The globalization process is characterized by a tension between unification and fragmentation. The global and local do not exclude each other. On the contrary, they are two aspects of a single process. The move towards globalization and world unification coexists with decentralization and localization. Nor is the nation-state destined to disappear.

Ronald Robertson coined the word “glocalization” to describe this process, for while globalization brings with it the unification of markets, civil society, cultural models, life styles and political institutions, it also fosters a need to preserve existing differences, local cultures and institutions. In fact, the moves to equalize and level social patterns simultaneously generate a need to maintain and develop more traditional local cultures and identities.

The trend towards fragmentation, takes two different forms. The first is a type of ethnic nationalism which not only resists globalization, but also can often result in the disintegration of established nation-states, thus leading to the transformation of the world into a collection of closed communities divided by tribal hatred. The second, alternative, scenario foresees the redistribution of governmental powers to different levels ranging from sub-national to supra-national through a structure of local and regional self-governments designed to be compatible with supranational powers and institutions.

Thus the erosion of state sovereignty stimulates the need for new forms of governance based on a division of competences between the national and the higher and lower levels of government. The architectural articulation of authority structures which has occurred in the globalization era has much in common with the medieval political organization, as Hedley Bull pointed out in his book The Anarchical Society, written in 1977 at the time when the word globalization was just beginning to come into use. His theory of a “new medievalism” underlines the analogy between the reorganization of the national and international political space, in progress during the last phase of the Cold War, and the overlapping of different levels of government from the local to the universal community which was typical of medieval times.

Whereas the formation of the modern state was characterized by the assertion of the concept of sovereignty – i.e. the progressive centralization of power on the military, fiscal, administrative, legislative and judiciary plane –, globalization on the other hand triggers a process which is developing in the opposite direction, namely that of the decentralization of political power and legal systems. A growing number of power centers are escaping state control and thereby undermining state sovereignty.

Observation of the effects of the globalization process shows the old sovereign states’ diminishing authority, the wider spread of political power and the weakening of legal certainties. Clashes between ill-defined rights pave the way to abuse. Encroachment by the strongest powers and groups against the weakest, the assertion of new privileges, the limitation of individual liberties, the spread of violence: all these aspects of the globalization process represent a serious danger to the values and institutions on which our civilization rests.

The ‘state’ is an invaluable heritage and a building bloc of the civilization process. On it depends the supremacy of the common good over the private interests. The problem, therefore, is to rethink and reorganize the state, not to abolish it.

In contemporary political-science literature, this reorganization of political power at different territorial levels has been called “multi-level governance”. This expression echoes the federalist vision of political institutions and enables us to rethink and question the traditional model of the unitary state. It is worth recalling that Kenneth C. Wheare defines the federal government “that system of power sharing that allows the central government and the regional governments to be, each in its own sphere, coordinated and independent”. It is appropriate to call this institutional arrangement “multi-level government”.

It is simply a delusion to imagine that the destruction of the nation-state alone could prove to be the vehicle towards more elevated forms of solidarity. It is true that the nation-state has led to the deepest political divisions and the strongest concentrations of power that the world has ever experienced. However, the well-known examples of Yugoslavia and Somalia show how the collapse of the state has meant a return to primitive barbarism, to ferocious, selfish tribalism and a return to obsolete forms of solidarity based on ethnic or religious ties.

Faced with these phenomena, one can appreciate the positive aspects of national solidarity in overcoming local, regional and class self-interests and the great role that nation-states have played in our history. France, Spain, Italy and Germany have unified populations with a variety of cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious backgrounds. To be sure, this unity was achieved by means of centralization, i.e. by sacrificing pluralism. It is what the federalists of the past century, from Proudhon to Frantz and Cattaneo, untiringly denounced even if the federalist political proposal, historically, had no chance of influencing states such as France, Germany and Italy. In fact, the strong political and military pressure that these states underwent on their borders and the radical nature assumed by the class struggle created a drive towards power centralisation that no force could oppose. The fact is that democratic centralism has been a stage in the construction of democracy, of its extension to mixed populations with equal rights as citizens; and a means of overcoming old political and economic institutions in which the privileges of the feudal guilds were concealed.

Federalism’s contribution to understanding, and therefore to identifying, the limitations of the national experience lies in the denunciation of the exclusive character assumed by the ties of national solidarity, which do not tolerate any loyalty towards communities that are smaller or larger than the nation itself. However, national solidarity does not have to be abandoned in the globalization era. It should rather be considered as a necessary step towards wider forms of solidarity shared between nations within regional federations which will themselves be bound together in a worldwide federation. At the same time, national solidarity does not exclude other forms of solidarity within regional and local communities, but can coexist with them.

The federal model is therefore an institutional formula that allows for the coexistence of solidarity between territorial communities of varying sizes ranging, where necessary, from small local communities to – through UN reform – the entire world.

Evidence shows that the federalizing process is now increasingly widespread. It will eventually embrace entire continents and potentially the whole of the planet. At the same time, certain unitary states have also been influenced by federalism, leading some of them to transfer power towards smaller territorial communities. As a result of this process developing in two directions, one towards the top of the federal hierarchy and the other towards the bottom, it has become necessary to organize federations with more than two levels of government and so to supersede the traditional model that shared power only between the federal government and the federated states.

To these two levels of government must now be added (with an equal standing within the state) the region, county or province (i.e. the intermediate community between the region and towns), and local community levels, i.e. the borough of a large city or the town. Then, above the continental federation, there is the worldwide level. Of course, in each of these territorial areas, institutions already exist that are a clear expression of governmental and organizational requirements. These are not, however, usually autonomous centres of power, but are subordinate to the nation-state. Their institutional reorganisation according to the federal pattern allows every level of government to be given an independent power. This implies full freedom for each level of government to have relationships within the framework of its own authority with all the other corresponding or different levels without being subjected to the control (except for those of a constitutional nature) of the higher levels of government. For example, Region-European Union relationships, or links between bordering regions, and so on.

The federal model should be seen not as destroying the national model but as superseding it. It is a change in two directions: towards the top and towards the bottom. In fact, the federalist design improves on the limitations of national democracy, which is in decline owing to its excessive concentration of power in the hands of national governments. This improvement is achieved by adding new levels of government, popular participation and citizenship, both above and within the nations.

On the other hand, the decline of power politics and the ever closer interdependence between peoples have weakened not only the incentives towards centralisation. It has also changed the traditional concept of border. This used to give states the unchangeable shape of a closed society with homogeneous characteristics. The new forms of federal organization link the coexistence of different levels of government with openness and the overlapping of the individual territorial communities.

As an example, the removal of military and economic divisions within the European Union has brought to light the artificial character of nation-states. It is now possible for border populations to develop new forms of association with their neighbours in the European regions, such as in the Basque countries, Tyrol, Catalonia and Roussillon, Alsace and Baden, or the region where the French and English face each other across the Channel. Possibly there will be in the future an institutionalization of these regions that goes beyond mere cross-frontier cooperation. This would constitute a new aspect of contemporary federalism and point the way to overcome the obsolete formula of the nation-state.

The United Nations Charter, written in 1945 by the victorious states of the Second World War, begins its preamble stating: “We the peoples of the United Nations”. Half a century on, we ask ourselves: We? Which peoples?

An academic perspective
In a thesis recognized in the academic world of international relations, John Ikenberry states that international organisations are the result of a transaction between the victorious countries and the defeated countries of a systemic war. He describes a systemic war as one in which the structure of the international system is replaced, thus modifying its own logic of interaction.

So, after all systemic wars, the victorious countries develop deliberate strategies to maintain their position of relative power. For example, the Great War destroyed “the concert of nations” strategically created in the nineteenth century by Chancellor Bismarck, and structured the peaceful period that followed in accordance with the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. Through this agreement, France tried to consolidate its situation of relative success, as compared to its neighbor Germany, by imposing war costs, by forcing them to return territories over which they had historical claims, and by forcefully restricting Germany’s military power.

The same happened towards the end of the Second World War. The victorious countries were the ones that pushed for the creation of an organisation with the objective of avoiding a new systemic war, based on Wilson’s League of Nations: the United Nations. Although the objective of preventing a new situation of systemic crisis was by all means ethically commendable, the effect was to perpetuate, to some extent, the immediate status quo. The victors of the Second World War developed an institutional structure for the new organisation based on the desire to maintain the power asymmetry.

In this way, they created the Security Council, with two mechanisms to maintain their relative power: five permanent seats and the right of veto. The Security Council is in charge of deciding and acting on any threat to international peace and stability. Therefore, it is the only body authorized to decide on the use of force.

We have said that John Ikenberry explains the emergence of international organisations as the result of a transaction between the victorious and the defeated countries in a military struggle with systemic characteristics. The question is, what drives the non-victorious countries to enter in a relation which reproduces the power asymmetry at a particular juncture? The answer is the ability to be heard by the international community, in the face of the threat of potential unilateral decision-making, without the possibility of expressing their opinion.

Today, half a century after the signing of the San Francisco Charter, we have an organisation that reproduces an age-old international order. Who would doubt the power of the countries of the G-8, the G-14 or the G-20, for instance?

One of the challenges that the United Nations will have to face in order not to become obsolete is its own reform. The UN is a formal institution, and, in this role, it needs to find a correspondence with the set of practices that, by the force of customs, have become institutionalized but haven’t acquired any formality yet (the G-8, the G-14 or the G-20).

An empiric perspective
Returning to the beginning, we asked ourselves to whom the preamble of the San Francisco Charter refers when it states “We the peoples”. We observed that it alluded to a much more restricted group than its current one: the 50 countries who signed the San Francisco Charter on the 24^th of October 1945. Nowadays, the organization is composed of 192 countries. Nevertheless, it was in 1945 that these 50 countries created a mechanism that, 50 years later, neither constitutes nor represents the 192. But, let us think a little about this claim.

Let’s see what happens in the main bodies of the United Nations: the Assembly and the Security Council. The United Nations General Assembly is the arena where diplomatic delegations of the 192 member countries interact. It is the main deliberative organ, that formulates policy and, according to the Charter, is “representative” of the United Nations. Nevertheless, diplomatic delegations represent countries and, sometimes, merely governments, not the heterogeneity of the peoples. We should not confuse these two. The diplomatic delegations are in the best of cases representing countries, not peoples. And this is without speaking of the representation of specific collectives, recognized by the Assembly through the so-called “Third Generation” Treaties. Neither are these collectives, i.e. women, native peoples, etc., part of the decision-making process.

What happens at the Security Council? Here we find a selective composition: five permanent members and ten who rotate every two years. Likewise, we can see that decisions are taken by a majority of members, but the five permanent seats are the ones with the right to veto these decisions. We also find that decisions taken in the Security Council are the only ones which are binding. In this way, in accordance with the Charter’s famous Chapter VII, the United Nations Security Council is the only one authorized to call on members to apply economic sanctions and take military action.

So we can ask ourselves whether these five “world policemen” represent the global population. What we can conclude is that little more than 25% of the global population is represented by the Council’s permanent seats. If we restrict this measure to the western population we find that only about 6% is represented at the moment of taking binding decisions about international peace and security, decisions that affect all of us. As a Latin American, I find myself obliged to ask about the “presence” of my region in this Council. And then I find that the percentage is 0%! To what representation do we refer if the indexes of representation are 0%, 6% and, in the best of cases, 25%? It seems we just have to be sorry that the USA, China, Russia, France and the United Kingdom are not Latin Americans, nor Africans, for instance. What continues to prevail is the logic of force over the logic of consensus and constructive deliberation.

Towards the establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly
It is imperative to undertake an integral reform of the United Nations taking into account that any representative institution, that is to say, any democratic institution, should have a structure that honours this characteristic. We propose a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, composed of delegates elected by the peoples represented in the international community.

To ensure international cooperation, the acceptance and legitimacy of the United Nations, and to improve its ability to act, the peoples should be directly and effectively integrated into the United Nations and its agencies.

A UN Parliamentary Assembly will not be just another institution. As the mouthpiece of the citizens, it would be the expression and the vehicle of the transformation of world consciousness and of the comprehension of international politics in peaceful terms. It is clear that the establishment of such an institution would be a decisive step towards the democratic consolidation of the United Nations system.

Actions to support the establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly
The Congress of the Republic of Argentina was the first national legislative organ that supported the establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly. On the 8^th of November, 2008, the Chamber of Senators approved a draft authored by myself on this matter, and on the 5^th of August, 2009, the Chamber of Representatives passed a similar bill/draft, presented by MP Fernando Iglesias.

Likewise, the Latin American Parliament was the first regional parliament which passed a declaration supporting the constitution of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, on the 5^th of December of 2008. These initiatives express the desire of the region to be more actively represented in the United Nations.

In Conclusion
Albert Einstein, a highly revered scientist but in particular a skilled analyst of the modern world, sent an open letter to the UN General Assembly, in which he stated: "The method of representation at the UN should be considerably modified. The present method of selection by government appointment does not leave any real freedom to the appointee. Furthermore, selection by governments cannot give the peoples of the world the feeling of being fairly and proportionately represented. The moral authority of the UN would be considerably enhanced if the delegates were elected directly by the people. Were they responsible to an electorate, they would have much more freedom to follow their consciences". Fifty-two years later, we are still fighting for an organisation in which “we the peoples” truly and actively participate.

1. The first, feeble signs of recovery appeared in Europe after the financial tsunami that threatened to disrupt the world economy cannot hide the fact that the predicted growth for 2010 is still quite modest and it will take many years for people to get back to the pre-crisis income levels. On the other hand, the negative impact of income falloff on tax revenues has produced significant unbalances in public finance accounts, making it difficult to put in place expansionary policies. Within a monetary union, a policy of income and employment stabilization run at the national level produces nowadays very limited effects, and must be supported necessarily by a plan of interventions managed at the European level. An expansive policy run by a single member country of the European Union concentrates costs -hence the increase in public finance indebtedness- in the country that carries it out, while the benefits in terms of expansion of demand are transmitted to a large extent abroad, in the other countries of the European internal market. In the presence of significant positive externalities, the production of the public good “stabilization” is therefore sub-optimal, since every country finds it convenient to wait until others take the initiative, thus avoiding to bear the costs.

The necessity to launch a European project to stimulate the economy in this difficult phase following the financial crisis is generally acknowledged but, confronted with the difficulties of building the necessary political support in an institutional framework characterized by the absence of a European government of the economy, there is anyway a strong desire to try to get a similar result through support measures taken at the national level. However, also on the basis of the experience accumulated since the start of the crisis, it looks utterly illusory to think that a coordination of national policies could lead to results similar to those attainable with a European recovery plan.

2. The burst of the crisis has in addition made it apparent that a phase of the European economic growth has now come to an end. The decisive factor of growth was represented by a technological development of an imitative type: in essence, it was enough to import the best technologies from the more advanced countries to increase productivity and hence continuously raise the living standards of the population. But Europe has now reached the technological frontier and is not able any more to relaunch development by importing technologies from abroad. If it wants to start growing again, Europe must count only on its own resources and in particular on a renewed and strong capacity of producing innovation, in order to promote an increase in productivity and in its ability to successfully compete in the world markets.

From the present crisis we will not get out with a mere policy of support of the demand of consumption goods; instead, it is a question of launching a new phase of growth of the European economy, with the aim to promote a development that has to be sustainable on the economic, social and environmental plan. The motor of that new development phase shall be, then, public investments, which will have short-term effects in supporting demand and employment, but also long-term effects on the supply side, by making higher the potential income and more competitive the European economic system.

3. A lasting growth of the European economy implies, in fact, a productivity increase, which in turn requires a series of measures that shall be taken and implemented at the European level in order for them to be effective, in the framework of an evolution of the world economy that looks today quite different than in the past. A new technological revolution has by now taken place, and the United States was able to take the greatest benefits of it, with very high growth rates in productivity and output, while the new industrially emerging countries are now competing in many sectors (and not just in those with mature technologies) with the countries of long-established industrialization. Europe is thus caught in from two sides and has difficulties to find a new road to a stable and sustainable growth.

In the United States, productivity growth was supported by a technological development originated and accelerated by public demand, coming in particular from the defense sector, that made investments of a very innovative nature possible. But such a propulsive element cannot be envisaged in Europe, where military expenditures are necessarily limited after the tragic experience of nationalism and the ruins caused by WWII.

4. The increase in investments is therefore tied by necessity to launch a plan promoting a sustainable development and improving the Europeans’ living standards, through expenditure plans for research and higher education, the betterment of the network of material and immaterial infrastructures, the promotion of energy efficiency and the use of renewable energies, the support of soft mobility, and for assuring the conservation of the patrimony of artistic and natural riches, and favoring urban renewal. But the implementation of such a plan is blocked by, on the one hand, the constraints plaguing national budgets, and, on the other, the limited size of the European budget and the inability to take constructive decisions in an institutional structure of a confederal type like the one that still dominates at the European level.

The recovery plan can be financed through the issuing of securities by the EIB as far as investments in infrastructures or in projects liable to generate revenues on the market are concerned, while it shall be covered by the issuing of bonds guaranteed by the Union’s budget when there is to finance expenditures that have the nature of investments aimed at the production of European public goods. The issuing of bonds shall reach an amount equal to at least one point of the GDP of the euro-area -i.e. of the order of €100 billion- in order for it to have a meaningful macro-economic impact and a positive influence on the confidence of families and businesses.

5. Supporting development on the part of European institutions by recurring to Union bonds, in addition to budget resources, was already done in the past. In the 1950s, the ECSC financed through the issuing of bonds of its own the conversion of the coal industry (which represented the energy problem of the time), while in the 1980s the Commission, with the proposal of Commissioner Ortoli, intervened with the NIC (Nouveau Instrument Communautaire) in support of the industrial conversion made necessary by the changes brought about by the oil crises.

Thanks to the Union’s prestige in the world market and the current strength of the European currency, the Union bonds could be issued at a low interest rate and could contribute, beside strengthening the European financial market by absorbing part of the liquidity surplus that is one of its present features, to help attract a large share of world savings that, lacking suitable alternatives, are still invested in the American market despite the dollar’s progressive loss of value.

Should the maneuver be realized up to the recommended amount, the European budget would rise to a comprehensive volume equal to about 2% of GDP -as already suggested in 1993 by the commission of experts tasked with the study of the role of fiscal policy in an economic and monetary union in its Stable Money-Sound Finances. Community Public Finance in the Perspective of EMU Report-, and would be composed of two sections: a section in capital account, financed with Union bonds and aimed to finance the development plan; and a balanced section -in line with the rules of Art. 310 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union-, which finances the agricultural policy and the redistribution and cohesion policies.

In the new context of the European economy -characterized by the necessity of a conversion for facing the challenge of environmental sustainability and the changed structure of the world market caused by the transformation of demand brought about by the growing purchasing power of the emerging countries and by the ensuing necessity to raise the savings of the already developed countries- we can see different modes of intervention that can be carried out through the action of European federal agencies.

6. The American experience demonstrates how in a federal system it is possible for the government to mobilize huge resources in support of economic growth, provided that at the same time a full transparency and responsibility is assured in the use of the funds collected at the federal level. The two most meaningful examples of federal agencies are represented by the Tennessee Valley Authority, instituted by Roosevelt as the exemplary instrument of the New Deal, and, in the post-WWII period, by NASA, instituted with the aim to face the challenge with the USSR in the Space Race, which gave origin later to the great progress in information technologies whose emblematic symbol is the Silicon Valley.

A system of federal agencies would allow, on the one hand, to keep in the hands of political institutions (the Commission, the Council and the Parliament) the choice of the objectives to be pursued and the priorities in their implementation, and, on the other, to entrust to the agencies the task to realize individual programs, maintaining the authority to control the outputs and the use of public money (which would be very difficult to do if the resources to invest are part of the general budget).

Such a system has already been successfully realized in Europe, first with the ECSC and later with the EIB, where the Board of Governors (composed of the Finance Ministers) sets the priorities, while the Board of Directors, where a representative of the Commission sits, implements the operational decisions. And in fact the EIB’s success induced the American Congress to examine a proposal to institute a federal National Investment Bank, just taking inspiration from the European model, and that proposal is currently supported with determination by the Obama Administration.

7. The historical activity of the EIB can today go hand in hand with the agencies created jointly by the European Union, with the same EIB, and financial public institutions (Caisse de Depôts, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, KfW, etc.) oriented to the long-term, capable of sharing in the capital of companies concessionaires of networks, as in the case of the “Marguerite” fund, now in its start-up phase. The Union bonds issued by those agencies can be repaid with the revenues coming from their respective investments, although with long-term reimbursement plans, given the characteristics of that type of projects, which the financial market institutions, oriented to the short-term, are unable to give suitable answers to.

Such agencies, managing public goods presenting monopolistic features, are in a position to impose the payment of usage rights (“taxes”) on market operators exploiting such goods. On this point, there is to consider the fact that technological evolution and the constraints of environmental sustainability considerably widen the need to use public goods (suffice it to think of air quality in the cities).

A particularly meaningful example of joint projects is the “Galileo” project for the use of satellites, but there may be other cases of shared usage of the airspace. The juridical instrument to resort to in such cases is the “joint undertaking” provided by Art. 187 of the Lisbon Treaty.

8. As to the financing of research and innovation, a real program replacing the disastrous Lisbon strategy launched ten years ago must single out a limited number of strategic projects -as the USA did with NASA-, where to concentrate the European common resources. In addition to the energy sector, and in particular the new renewable sources, one shall not forget basic medical research, which cannot be left entirely in the hands of multinational companies.

The financing of the agencies cannot but pass through the Union’s “warranty”, that must ensure, through its own budget, that the funds collected through the Union bonds will be paid back. The project, already put forward by Delors, to resort to a European “Carbon Tax” -endorsed today by the Swedish Presidency- becomes topical once more.

9. The increase of the EU budget’s size, aimed to support the European development plan, would also allow to proceed to a first rationalization (hence a parallel reduction) of the member States’ military expenditures, with the creation of a first embryo of European Army – as recently proposed in the Munich Security Conference by the German Foreign Minister Westerwelle-, and to launch a Marshall Plan for the countries overlooking the Mediterranean, aimed at stimulating the endogenous development projects able to rein in the migratory flow towards the European Union, and the social problems connected to that in the immigration countries.

The fact remains, however, that, due to the fact that the increase of the EU budget is limited to 1% of the European GDP initially, the dimensions of the potential market for Union bonds are anyway influenced by its limited size, as it is supposed to guarantee their service and reimbursement. Consequently, to the extent that the requests of investments to be financed through European debt will inevitably grow further in the next years, in parallel becomes more urgent the need to proceed to an in-depth reform of the European budget.

10. In the perspective of a reform of the European budget aimed to make it capable of guaranteeing the financing of the investments required by a European recovery plan, through the issuing of public debt securities, it is necessary to contemplate a return to a system of veritable EU own resources. In fact, it is not a true own resource the so-called fourth resource, which is nothing else but a national contribution proportional to a nation’s GDP, which should be replaced with a European surtax, additional to the national income taxes -which will not be touched by the reform-, directly paid by the citizens to the European budget so as to assure a better transparency of the tax collection and reinforce at the same time the responsibility of those using up the resources.

A new resource could be provided to the European budget by reconsidering the Directive Proposal introducing a carbon/energy tax. In a situation where the dangers connected to climate change appear clearer and the ever more urgent necessity emerges to replace fossil fuels with alternative energy sources, a tax proportional to the carbon content of energy sources appears to be a suitable instrument to start virtuous energy-saving and fuel-switching processes in the direction of renewable energy sources, reducing the negative impact on the environment of energy consumption, and favoring the introduction of less energy-intensive production processes, thus promoting the transition to a low-carbon economy.

That tax, whose structure is outlined in the Directive Proposal approved by the European Commission in 1992, with an estimated yield at full speed of 1% of the European GDP, would have a twofold objective: to finance the budget and guarantee the debt service, and, at the same time, to promote the conversion of the European economy along a path of sustainable development. The tax could be introduced by the Union unilaterally, in order to avoid a stalemate otherwise caused in every country by the fear that the other members will behave as free-riders, and to exert a considerable pressure on the member States in view of a multilateral agreement to be reached in the post-Copenhagen phase, without putting at risk the external competitiveness of European production if it were accompanied by the introduction of a border tax adjustment to be levied on imported goods, of the same amount as that resting on the shoulders of European producers.

11. The launch of the European development plan, with the issue of Union bonds and the introduction of a carbon/energy tax to ensure an enlargement of the European budget and promote the transition towards a sustainable economy, presents obviously difficulties of a political nature, since it implies to reach an agreement between all the governments. In addition to the objections of principle by countries like the UK, which oppose any initiative contemplating a government of the economy at the European level, there is also a resistance on the part of Germany, because the Berlin Government believes that the cost of an issue of Union bonds would be higher than the cost of German issues. Actually, the risk of default of some countries of the euro-area pushed upward interest rates and weakened the value of the European currency, while a crisis of those same countries would inevitably hit German export, which for German enterprises represents the main component affecting the growth of demand. But, as Padoa Schioppa observed – and a similar opinion has been expressed by Eichengreen-, the Greek crisis does not represent, as many argue, the prelude to the end of the euro; on the contrary, just when the crisis hit one country and threatened the euro, the governments “began to understand that we cannot do any longer without the State of the euro”, and a process started that shall bring us from a monetary Union – a currency without a State – to a political Union.

Towards a World Reserve Currency

On the 14^th of May 2010, an International Colloquium on the Initiative Triffin 21: “Towards a World Reserve Currency”, organized by the Triffin International Foundation¹ in co-operation with the Compagnia di San Paolo², took place in Turin (Italy) and gathered policy-makers, central bankers and economists from all over the world.

The Initiative Triffin 21 was launched by the Triffin International Foundation, chaired by Alexandre Lamfalussy, with the aim to contribute to the debate on the reform of the international monetary system. The first step of the Initiative was a lecture given by Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa on “The ghost of bancor: the economic crisis and global monetary disorder”³ at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve last February. The international colloquium in Turin was the second step of the initiative, with the objective of bringing together different views of scholars and policy-makers, all united by the will of developing a multilateral approach to international economic and monetary issues.

The colloquium focused on two areas which constitute the necessary premise of any reform proposal: on the one hand, the analysis of the non-sustainability of the present monetary arrangements as a systemic root of the current crisis, and, on the other hand, the identification of the rules and requirements of a stable international monetary system.

On the first point the discussion was based on the recognition of the persistence of the so-called “Triffin dilemma”. Triffin, back in 1960, identified a flaw at the basis of the use of a national currency, namely the US dollar, as the international reserve currency, basically linked to the impossibility to reconcile the external equilibrium of the US with the creation of an amount of international liquidity sufficient to support the development of international trade. The symmetrical growth of the deficit of the US balance of payments on the one hand and the accumulation of reserves in the emerging countries on the other hand, experienced in the last decade and generally considered one of the problems at the heart of global imbalances, resulted in a net transfer of funds from the developing countries to the developed ones: in other words, the developing countries’ savings were financing the developed countries’ expenditures.

After the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the global economy was left without any monetary order: exchange rates were left to the market and, even without a formal global arrangement, the dollar became the international reserve currency. In a sense, after the gold exchange standard and the dollar standard, we have experienced a “fiduciary dollar standard”. This monetary “non-system” was the result of individual countries’ choices and it gave rise to a broad and bizarre combination of exchange rate regimes, ranging from monetary unions and hard pegs to freely floating rates.

Currently, there is no adjustment mechanism of global imbalances nor there is a stable anchor for the monetary policy stance of the global standard’s issuer. Furthermore, there is no international authority empowered to adopt coordinated (domestic) measures to address the problem.

During the discussion in Turin there was a common acknowledgement that the lack of a monetary anchor with a universally accepted rule and the lack of a mechanism able to ensure the global consistency of national objectives has brought about a recurrent systemic instability with large fluctuations of the exchange rates, repeated episodes of currency and financial crises in the emerging markets and a sharp widening of current account imbalances. Furthermore, in the long run it cannot be politically acceptable and economically sustainable that developing and emerging countries transfer funds to the industrialized ones, while still under-represented in international institutions.

On the second point about the desirable requirements of a stable international monetary system, the considerations emerged during the colloquium pointed to the ruling out of the two extreme solutions: worldwide flexible exchange rates or fixed exchange rates. Both options appear to be unrealistic and undesirable. The former option would be destabilizing, as it would require a fully efficient market reacting to disequilibria in the fundamentals. The latter implies to give up capital mobility and establish a single world monetary policy, namely a transfer of sovereignty from the national level to the international level, that appears to be politically impossible in the foreseeable future.

If the possible solution is not simply one of the above mentioned extremes, other options need to be considered which allow for gradual adjustments aiming at incremental solutions, rather than sharp turns.

During the colloquium, a number of requirements for a future and more stable monetary system were expressed, namely:
-    the presence of rules (and incentives) that impose some form of discipline on national economic policies, that are now left to the market only;
-    the presence of a global anchor to stabilize inflation expectations. This would replace the use of the US monetary stance, which is determined on national parameters and needs, as a global stance;
-    the need to find a solution to the issue of the global (mis-)matching of demand and supply of reserves and to the diversification needs;
-    the participation of the emerging countries to the definition of possible solutions and the need to answer to their request for a stronger representation.

Starting from these points, some hints about possible future actions and configurations of the international monetary system looking ahead were put forward.

Particular reference was made to the proposal of the Governor of the People’s Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan, who, in March 2009, put forward a plan for the use of the SDRs issued by the IMF as a supra-national reserve currency. His proposal included a number of desired reforms, including the need to review and broaden the composition of the SDR basket⁴.

In line with this proposal, a number of measures have been discussed during the meeting in Turin to support the adoption of the SDRs as international reserve currency, consistent with the demand in the international settlements and payments for trade and finance. It is worth noting that there are some obvious similarities between some proposals for the development of the SDR and the European experience with the development of the ecu.

The first step indicated is linked to the need to make the SDR fully convertible. The IMF and all its members could sign a pact in which they agree to make the SDR fully convertible, which means that a member can exchange the SDR currency mix into a “real” SDR and vice versa. It has also been argued that, in revisiting the composition of the SDR basket, it should be kept in mind that all the currencies included in the basket should be fully convertible.

Secondly, SDR payments and settlements need to be made legal in every IMF member country. There should be a settlement system between the SDR and other currencies, and the BIS (or the IMF itself) could act as the international SDR settlement bank.
On the other hand, it is not perceived as necessary to back the SDR with commodities, as it is already the case for national currencies, and the SDR could coexist with national/regional currencies, which means that each country can continue to enjoy a relevant degree of independence in its monetary policy.

Since the use of the SDR as the internationally accepted reserve currency implies the overcoming of the drawbacks currently linked to the SDR, as it was invented by the governments, and the achievement of a critical mass, it is unrealistic to rely on the private market only. On the contrary, there is common acknowledgment that there must be an organized and top-down approach by the governments. Then, also market players could perceive the SDR as an opportunity, notably as a sort of global hedge due to its basket’s composition. Therefore, it is essential that world leaders are convinced that this process is in the interest of both the international system and individual countries.

However, before looking at possible solutions and actions to put in place, it is essential to reach a wide consensus on the two points discussed during the meeting, i.e. the non-sustainability of current global monetary arrangements as sources of systemic instability and imbalances, and the requirements for a more stable monetary system. With this aim in mind, the next step of the Initiative Triffin 21 consists in the stimulation and collection of studies and researches from economists and experts from all over the world, in order to formulate recommendations for national and international policy-makers.


1 A foundation established in the 1990’s to preserve the intellectual heritage of the Belgian/US economist Robert Triffin and to address the new problems of our global economy in light of his ideas.
2 An Italian foundation with a strong focus on European and international issues.
3 The full text is available, in English and French, on the website of the Triffin International Foundation http://www.uclouvain.be/fondation-triffin.html
4 The SDR basket now includes only the US dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen and the British pound and its next review is scheduled for end 2010.

Appreciation of Agence Europe's role
The Altiero Spinelli Institute on Federalist Studies awarded its 2010 Prize for Journalistic Services on European Political Unity to the press agency Agence Europe; the prize-giving ceremony took place on August 29 in Ventotene, a small Mediterranean island in Italy where Altiero Spinelli was imprisoned by the fascist regime and where he wrote his celebrated Manifesto recommending the creation of a European Federation.

A message of confidence
I am not going to highlight the importance and scope of Altiero Spinelli's work or the role of Agence Europe in helping people understand this bold adventure that changed the face of the world. I would like to stress the message of confidence and the enthusiasm of the speakers in a debate on the Schuman Declaration, in reaction to the currently fashionable apathy. Lucio Levi, chair of the European Federalist Movement, pointed out how much the main goals of the founders of Europe have already been achieved. The reconciliation of peoples who had been butchering one another during the cruelest and most inexorable war in history only months before, the scrapping of border controls, supranational institutions, an elected European Parliament with genuine powers, the single currency - all this is in existence despite the wars that continue to exist elsewhere in the world. There are still big lacunas, of course, and Levi explained that progress is essential, yet he said that the European Federation already exists in part.

MEP Gianluca Susta then described the current time as a moment of hope, explaining not only the many disappointments but also the various options opened in the field of foreign relations by the European diplomatic corps and in the field of business by the emergence of a common European economic governance, which may be embryonic but exists nevertheless. He also pointed out how Europe is in the avant-garde when it comes to the climate - he added that he'd like President Obama to adopt similar positions to Europe's on climate issues.

The other speaker, Pier Virgilio Dastoli, who worked directly with Altiero Spinelli at both the European Commission and the European Parliament in Strasbourg, naturally regretted that the programmes launched by the great visionary had not succeeded at the time, but he said that 60% of the current achievements and projects are based on what Spinelli recommended and prepared for back then.

These messages to young people on the small island where the imprisoned Altiero Spinelli wrote his European Manifesto reinforce my conviction that the European project is far from going through a period of stagnation and crisis and is actually preparing its recovery, even in areas where all previous attempts have failed, like economic governance, foreign policy and defence. The agreement that has just been reached on financial supervision is a significant feat and several signs show that the energy industry may soon be added to the list of innovations.

Return to the intergovernmental method?
I am well aware of the fear that the EU is gradually slipping backwards into an intergovernmental type of management to the detriment of the Community method. The greater weight of the European Council is described as a symptom of this. The danger certainly exists and must be closely monitored. But we should not forget that the European Council is a European institution with a permanent President who is not a national head of state, so the holders of real power in the member states can no longer wriggle around the Community method. I believe this development should be seen as a positive step in itself. It is risky, as Martin Schulz makes clear, but the risks can be managed through the increasing role of the European Parliament (which is in the process of properly assuming its greater powers and responsibility) and the gradual enhancement of how the president of the Commission and the president of the European Council will work together. Both presidents come from small member states and are probably keen to safeguard the Community method. The “big countries” are tempted to throw their weight around but are increasingly aware that their weight in the world depends these days on whether they speak for Europe rather than just for their own country; and they aim to speak for Europe as often as possible. If the other EU institutions function as they should, then the Community method will be safe.


The text originally appeared in A Look Behind The News, Agence Europe, September 4, 2010.

The City of Winnipeg, Canada, in the Province of Manitoba, is to be found at the longitudinal centre of both the country and the continent. It straddles the juncture of the Red and Assinaboine Rivers, for millennia a meeting place for the first peoples of North America. Between June 16^th and June 23^rd of 2010, three significant and interrelated events occurred in Winnipeg, individually and collectively defining both the historic nature of Canadian federalism, and suggesting a shape for its future. They were: the first national convocation of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools; the World Religions Summit, 2010; and the visit of HRH Elizabeth II and the laying of the corner stone of the Canadian Human Rights Museum. “How”, I hear you say “do these three events relate one to another, let alone to the essentials of federalism in Canada”?

Federalism is a political philosophy, but even more a political methodology; a structural device of some use in the governing of human affairs – especially in areas of political diversity and complexity. The Oxford English Reference Dictionary defines federalism as: a system of government which unites separate states while allowing each to have a substantial degree of autonomy…(Federalism) usually has a written constitution and tends to stress the decentralization of power and, in its democratic form, direct communication between the government and its citizens. This definition adequately describes the structure of federalism, and even suggests why federalism is such a useful tool in establishing institutional harmony amongst diverse sovereignties, whether states parties or otherwise. But the capacity of federalism to be an instrument for peace building in a global community depends more on its substance or essence than on its structural excellencies. This essence is less tangible than constitutional instruments, but no less critical to its functioning. It is characterized by an appreciation of three principal attributes: diversity, inclusivity and interdependence. These together denote an attitude of mind rather than of statute.

H.G. Wells, a pioneer of the world federalist vision, captured this in his prophetic 1933 book, The Shape of Things to Come. In describing the aftermath of the risible Versailles Peace Conference of 1919 and the establishment of the League of Nations – more the “Beleaguered Nations” –, Wells notes the Allies' desire to establish black and white categories of “Good Peoples” and “Bad Peoples” in order to demonstrate who might be in and who out of a new world order. Such categorization is inimical to a federalist vision.
He writes: “If Russia and Germany in their character as Bad Peoples were excluded from the League, such remote peoples as the Chinese and the Japanese were included as a matter of course. It was assumed, apparently, that they were ‘just fellows’ of the universal Treaty-of-Westphalia pattern. The European world knew practically nothing of the mental processes of these remote and ancient communities, and it seems hardly to have dawned upon the conferring statesmen that political processes rest entirely upon mental facts”. This must have been particularly irksome to the man who, in 1917, “sat down with the Encyclopedia Britannica at his elbow” to attempt for the first time a history not of discreet nation-states but of the whole human community. Today we take the principles which dominate Wells’ Outline of History for granted, but during the “war to end wars” – another Wellsian phrase, this from 1914 and sadly inaccurate – it was a revolutionary concept indeed, and one without which a real vision of a diverse, inclusive and interdependent world federalism could never have developed.

It is vision which drives world federalism; structures, no matter how sophisticated and nuanced, are but tools to be modified and improved upon as needs must. For federalism is complex; it is ever evolving, ever in process of negotiation and renegotiation.

If you will permit me to risk a humorous aside, for it is always risky to test humour in the context of multiple linguistic and cultural constituencies, I will illustrate with a Canadian story the complexity of federalism as an evolutionary concept. Three philosophers were commissioned to produce books on the elephant. A French philosopher produced a slim volume entitled The Elephant: a Gastronomic Delight. A German published a treatise in 8 volumes with 2 additional volumes of appendices entitled The Elephant: An Ontological and Dialectical Approach. A Canadian wrote a volume with a particularly contextual flair, The Elephant: a Question of Federal or Provincial Jurisdiction.

There is often much truth in humour, and this illustration captures well the Canadian experiment in federalism which, I will suggest, is a useful model to be considered for the great global adventure. It demonstrates that Canadian federalism is constantly under negotiation despite a nearly thirty year old written constitution, the gift of our late Cartesian Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau. Its living essence, diverse, inclusive and interdependent, can be expansively illustrated through an examination of the three convergent events which I noted in beginning this paper. Permit me to briefly describe the surface expression of the Canadian federal system, then to peel away that surface layer to embrace the complexity which lies beneath.

The Canadian federation is a constitutional monarchy enshrined in a bicameral parliamentary system with an elected House of Commons and an appointed Senate – appointed ostensibly by Her Majesty Elizabeth II, but in effect by the Prime Minister of the governing, most often majority party, in the House of Commons. The federal union brings together ten provinces, the self-governing aboriginal Territory of Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon Territory. Each of these has a legislature which is responsible for significant areas of governance in the best tradition of subsidiarity: the delegation of governmental authority to the most appropriate and effective legislative level. In Canada, provincial authority and responsibility is closely defined and circumscribed, and all juridical authority not named specifically to the provinces or Nunavut devolves to the federal government. Parenthetically, this is diametrically opposite to the republican system of devolution of powers in the United States of America.

The system was formally established through the British North America Act of 1867, passed by the British Parliament, Canada being a British colony at the time; modified by the Statute of Westminster, passed in 1931, again by the British, but relinquishing virtually complete sovereignty to what was then delineated the Dominion of Canada; and then rendered fully independent by virtue of the repatriation of all constitutional authority through the adoption of a written constitution and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms under the leadership of the Hon. Pierre Eliot Trudeau in 1982. Nine provinces operate under British Common Law; Nunavut incorporates significant aboriginal tradition, and Quebec, closely linked by history and sentiment to France, according to the Code Napoleon. All in all, this is a complex yet fairly tidy approach to federal governance. But it fails to tell the whole story.

On the surface, Canada is a country established and governed according to the two antique European traditions traditionally referred to as the founding “nations”: those of Great Britain and France. But a minority view, long quietly espoused by the reemerging aboriginal communities of Canada – the First Nations, Inuit and Métis – has recently been championed by the eminent Canadian public philosopher and iconoclast, Dr. John Ralston Saul. In his 2008 publication, A Fair Country, Ralston Saul argues controversially and effectively that Canada is not really a European nation at all, but a Métis nation, and it is that demonstrable and incontrovertible fact which renders Canadian federalism unique in all the world. I contend that it is this particularity which renders Canada a model for world federalist approaches to the complex issues facing theorists of global governance in the 21^st century. It is this heritage which addresses not only the structure but the substance or essence of federalism, which, in the end, as Wells suggested, is more mental than material.

And it is at this point that I will draw together the three events which I cited in the opening paragraphs of this paper. The eminent biblical scholars, John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, in their recent collaborative work The Last Week, have noted with deadly accuracy that the majority of humanity has, throughout history, experienced life in three dominant ways: political oppression; economic exploitation; and religious validation of the first two. This has been clearly evident in the story of the indigenous Aboriginal population of North America, and, for the purposes of this paper, Canada.

When I was a child we recited a bit of doggerel that went, “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”. Whatever that may have meant by way of good news for Europeans, the result was rather more mixed for the Aboriginal peoples who came to be identified by the generic and erroneous label of “Indians”. From the spread of virulent European diseases through land grabbing fictions denoted treaties, the millions of inhabitants of North America, replete with rich and complex societies, were nearly annihilated during the first 450 years of European incursion. And yet despite the easily demonstrable hardships brought to Aboriginals by Europeans, it was Aboriginal support that allowed Europeans to flourish in the harsh environment of what is today Canada.

The earliest Europeans in Canada were French, Scots and Orkney traders through Hudson’s Bay and up the St. Lawrence. They were taught the cure for scurvy; how to use the natural river “highways” of the continent with the aid of birch bark canoes; how to employ fur to survive brutal winters – and how to develop new expressions of society. They intermarried with Aboriginal women, forming alliances of great strength and significant advantage. While some were no doubt simply for convenience, many proved long lasting, bringing into being an entirely new culture, the Métis. One of the most interesting and illustrative was James Douglas, the son of a Scots trader and a black West Indian freedwoman, who married an Aboriginal princess, became the first governor of Victoria on Vancouver Island; married her by benefit of Anglican clergy, and whose children married into the English aristocracy.

And there is the rub. By the latter half of the 19^th century, a desire to forget the Aboriginal roots of Canadian society caused Canadians to lose the knowledge of how this country was conceived, in a mad scramble to emulate Europe to become “more English than the English”. The disaster of the “residential school system” was implemented. With the kind of good intentions paving the road to hell, Aboriginal children were torn from their families and taken away to schools in which many were beaten, many were abused, and all lost their heritage. In consequence, the larger Canadian society suffered a commensurate loss.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been established as a means to begin the redress of this national tragedy. Through it we are beginning to recover the essence of Canadian federalism which is marked more by an Aboriginal than a European worldview.
Ralston Saul notes some of those attributes: “Our obsession with egalitarianism. Our desire to maintain a balance between individuals and groups. The delight we take in playing with our non-monolithic idea of society – a delight in complexity. Our tendency to try and run society as an ongoing negotiation, which must be related to our distaste for resolving complexities. Our preference, behind a relatively violent language of public debate, for consensus – again an expression of society as a balance of complexity, a sort of equilibrium. Our intuition that behind the formal written and technical face of society lies something more important, which we try to get at through the oral and through complex relationships. Our sense that the clear resolution of differences will lead to injustice and even violence. And related to that a preference for something that the law now calls minimal impairment, which means the obligation of those with authority to do as little damage as possible to people and to rights when exercising that authority”.

All these ideas are, Ralston Saul demonstrates, “central to indigenous culture”. Canadian federalism is, he says, “…all about working out how to create relationships that are mixed in various ways and designed to create balances. It is the idea of a complex society functioning like an equally complex family within an ever enlarging circle. That is the Canadian model”. (emphasis mine) It is captured in the Cree term, Witaskewin, or “harmonious living”, which means, Saul notes, “living together on the land…an agreement to live together in peace. You could translate it today as democratic federalism or practical environmentalism”. Permit me to note, without any sense of hyperbole, that this is not only the essence of federalism, but critical to the very nature of democracy. In fact, democracy, especially a federal democracy, has but little to do with elections and constitutions, and everything to do with the free associations inherent in a healthy civil society and the complex interrelationships of the same.

This brings me to the second and interrelated event, The World Religions Summit, and the 47 member Inter-religious National Partnership to coordinate that Summit. In 1997, then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, convened the G8 leaders in Birmingham. During the course of the summit, Mr. Blair made an opportunity to meet with demonstrators of global religious communities, mostly Christian, who were promoting the principle that the wealthiest nations ought to forgive the debt of the poorest of nations. Like Wesley before him, Mr. Blair found himself “strangely moved”, and used his influence with his colleagues in G8 leadership to achieve just that end.

Heartened by this, in 2005, Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury and Jim Wallis, the influential editor of Sojourners’ magazine out of Washington, convened the first World Religions Summit in coordination with the G8 in Lambeth while Mr. Blair hosted for a second time in Gleneagles, Scotland. The results were again extraordinary, with the G8 leaders reaffirming their commitment to the achieving of the Millennium Development Goals, established by the United Nations Millennium Forum in 2000. World Religion Summits – now interfaith in nature – followed each year in Moscow, Cologne, Kyoto and Sapporo and Rome. Each has been of intrinsic value, but in Canada, the format was greatly changed by virtue of the Canadian “model” cited by John Ralston Saul. Not only was the event convened through a national interfaith collaborative partnership, but an extensive public engagement campaign was incorporated including a significant youth constituency. In every aspect of the Summit, a process of consensus was employed, another gift of Aboriginal governance principles. This campaign included thirty-five “Interfaith dinners” among people of a variety of world faiths and legislators of every level of government, and convened from “coast-to-coast”. This has never been attempted before, and while it is a process which corresponds to the Oxford definition noted earlier, its importance is that it demonstrates the substance or essence of federalism more than formal constitutional structures.

The third interrelated event was the visit of Elizabeth II to Winnipeg, on which occasion she dedicated a cornerstone for the emerging Canadian National Museum for Human Rights. The cornerstone was brought from Runnymede, the English meadow in which King John signed Magna Carta. This was surely the symbol, the hymn in stone, which connects the Truth and reconciliation Commission and the World Religions’ Summit.

Here is the crux. I believe that H.G. Wells was right. Federalism is much more about mental than material processes; far more a question of substance than of structure. By all means, let us pursue diligently political and constitutional strategies to achieve a more peaceful planet. But let us pursue with equal diligence the poetry of peace.

A great federalist and a mentor of mine, Arthur Beel, observed that Italian unification was achieved because it had three champions: Cavour, the statesman; Garibaldi, the soldier; and Mazzini, the poet. Though a contemporary poet of world federalism has yet to emerge, we have had our poets in the past. Dated, perhaps, yet still they speak words with power. In 1837, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote in Locksley Hall:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of purple sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens filled with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunderstorm;

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furled
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

On September 15, at the European Parliament, Guy Verhofstadt, President of the ALDE Group, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Co-Chairman of the Greens, Isabelle Durant, Vice-President of the European Parliament and Sylvie Goulard, member of the ALDE Group, launched an initiative called Spinelli Group to gather MEPs, intellectuals and citizens in favor of a Communitarian Europe, ready to place the interests of Europe ahead of narrower interests.

To promote a truly European approach, they have drawn up the following manifesto, which summarizes their beliefs: the need to encourage post-national approaches to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, and to tell the truth about the limits of political power as it is organized today.

The Group will notably work in the form of a "Shadow Council" on the eve of important European Council meetings. It will meet to advance concrete proposals based on the Community method, in a federal perspective, and to denounce the nationalism of some governments which feeds a growing collective impotence and slows the emergence of Europe in the world.

Its members would like to push ideas like, for example, a European army, a more integrated economic policy, an independent European budget, funded by own resources, an energy-saving community, a Europe based on closer cultural and human links.

The Group plans acting on three levels: 1) at the European Parliament, bringing together members of all colors, ready to engage in their legislative and political actions to influence developments. 2) Via a steering committee which brings together European personalities from different backgrounds, political or academic officials and intellectuals, experienced and more junior. Among these, Jacques Delors, former President of the European Commission, Ulrich Beck, a sociologist, Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate, Mario Monti, former European Commissioner and President of the Bocconi University, Joschka Fischer, former German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Elie Barnavi, historian and diplomat and also Andrew Duff, Danuta Hubner, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa and others. 3) Through the internet-based Spinelli network, open to everyone, which will allow a convergence of ideas and proposals from civil society, experts and elected officials.

To sign the manifesto and read more about the Spinelli Group, visit http://www.spinelligroup.eu.

Paul Hawken
Blessed unrest: how the largest movement in the world came into being, and why no one saw it
New York, Viking, 2007

Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, journalist and well-know author among ecologists and supporters of natural environment. His activity and publications, translated in 27 languages and published in over 50 countries, have won him huge recognition.

In this last book, the Author reflects upon the common roots of the movements dealing with environmental issues and of those fighting for social justice, and upon the significantly unitary nature of their respective inspirations that foreshadow a single Movement, without the parties concerned knowing it; in every corner of the world, groups of persons representing the “civil society” get organised into non-profit and non-governmental associations, created spontaneously, which work for the environmental sustainability of development or for social justice, on very similar bases.

This complex “archipelago” forms a movement that does not correspond to any traditional model, is not organised, is proudly independent, does not acknowledge any leader, and, therefore, represents a global humanitarian movement that is timidly emerging from the bottom up. The Author sees it as «the largest social movement in the history of humanity», and, in the first chapters, he reviews its story in the various regions of the world, starting from North America, highlighting connections and coincidences that show common inspiration, although unconscious.

On this point, the Author quotes very interesting data on the Web sites of millions of organisations, data that form an indispensable “database” at world level. Through this “database” it is possible to know “who does what and where”, to exchange mutual experiences and resources and try to put in relation the local organisations, with the purpose of implementing common actions to achieve unitary objectives.

For further information on this subject, reference can be made, among others, to the very well documented site “wiserearth.org”. The Author then dwells upon the initiatives of the indigenous populations that, together with some non-profit organisations, are opposing the invasion of multinational companies which, hungry for resources, are destroying the “biological arks” of Latin America, Asia and Africa.

He also emphasizes the damages of globalisation and the damages produced by the “free market fundamentalism” in many areas of the world. In the chapter “Immunity” the Author uses the cells of an organism defending itself as a metaphor for describing the movement's collective activity. In the final chapter, entitled “Recovery”, the Author explains his thesis on the future prospects of the Movement.

According to the Author, the condition for future action lies in the conviction that, too often, the issues appear unsolvable due to the methods used to tackle them, that is “in an ideological, oligarchic and militarist manner, from top to bottom”. And he proposes a different approach, starting from simpler facts, proceeding from the bottom up, solving the issues “by schemes”, one after the other, «without any mega solution, so that the various groups can find their place in a multicentric world».

According to Hawken, in the end the movement will prevail. The way of thinking at the root of the movement’s objectives will become predominant in front of the gradual worsening of the environmental situation and the aggravation of the social conditions that will emerge and will become unsustainable to everyone.

«Soon, it will spread among many institutions, but before that, it will change a sufficient number of people to trigger an inversion of the trend after centuries of frenetically self-destructive behaviour…. People do not change until they feel at ease». «Human nature’s resilience will clash with the severity of the social and environmental conditions we are in».

Therefore «it is not too late for the major institutions and companies of the world to get together to save the Earth, however cooperation must take place under the terms of the planet», which means learning from life and reinventing the world from the bottom up, on the basis of justice and ecology principles. Ecological recovery appears to be extremely simple to the Author: all there is to do is to eliminate what prevents the system from healing by itself. Social recovery functions in the same way.

«We must have trust in “Ourselves”: ourselves means all of us, everyone of us». «Our house is burning: the only way to stop the fire is to unite the environmental movement to the movement for social justice».

The Author concludes with the following statement. «Our guide will be an intelligence that creates miracles every second and lives through a nameless movement».

The Author is certainly right to magnify the potential of the civil society movements, however he does not seem to realise the conditions under which so many spontaneous movements operating at local level can turn into a single revolutionary entity, able to transform the world to impose peace, to start restructuring the world economy in an ecological manner, to govern globalisation in the interest of the whole of humanity.

The optimism of Hawken’s conclusions is puzzling, as it reveals trust in the spontaneous and nearly automatic capacity of citizens and institutions to react in front of the foreseeable further aggravation of the world situation, a position that cannot be shared since there is no evidence and no historical parallel capable of supporting this expectation. The naiveté of the thesis is contradicted by the very statement contained in the title according to which, up to now, “nobody has been aware” of the largest movement in the world.

It is worth mentioning that Hawken’s fideistic and optimistic statements have many precedents in the environmental philosophy, since its origins. In the 1970’s, Aurelio Peccei, founder of the Club of Rome, wrote (in Quale futuro, Mondadori, 1974) «I see a huge popular army that slowly rises and moves on scattered and fragmented fronts all over the world. It is an army of citizens, who believe that the time has come to change things… . Like in the tradition, this popular army has strong motivations but is very badly equipped, it wins skirmishes but loses battles; this notwithstanding, as history marches with it, sooner of later it will prevail».

Since then, things have kept worsening from all points of view; from the point of view of climate changes, the world is dangerously reaching a “point of no-return” and the possibility of an environmental disaster; the distribution of wealth, incomes, consumption of natural resources, has never been so unequal and unjust between and within the States; structural unbalances between the various monetary zones have grown to a huge extent; and we cannot say that wars and international tensions have decreased, on the contrary.

This notwithstanding, the political weight of the civil society movements has not increased. Its opponents, among which international finance, multinational companies, international crime, terrorism, taking advantage of a globalisation trend without rules and without government, have taken on a global dimension and turned the international scenario into a “Far West” governed by free market rules where the use of lawless force triumphs, according to the logic and law of the jungle.

On the other hand, the issues have grown since then, so much so that peace, environmental protection, sustainable development and financial balance have acquired a global dimension, taking on the features of real global public assets to defend.

Therefore, I deem out of place the Author’s satisfaction in finding “concreteness” in the civil society movements that measure themselves daily with the problems that have remained within their reach, and his exaltation of the need to build a single movement “from the bottom up”, as if the virtuous commitment to the “particular” were automatically the premise and condition for union and force.

Hawken has not understood that the civil society movements can weigh upon and condition power only if they are able to get organised in a coordinated and united manner on precise political objectives, clearly aimed at pursuing at all levels, including worldwide, the global public assets mentioned above. These require a unitary management, a suitable strategy and the clear awareness of the institutional instruments required to change the world.

A successful strategy that could be taken as an example for the way to follow, is that of the NGO coalition (in the beginning they were 300 and they became now 2.500) that obtained in 1998 the Charter of the International Criminal Court against war crimes and crimes against humanity.

“Notwithstanding this prospect of a very full and respectable meeting [the Philadelphia Convention of 1787], no very sanguine expectations can be well indulged. The probable diversity of opinions and prejudices, and of supposed or real interests among the States, renders the issue totally uncertain. The existing embarrassments and mortal diseases of the Confederation form the only ground of hope that a spirit of concession on all sides may be produced by the general chaos…”
James Madison²

Anyone who seeks principled guidance for establishing a republic of the world, and hence the beginnings of a world governed by universal law, would do well to study the records of the American constitutional convention at Philadelphia and The Federalist Papers, which justified it. The diversity of people brought into the American Union was certainly not so great as in Europe, and far less than in the whole world, but the courage with which the Founding Fathers faced the necessity of a government will continue to inspire humanity in search of peace. “If we are in earnest about giving the Union energy and duration”, wrote Hamilton, “we must abandon the vain project of legislating upon the States in their collective capacities; we must extend the laws of the federal government to the individual citizens of America”³.

Thomas G. Weiss has written another challenging book on the United Nations, starting from the perspective of global governance, but what is unusual about this one is that he concludes with some regret that the idea of world government seems to have dropped out of contemporary thinking about international relations. Governance lacks, he admits, “prescriptive power in pointing to where we should be headed”. Their assumptive framework (world government is unattainable) reduces governance scholars to observers at most of creative initiatives mostly within the UN Secretariat (what Weiss calls the “Second UN”) to solving global problems, while those efforts mostly fail in the face of state (“First UN”) resistance. “We have strayed too far”, he writes, “from the kind of paradigmatic rethinking of human relations that is absolutely critical if we are to solve the more intractable problems faced by the United Nations”.

What is also surprising, Sir Brian Urquhart in his preface praises Weiss for going further from the present stage of thought on “international governance” toward “world government”. “Weiss suggests”, writes Urquhart, “that world government is the necessary conceptual basis for adequate future management of the major problems of our planet”. Since Urquhart refused to write a preface for my book, The Politics of World Federation, we wonder what has changed his mind? In the last chapter of What’s Wrong with the United Nations, Weiss does not fail to appeal to the prejudices of fellow scholars in the mainstream with remarks about “rabid world federalists” and “idealism beyond the pale”, “naive and demented”. But later he actually makes quite an argument, as he did in his 2009 International Studies Association presidential address⁴, for restoring the idea of world government to the spectrum of thinking about international relations. His last line is, “…how soon will we revert to an old-fashioned concept, world government?”. His next book is said to be, The UN and Global Governance: An Unfinished Journey.

The very term, “world government”, in the hands of most mainstream scholars in the United States, is pejorative, since they imagine it means a unitary world state built on the destruction of the national states. Hence, we prefer the term, “world federal government”, since no historic proposal since first use of atomic bombs in war was unitary and all aimed to preserve the states: Robert M. Hutchins, G.A. Borgese, and the University of Chicago’s Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution (1948), Grenville Clark and Louis B. Sohn’s World Peace through World Law (1958), and Philip Isley’s Constitution for the Federation of Earth (1977). The whole point of these proposals was to preserve the United States, like other states, in a world grown too interdependent for isolationism, another name for absolute sovereignty.

Weiss at least uses “world government” fairly as the fundamental alternative to an organization of sovereign states (a “confederation”) like the United Nations. The idea of world federal government has historically functioned as the extreme of the spectrum of thinking about international organization. UN introductory documents take care to define the UN as “not a world government”. Until recently, it was possible for such a person as Gillian Sorenson, advisor to the UN Foundation, to deflect “UN bashing” by the Heritage Foundation with bashing “world government” – at least until she was challenged in Cambridge by someone who knew The Federalist, Nos. 23 and 51! What is significant about Weiss and Campbell Craig, as reviewed here in The Federalist Debate, Year XXIII, Number 2, July 2010, is that they are not ridiculing the idea any more but taking it seriously. Even Paul Kennedy, in The Parliament of Man, cites my book in his first note. He treats world federalism as beyond the pale, but at least he does not ignore it⁵. Joshua Goldstein and Jon Pevehouse, in their standard text, International Relations, used in many courses including my own, repeatedly discuss world government as the theoretical alternative to anarchy, especially in the field of positive peace⁶. World federal government may be difficult to establish, but it is adequate to the problem of the anarchy of states.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote: “Truth passes through three stages: first it is ridiculed, then it is violently opposed, and finally it is accepted as self-evident”⁷. World federalism is currently in the first stage, yet, since the end of the Cold War, it is slipping into the more serious category. Weiss’s book exhibits the strain. The whole book goes by without a mention of the rule of law until p. 218, when “laws” are mentioned as elements in the notion of global governance. Does he mean domestic or international law? A little later in a context closer to world federalism (described there as “rabid”), there is a second mention of “law”. The good man cannot even imagine that what is seriously proposed is the rule of world law, enacted by a world legislature, enforced by a world executive, with the assistance of a world judiciary, exactly as in any of the 30 historic national federations. Weiss makes no mention of a Second Chamber of the UN General Assembly, as proposed by Andrew Strauss and Richard Falk⁸, which is exactly the kind of current, shrewd proposals to move the world toward the inauguration of the rule of world law. The idea is building a constituency in the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, which as of 2009 has been supported by 731 members of national parliaments from 96 countries⁹.

What is needed to break the current impasse at the UN – however naïve and unrealistic it may seem – is to find ways to enlist the people in the work of the United Nations. In Weiss’s book, there is virtually nothing on the people, prospective world citizens, representative government (even like that of the EU), and law enacted with the consent of the governed. As long as global governance scholars cannot bring the people into their thinking, they will be unable to take the step toward world federal government. For what world federalists demand is to abandon the distinction between “domestic” and “international” affairs, just as is happening now with the weakening of the Charter’s Article 2(7), the shift in peacekeeping to peace enforcement, repeated humanitarian intervention to protect human rights, and the emerging norm of the responsibility to protect (R2P). After 2007, in the fifth edition of his mainstream text, The United Nations and Changing World Politics, Weiss introduced a term for the people’s role in the work of the UN (the “Third UN”, mostly NGOs, Multi National Corporations, and the occasional individual), but it needs to be greatly developed and encouraged.

The notion of world politics, we submit, has to change if we are to move to world federal government. Weiss seems to think, with Goldstein and most mainstream international relations scholars, that world politics means the relations between states and occasional non-state actors. But that includes war and all the violence that goes under the head of the threat and use of force, despite the Charter’s effort to forbid it in Article 2(4). To call such things politics, seems to me like calling rape, love. It is not politics as the completion of ethics (Aristotle), nor the process by which a free people choose their governors and enact the laws (American usage). If the US invasion of Iraq, without UN Security Council mandate, and then the killing of at least 100,000 people and the making of 2,000,000 refugees is politics, then it must be extremely primitive politics, suitable for Men emerging from the Stone Age.

One difficulty in going still further toward world federal government is that federalist plans like the Chicago Committee’s or Clark and Sohn’s have run against the conventional wisdom of the inadvisability of Charter amendment. Yet the Charter has been amended (1965, 1973), so it is not impossible, and the old plans deal with conditions not very different from those today. Even my history of the federalist movement, read with a little imagination, recounts events rather like those today. Probably the last significant proposal for the practical federation of modern states was Altiero Spinelli’s Draft Treaty Establishing the European Union (1984), which was enacted by the European Parliament after it was made directly elected by the people. It passed by a vote of 237 to 31, with 43 abstentions. Although rejected by the Council of Ministers, it led to the Maastricht Treaty and the European Union we have today since Lisbon. At the world level, a similar proposal based on democratic legitimacy could lead to similar achievements.

Weiss’s book will be useful for both global governance theorists and scholars inclined toward world federal government. His views draw attention to the post–Cold War developments (like the decline of sovereignty and the growth of new partnerships) that point toward greater centralization in international organization. He informs the public about the great continuing difficulties (like the North–South imbalance) that cannot be wished away by projects to increase popular representation in the General Assembly or strengthen the rudimentary international court system (ICC). He draws his guidance, if not from the world federalist literature, then from such Second UN critical works as Robert Jackson’s Capacity Study (1969); the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty’s report (2001), which gave us R2P; the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change’s report (2004), which outlined Security Council reform for the ill-fated 2005 summit on UN reform; and especially the High-Level Panel on Coherence’s report, Delivering as One (2006), which Weiss cites revealingly for his critique of development. Any scholar or aspiring world citizen would do well to consult these works for current information on the difficulties before any form of international organization.

We conclude with some world federalist comments on the UN’s delivery of international peace and security. It is time to admit that most of Chapter VII is misconceived; it amounts to international war on the pattern of World War II, starting with aerial bombing (Art. 45). There is a reason why collective security has worked only twice (1950, 1990), if threatened perhaps eleven times, as Daniel Ellsberg once pointed out: Such “action” is so indiscriminate that national states will not agree to its use, except in the now exceptional case of cross–border aggression. Meanwhile, the threat of UN force corrupts the whole development of peaceful settlement (Chapter VI) and of proper institutions of world law, including treaties to protect and promote human rights, state reporting systems, and slow progress toward courts like the European Court. Madison, faced with the problem of enforcement by the federal government, once argued that “the use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war, than an infliction of punishment, and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound”¹⁰. There is a need for a military power at the world level, true, but it cannot be the usual meaning of “enforcement”.

Experience shows that cooperation among sovereigns is almost worthless in building lasting peace. Jean Monnet understood this when turning to the European Community, looking forward to its outcome in a federal union¹¹. In a European context, to suppose that voluntary cooperation is enough to undo a history of war and hatred would be to suppose that the Council of Europe could succeed better than the still emerging European Union, which already, even if not yet a strict federation, has abolished war among its 27 members.

Almost certainly, for a change from cooperation to binding law, a crisis will be necessary, as Mark Malloch Brown fears. Jean Monnet did, too, saying, for the hard work of uniting sovereignties, people will act only when faced by a crisis¹². Thomas Jefferson said much the same when he wrote, “All experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than they are to right themselves by changing the forms to which they are accustomed”¹³. Judging by current trends, this crisis will come when America falls, as did Britain, from the rank of world hegemon. Then we will need world federal government. Scholars should prepare for such a day.

Let me conclude by pointing out that there exists a vast, unworked literature on world federation and general international relations scholarship that looks in that direction. In The United Nations System: Meeting the World Constitutional Crisis (1995), we surveyed the most progressive literature since the end of the Cold War^14. The book is an annotated bibliography, organized from most to least consensus on effective international organization – from the Universal Postal Union to the UN Environment Program. In The Politics of World Federation (2004), we included another annotated bibliography on world federal government, pro and con”¹⁵.



Review of Thomas G. Weiss, What’s Wrong with the United Nations, and How to Fix It. Foreword by Sir Brian Urquhart. Polity Press, 2008.
2 Letters and Other Writings of James Madison , Vol. I, 1769-1793 (New York, 1884), pp. 286-87.
3 Federalist, No. 23. Other numbers relevant to UN reform include 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 21, 39, 46, 51.
4 Thomas G. Weiss, “What Happened to the Idea of World Government?” International Studies Quarterly (2009) 53, 253–271.
5 Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (New York: Random House, 2006), 3, 295.
6 Joshua S. Goldstein and Jon C. Pevehouse, International Relations (Longman Pearson, 9th ed., 2009), 134.
7 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Foreword to the First Edition (1818), p. xv.
8 Andrew Strauss and Richard A. Falk, “Toward Global Parliament”, Foreign Affairs, 80 (2001): 212-20; Strauss, “Envisioning a More Democratic Global System”, Widener Law Review, 13, 2 (2007).
9 http://www.unpacampaign.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Parliamentary_Assembly
10 Max Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911, 1966), I: 54.
11 Jean Monnet, Memoirs, trans. Richard Mayne, intro. George Ball (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 17-20, 87, 271, 295, 316, motto.
12 Ibid., 13, 421.
13 Declaration of Independence, 1776.
14 Joseph Preston Baratta, The United Nations System: Meeting the World Constitutional Crisis. Oxford: ABC-Clio; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1995.
15 Baratta, The Politics of World Federation. Vol. 1: United Nations, UN Reform, Atomic Control. Vol. 2: From World Federalism to Global Governance. Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2004.