Uniting the democracies: Let’s Imagine
by Dieter Heinrich

This is an abridged version of a longer article which will be made available online.

Democracy, or something approaching it, now rules in most of the world, representing most of the world’s states and people, and governing most of its economy. We can now imagine – for the first time, and not in some far-off future but in present time – a uniting of these democracies within a process leading to
world federation or something approaching it. We can imagine a process similar to Europe’s, this time among all the democracies (meeting some minimum criteria), and this time encompassing most of humanity.

One might have thought world federalists would be imagining vividly and excitedly along these lines, but sadly we are not. And while we are not, the governments of the democracies have actually gone ahead and quietly started without us. So imagine that. An association of the world’s democracies, which may well prove to be the beginnings of eventual world federation, is already here, and the World Federalist Movement has barely taken notice.

It’s called the Community of Democracies (CD). It had its first meeting of some 100 governments in Poland in 1999, has met two more times since, and will meet again in 2007. So far, it remains an informal association without institutions, oriented mainly toward democracy promotion at the national level. There is no declared intention to work toward any supranational integration among its members. But that idea almost suggests itself, the more so since it would be a great way to achieve the stated goal of democracy promotion.

So why aren’t world federalists there? We remain fixed on United Nations reform. It’s what we know, and we are among the best in the business at it. Lately we have had some real successes – for instance, the International Criminal Court – and we are enthused because governments are finally picking up some of our ideas and discussing reform in earnest. But when we look at the landscape of UN reform in relation to our vision of world federation, we have to admit it still looks like stony ground out to the horizon.

Until recently, we had no choice but to go on directing our labours toward the UN. But now we do have a choice. A new route to world federation is opening before us. It not only passes all the reality tests but offers something else besides: it lets us retrieve the light of world federalism out from under the bushel basket to shine again without all the dissembling and apologias required of us by UN reform politics. It also offers the hope of connecting us to the wider public with a strategy people can immediately understand, assess as credible, and get excited by. This, in turn, may rejuvenate our whole organization as our work once again starts to match our name.

World federalists have all along been aware of uniting the democracies as another possible strategy of transition to world federation. During the Cold War, however, when the democracies were fewer, uniting them would only have consolidated further the divisions in the world.

It’s been 15 years since the Cold War ended, yet we have never properly revisited this orphaned strategy. We are by now fully invested in UN reform. Our UN reform work is important to the world and worth continuing. But I do believe the world has become ready for a uniting-the-democracies approach.

Democratic countries would share from the start the values upon which a world federation can eventually be built, especially regarding human rights and the rule of law. The democratic composition of such a union would immediately allow for a degree of supranationalism. This would enable it to govern itself by passing laws possessing the needed legitimacy to be binding on its members.

Democratic union would have an almost scientific credibility

It is believable because the template is already proven. The same process has already produced stunning results in Europe. Notwithstanding the day-to-day tribulations and setbacks, we still see ever more countries tripping over each other on the way to ditching their national sovereignty, even their national currency, to join the European Union. This is a spectacular rebuttal to all those critics who have said this would never happen, that nations would never surrender their sovereignty.

It is easy to imagine on the global level the European process repeating itself, and why not? The EU’s existence proves the realism of such an enterprise among democracies, even if the specifics of the European Union’s structures are not necessarily appropriate for a global organization.

One thing that seems key is that there be from the outset a declaration of intent to progress toward closer union. That could, in fact, be the step that launches the process. It is important to create the sense of destiny Europeans have had about the progressive integration of their separate nation-states into a European whole.

There is no comparable sense of destiny right now around the UN, or anywhere else within the politics of the present world order. Integration is happening every day in the world but in a preconscious fashion as a collateral result of other things governments are doing, not as the reason governments do things. There is no proclaimed intentionality to entrain the process. Imagine if there were.

Imagine if the democracies, in founding their Union, then quit the World Trade Organization and agreed henceforth to preferential trade only with other member democracies, with their free labour unions and environmental safeguards. Imagine if this Union had a supranational Human Rights Court, as Europe had from the outset, to which members had to accede as a condition of membership. Imagine if there were real development guarantees to underwrite and stabilize the newly emerging democracies. These countries would then have a fast track to development, much as Spain, Portugal and Greece have had within Europe.

A supranational funding mechanism could be established which developed democracies would be more willing to support than similar global funds that include corrupt regimes as recipients. Knowing they were helping the poorer democracies and newly forming democracies, citizens would be inclined to be more generous, again as per the European example. This would additionally increase the pressure for democracy in the holdout dictatorships, as citizens there saw hope in casting off their tyrants and joining the union. 

Imagine if the union then absorbed NATO and the OSCE, two other Cold War vestiges looking for a new reason to be. It would immediately acquire a huge institutional competency.

Our strategy might be to take to each member parliament in the CD a draft resolution by which the country would declare a willingness to negotiate the terms of a democratic union when a certain number of other democracies have passed the same resolution.

Some would criticize getting too close to the Community of Democracies because we  would be seen as handmaidens of the U.S. This arises perhaps from the fact that the Community of Democracies was indeed initiated by the U.S., in an unexpected bout of statesmanship by Madeline Albright. She very wisely asked Poland to be the convener, presumably to signal that this was not an initiative America wanted to put a big stamp of hegemony upon. In any case, we would not be cheerleaders for that sort of a Community, but for what it could become.

Far from being an extension of American hegemony, the Community of Democracies could help ease its end. U.S. power is in steep decline. Its percentage of the global economy is shrinking. U.S. public finances are in a $50 trillion crater of unfunded obligations over the coming decades.

The U.S. military must go home, and one day it may have no choice. But the day could be sooner if the democracies together could provide a credible alternative to U.S. unilateralism. The democracies do need to be able to project force globally once in a while. There will be more Kosovos, Rwandas and Darfurs. There may still be anti-Western terrorism even after the U.S. stops stirring the pot. But even if the U.S. did want to retire as world policeman, there is no prayer certainly that it would let the UN fill any of the vacuum. It might very well, however, relinquish the role to a joint command governed by a Community of Democracies and paid for in common. It might find there a graceful way to climb down from its increasingly unaffordable perch.

It’s been said there are many roads to the sea. After years of wandering lonely trails in the high sierras of UN reform, is it possible that there is now, after all, an expressway through the mountains? In any case, it is an alternative worth exploring. Instead of taking a universal organization, the UN, and trying to democratize it, we can now also propose a democratic organization which can be universalized.  heinrich@sympatico.ca