introduction: in order for globalization to be made democratic, democracy must be globalized; in order for democracy to be globalized, there must be a world Parliament. And upon an eventual world Parliament he dwells with details - including technical details - about its constitution, its functioning, its tasks, and even its venue and the number of representatives, pointedly answering to the objections on its alleged non-necessity, impossibility, insufficiency and dangerousness. Coming back, however, to the fundamental point (that is, the necessity to democratize globalization) and going to its root, Iglesias explains its causes with an argument that bears little dispute: the discrepancy between the political development and the techno-economy, and the injustice coming from a manifestly unfair global order have produced global crises that must be countered in a rational and democratic way, with global - not inter-governmental or inter-national - institutions of a parliamentary type.
The fact is that on the one hand the economy is ever more unconnected with the territory, and on the other the national institutions are proving inadequate to solve today's problems: "to face globalization's challenges equipped with national instruments is like trying to cross the sea with a bicycle"- is Iglesias' telling example. And note that international institutions - from the NGOs to the various UN, IMF, etc. - are already proliferating, and the intergovernmental ones are already and dangerously taking the shape of an anti-democratic and potentially totalitarian world State! They must be made more democratic. In addition, for those who still have doubts about the positive nature of globalization, here is just one figure among many: the richest 20% of the planet is the most interconnected and globalized, whilst the poorest 20% are the ones in the opposite condition. Any attempt at fighting globalization by closing oneself in his own nation-State - with an "every man for himself!" spirit on the part of the better-off, and with a third-world-supporter nationalism on the part of the worse-off - cannot be but counterproductive. The ideas around which the arguments of the book revolve are those dear to the federalists: opposition to international anarchy, supranationality, transnationality, subsidiarity, universality of law and ethic anti-relativism in its most extreme forms ... An anti-nationalist spirit is apparent in each page, with terms like "zombie" not rarely associated with existing national-State institutions. Today's national democracies are considered as "unable to save the world, but able to destroy it". Iglesias does not, in fact, want their complete destruction: rather, what he wants for them is deep renovation and retrenchment.
From the viewpoint of this South-American writer, also the viewpoint of many Italian federalists, from Altiero Spinelli to Lucio Levi, everything has an historical dimension.There are no institutions or forms of political organization that are absolutely good or progressive, whilst others are of an opposite type. If "being nationalists was progressive in the era of feudal, monarchical and papal powers, and being internationalists was so in the times of nationalist industrialism, in the era of globalization a true democratic and progressive thought cannot be but anti-nationalist and worldist".
As European citizens and in particular as federalist activists, it comes immediately natural to ask ourselves: what does Iglesias think of the European Union? One does not have to wait for too many pages to find the first quotations, which will be repeated many times in the rest of the book. The author praises the project of European construction and highlights the many results it has attained, but is convinced that European unification essentially has two problems: a democratic deficit (and here he cites with irony Thucydides' sentence against "the tyranny of a minority" placed as an epigraph to the EU Constitutional Treaty), and its limiting itself to the continental scale with, moreover, suicidal temptations of closing itself off from immigration from the poorer world.
Being a Kantian, in addition, he believes that the world federation could be attained starting indeed from Europe (and here he quotes the Italian Federalists' motto "unite Europe to unite the world"), and that Europe's history from Westphalia onwards is, to a large extent, the forerunner of the history of the world: from the forming of the nation-States system to its collapse in the first half of the twentieth century and to the following reconstruction in the period after WWII, passing through the dramatic contradiction between the thrust to a world dimension coming from the techno-economy and the national restrictions operated by the political classes, that meant the end of the continent's world supremacy.
With some optimism the author states that the time for instituting a world Parliament has come, and it is time now to pass from the countless isolated projects in existence (described in great detail in the second chapter) to a real "planetary debate"on the issue. He warns that "unless we create a world Parliament within one generation, we are heading for a catastrophe", but he does not take that for granted.
In conclusion, this book by Fernando Iglesias is innovating for the issues it deals with, rich for the historical data it gives, written in a bright style, and resolute, consistent and constructive in the ideas it proposes. It is worth being translated in English and published on a world scale.