It is not utopian to think that a federation of free states could encourage and nurture a world cured of war.
Conflict and war have been an ineluctable part of human existence. But as technology has progressed, the means and scale of destruction have also advanced. The threats of nuclear war, and the fright of nuclear power stations in Ukraine caught up in combat, remind us that we should redouble our efforts to build international systems of mutual regulation that banish war.
It is easy to be unrealistic and to imagine ideas of paradise when writing articles calling for an end to all war. From Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis” to James Harrington’s “The Commonwealth of Oceana,” world literature is awash with visions of societies that offer Elysian hopes but are largely impractical when applied to the frailties of the human mind and action.
Yet, we don’t have to suggest a utopia to make significant advances in the state of humanity to overcome many burdens. And within such a realistic framework I include eradicating war. I do not think it is impractical to suggest that conflict can be significantly meliorated to achieve this state of affairs; I mean the end of major war, among the whole human race.
After all, democracies across Europe have desisted from violent war since the middle of the last century and I think we have every reason to think that this successful experiment is not some strange and exceptional product of the European mind. We might apply the same reasoning to North America.
A new vision for Europe?
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently suggested a new alliance and alternative to the European Union (EU). But constructing a new order in the world should not be founded on building antagonisms to existing coalitions. The EU is the most successful alliance ever constructed without coercion between culturally and historically diverse, and previously warring, nations. It is a magnificent triumph of rational thought over human tension.
This European vision is a powerful antidote to conflict. Winston Churchill remarked on 19 September 1946 at the University of Zurich, surrounded by the rubble of war: “There is a remedy [to tyranny and war]…It is to re-create the European family…with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe.”
Churchill was not the first to suggest this, but the context in which he said it is given force and relevance by the current situation.
If we are to conceive of a new type of alliance, it should be ‘for’ something. It should stand for a complementary and additional vision. Perhaps we should form a new alliance whose primary purpose is to work towards a global polity free of war.
To achieve this, it might focus its attention on helping nations avoid despotism. Autocracy is not necessarily the cause of war, but it is often the mechanism by which it is brought into action.
Although despotism may be the consequence of deeper social ills than bad government, if we should train our efforts on helping nations achieve successful accountable administration, then we might realize a beneficial effect on human order and assuage one of the major causes of human disorder.
This preoccupation with dictators and war arises because war can cause annihilation on terrible scales, as we witness in Ukraine, even with the use of conventional weapons. If we can prevent it, our future will be more assured, even with the other depredations our civilization endures. Indeed, if we can overcome war, then the other challenges can be solved more easily.
Such a new federated alliance could set its primary goal as the prevention of war by political and economic means – to build good government through developing the art of human organization. You might say, surely this is a description of the United Nations (UN) or the EU? But these bodies do not entirely reflect what this entity might do.
The UN was founded to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations and promote social progress, better living standards and human rights, but not to actively thwart dictatorship as such.
Although EU member states have not gone to war, the EU does not see its purpose to prevent conflagration as a stated end, but rather to advance political and economic objectives, from which the happy result has been a lack of war.
A new federation would not seek to impose political or economic unity on its members, although it might agree treaties and collaborations where its members see a merit in such a course. This is not a vision of a superstate.
How would a new federation work?
More to the point, how would this new federation help countries achieve accountable government and prevent the ills of dictatorship?
The federation would encourage in all nations the systems of government in which the executive powers are robustly embedded in electoral systems that make heads of state beholden to popular vote, securely limited in their term, facing credible political opposition, and the checks and balances in government are under constant development. Therefore, it’s objective is not merely to advance democracy, but to develop the complex mutually correcting mechanisms of accountable government.
Such a federation could welcome many types of government, but in general it should work to advance republican governance in societies seeking new institutions. I take this to be the best way forward in curing dictatorship. By that I mean a system of government in which the state is a servant to its citizens, not the other way around.
I mean a form of government where people, their lives, property, and liberties to speak out and think are respected. In this type of society, institutions from government branches to scientific and cultural institutions, to even the smallest local voluntary groups, observe the virtues of transparency in their operations, accountability to the wider public, and a commitment to advancing a generally free state of mind in the citizen.
But above all, in the context in which I write here, I mean a form of government committed to minimizing the chances of war by encouraging the emergence of peacefully cooperating commercial societies. This federation would work across the world, but it might also seek to prevent conflict in space, recognizing the potential for disagreement in that new and vast realm.
What of its military capacity? In this matter, it would diverge from the UN. We could imagine that such a federation would have the military capability to act, a palpable weakness of the UN model in the current crisis. The federation members must agree never to attack any of their own and to come to the assistance of the others. If they do engage in illegal military activity against a sovereign nation, their vote in the assembly of the federation is automatically revoked. Although this federation would not be primarily military, it would have the teeth to deter its members from war.
The federation would, in essence, be a support group for the art of good government, but with the wherewithal for military action; it would be federation of free states with military clout.
Of course, the practically minded reader will say that many nations will not join the federation and then how are we any better? But is it too much to think that in an era in which warfare is a palpable existential threat to humanity that we cannot build such alliances?
Can we not agree to end despotism once and for all by active efforts to build good government, to help one another construct responsible states using the greater than ten thousand years of experience in human organization that our civilization has amassed?
Can we not bring an end, finally, to the caprice of the tyrant and in the process rid our civilization of, or at least quench, one of the major wellsprings of war? Can we not build an alliance that all nations would eventually join; yes, all of us. Surely, every freethinking human seeks an end to the tedium of tyranny?
Can we not use Ukraine as the point of inflection, the pivot around which such a future might turn? If our civilization is to survive in this nuclear age for a long time, then the answer to these questions must surely be in the affirmative and I see no reason why there is anything utopian about such a proposition.
Charles Cockell is Professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh.
