Reflections on how to unite the world in peace and liberty, prosperity and justice

1. Introduction
In the tragic crescendo of events which unfolded over a few weeks, Gothenburg, Genoa and New York have made evident to the absent-minded a sickness that we could define as follows: the contrast between the things which divide the world and those which unite it. United in terms of trade, of climatic and nuclear risk; divided by the disparities in living conditions, by the absence of instruments to reduce economic, political, religious conflicts. Uniting the world is the key question of a century, which will certainly not be short if we measure it by the time needed to achieve a lasting result.

We do not know exactly the remedy for this sickness; the path ahead of us is a research, not only an effort of realisation. "War is as old as mankind, whereas peace is a recent invention" wrote Henry Maine, an English jurist, in
the mid-19th century. And yet we are not at zeropoint, we do not lack essential references. Ignoring them would certainly mean condemning the world to ruin. The events of a few weeks ago have in fact reminded us that the forces of destruction are today seemingly more globalised than those of construction.

First of all: peace, liberty, prosperity, justice are truly universal goods. Not everyone was conscious of this, even a few years ago.They are universal not only because they are desired by all, which has always been the case, but also because now it is no longer possible to achieve them "in a single country". Human beings alive today, and even more so those who are yet to be born, are already united today by the fact of depending on each other for achieving those universal goods.

In the second place: mutual dependence makes the attainment of these goods a political question, i.e. concerning the art and science of governing. It demands the exercise of power, methods to assign and control it, rules, administration of justice, coercion. The etymology of the word "political" reminds us that mutual dependence, and with it politics, was born in the city (the Greek polis) and remained there for a long time. Today the city is the world.

2.The market is not enough
Of the three main areas of human activity - the economy, politics, culture - it is undoubtedly the economy which has more rapidly crossed national borders. The term "globalisation" indicates the emergence of a global market and of global finance. Supporters and opponents of globalisation in effect seem to share the same myth which, born out of the first industrial revolution, seems impervious to reason and to experience: the myth of the economy as the sole pillar of the social order. This myth makes the enemies of globalisation believe that the evil lies in the market-typical quest for profit (what they call capitalistic mode of production). It prevents its advocates from seeing that an economic system cannot replace a political order. The opponents recognise a state of sickness, but are wrong in their diagnosis. The supporters deny the illness. That the illness is not the failure of the market-based economic system is evident from the comparative experience of the countries which have, in various ways, tried to escape from poverty. The many areas where living standards are high are also those in which market principles have been applied, whereas the areas which have chosen central planning have worsened poverty and corruption from which they were already suffering. In the Soviet area, where all market forms were radically suppressed for a very long time, the economic disaster has been complete and continues beyond the end of the USSR. The longer and more persistent the anti-market experiment, the greater its failure. It is therefore a wrong diagnosis the one which interprets the difficulties of globalisation as the final consequence of the so-called contradictions of capitalism.

But from negating the evil, no less serious dangers may derive: the comforting illusion that growth can, like a purifying wind, sweep away all difficulties; the refusal to correct the distortions of the global market and finance; the inability to reform international cooperation; the claim that economy can solve political issues. When they negate the illness, the supporters of globalisation fuel hostility and rebellion more than their adversaries do.

The fact is that to create peace, liberty, prosperity, justice, the establishment of the market is a necessary condition but it is not enough. It is not enough for human society in the same way as it is not enough for a village or a state. Three arguments seem to support this thesis.

In the first place, in order for it to function, the market itself needs juridical, social, cultural, political and institutional bases. In the second place, even if it works optimally, the market does not produce all the goods needed by individuals and by society.
There are fundamental goods, such as security or peace, the environment or education, monetary stability or respect for contracts, which nobody can individually produce for himself or sell to others. In the third place, the economy is not everything: you don't live by bread alone, either individually or collectively. Peace, liberty, prosperity, justice are
necessary for an orderly development of economic life; they are values, human ideals, for which some are ready to sacrifice their own bread. Not only: they are conditions for something else. It becomes possible to deepen one's knowledge, to enjoy and produce the beautiful, to travel, cultivate friendship and culture, otium and contemplation.

3. Politics: the golden path
To refute the sufficiency of the market means that no remedy to the misdeeds of globalization will be appropriate if it does not bring significant progress towards a political order that is also global.

A mind set free to speculate beyond what appears realisable in a short time clearly identifies the golden path to be followed. It is the path which leads to a world government founded on the very same principles which political thought and the experience of centuries have elaborated for other and more confined human communities (cities, countries, continents): proclamation of the fundamental rights of the individual, government instruments capable of protecting them, subjection of those who exercise power to laws and control by the citizens.

After the two wars which stained the past century with blood, these thoughts finally inspired political action itself. Precisely because the conflicts had been worldwide, so was the system of peace and law that started to be built to prevent their repetition. The concept of "citizen of the world" passed from language to reality.

The League of Nations and the United Nations are the two institutions created to set in motion, following the era of the survival of the fittest, the era of peace and the rule of law among all nations. Today we note that the United Nations is not held in high esteem by the public, that it is often ridiculed for its powerlessness, and that it does not appear to be an ideal for which it is worth sacrificing oneself. And this is the case not only for the very many who inattentively look at world events, but also for the many who are driven by anguish, piety and longing for peace to demonstrate against globalisation, against the tyranny of the market, and for peace at any price. It is true that the number of wars fought in the world since 1945 is reckoned to be in the hundreds, and the number of dead is reckoned to be in the millions. It is true that the United Nations has not been able to prevent extermination in countries like the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Algeria. But it has missed the target not because the inspiring principle has been mistaken, but because its implementation has been inadequate.

However, the progress that has been achieved along the golden path, and the slow but important changes of traditional concepts and instruments are too often forgotten. In the military sector, the armed forces are no longer institutions merely functional to offensive or defensive war, but also to peace-keeping and peace-making, i.e. to separating warring parties, control of territory, prevention of wider conflicts. The United Nations has currently 16 operations of this kind running, involving some 30,000 soldiers.

Steps have been made since 1948 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights towards defining and protecting values common to humanity. The concept of "crimes against humanity" has been elaborated, crimes which must be accounted for not in the prejudiced environment of a given place and time, but in the universal environment of the human race and in perpetuity. In line with the same principle of criminal law, according to which society in its entirety is offended by the crime and therefore it has the right to judge and punish, it is agreed that in certain cases the offended society is the whole of humanity.

Faced with the extraordinary acceleration of economic interdependence, with the growing threats that only humanity in its entirety can avert (biosphere, terrorism, atomic proliferation), the steps taken along the golden path have certainly been significant, but indeed slow and incomplete. The instruments which today the UN and other international bodies have at their disposal are quite inadequate.

Such inadequacy has provided the impetus to look for alternative paths: improper forms of government, individual humanitarian commitment, protest. Improper forms of government are the hegemony by one country over the world, the balance of forces, agreements between nations. Today, these are even more difficult to practise than in the past, and even in the past they have never secured peace. It is not peace, but rather a truce, the temporary and precarious absence of open conflicts which has been established between one or more sovereign powers, each one having the interest or ambition to expand its action and to exercise its influence outside the territory in which it is sovereign. The path of humanitarian commitment is that of thousands of persons who, working for organisations or individually, have gone to Sarajevo or Afghanistan at times of great danger, are helping street children in Guatemala, are teaching at the University of Mozambique, are looking after the sick in India. They are seeds of courage, intelligence, professional skill that do not remain without fruit; but the fruit will not be a political order for the world.
Along the path of protest come together tens of thousands of young people moved by compassion, na•vely longing for peace, fearful of an overlarge world; but also highly sophisticated political militants who wish to revive the Marxist-Leninist myth; and finally rioters and hooligans trained in urban guerrilla warfare. The path of protest denounces the sickness, but does not heal it and may even exacerbate it.

Each one of these three paths may have its usefulness, but none is conclusive, and none can take the place of a tiring journey along the golden path.

4.Trying again and again
The condition of the world is therefore at the crossroads between a golden path, of which we know the goal and inspiring principle, but also its uncertainty and difficulty, and paths of the past, which we know to be insecure and ineffective, demonstrations of self-denial or protest which do not suffice to fill the void of government.

The golden path is rough first and foremost because travelling along it means limiting the sovereignty of states. In a constitutional order inspired by the political philosophies mentioned above, powers and rules would be established, certainly with the participation of all, which would be above national powers. It is in the very nature of a social contract that the contracting parties be bound, but to this principle is opposed the idea that a sovereign state does not recognise any power higher than itself; an idea still so rooted in the dominant culture that merely discussing it seems to seek to endanger the survival of the state. But even if one wanted to go down this rough path, it would be necessary to mark it out anew, finding an answer to difficult questions. Which powers to transfer from the state to a world government? How to ensure proper representation? Which instruments to confer on it? The principle of democracy is a single one, but it is achieved through different procedures and institutions for governing a village, a city, a nation-state, a continental federation, or the world. At each of the historical moments in which the social contract was extended (because the community of people who recognised themselves interdependent became broader) the institutions of government had to be reinvented in order to maintain the characteristics of efficacy, legitimacy, balance of powers, which civil thought and conscience judged indispensable.

In the construction of a world political order within which to pursue that part of peace, liberty, prosperity, justice (I say "part" because not all peace, liberty, etc. are dependent on the state of the world: there is one peace in the family and one in the city, a local and a universal justice) which is realisable only on a global scale, the path is steep. But we must know that we are not at zero-point.We sensed and turned onto that path almost a century ago. The same failures endured up to now have something to teach us.

What Altiero Spinelli said on the subject of European unity is valid for the creation of a world political order: the strength of an idea is revealed not by the fact that it imposes itself without friction at its first appearance, but from its capacity to be reborn out of defeat. If an idea contains in itself what I call the beginning of the solution to a question that torments humanity, to that idea people will come back, trying again and again. The failings of repeated attempts will not succeed in erasing it from people's mind and will.

5.Multiculturalism and common culture
At a certain moment in the history of the West the word "union" was used to define a political order. At first, there was personal union of various territories under one crown (in Spain, in the British Isles), then a union of the people located in adjacent provinces (in the Netherlands).

In those times a unity, which was not only political but also cultural, was recognised, or was attempted to be put in place. That culture developed predominantly in the religious sphere, contrary to what happened in the Roman empire, which however abandoned syncretism and practised persecution when it felt itself threatened by Christianity. Only in the modern age and in the states with a Christian tradition did the separation between political and religious powers mature, and with it the emancipation of culture from political power.

We have to ask ourselves if a worldwide political union without any matching point in the field of culture is possible. The answer is no, it is not possible. Just as a production or trading system requires, for its own global functioning, rules and powers which govern it, i.e. one global policy, a global policy in turn presupposes that some of its founding principles are universally shared, consequently a matching point in culture. The social contract of the world can be written in more than one way; but whatever the wording may be, the ideas and the culture that inspire it must be shared by the contracting parties.

Today we see that precisely on the issue of keeping separate culture and politics, religious and political power, the world is divided so sharply as to make blood be shed and to threaten the security of all. In Afghanistan, eight aid workers (doctors devoted to humanitarian aid) risked being condemned to death because they were found with a Bible in Arabic and with crucifixes. The crime is called "proselytising". What are the true contours of such a crime? Would respecting the liberty of others consist of saying nothing to them about our truth? Or would not such silence be a lack of respect? Commenting on the case, the Afghan Minister of Foreign Affairs, Muttawakil, said: "We believe ourselves to be serving human rights but there is a small difference of definition.We believe in rights according to Islam, and if someone tries to impose his definition he makes a bad mistake, because this is not the world of a single culture or of a single religion".

I have spoken about a matching point in the cultural sphere, not about a common culture. Just as not all the economy is global, in the same way not all politics and all culture can or must be unitary for there to be peace in the world. If it is true that a global political order is not possible without a minimum shared belief in fundamental matters of political philosophy and law, it is also true that the world is and will remain multicultural. That order cannot and must not aim to block the processes of mutual influence, osmosis, contamination that mark history and often connote its highest points. It must prevent forced conversions, not free conversions; it must prevent the suppression of local languages, not their slow decline into disuse; it must prevent the oppression by the strongest, not the support to a better solution.

The rules of how to live together that the West has slowly improved upon, often by way of fatal errors, are imperfect and demand vigilant application; but they are the same as those for which Mandela, Sacharov and Gandhi have endured imprisonment, for which Chinese students died in Tienanmen Square, the boat people have fled from Vietnam, Iranian and Algerian women have been stoned. They are not "European" values or, as it was once said, "bourgeois", as opposed to "Asian", "socialist", or "Islamic" values: they are values without an adjective.

6. Entering into history
The bursting of historic tragedy into an individual's life is an experience which almost every human being undergoes at least once in the course of his life, and leaves him permanently marked. It is, usually, experience of war. This experience transforms our lives, makes us see death as an event that concerns not only the circle of our own loved ones, poses new questions: if history invades our life, what must we do in history, how can we, in our own small way,
enter into history.

For many of those who live in prosperous, democratic countries, the images of the attack on the Twin Towers have been and remain the dramatic realisation that our house, school, office are not protected from destruction. Vietnam, Iran, Kuwait, Kosovo, Chechnya were distant names. Some weeks ago, unexpectedly, the war, televised so many times from those countries, ceased to be something of remote places and times. Now that war has become a nearby reality, the difficulty and the price of peace present themselves in a new light. In a comparable but opposite way, the war cried out for in squares in 1914, especially by the young, turned out to be, in the space of a few weeks, not a romantic adventure but a terrible massacre. Even a peaceful existence, as we have seen in New York, can unexpectedly become a terrible massacre. It is now understood that the peace enjoyed for decades in Europe is not the fruit of pacifism, it is felt that the grandfathers and great-grandfathers who enlisted in the two world wars at the same age as those who are students today did not love peace any less than their grandchildren do.

And yet it is true that peace is not made either through violence or non-violence. If we want to improve on the modern invention of peace, action must be taken to prevent war, not to evade those wars already being waged.We must take action in politics, not only in the voluntary service. We cannot wait for the regeneration of minds to be completed: the world of peaceloving people will never come if, in the meantime, the violent ones conquer it. Neither can it be hoped that the humanitarian commitment may look after not only the sick and poor, but also fanatics and terrorists. It is not possible to aim at a uniform culture: a minimal matching point must suffice to draw up a global social contract.

To build peace it is necessary to spare no efforts in the political arena. There is no other method than that invented and applied successfully to prevent war within the borders of each country: to substitute the rule of law in place of the survival of the fittest, to put a limit on the absolute power of the states. It is a very long path that will require much more time than the war which broke out on September 11. Those alive today will not see the end, but they must know that we have already set off, that the goa is known and that we have a compass.