The world state: A necessary condition for world peace.

• Main Author: Dooley, Wm. Joseph.
• Format: Others
• Published: University of Ottawa (Canada) 2009
• Subjects: Philosophy.
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10393/10645; http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-16927

The overall plan of this study first describes such essential terms as "World State", necessary condition, and particularly the concepts of order and peace, with a clearly drawn distinction between international peace and world peace. An historical survey shows that the ancient formal writings favoring the concept of universal state are minimal even if one does find names like Zeno, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and St. Augustine. Coming to the Middle Ages one sees an author and philosopher that towers over all others - Dante Alighieri, who by his clarity and depth easily excels even the works of his successors in time, such as Henry IV of France, Emeric Cruce and Commenius, up until very modern times, when writers are nearly all a part of some wartime tradition. The account of the world state movement in the twentieth century is characterized by efforts to convert the League of Nations into a world state and now similar efforts are directed towards the United Nations. The opposition to the world state movement has finally crystalized into three general categories: nationalism with its myth-laden sovereign states as the best possible state form; Communism with its own plans for a Marxist dominated world; and internationalism, whose adherents stress an intensification of the functionalist approach to world peace among sovereign states. In the same fashion that the world state is considered as necessary for world peace, so certain conditions must be fulfilled before a world state can successfuly come into and remain in being. These necessary conditions, often so overstressed by some authors that they sound really like objections, can be divided into six groups: firstly, the relatively stable pre-existing world community; then, certain universal moral standards even if minimal in number; thirdly, a certain educational level to be reached by a sufficient number of people; fourthly, an attitude of loyal opposition and the peaceful interchange of rule; fifthly, a world state federal in form; and lastly, the world state myth with all its rational, poetic and romantic elements properly intermingled so as to fascinate peoples of this world into its favor. The philosophical arguments favoring a world state are rooted in a careful analysis of the concept of world peace. Once the full import of the concept is clarified, the full necessity of a world state, whether it is obtainable or not, becomes quite obvious. The peace discussed in connection with world peace is the peace that is the product of order, specifically, political order that results from a well managed government with true political authority. This peace consists in the harmonious living together of groups enjoying at least minimal concord and the tranquility of order, to borrow the Augustinian terminology. Order thus becomes the key word in the discussion of peace, and this order is the result of the proper disposition of things equal and unequal, that is, the rulers and the ruled. This type of order is possible only in what Scholastic philosophers call a perfect society. An evaluation of the concept of sovereignty in its historical origins as well as in its practical effects, causes some Scholastics, chiefly Jacques Maritain, to reject the concept vigorously, since it was conceived with and provides the way for absolutism. Modern non-Scholastics see the present day use of the concept of sovereignty as largely mythical. As a philosophical concept held tenaciously by nation-states it is of no help to the formation of a world state. Nor should it be of any service to the world state either if it paves the way for world state despotism. Multiple sovereignties in the same - now one world - neighborhood spell anarchy. A world state possessing all the implications of the modern concept of sovereignty could easily be an absolutistic world state in many ways offensive to the world common good of human rights. Lastly, the Scholastic concept of subsidiarity, closely allied to the idea of the common good, also leads just as inexorably to the necessity of a world political order which in practice can be achieved only by a world state. The arguments of recent writers advocating world federation repeat the arguments connected with the Scholastic concept of subsidiarity, without of course, using that somewhat clumsy word. They likewise stress the need for world law, and the fear of common destruction from future nuclear warfare. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)