Borderlessness

People Without Borders

By John Taylor; 2007 July 09

"People Without Borders," that is the latest working title of my book-in-progress, which I am writing backwards, as always. That is how I write. I cannot help it. I sit down in the morning and write a sentence. Then I realize that I forgot the point that goes before it, then I come up with another that has to come before that, and so forth until at the close of my day I at last write the real first sentence of the essay. Even as it was prophesied in the beginning, the last comes first and the first last. I am a living demonstration Soren Kierkegaard's interpretation of the psychological reality behind that prophesy:

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

Thus it came to pass with the first draft of "People Without Borders." The 2nd and 4th of July pair of essays, I now think, will come first in People Without Borders, and the next step will be for me to turn around and start putting them in order, re-writing each one so that it faces forward. I will therefore be producing here a second draft of the dozens of essays on my utopian proposals, mostly completed in reverse order over the past five years. I am aware that this will bore my veteran readers. More to the point, it is likely to bore me too, a certain kiss of death. So in all probability these will be major rewrites, updates and rethinks -- anything to keep the flame from dying out on my only realistic hope to make a contribution to the world.

A bit of an explanation about the provenance of those two fateful first essays for People Without Borders ...

What happened was that a couple of weeks ago I stumbled across an early proposal by an obscure German religious philosopher for a world government based on five regional federations, Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Australia. These unions, he suggested (using a strange deistic metaphysical grounding), should then come together to form a federal world republic. I saw it right away: this was the key! This was why I could not connect the technical proposals I had been working on with the political machine that would manufacture it. We always talk about world government, but I saw that there has to be an intermediate level, continental government, before we can imagine going higher. It is like heaven, if you want to go there you need Jacob's ladder to raise you up. To get into the Parthenon you gotta mount the steps and go between pillars or girders holding up the roof. Any institution of world governance, then, must rest on a firm continental foundation.

This morning I found a slightly more detailed summary of this early proposal that I had seen briefly mentioned for the first time two weeks ago in an article that was itself probably borrowing from this source.

"In 1811, the German religious philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause first distinguished the concepts of European federation and world-wide government. In Das Urbild der Menschheit (The Archetype of Humanity), he proposed regional federations of Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Australia. The European federation was to use the German language, and to have its capital in Berlin; and each regional federation was to be part of a sovereign world republic with its capital in Polynesia. No doubt the bureaucrats would be happy with a capital in Tahiti! But in any case, this work is looking remarkably prophetic, in view of the growing trend towards regionalism in the world today." (A Global Parliament, Principles of World Federation, by C. Hamer, p. 24 <http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/COURSES/GENS4008/newCh2.pdf>)

There is one twist here that I had not heard of before, Krause's suggestion that the seat of world government be placed in Tahiti. Just as well that I had not heard of it, really, because I think my re-conception of Krause's proposal in the two "Terra City" essays earlier this month hit upon a much better location, Antarctica. Only in these demanding climes would world leaders be forced to think, live and act in ways entirely appropriate for addressing our climate crisis. There would be no cutting class to go sunning on the beach when the world center is Antarctica.

Gradually I have come to see that Krause's brilliant concept of continental union will be the only way to get around the demands of geography, which even with jet travel and the internet remains a huge barrier, both physical and psychological, to any future world government. Continental union will surely be necessary to uphold world government at every stage of the process.

This past weekend's column by Gwyn Dyer describes how early negotiations are already beginning for a United States of Africa, exactly what Krause suggested! Africa is slightly less populous than India or China, but it has almost incredible diversity, ethnic, tribal, genetic and linguistic. An intermediary level of government that equalized and galvanized Africa, I can now see, would unleash tremendous human potential for the good of all.