Cosmopolization
By John Taylor; 2009 Mar 1, Ayyam-i-Ha, 165 BE
I met with a few Esperantists in Hamilton yesterday. When I brought up my ideas for a world government, Janus (pronounced Yanush) protested that attempts were made a few years ago to form a world government with English as its official language, but demonstrations in the streets prevented talks from going forward. At first I was bewildered. What was Janus talking about? Then it hit me that although the negotiations of GATT and its successors were masked as economic discussions, it would probably not be exaggerating to construe their actions as a plot to create a sort of shadow world government run by and for not the people but the super-rich and super-powerful. The people were not fooled, though, and prevented that from moving forward. The elites already own a grossly disproportionate amount of the world's wealth. No sensible person wants globalization to go a step further as long as it advocates an international order designed to keep the unwashed masses away from their precious booty, the stinking spoils of privilege.
What I envision is the reverse of globalization. Rather than a plot on behalf of the elites, the open world government I stand for might be called cosmopolization, since it would be done on behalf of all humans. Although I am discussing what it would look like at its nucleus, the purpose of cosmopolitan governance is to spread power around and to delegate as much decision making as possible to the local level. This decentralizing emphasis we are calling subsidiarity. In economic terms, instead of promoting profit for large, private corporations, cosmopolization would promote open standard technology that small companies and local cooperatives could use for no or very small licensing fees.
Last time we looked over the idea of a corruption-free, coup d'etat-proof, de-centralized world government distributed among eight continental parliaments. These indirectly elected parliaments would elect from among themselves a counsel of twenty parliamentarians to act as go-betweens between their own respective parliaments and a rotating series of conferences to be held each year in a different continental capital city.
The world counsel's main task is to host and set the agenda for conferences held, as we shall see, on a rotating ten-year schedule. While the continental parliaments would be traditional law-making institutions, these ongoing, rotating conferences would be something extraordinary, unprecedented in world history. They would be designed to take in everything that is human, not only governments and NGO's but every trade, profession, religion, club, interest group, sport, school and university, in short, the entire circumference of "civil society."
Soon, I want to talk about how this ongoing conference would work. But first, a little more on the nature and limits of this world council.
Taking as axiomatic the political saying that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," the world council would not have a permanent president or CEO. Everything they do is designed to keep power out of the hands of any individual. The council decides only as a body, following strict constitutional rules. Individual members have no title or honours. There is a chairperson for internal order, but the job rotates among members.
Nor can the counsel ever work independently from the conferences and constitutional conventions. In them it has a circumscribed executive function, handling minor decisions quickly that come up on the spot during sessions. It has authority to ratify lesser decisions of the specialists at the world conference on the spot. But the council cannot make policy on its own, independent of continental parliaments and the conferences. Whenever the council come upon a major change, a new development or policy decision involving a broader issue, they must pass it on to the continental parliaments for approval and feedback. Depending on the nature of the concern, all continental parliamentarians might vote in a plebiscite, based on their own conscience as individuals, or each parliament as a body might deliberate separately, with the majority of parliaments ruling.
John Taylor
email: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/
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