World Federalism
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World Federalism or global federalism is a political ideology advocating a democratic, federal world government. A world federation would have authority on issues of global reach, while the members of such a federation would retain authority over local and national issues. The overall sovereignty over the world population would largely reside in the federal government.
Quotes[edit]
- Mankind's desire for peace can be realized only by the creation of a world government. With all my heart, I believe that the world's present system of sovereign nations can only lead to barbarism, war, and inhumanity.
- Albert Einstein, as quoted by Garry Davis, [1] "Letters to World Citizens" p. 38.
- Unless some effective supranational government can be set up and brought quickly into action, the prospects of peace and human progress are dark and doubtful.
- Winston Churchill, as quoted by Robert Muller, [2] (1999) "Globalization: The next development of the international system".
- It is quite clear that as long as the nations of the world spend most of their energy, money, and emotional strength in quarreling with words and weapons, a true offensive against the common problems that threaten human survival is not very likely. A world government that can channel human efforts in the direction of the great solutions seems desirable, even essential. Naturally, such a world government should be a federal one, with regional and local autonomy safeguarded and with cultural diversity promoted.
- Isaac Asimov, as quoted by Richard Bryan DeFabio, '[3] (2010) "The Deltium".
- Future peace, security and ordered progress of the world demand a world federation of free nations, and on no other basis can the problems of the world be solved.
- Jawaharlal Nehru, as quoted by Manu Bhagavan, [4] (2013) "India and the Quest for One World".
- I am an uncompromising pacifist... I have no sense of nationalism, only a cosmic consciousness of belonging to the human family.
- There is no salvation for civilization, or even the human race, other than the creation of a world government.
- If the matter is presented clearly, it will not be hard to get people to agree that protective institutions are necessary, both on a regional and on a world-wide scale.
- Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
- In a very real sense, the world no longer has a choice between force and law. If civilization is to survive, it must choose the rule of law.
- The new miracles of science and technology enable us at last to bring our world some measure of unity; if our generation does not use them for construction, they will be misused to destroy it and all its slowly-won civilization of the past in a new and terrible warfare.
- Our own land and our own flag cannot be replaced by any other land or any other flag. But you can join with other nations, under a joint flag, to accomplish something good for the world that you cannot accomplish alone.
- Most of the threats hanging over the world now, as well as many problems confronting it, could be handled much more effectively if we were able to see past the ends of our noses and take into consideration, to some extent at least, the broader interconnections that go beyond the scope of our immediate or group interests.
- A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient means of social justice to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history.
- If we do not want to die together in war, we must learn to live together in peace.
- We must create world-wide law and law enforcement as we outlaw world-wide war and weapons.
- That all members of the League should therefore bend all their efforts toward reconstituting their respective countries, in order to replace their old constitution – founded from top to bottom on violence and the principle of authority – with a new organization based solely upon the interests, the needs, and the natural preferences of their populations – having no other principle but the free federation of individuals into communes, of communes into provinces, of the provinces into nations, and, finally, of the nations into the United States of Europe first, and of the entire world eventually.
- It is obvious that no difficulty in the way of world government can match the danger of a world without it.
- Carl Van Doren, The Great Rehearsal (1948)
- It will be just as easy for nations to get along in a republic of the world as it is for us to get along in the republic of the United States. Now, if Kansas and Colorado have a quarrel over a watershed, they don’t call out the National Guard of each State and go to war over it. They bring suit in the Supreme Court and abide by its decision. There isn’t a reason in the world why we can’t do that internationally.
- Global peace is a thing that cannot be achieved on the basis of division and rival sovereignty. The experiences of the US and Swiss federations show that unification can ensure peace and prosperity as long as the decisive power in common affairs is held by the global parliament, and not by the various states.
- Edmond Privat, Federala Sperto (1958)
- The international community should support a system of laws to regularize international relations and maintain the peace in the same manner that law governs national order.
- In our earliest history, so far as we can tell, individuals held to an allegiance toward their immediate tribal group, which may have numbered no more than ten or twenty individuals, all of whom were related by consanguinity. As time went on, the need for cooperative behaviour--in the hunting of large animals or large herds, in agriculture, and in the development of cities--forced human beings into larger and larger groups. The group that was identified with, the tribal unit, enlarged at each stage of evolution. Today, a particular instant in the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth and in the several-million-year history of mankind, most human beings owe their primary allegiance to the nation-state (although some of the most dangerous political problems still arise from tribal conflicts involving smaller population units). Many visionary leaders have imagined a time when the allegiance of an individual human being is not to his particular nation-state, religion, race, or economic group, but to mankind as a whole; when the benefit to a human being of another sex, race, religion, or political persuasion ten thousand miles away is as precious to us as to our neighbour or our brother. The trend is in this direction, but it is agonizingly slow. There is a serious question whether such a global self-identification of mankind can be achieved before we destroy ourselves with the technological forces our intelligence has unleashed.
- World government is not only possible, it is inevitable; and when it comes, it will appeal to patriotism in its truest, in its only, sense, the patriotism of men who love their national heritages so deeply that they wish to preserve them in safety for the common good.
- I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.
- The sovereignty of humankind encompasses all races and all peoples in their respective particularity. For the human community as a self-aware entity, races and peoples are no longer basic political entities linked by power, but rather are cultural and ethical existences that give life to the individual and that, through the actions of individuals, are harmonized with mankind.
- Masao Abe
- What is clear is that when the sovereignty of states and the sovereignty of individuals come into conflict, we as an international community need to think hard about how far we will go to defend the former over the later. Human rights and the evolving nature of humanitarian law will mean little if a principle guarded by States is always allowed to trump the protection of citizens within them.
- The nation-state is too big for the small problems and too small for the big problems.
- There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don't come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.
- The Republic is the only alternative to the blind, elemental, erratic, uncontrolled, divisive and polarizing globalization forces. We need political institutions effective in the planetary scale equivalent to that of transnational powers.
- The principle that the deliberate pooling, through democratic processes of consent, of strictly limited and carefully defined portions of sovereignty of the individuals so as to obtain what cannot otherwise be had is the basic operational principle of free and lawful human society.
- The prospects for humanity would be considerable brighter if, looking to the lessons of history for guidance, we were to set out consciously and deliberately to build a world community based upon democratic principles, upon the rights and responsibilities of its citizens, and upon the exercise of their individual sovereignty under the rule of law.
