The Best Way To Give The Poor A Real Voice Is Through a World Parliament
Global Governance As It Stands Is Tyranny Speaking The Language of Democracy. We Need a Directly Elected Assembly
It was first proposed, as far as I can discover, in 1842, by Alfred Tennyson. Since then the idea has broken the surface and sunk again at least a dozen times. But this time it could start to swim. The demand for a world parliament is at last acquiring some serious political muscle.
The campaign for a UN parliamentary assembly is being launched this week on five continents. It is backed by nearly 400 MPs from 70 countries, a long and eclectic list of artists and intellectuals - among them Günter Grass, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Alfred Brendel and Arthur C Clarke - several government ministers and party leaders, including our own Ming Campbell, six former foreign secretaries, the president of the Pan-African Parliament and a former UN secretary general. After 160 years of ridicule, Tennyson’s crazy idea is beginning to look plausible.
Those of us who want a world parliament are often accused of trying to invent a system of global governance. But there is already a system of global governance. The UN security council, the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization make decisions that affect us all. They do so without our consent. The best that can be said for any of them is that they operate by means of photocopy democracy. We vote for an MP, and this vote is then deemed to communicate our support for his party. That is then presumed to legitimize the government, which in turn assumes the right to appoint a prime minister. He then delegates ambassadors and bureaucrats to represent us globally, and their decisions are deemed to express our wishes. With every presumed transfer of democratic consent, the imprint of our cross on the ballot paper becomes fainter. Though the international bodies operate in our name, we have no more influence over them than the people of Burma have over the military junta. Global governance is a tyranny speaking the language of democracy.
The purpose of a world parliament is to hold international bodies to account. It is not a panacea. It will not turn the IMF or the UN security council into democratic bodies - as they are controlled by the veto powers of their major shareholder and permanent members, nothing but abolition and reconstruction could do so. But it does have the potential to impose a check on them. It wields no army, no police force, no weapons, no ready-made powers. Instead, it possesses something that none of the other global bodies have: legitimacy. One of the surprising lessons of history is that undemocratic organizations are often obliged to grant powers to democratic ones, to try to acquire some retrospective legitimacy. Why else was the European parliament established? Why else have its powers been enhanced, despite the centralizing tendencies of the European council?
Those who claim, like the British Eurosceptics, that regional or global decision-making is unnecessary are living in a world of make-believe. No political issue now stops at the national border. All the most important forces - climate change, terrorism, state aggression, trade, flows of money, demographic pressures, the depletion of resources - can be addressed only at the global level. The question is not whether global decisions need to be made. The question is how to ensure that they are made democratically. Is there any valid answer other than direct representation?
Global democracy has a special problem - the scale on which it must operate. The bigger the electorate, the less democratic a parliamentary body will be. True democracy could exist only in the village, where representatives are subject to constant oversight by their electorate. But an imperfect system is better than no system at all. Even the most pig-headed Eurosceptics would have trouble arguing that the European Union would be better off without a parliament.
What the scale of these supranational bodies demands is a more participatory democracy than any we have been offered so far. The recent fiasco surrounding the European constitution is a useful demonstration of how not to do it. First the people of Europe were presented with a meaningless question which makes a mockery of democracy. “Here is a document containing hundreds of proposals. Some of them will be good for you, others will be bad for you. You must agree to all of them or none of them. If you agree (and we will keep asking until you do), we will deem that you have consented to every measure it contains.” When this pantomime of managed consent fails, the managers announce - as Tony Blair did last week - that a referendum is, after all, unnecessary. We will have a new constitution whether we want one or not, and it will be written and approved on our behalf. Nothing could be better calculated to destroy our remaining enthusiasm for Europe.
The European Union, like the United Kingdom, needs a new constitution: we need to know what the limits of its new powers are and whether it is breaching them. And we should all have the opportunity to vote for or against it. But to ask us to give a single answer to several hundred conflicting questions is to treat us like idiots, the dumb cattle of democracy whose bodies are required to lend this institution legitimacy but whose minds are not.
The process would be meaningful only if we could vote on every clause. This means that ballot papers would be complicated and very long. But that is the cost of democracy: it requires some effort on our part. A world parliament will work only if we are required to do more than simply place a cross on a piece of paper every five years.
There are some aspects of the new campaign with which I disagree. The parliamentary assembly it proposes would initially consist of members of national parliaments. It would gradually move towards direct representation. I accept that this is the quickest and easiest means of launching a global assembly, but it seems to me that this path would damage its legitimacy.
If someone proposed that our national parliament be composed of a delegated committee of local councilors we would be horrified. Why should we wish national parliamentarians - who know little of global politics and who can engage with them only as a hobby - to represent us at the international level? It looks like another form of photocopy democracy.
But I am splitting hairs. If this is the only realistic means of launching a global assembly that will one day be elected directly, it would be stupid to stand in the way. What jumps out as you read the list of signatories is the number of African names. There is a growing recognition in Africa that a world parliament offers the best chance - perhaps the only chance - that the unmediated concerns of the poor will reach the ears of the rich. A global parliament ensures that the voices of the poor world can no longer be ventriloquized by Bob Geldof and Bono and the leaders of the G8. The people will be able to speak for themselves.
For this reason, reactionaries all over the world will oppose the new campaign for an assembly. And the rest of us should support it. You can find details of the campaign at www.uno-komitee.de/en/
© 2007 The Guardian
I think a World Parliament will be a wonderful start. Perhaps one day they would be strong enough to enforce the basic rules of human dignity everywhere. An ‘empire’ operated by representitives from every country on the planet.
Democracy is a tool not a cause in and of itself. Why do I want another layer of government above me. My local government concerns itself with putting anti-evolution stickers on the front of books. If that is enough trick my future children then they don’t deserve an education anyway. The national government takes a roughly a third of my paycheck so it can pay Americans not to work and forgeiners to take manufacturing jobs and coming soon my right to pay a doctor to make me better (not that they’re any good at it). I can’t imagine what over a billion uneducated African and south Americans, 1 billion people controlled by communist china and 3/4 billion Islamic theocrats would tel me i can and can’t do. Liberty suvives only when power is kept nearby preferably below the state level.
As for enforcing basic rules and human dignity. Count the people where that happens and where it doesn’t then set up an inequality see what hapens
Oh and I know I singled out Islamic theocrats while leaving out Christians but I live in the Deep South. The christofascists already run my neck of the woods
Kerry, bad government is not an argument for anarchy. Nature abhors a vacuum in government as elsewhere. If we don’t put something good in that void, bad things will rush in from all directions. Therefore, work for good government. You already have a bad layer (IMF, World Bank, WTO) at the international level. The ICJ, for example, refuses to hear individuals’ cases and is consequently no help in preventing the spread of fascism. Replace it with a good layer. Reform the national, state and local levels too. Refuse to cooperate with injustice at all levels.
“It wields no army, no police force, no weapons, no ready-made powers.” Count me in. We need to learn to act by force of cooperation not by force of fear. http://www.libertyandpeace.org/liberty.html
I don’t want no governement (except when I’m either angry, rare or drunk, common)I want a government with lots of limits placed on it that it can’t circumvent i.e. enemy combatants. There is also one more problem. If the U.S got really bad I can always leave, New Zealand is nice. If the world gets bad I have to move to the moon a hassle to say the least. Don’t reform world institutions reform local institutions and get the world and feds and states off your back. It is the best way of running things and the only room for truly progressive change if that’s your cup of organic fair trade tea.
Sorry, guys, no representative democracy for me if we’re going global. My elected representatives have screwed me over too often. Direct democracy by internet, though . . . .
The corrupted, government and corporate, do more harm to the poor than anything else. There is enough of everything to go around; there are not enough honest people available to do the distribution.
Clark Kent,
Good point. I wonder what the peasants in Afghanistan are thinking about the joys of living in a world with no operative government right now (not that they wished that on themselves, though I bet some loony libertarians envy them). There will always be those ready to fill that void, and if one does not have the means, and exercise those means, to pressure them to represent one’s interests, they won’t.
“The purpose of a world parliament is to hold (inter)national bodies to account.”
You can’t manage that in your own country let alone some international government.
If anything the world is moving towards local limited government. Even Scotland is breaking away from Great Britain, heck “terrorism” pretty much everywhere tends to stem from the desire to self-rule, which by the way was the foundation of America.
The poster who pointed out that if their home country gets bad enough leaving is an option, said it clearly.
Imagine if you will, Bush legally in charge of the planet?
As for the notion of not having guns or using force, that’s garbage. The entire point of any such entity is the application of POWER - and that doesn’t happen through scolding and giving a bad frown.
You think corporatism is bad now? Sheesh.
Yes, the World Bank and IMF are among the most damaging and corrupt entities out there - but at least they don’t openly shoot and bomb people (they get American taxpayers to do it).
Quite simply it’s a truly awful idea.
Great, wait for the parliament to, quite democratically, vote to exterminate the Jews or the Hutus or some other group of undesireables.
I have to agree with Kerry & others that this World Parliament is a bad bad bad idea. More government is not the answer. It is most likely to turn into a world police state, making decisions based on increasing and maintaining it’s power. I believe in democracy and self rule, and I am a de-centralist. I believe democracy works best in small groups of well informed people who know the issue of their own areas and peoples. Any power above small local groups should be seriously limited and tightly regulated.
I must agree with the rest of the posters here. My local congressman-for-life is completely a paid lackey of his corporate masters. My state legislature, California, routinely refuses to legislate on crucial matters and prefers to allow for direct democracy by corporate-pumped initiatives.
California is now the worlds leader in imprisonment of it’s citizens. Yeah, that worked.
I would agree to a world parliment on two conditions:
1) Any member or paid employee of said parliment convicted of selling or trading votes for $$ or like value be lobotimized and set free to roam the streets. No appeals.
2) Members of parliment accused of crimes shall be assigned a public defender from the poorest legislative distict at random. Said public defender shall maintain his usual caseload while defending the accused MP. The parliment shall be subject to the laws and defense from said laws available to its poorest subject.
Currently honor among the governing class is rarer than hen’s teeth.
We can not go on like this, with the rich governing by proxy and the poor getting poorer by the day. It is not a world in which I want to live.
I know that most efforts to reform the system end up being worst than what they set out to correct. The rich must demand change. It is they who have all the money and will continue to have it under any representative system.
The prospect of the Cheney-like grinches of the planet seeing all those starving, diseased, desperate masses as their brothers and sisters is slim.
But sharing the wealth is in the best interest of the likes of corporate moguls. Money as money is worthless once one has so much of it that it turns into power.
A mechanism for making money worthless as power must be the first step
world parliament? pfft! sounds loverly in theory, never works in practice tho, does it now?.
sounds like more of the same old, same “new” New World disorderliness to me. bigger, more bureaucratic, less efficiencies, less democracy…yadda,nada!
smaller gov’ts are the way to go. de-centralization of powers. if the tragic, insane, heinous lessons of the already massive super gov’ts aren’t obvious to most by now, then there’s nothing left to say.
power to the people, All the peoples, everywhere. less, less to the gov’ts everywhere!
yes i realize that, politically, i’m an idealist/dreamer
monbiot is a tool. either by choice or ignorance. i for one will not swallow this bait. no matter how “lovely” it’s packaged. pfft!
“A mechanism for making money worthless as power must be the first step”
Nietzche…are you aware of Silvio Gesell’s ideas about money?
My researched intuition tells me that many of the chronic dysfunctions in our global society are derived from the systemic problems in how we have concieved of and implemented this most curious of artificial tools -money. We have to develop systems which cultivate balance for obvious reasons-consider how your body works.
The current game we are playing knows nothing of balance and so is deaf to the needs of life-hence we plow under millions of years of ecological wisdom so some ‘developer’ can accumulate dead digital claims in a banks computer.
Perhaps the first step in making money worthless as a predatory tool of power is to awaken ourselves to the reality that money is not a thing-to run out of things that don’t really exist is a rather strange and powerful riddle.Our current money is an immaterial measure which continues to be packaged as a commodity and its through this confusion that a wealthy people and world is made artificially poor. We need to realize group by group community by community that we are being ruled by a phantom and then do something about it.
Check out Werner Onken’s essay on Silvio Gesell
“The day that hunger is eradicated from the earth there will be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever known. Humanity cannot imagine the joy that will burst into the world on the day of that great revolution.” Federico Garcia Lorca
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“Without sharing there can be no justice;
without justice there can be no peace;
without peace there can be no future.”
Maitreya, the World Teacher
http://www.Share-International.org
Your the world teacher! I like the words……Gee U R U