Study Circles Participant Manual

Study Circles

Participant Manual

One World United & Virtuous A Non-Profit Education Foundation 55 Hillandale Rd. Rye Brook, New York 10573 www. oneworlduv.com (US) 914-939-3766 2

Contents

An Introduction to Study Circles

Outline of Syllabus 4

Session One Reading

• An Introduction to One World Untied and Virtuous 12

Session One Agenda

Session Two Reading

• The Legacy of Cosmopolitanism 22

Session Two Agenda 35

Session Three Readings

• Global Citizenship, Appiah 36 • The Resurgent Idea of World Government, Craig 47 Session Three Agenda 56 Session Four Readings

• Article About Kung 57 • Global Ethic Article by Kung 62 • Universal Declaration of Human Rights 68

Session Four Agenda 73

• Basic Human Rights Activity 75

Session Five Reading

• Beck: Cosmopolitanism is in the Air 76 • Case Study on Intervention 83 • The Travels of a Tee Shirt (optional) 86 Session Five Agenda 90

• The Fifty Dollar Tent 92 • Session Six Readings

• Moving From Talk to Action 93 • Action Plan 98 Session Six Agenda 100 Supplemental Readings 101

Feedback Form 118 3

An Introduction to Study Circles

Welcome, and thank you for agreeing to participate in this unique series of One World Study Circles. One World United and Virtuous is a grassroots not-for-profit educational foundation that seeks to foster the body of knowledge on the idealistic legacy of cosmopolitanism and world citizenship, blending those concepts with our real world experience to create learning vehicles and action projects that nurture the perception of common humanity among peoples and groups, and lead to more effective means of global cooperation, governance, and communication. This series of One World Study Circles is intended as a first step. We started at my dining room table with friends and neighbors, now, One World study circles are video-conferenced internationally. We also involve ourselves directly through One World-related service projects and organizations that build community bridges, One World school clubs, and educational programs intended to foster cosmopolitanism. We are not allied with, nor do we represent the views of, any existing political party, religion, or fraternal/civic organization, and we will actively discourage the advocacy of partisan views. The goal of these conversations will be to foster a greater awareness of our “global citizenship”, of our connection to each other across the boundaries of nations and states, of ethnicity, race and religion, socio-economic status and gender. One World Study Circles are intended to provide a safe space for the democratic exchange of ideas on the social and political issues relevant to cosmopolitanism. They are vehicles for deliberation, but they are also intended to be vehicles for community building and action planning. We hope you find these discussions enlightening, engaging, and open to your participation in this grand endeavor.

Jack J. Zaccara Director of Education 4

Outline of Syllabus: One World Study Circles

Session One Theme: Introduction to OWUV Foundation and the Business Case for One World

Advance reading: An Introduction to One World United & Virtuous

Discussion:

A. Intro of One World United & Virtuous • Background (5 minutes) • Mission and Vision (5 minutes)

B. Personal Introductions (20 minutes) • A brief personal introduction • A brief statement of motivation for coming to study circle

C. Study Circles Overview • Goals and expectations (5 minutes) • Syllabus and Structure of classes (5 minutes)

D. Ground Rules for Respectful Dialogue (5 minutes)

E. Q and A opportunity before proceeding (10 minutes)

F. Facilitator conducts a quick review of the main points of the pre-reading: “An Introduction to One World United & Virtuous” (10 minutes)

G. Facilitator leads a discussion on the group’s reaction to the Business Case (55 minutes) in particular: • What was their general reaction to the reading? • What were the most compelling items to them? • How practical are our goals? • What are their concerns about the goals of our foundation? • Do you believe “ordinary” people can make a difference? • What would motivate them to become involved? • What are the areas they’d like to know more about

H. Homework: The Legacy of Cosmopolitanism (Thumbnails) (2 minutes) I. Reflections on our first session J. Unstructured social time 5

Session Two Theme: The Rich History of Cosmopolitan Thinking

Advance reading: The Legacy of Cosmopolitanism - Pick one person to report out on

Discussion: A. Welcome back and group “housekeeping” (5 minutes) B. Weekly check-in on One World in the news or personal stories of “One World moments” you’ve encountered since our last meeting (30 minutes) C. Discuss reaction to thumbnails. • What was you general reaction to this reading? • Who did you choose to report out on? Why? • Do individual report-outs • Include examples of individuals who transitioned from introspection and theorizing to action…what moved them to action? • What was their moral imperative? How were they different and similar? • How did they think about effectiveness and moral choice? • Do you know of any thinkers or leaders who are currently talking about cosmopolitanism? • Why are there few, if any, group entities that work to make One World a reality? (25 minutes) • How does all this history relate to the “Business case” for One World we discussed last week?

D. Facilitator leads: (20 minutes) • How do you define your community? • What communities do you participate in? • How does nation-state affiliation color your world view? • How are your responsibilities different for people who are inside or outside of your community?

E. “Thanksgiving turkey for your neighbors vs. writing a check for Darfur” exercise. Why was this easy or difficult? What kinds of considerations came into play? (15 minutes)

F. Homework: Appiah Keynote on Gl0bal Citizenship and Campbell Craig, The Resurgent Idea of World Government

G. Reflections (5 minutes)

H. Social time over coffee, unstructured discussion 6

Session Three

Theme: What is our Moral Responsibility to Others?

Advance Reading: Appiah Keynote on Global Citizenship, Campbell Craig, The Resurgent Idea of World Government

A. Welcome back and group “housekeeping” (5 minutes)

B. Weekly check-in on One World in the news or personal stories of “One World moments” you’ve encountered since our last meeting (30 minutes)

C. Discuss Appiah and Craig reading: 1. Do you agree with the 3 points Appiah makes early? • We do not need a single world government • We must care for the fate of all human beings • We have much to gain from conversations with one another across our differences 2. Appiah’s concern about world government is that “different communities are entitled to live according to different standards… Must a world government require all communities to live under the same standards? 3. Is One World a threat to cultural diversity? 4. Must cosmopolitanism be relativistic in accepting all cultural practices? 5. Are there cultural practices you can think of that would be unacceptable to you? 6. What can or should you do to change that? 8. How has globalization impacted One World thinking (positively? negatively?) 9. How has technology impacted One World thinking? 10. Do you think world government is desirable as the only way to prevent nuclear war? 11. Do you think world government is inevitable? 12. How does the European Union fit as a One World Model?

F. Homework: Consolidated inventory of human rights document, Kung reading (5 minutes)

G. Reflections (5 minutes)

H. Social time over coffee, unstructured discussion. 7

Session Four

Theme: Global Ethics and the Quest for Universal Rights & Responsibilities

Advance reading: Consolidated inventory of human rights document, Kung reading

Discussion:

A. Welcome back and group “housekeeping” admin/ground rules, etc. (5 minutes)

B. Check-in on One World “AHA” moments or One World “in the news” that week (20 minutes)

C. Facilitator led discussion on Kung reading. Some suggested discussion questions include:

1. Was there anything that stood out for you in the Kung reading? 2. Do you think a global ethic might ever be attainable? 3. Is there a “necessary minimum of common values, standards, and basic attitudes? 4. What role does religion play in either helping or hindering a values consensus? 5. Do you agree with Kung’s assertion that “there can be no new world order without a world ethic, a global ethic? 6. Could this be achieved without imposing the norms of one culture upon another? 7. Kung talks about human responsibilities as well as human rights. Do you agree that individual rights should not be dependent upon someone meeting their human responsibility?

8. Lets discuss his three summary statements and how you feel about each one:

i. There will be no survival of our globe without a global ethic. ii. There will be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions. iii. There will be no peace among the religions without dialogue and cooperation among the religions and civilizations

C. Activity: How Easy is a Global Ethic?

Facilitator leads exercise:

1. Each person must decide which 3 rights from the handout “Thirteen Basic Human Rights” they would choose as the most important. Give individuals the right to edit a statement to make it more acceptable to them.

2. After each person has decided, split the study circle into groups of 3 or 4 people and ask each group to negotiate an agreement on the 3 most important basic rights.

3. As time allows, ask the groups to then try and reach agreement with each other on the top 3 basic rights.

D. Discussion Questions:

1. How easy was it for you to decide on three rights individually? 2. What did you struggle with? 3. Did you use your editorial right on any statement? 4. What was the process like in small group? 5. Who led? Dominated? Was the mediator? 6. Were you able to agree? Why or why not? 7. What happened in large group? 8. How does this pertain to Kung’s quest for a global ethic? 9. Did this activity change your thinking in any way about the about the ability of the world to reach a minimum set of standards? 10) Were cultural or religious differences in this room an influence on your work this session?

E. Homework: Ulrich Beck article, Intervention Case Study

F. Reflections (5 minutes)

G. Social time over coffee, unstructured discussion.

Session Five

Theme: Justifying Action by Intervention in the Affairs of Other Nation States and by the Coordinated Power of Consumer Choice

Advance reading: Ulrich Beck article, Intervention case study. Optional: “Travels of a Tee Shirt” excerpts

Discussion:

A. Welcome back and group “housekeeping” (5 minutes) B. Current events and “AHA” moments check-in (20 minutes) C. Facilitator leads the Intervention Case Study. The participants should discuss their opinions in preparation to vote on the following two questions for each of the 4 cases: (30) • Should the world community intervene? • Upon failure of the world community to intervene, should the United States intervene unilaterally?

D. Suggested Discussion Questions: (30) 1. What criteria should the world community use to decide on intervention? 2. How does this relate to last session‘s discussion on human rights and responsibilities? 3. When, is ever should the United States act unilaterally? 4. Note that the loss of life in Darfur and in Rwanda is much greater than it is in Kosovo and Zimbabwe. What if one million lives were in the balance? What if it were on 10,000? 1,000? Is there a number? 5. What of the phrase “Never Again”? 6. What are some of the options for intervention? Other than military? 7. How much influence does an individual citizen have over such decisions?

E. Reactions to Beck reading 1. Do you agree with Beck’s assertion that there is an internal globalization occurring that is altering the construct of social identity? “Us” and “Them”? 2. “We forgive the crusaders and await the investors” - Means of coercion is not the threat of invasion – but of non-investment! 10

3. The threat of declining to invest in a particular country? 4. Multi-national corporations replaces military bases 5. Globalization: The organized absence of responsibility? 6. Have the rules of global power really changed? Where are we? 7. Is there an opportunity to transform the rules from win/lose/or lose/lose to win/win? 8. Are consumers the counterbalance to globalized capital? 9. Do you use the weapon of non-purchasing? Can it be organized? Can it be organized trans-nationally?

F. The Fifty Dollar Tent” exercise 1. Do the fifty Dollar Tent Exercise 2. Group discusses outcome of exercise What were the issues in deciding? Could this work in the real world? Could enough consumers be mobilized globally to affect the policies/behavior of a nation/state?

G. H.W. • Read “Moving from Talk to Action” • DO: Action Planner In the time between sessions, fill out the action plan. Be prepared to present and discuss at final session

H. Reflections (5 minutes)

I. Unstructured Social Time

Session Six: Moving From Talk to Action

Theme: Study Circle Members Take Action

Advance reading: Read Moving from Talk to Action, Complete Action Plan

Discussion:

A. Quick check-in and group “housekeeping” (admin/scheduling issues, if any) ( 5 minutes)

B. Reactions to “moving from Talk to Action

C. The Power of One (20 minutes) • Do you believe that one person can make a difference in the world? • Can you give some examples? • Do you believe that you can make a difference in the world? • How can this organization make a difference? • How can the people at this table work together to make a difference? • What are you willing to do?

D. Group members report on their action items and receive feedback from other members and facilitator. (60 minutes)

A. Facilitator leads discussion on Next Steps for One World United & Virtuous, things already planned for the immediate future, brainstorming with members, interaction between individual action plans and One World activities. (30 minutes)

B. The facilitator should collect all action plans and promise to email a summary to the group. Participants should be invited to the next bi-monthly meeting of One World United & Virtuous (5 minutes).

F. Closure

Session One Reading:

One World United & Virtuous Educational Foundation Who We Are: Mission of One World United & Virtuous: We will compile, develop and share a body of knowledge on the idealistic legacy of cosmopolitanism and world citizenship, blending those concepts with our real‐world experience to create learning vehicles and action projects that nurture the perception of common humanity among peoples and groups, and lead to more effective means of global cooperation, governance and communication.

One World United & Virtuous is an embryonic, grassroots, learning organization that has been created to foster a sense of global citizenship. The word ‘cosmopolitan’, which derives from the Greek word kosmopolitês (‘citizen of the world’), has been used to describe a wide variety of important views in moral and socio-political philosophy. The nebulous core shared by all cosmopolitan views is the idea that all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, do (or at least can) belong to a single community, and that this community should be cultivated. One World aims to cultivate the community of all human beings. We intend to blend the cosmopolitan body of knowledge with our membership’s real-world experience in education, management, international organizations, finance, and politics, to create learning experiences and action projects that foster an awareness of the need for improved global governance and global collective action.

Our name, “One World United & Virtuous”, comes from a phrase of Benjamin Franklin’s, extracted from his “Observations on my Reading History in Library” proposing ways that men and women of virtue could unite political efforts, across national boundaries, for the common good, condemning factionalism and petty self- interest. Some 277 years ago, when the Earth’s population was 600 million, Benjamin Franklin also observed that politicians were generally acting in their own narrow self- interest. Since Franklin wrote those words in 1731, technological advances have transformed the way we live and communicate, nearly 6 billion people have been added to the planet, and his United States has become the world’s preeminent superpower. In spite of massive technological, environmental, and demographic changes, we can find scarce improvement in the way humans conduct global public affairs.

Our organizational agenda is to first create a set of venues and opportunities for discussions, whether small group meetings, lectures by experts, conferences or threads on our web site, that raise awareness of the legacy and contemporary thinking on One World. We also involve ourselves directly through One World-related service projects 13

and organizations that build community bridges, One World school clubs, and educational programs intended to foster cosmopolitanism.

Over time, as we work to nurture the perception of common humanity among peoples and groups we hope our efforts will help to redesign such artificial mechanisms as the nation-state and devise more effective means of global cooperation, governance and communication through a new understanding of our World, one person at a time.

Our goals are to:

• Encourage broader public awareness and discussion of One World/cosmopolitan thinking • Encourage human beings to understand that our essential link is human and that world problems should be viewed from that perspective • Help people reconsider where their community begins and ends • Stimulate a range of (grassroots) actions that foster improved global governance and improved global collective action • Raise awareness of the urgency of the need for One World solutions

We are not allied with, nor do we represent the views of, any existing political party, religion, or fraternal/civic organization, and we will actively discourage the advocacy of partisan political views.

Citizens of the World:

To Americans of a certain age, the phrase: “One World” evokes faint memories of 1940 Presidential candidate and author Wendell Wilkie. His views of humane global governance, expressed in his speeches and 1943 book One World, flourished all too briefly as his fellow citizens reflected in horror on the devastation and chaos of World War II, and sought to create means to prevent its recurrence The ideal, the image, the resonance of “One World” simply won’t go away. Since ancient time great thinkers, and ordinary people just hoping for peace, kindness, and fairness in human affairs have been drawn to the ideals and possibilities of acting on our common humanity, transcending differences, and avoiding conflict. From the philosophical position of Diogenes that he was a citizen of the cosmos--something beyond his home city of Sinope in the 4th century B.C.—down to current entrepreneurial efforts by leaders of civil society to alleviate the threat of “loose nukes” in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere—the phrase “One World” implies a deep and honorable legacy of moral & political philosophy, and of pragmatic measures to create international institutions and address the hardships and injustices that our system of nation-states inflict on the people of our planet. Reasoned, rational, aware life only exists (as far as we know) on the planet Earth. Humankind is clearly at a defining moment in the history of life in the Cosmos. Many will see our faults. We see our promise. One World United & Virtuous intends to challenge the apathy and the consensus. We propose to take up the defining challenge of the 21st century. Some will say we are 14

wrong, others will simply say we are dreamers. If so, we keep good company. Socrates, Diogenes, Epictetus, Franklin, Einstein and a host of other one world thinkers are in our lineage, and yours. We insist that we are first and foremost: Citizens of the Cosmos Citizens of the World Members of The Community of Human Beings

Imagine how differently the problems facing humanity would be framed if we took a humanistic view rather than a nationalist view. For the bulk of the world’s population, the 20th Century ideological stances of East-West relations that drove the nuclear standoff were an irrelevant distraction from the immediate problems of poverty and environmental hazard. Harvard Biologist Edward O. Wilson has suggested that almost all of the crises that affect the world economy are ultimately environmental in origin. Yet the world has little chance to solve any of them until we understand how all of them connect by cause and effect. We would be wise to look upon ourselves as a species and devise more realistic and pragmatic approaches to all the problems as a whole. One World United & Virtuous calls upon each of us to do just that: to look at ourselves as a species. Jeffrey Sachs in Common Wealth explains that “The defining challenge of the twenty- first century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet. That common fate will require new forms of global cooperation, a fundamental point of blinding simplicity that many world leaders have yet to understand or embrace.” Why has our leadership – political, business and media – been so slow to put the pieces together? Which are the groups calling for new forms of global cooperation? Where are the pressure groups calling for improved global collective action? Where are the serious academics talking about the need for World Government? While the facts presented by Sachs and Wilson indeed capture reality and are not very difficult to grasp, we all operate by a worldview distorted by the residues of hereditary human nature. In Sachs’ characterization, we exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology. This, in a nutshell, is how we lurched into the twenty-first century. One World United & Virtuous seeks to undo the distortions, to break through the residue of inheritance so that we can see more clearly the challenges that face us as human beings.

The Business Case for One World:

Renowned British astrophysicist, Sir Martin Rees, believes that this volatile cocktail of emotions, beliefs and technology has a 50/50 probability of ending the only known source of life in the Cosmos!! One World United & Virtuous looks to boldly step into the void. We seek to educated, motivate, and activate concerned citizens who understand that humanity cannot govern itself over the next 100 years in the same fashion it has governed itself over the last 100 years and hope to survive. 15

The need for effective global collective action is no longer a fanciful, idealistic wish - it is an absolute necessity. Few if any of the critical problems that face us today can be solved by nation states acting alone:

1) Energy: Oil supply very simply cannot keep up with oil demand. We need to completely revamp our oil based global economy simply because sooner or later, sooner according to many resource experts, there will not be anymore of it. Natural resources represent security and prosperity for any nation. As they become scarce, our inability to deepen cooperation between the peoples of the world will impact not only world peace, but perhaps our very survival.

2) Climate Change: According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the world needs to halve greenhouse emissions by 50% by 2050 in order to prevent average global temperatures from rising 2 degrees centigrade. We have come to recognize that we are in a situation of increasing interdependence, and that our future is intrinsically linked to the preservation of the global life-support systems and to the survival of all forms of life. The nations and the scientists of the world are called upon to acknowledge the urgency of using knowledge from all fields of science in a responsible manner to address human needs and aspirations. As some world leaders begin to respond, there is still a lack of a sustained and coordinated global plan.

3) Poverty: The World Bank estimates that the number of people facing hunger will increase by 100 million this year…not because there is not enough food but because they do not have enough money to pay for higher food prices. Every cow in the European Union countries is subsidized by $2.50 a day-- more than what 75% of Africans live on. One in five of the world’s people live on less than $1 a day. Poverty is not just about lack of material wealth. It is about hunger and starvation and death. It is about illness and disease and suffering. It is about lack of access to shelter and to education. In developing countries the rise of a middle class has also added to the demand for food. The New York Times reported (March 9, 2008) on the global need for grain that farmers cannot fill. “Everyone wants to eat like America on this globe,” said Daniel W. Basse of the AgResource Company, a Chicago consultancy. “But if they do, we’re going to need another two or three globes to grow it all.” The poorest countries are caught in what in what economist Jeffrey Sachs refers to as a self-reinforcing and not self-correcting “poverty trap”. Such countries have the highest fertility rates, and suffer massive local environmental degradation from over-fishing, forest degradation, and soil depletion. Moreover, they tend to be the most unstable politically and therefore prone to violence and conflict. A global commitment to lift millions out of the poverty trap is more than just “the right thing to do;” it will create a safer world for us all.

4) Military Spending: Every year the world spends more than $1,000 billion dollars on military expenditure. Such a staggering amount could provide basic health care, basic education, and sustainable agricultural programs for the entire planet.

5) Nuclear Proliferation in an Age of Terrorism: The new century was in its infancy when its history was formed by the events of September 11, 2001. We now live in an age of unaccounted-for nuclear weapons (“loose nukes”), global terrorism, and 16

competition over limited natural resources. Nuclear proliferation is more than a threat, Israel stated that “Attacking Iran, in order to stop its nuclear plans, will be unavoidable.” The remarks by Mr. Mofaz, a former military chief of staff and ex-defense minister, reflect rising concerns in Israel and the US over Iran’s nuclear program. Albert Einstein once said: “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. Can we find global solutions to conflicts between nation-states as well as those that involve non-state actors? Is it unrealistic? Is it any more unrealistic than just hoping that we can avoid a nuclear nightmare?

6) Ethnic Strife: Prejudice is a conditioned response that blinds us to our “oneness”. The sense of the “other” is the foundation of opposition to One World. Many people are drawn to One World for social and political reasons. Others get involved for spiritual reasons that transcend religious differences and acknowledge that there are many paths to God, or spirituality without deism. One World looks to a consciousness of the interconnectedness of all life, and all people. Unfortunately, our religions often divide us. It is our recognition of our common nature, while celebrating our differences that will unite us.

7) Clean Water: As early as 1985, then UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali warned that “the next war in the Middle East will be fought over water, not politics.” Agriculture consumes about 70% of the world’s fresh water, but in developing countries it may be closer to 90%. When multiple states rely on the same water supply, and the demand increases, the potential for conflict is great. Access to safe, clean water, a sustainer of life itself, should not become a privilege.

8) Biohazards: Perhaps the world grows smaller because we are filling it up with our own garbage. Some chemicals commercially manufactured or produced as by-products have led to severe global environmental and public health impacts. Ozone depletion, DDT’s impacts on birds and wildlife, bioaccumulation of PCBs and other persistent organic pollutants in the Arctic and elsewhere, and lead contamination in many urban areas, are just some examples. Almost all ecosystems have been greatly modified by humans, who transform habitats and exterminate rivals and competitors, leading to the loss and fragmentation of natural habitats. This includes clearing forests for timber or plantations, overgrazing, draining wetlands, and the destruction of heathlands and coral reefs. A global approach to stop the destructive “tinkering” with the balance of life on this planet has yet to be found. Once again, a serious threat to human health on a global scale deserves to be addressed by a world united.

9) Financial Instability: In a world where activity in one financial market will impact another across the world overnight, global economic cooperation continues to remain a distant goal. Yet raising per capita incomes can transform a society’s living standards and provide resources to address critical social problems. There is a recent push to promulgate international standards for financial best practices. The international policy community, led by the multilateral financial institutions, can assist emerging markets in enhancing financial transparency, strengthening shareholder and creditor rights, and improving supervision and regulation. 17

Despite the economic and social benefits of reducing most government subsidies, almost every national government intervenes in markets for goods and services. Cuts in subsidies would reduce government spending by hundreds of millions. It could directly alleviate poverty, reduce environmental degradation, financial instability, and even improve governance by reducing the corruption in trade bureaucracies. Hunger and malnutrition can be eased by open trade, not only of goods, but also in agricultural technologies. The very idea of One World invokes a world free of subsides and trade barriers.

Many economists have suggested the advantages of simplifying the jumble of nearly 190 currencies world wide. Since the world trades about $1.2 trillion worth of currencies a day, a global currency would save companies and individuals hundreds of billions of dollars a year in foreign-exchange and hedging costs. It would also eliminate national currency crises such as those that hit Argentina, Mexico, Thailand, and Russia in recent years. No country would have a balance-of-payments problem or need to maintain reserves of foreign assets, such as currency or bonds, to counter dramatic fluctuations in the market. The end of currency fluctuations would also stabilize international business. Manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic, for example, would no longer have to adjust to huge changes, such as the slide in the value of the dollar the US is currently experiencing. The value of stocks and other assets in countries now subject to high currency risks and inflation would also soar hugely as investors became more reassured of values. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker has said a truly globalized world economy needs a global currency. One World…one currency?

10. The need for new forms of governance: The forces and opportunities of globalization have reshaped corporations, academic institutions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs, i.e.: Doctors Without Borders, Greenpeace, etc.) and communication around the world. Nation-states, however powerful, are simply now too small to address global economic, demographic, and environmental threats. In his recent work Common Wealth, Jeffrey D. Sachs writes: “I believe that it is as citizens of the world that we can flourish in the coming generation. As individuals we will find the maximum outlet for our creative energies and income earning potential when we are part of global networks, at work and play…Without a determined effort to build understanding and empathy for other societies, cultures, religions, and the voiceless poor, we will risk a downward spiral of distrust and even hate across the divide of us- versus-them.” Sachs concludes that the defining challenge of the twenty-first century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet. That common fate will require new forms of global cooperation, a fundamental point of blinding simplicity that many world leaders have yet to understand or embrace.

A Call to Action:

Starting to feel overwhelmed? Well, don’t!! Get involved. Please join us as we begin to educate ourselves and others on the best thinking to date, and explore how to take 18 action and support those leaders willing to take a stand…and to ally with all of our neighbors around the world who are truly working for the betterment of humankind.

Very sober, practical leaders are already grappling with the dimensions of the problem. World Bank President Robert Zoellick has recently proposed a 10-point plan for the food crisis. His tenth point reads: there should be greater collective action to counter global risks. The interconnected challenges of energy, food and water will be the drivers of the global economy and security. We might explore an agreement among the G8 and key developing countries to hold “global goods” stocks, modeled on the International Energy Agency, governed by transparent and clear rules.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, former UK Ambassador to the UN and currently director of a foundation on global change, recently commented on the local dimension of the global challenge (alluding to a speech in April by Prime Minister Gordon Brown):

The prescription…is to take responsibility to a local level. The defense against terrorism has to include rejection of it within the community where it hides. Carbon reduction and energy conservation requires local targets to be set. Effective prisons, if they are to reduce rather to feed crime, have to connect with the people who know the inmates or are affected by their crimes. Even with cross-border issues, action is best taken by the neighbors and sub regions that own the problem. Global institutions can supply the norms, the finance, the legitimacy or expertise. But the responsibility has to be pushed lower. The fact is that democratic accountability evaporates when we think [only] globally: another country is to blame, the solution must be someone else’s job. In reality… the buck stops with the individual. It is no longer enough to expect government to do the difficult things, such as providing the secure framework, and leave us to get on with enjoying the easier things without interference. We all have to contribute.

Our new effort endorses the above sentiments. We believe that the individual and individual actions are all-important. We believe that it is not just the policy makers but all who must contribute. One World would like to give you an opportunity to contribute by joining an exciting enterprise whose goal is to foster increased awareness of our common humanity, and to deepen our understanding of the need for global collective action.

To some, the very thought of global governance conjures up images of a nightmarish Orwellian world in a totalitarian grip. Yet the ideals of democracy and freedom are denied to many millions on a daily basis. The long list of global challenges discussed above will be surmountable only if nation states increasingly see it in their interest to form an international system that is far more cohesive, far more empowered by its members, and, therefore, far more effective than the one we have today. That might well be some future evolution of the U.N. less encumbered by the sheer size and scope of its obligations and the relative poverty of its resources. The future of global governance, if it is to have a future, might more plausibly be, as suggested by Strobe Talbott of the Brookings Institution, a wider network of structures and arrangements -- some functional in focus, others geographic; some intergovernmental, others based on 19

systematic collaboration with the private sector, civil society, and NGOs. In other words, what Talbott envisions is not a scary, all-powerful bureaucracy deploying black helicopters over Kansas, but rather a flexible mesh of international agreements and organizations that support each other. Only in this way, he contends, will the world be able to deal with such clear dangers as a new wave in nuclear proliferation and a tipping point in global climate change.

One World, then, is a call to the people of the world to come together as one and foster the realization of humanity’s highest aspiration – peace and justice on earth. Imagine.

Many will claim that working toward global governance is naïve and unrealistic. We would argue that it is naïve and unrealistic to believe that nuclear weapons will continue to proliferate among competing governments without ever being detonated. We would argue that it is naïve and unrealistic to think that China and India will industrialize in the same manner as Europe, US and Japan with no impact on the world’s natural resources. We would argue that it is naïve to act as if oil will last forever when we know it will run out sooner rather than later, that technology will once again solve increasing food shortages, that these problems will solve themselves.

We would argue that if we do not act now there is no certainty that our grandchildren will have the ability to act.

We would therefore like to invite you to join us in the club that Ben Franklin never had time to create. Come join One World United and Virtuous!

Session One Agenda A. Personal Introductions (20 minutes) • A brief personal introduction • A brief statement of motivation for coming to study circle Intro of One World United & Virtuous

B. Mission and Vision

• Background (5 minutes) • Mission and Vision (5 minutes)

Mission of One World United & Virtuous

We are grounded dreamers who will compile, develop and share a body of knowledge on the idealistic legacy of cosmopolitanism and world citizenship, blending those concepts with our real-world experience to create learning vehicles and action projects that nurture the perception of common humanity among peoples and groups, and lead to more effective means of global cooperation, governance and communication.

C. Study Circles Overview • Goals and expectations (5 minutes) • Syllabus and Structure of classes (5 minutes)

D. Ground Rules for Respectful Dialogue (5 minutes)

Sample Ground Rules for a One World Study Circle

1. Respect (Ask people to be specific-what does it look like? Sound Like?) o Volume and tone of voice o “I” statements, not “you” statements (no personal attacks) o Discuss, don’t debate o Agree to disagree

2. “One Mic” (one person talks at a time. Active listening is encouraged)

3. One time and on task (Punctuality, succinct contributions, and staying on topic helps the group)

4. Speak to each other and not to the facilitator

5. Honesty

6. Openness (open to sharing and receiving ideas)

7. Help the group succeed (teamwork) 21

Are there additional Suggestions for ground Rules?

E. The Role of the Participant: ¾ Seek first to understand (the concerns and values that lie behind other’s views), then to be understood ¾ Listen carefully to others, asking for clarification when needed ¾ Work hard to understand the why of the positions others take that disagree with you ¾ Challenge your assumptions, biases, and baggage ¾ Don’t “right-fight”. It’s not a debate and there is no winner ¾ Help us stay on track, (on topic and on time). Leave your agenda home and keep your contributions short and to the point ¾ Try not to restate something that’s already been said unless the group asks for clarification ¾ Talk from the “I” and not on behalf of others. Don’t “represent” ¾ Speak your truth openly and honest without monopolizing the conversation. Share the air-time ¾ Do not address your remarks to the facilitator. Speak to the group ¾ Participate fully, with your piece of the puzzle the picture will remain incomplete ¾ Don’t hesitate to challenge ideas you disagree with, and don’t take it personally if someone disagrees with your ideas ¾ Keep in mind that the ultimate goal is to identify small or large action steps that you can take to foster global awareness and cooperation.

F. Q and A opportunity before proceeding (10 minutes)

G. Facilitator leads a discussion on the group’s reaction to the Pre-Reading, in particular:

What was their general reaction to the reading? How practical are our goals? What were the most compelling items to them? Are there other good reasons for One World? What’s going on currently in the world that makes One World more or less likely? Is there a “special moment” to this time in our history? What are their concerns about the goals of our foundation? What would motivate them to become involved? What are the areas they’d like to know more about (55 minutes)

H. Homework: Thumbnails (abbreviated) and Appiah Reading (2 minutes)

I. Reflections on our first session

J. Unstructured social time 22

Session Two Reading: The Legacy of Cosmopolitanism

Diogenes was probably born in 412 B.C. in the Greek colony of Sinope, Turkey, but it was in Athens that he adopted the philosophy of the Cynics and became the most famous philosopher of that school. He lived in accordance with the teaching of their belief that a man, in order to attain wisdom and virtue, must be independent of his own desires and ambitions, of the sustenance of others, and of the acquisition of fortune. The Cynics further believed that it was necessary to give up all the pleasures of life which stand in the way of self mastery. According to that tradition he got rid of all his possessions except a cloak and purse and wooden bowl and lived in what is called a “tub”—perhaps a kind of dugout or large earthenware jar. Diogenes was asked why he always begged. "To teach people," replied Diogenes. "Oh yes, and what do you teach?" people would ask him scornfully. "Generosity," he replied.

Many legends have come down to us relating to his eccentricity. It is said that he walked the streets of Athens barefoot, wearing a long beard and carrying a stick. There is a famous but perhaps apocryphal story that he was often seen there carrying a lantern during daytime; his explanation being that he was vainly searching for an honest man. In another story, Alexander stood opposite him and asked, "Are you not afraid of me?" "Why, what are you,” said Diogenes, "a good thing or a bad?" Alexander replied, "A good thing" whereupon Diogenes said, "Who, then, is afraid of the good?" At another time Diogenes was sunning himself when Alexander stood over him and said, "Ask of me any boon you like." To which he replied, "Please move…you’re standing in my light." Alexander is reported to have said, "Had I not been Alexander, I should have liked to be Diogenes." As it turned out, both Diogenes and Alexander died on the same day in 323 B.C. Alexander was 33 and Diogenes was 90.

Diogenes is credited with the first known use of the word "cosmopolitan". When he was asked where he came from, he replied, "I am a citizen of the world (cosmopolites)". This was a radical claim in a world where a man's identity was intimately tied to his citizenship in a particular city state. Diogenes’ simple retort has reverberated among great thinkers down through the ages. 23

Epictetus was probably born between 50 and 60 AD at Hierapolis. The life and works of Epictetus is the remarkable story of an emancipated slave in the Roman Empire who by the sheer power of will (central to his teachings) went on to take his place among the Roman elite, and who, despite his lowly origins, chronic ill health, later exile, and what must have been precarious income and security, would have a profound influence upon Western thought. Epictetus himself produced no written work of his own, yet he became the most accessible of Stoic teachers because of the devotion of one of his students, Arrian, who recorded the lectures of Epictetus in eight books of The Discourses, four of which survive, and then excerpted from them The Manual. The Manual is the forerunner of modern day self-help books. It consists of fifty-three aphorisms that summarize a set of rules to live by in the distinctive Stoicism of Epictetus. We have, he taught, the capacity to discover our place in the cosmic order and organize our lives as a community of cooperation.

“You are a citizen of the world and a part of it, not one of the subordinate parts (like domestic animals) but one of the foremost: for you are capable of understanding the divine administration and of reasoning out what follows from it. What is the profession of a citizen? To treat nothing as a purely private interest and to deliberate about nothing as though one were detached (from the world as a whole), but as the hand or the foot, if they had reason and the capacity to attend to the world’s (natural) constitution would never exercise impulse or desire except by reference to the whole.” (2.10.3-4)”

Epictetus is clearly a cosmopolitan. His assertion is that if you isolate yourself (and your interest) from these “social wholes,”, you become in turn like a detached limb, you cease to be a functional person. We are not born morally neutral. Lack of integrity is a failure to make proper use of what was ours from the start. Moral progress is trying to be true to our God-given selves while remaining connected to the whole of humanity (and the cosmos).

“For what is a human being? The part of a community, first the community of gods and human beings, and secondly of the one called closest to that, which is a small copy of the universal community.” (2.5.24-6)

Epictetus argues that our identity is irreducibly social, both globally and locally, and that we cannot achieve our own good unless we see ourselves as an integral part of the world in general, and our society in particular. World citizenship has a complex Stoic background and is clearly connected to the Cosmopolitanism of

Diogenes and the Cynics. What Epictetus would call our “divine rationality” makes us participants with God in a shared law, and therefore a shared community, irrespective of local nationalities and interest. This recipe for a free and satisfying life can still engage our modern selves.

Dante Alighieri, or simply Dante (between May 14 and June 13, 1265 – September 13/14, 1321), was an Italian poet from Florence. His central work, the Divina Commedia, is considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature. In Italian he is known as il Sommo Poeta (“the Supreme Poet”). Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are also known as “the three fountains” or “the three crowns”. Dante is also called the “Father of the Italian language” (see below). Dante wrote the Comedy in a new language he called "Italian", based on the regional dialect of Tuscany, with some elements of Latin and of the other regional dialects. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression. In French, Italian is nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break from standards of publishing in only Latin (the languages of liturgy, history, and scholarship in general). This break allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience - setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future. Dante’s writings reflect both the direct knowledge and the personal suffering of a man of affairs who entered fully into a turbulent period and milieu. He had been caught up in outbreaks of civil war over the rights of the nobility and the degree of self-rule granted to the Italian city-states. He experienced bloody battle and vicious political infighting; as a result of bad luck and poor political choices, he was banished for life from his native Florence under threat of execution.

Early Cosmopolitan Thinking In political essays and in the Divine Comedy itself, he reflected on human misdeeds and imagined that the best solution would be a humane global emperor in an arrangement suggestive of constitutional monarchy with federalist aspects. The outcome would be “…a universal peace [that] is the most excellent means of securing our happiness.” He accepted monarchy at the apex of power as most natural, but also suggested that at lower levels leaders might be “raised to office by the consent of others…” that is, elected. His model seems to incorporate some democratic representation with a precocious vision of federalist administration, perhaps referencing the Papal principle of subsidiarity, allowing certain powers to be held and decisions to 25 be made at a level closest to the affected parties and the local conditions, including cultural differences. According to Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), humankind constitutes a single community (humana universitas est quoddam totum) whose aim is peaceful coexistence for all individuals. In De Monarchia (1310-13), Dante claimed that the 'world is our fatherland' over and above specific dissimilarities, including differences of religious creed. Coexistence is not only natural, but imperative, and only through coexistence can man attain this-worldly happiness.

Ben Franklin (1706-1790) was a scientist, author, printer, inventor, political theorist, politician, and diplomat. One of the Founding Fathers of the United States, he was a leader of the Enlightenment whose recognition among scientist and intellectuals in Europe helped in his diplomatic efforts to gain the critical support of France for the new American nation during the American revolution. Franklin was fluent in five languages and his encyclopedic knowledge over a broad range of academic and practical disciplines brought him worldwide acclaim. His leadership during the fight for independence made him a national hero.

Much of Franklin’s political and diplomatic career was centered on building consensus and unified action, perhaps most famously stated in his pro-Revolutionary witticism, “If we don’t hang together, we shall all hang separately.” As a son of the Enlightenment he demonstrated consistently progressive views for his times. An early anti-sexist, he later became one of the leading abolitionists among the Founding Fathers. He was clearly a great skeptic toward the prevailing views toward the alleged inferiority of other races, peoples, nations, and cultures. He echoed Hume in regarding no nation as “naturally” superior, nor indeed based in an a priori natural order. His pragmatism fostered a fierce belief in uniting people for the common good – their resources, their goodwill, and their energies.

While Franklin never used the term “One World”, the foundation One World United and Virtuous was inspired by his “Observations on my Reading History in the Library.” In this piece he speaks of a party of virtue in global terms, proposing ways that men and women of virtue could unite political efforts across national boundaries, for the common good:

“That few in Public Affairs act from a mere View of the Good of their Country, What ever they may pretend;…And did not act from a Principle of Benevolence. That fewer still in Public Affairs act with a view to the Good of Mankind. There seems to me at 26

present to be great Occasion for raising an united Party of Virtue by forming the Virtuous and good Men of all Nations into a regular Body, to be governed by suitable and good and wise Rules, which good and wise Men may probably be more unanimous in their Obedience to, than common people are to common laws. I at present think, that whoever attempts this aright, and is well qualified, cannot fail of pleasing God and of meeting with Success.”

Immanuel Kant (April 22, 1724–February 12, 1804) was a Prussian philosopher, generally regarded as the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment period, having a major impact on the Romantic and Idealist philosophies of the 19th Century, and as one of history's most influential thinkers. Strobe Talbott suggests that his work is more often evoked than read, and that his writings are “somewhere between exceedingly difficult and absolutely impenetrable.” Much of the information on Kant below has been adapted from Talbott’s “The Great Experiment”, a fascinating history of One World thinking and the nation state.

Kant spent almost all of his eighty years in Konigsberg, a cosmopolitan hub of political and commercial cooperation that would serve first as a model for the Common Market, and then for the European Union. So influenced was Kant by this interaction with people from all parts of the world that his biographer, Manfred Kuehn, said he “considered himself first and foremost not a Prussian but a citizen of the world”. Influenced by Saint Pierre’s “Project for Perpetual Peace”, he called for a united, federated Europe that might serve as the precursor and eventual leader of a united, federated world. The form of governance of its member states must be, in his view, “republican,” although the term many of his interpreters have used is “democratic.”

Kant felt that sovereignty in the hands of an absolute monarch was a license for tyranny. It was Kant, reports Talbott, who introduced anexplicit version of an idea implicit in humanism – and which became part of the intellectual bedrock of the American Revolution: that the individual himself was sovereign. IN Kant’s view, the legitimacy of a governing authority flowed upward, not just from the citizenry as a whole but from each citizen. It followed that the government must not only reflect the consent of the governed but must respect the rights of those who dissent from the majority and therefore from the decisions of the government. He called for a Volkerbund, or federation of the people, what we today would call a constitutional democracy. At age sixty, he took the federal concept to the international level, and at seventy-one, wrote “Toward Perpetual Peace” calling for a “league of Peace” to make an end of all wars forever” under what he called “cosmopolitan law”: 27

“For states in their relation to each other, there cannot be any reasonable way put of the lawless condition which entails only war except that they, like individual men, should give up their savage (lawless) freedom, adjust themselves to the constraints of public law, and thus establish a continuously growing sate consisting of various nations which will ultimately include the whole world. Kant died in 1804. To this day, his writings provided a touchstone for liberal internationalists and their hopes for a democratic peace.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), British philosopher-economist. He had a great impact on 19th-century British thought, not only in philosophy and economics but also in the areas of political science, logic, and ethics. In philosophy, he systematized the utilitarian doctrines in such works as Utilitarianism (1863), basing knowledge upon human experience and emphasizing human reason. In political economy, Mill advocated policies that he believed were most consistent with individual liberty, and he emphasized that liberty could be threatened as much by social as by political tyranny. He is probably most famous for his essay “On Liberty” (1859). In Parliament, Mill was considered a radical, because he supported such measures as public ownership of natural resources, equality for women, compulsory education, birth control, and the rights of workers. His advocacy of women’s suffrage led to the formation of the suffrage movement in England (Mill’s other major writings include Principles of Political Economy (1848), The Subjection of Women (1869), his Autobiography (1873), and Three Essays on Religion (1874).

Mill argued for a rationally grounded principle which governs a society’s dealings with individuals. This “one very simple principle”—often called the “harm principle”—entails that:

“The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”

Mill’s recommendations for the economic, political, and social organization of society always paid careful attention to how institutions, laws, and practices impacted the intellectual, moral, and affective well-being of the individuals operating under or within them.

“Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot.” 28

His vision of a just world is a caution in defense of diversity:

“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was the English naturalist who devoted his adult life to meticulously demonstrating that the diversity of life on Earth was the result of the mutability of the species as driven by natural selection, thus establishing the fact of biological evolution. Darwin’s circumnavigation of the globe on HMS Beagle provided him with unique experiences, empirical evidence, and experimental opportunities that converged to confirm in his mind over a seven year period (1831- 1838), the relationship between species and environment. As a student of geology, reading Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology had previously caused him to doubt the story of Genesis, and Malthus’s An Essay on the Principles of Population, with its gloomy description of life as a “struggle for existence” gave him his explanatory mechanism for descent with modification. Understanding the controversial implication of his theory, Darwin waited twenty years to publish. In 1858 he received word from Alfred Russel Wallace that he had independently discovered evolution by natural selection. Darwin’s letters, essays, and twenty years of research gave him recognition as having priority in the discovery, but Darwin promptly published On the Origin of Species in 1859, which did not include a discussion of the evolution of humans. Darwin avoided the controversy inherent in his work and waits twelve years to publish The Descent of Man which correctly identifies Africa as the birthplace of man and argues that the human animal differs from others merely in degree rather than kind. As a result of his work, for the first time in scientific (and philosophic) history, the human animal is not separated from every other species, or from the planet itself. Instead, humans are the product of, dependent upon, and totally within the biosphere. The scientific value of Darwin’s work will last for all time. Cosmopolitan Views: Darwin’s ability, not only to analyze objects in great detail but also to synthesize vast areas of knowledge into a comprehensive world view, brought him eventually into consideration of the cosmopolitan implications of his own work. In the Descent of Man he writes: “As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shows us how long it is before we look at them as our fellow creatures.” Indeed, Darwin holds out hope for our future as a species, even in the 29 knowledge that extinction is more the rule than the exception: “Looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance.” Our choice seems starkly clearer after reading Darwin, “One World United and Virtuous” becomes a path away from the road to extinction. Darwin moved science and philosophy away from the question “What are we?” to the question “What might we try to become?.

Bahá'u'lláh and the Bahá'í Faith

The Bahá'í Faith is a religion founded by Bahá'u'lláh in 19th-century Persia, emphasizing the spiritual unity of all humankind. There are about six million Bahá'ís in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. According to Bahá'í teachings, religious history has unfolded through a series of God's messengers who brought teachings suited for the capacity of the people at their time, and whose fundamental purpose is the same. Bahá'u'lláh is regarded as the most recent, but not final, in a line of messengers that includes Abraham, Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Krishna, Jesus, Muhammad and others. can be an adjective referring to the (ﯼﺑﻬﺎئ :Bahá'í (IPA: [bæhɒːʔiː] Persian Bahá'í Faith, or used as a term for a follower of Bahá'u'lláh. (Bahá'í is not a noun meaning the religion as a whole.) The word comes from the Arabic word Bahá’, meaning "glory" or "splendour". "Bahaism" (or "Baha'ism") has been used in the past but is fading from use. Glory of God") (November 12, 1817" اﷲ ﺑﻬﺎء :Bahá'u'lláh (ba-haa-ol-laa Arabic was ,(ﯼﻧﻮر ﯼﻧﻌﻞﯼﺣﺲ رزاﯼم :May 29, 1892), born Mírzá Ḥusayn-`Alí Nuri (Persian – the founder of the Bahá'í Faith. Baha’u’llah claimed to fulfill the Bábí prophecy of "He whom God shall make manifest", but in a broader sense he also claimed to be the "supreme Manifestation of God", referring to the fulfillment of the eschatological expectations of a prophetic cycle beginning with Adam, and including Abrahamic religions, as well as Zoroastrianism, the Indian religions, and others. Bahá'ís see Bahá'u'lláh as the initiator of a new religion, as Jesus or Muhammad — but also the initiator of a new cycle, like that attributed to Adam. Such fulfillment would coincide with his mission to establish a firm basis for unity throughout the world, and inaugurate an age of peace and justice, which Bahá'ís expect will inevitably arise. Bahá'u'lláh authored many religious works, most notably the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and the Kitáb-i-Íqán. He died in Bahjí, Palestine, present-day Israel, and is buried there. There are two known photographs of Bahá'u'lláh. Outside of pilgrimage, Bahá'ís prefer not to view his photo in public, or even to display it in their private homes. Out of respect for that tradition, we omit his photograph here.

Summary of Teachings 30

The Bahá'í writings emphasize the essential equality of human beings, and the abolition of prejudice. Humanity is seen as essentially one, though highly varied; its diversity of race and culture are seen as worthy of appreciation and tolerance. Doctrines of racism, nationalism, caste and social class are seen as artificial impediments to unity. The Bahá'í teachings state that the unification of mankind is the paramount issue in the religious and political conditions of the present world. Shoghi Effendi, the appointed head of the religion from 1921 to 1957, wrote the following summary of what he considered to be the distinguishing principles of Bahá'u'lláh's teachings, which, he said, together with the laws and ordinances of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas constitute the bed-rock of the Bahá'í Faith: The independent search after truth, unfettered by superstition or tradition; the oneness of the entire human race, the pivotal principle and fundamental doctrine of the Faith; the basic unity of all religions; the condemnation of all forms of prejudice, whether religious, racial, class or national; the harmony which must exist between religion and science; the equality of men and women, the two wings on which the bird of humankind is able to soar; the introduction of compulsory education; the adoption of a universal auxiliary language; the abolition of the extremes of wealth and poverty; the institution of a world tribunal for the adjudication of disputes between nations; the exaltation of work, performed in the spirit of service, to the rank of worship; the glorification of justice as the ruling principle in human society, and of religion as a bulwark for the protection of all peoples and nations; and the establishment of a permanent and universal peace as the supreme goal of all mankind—these stand out as the essential elements [which Bahá'u'lláh proclaimed]. (Boldface added to emphasize elements of special implication for One World.) As a result of such beliefs, advocated tenaciously in the face of persecution by the Ottoman and other authorities throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Baha’i’s have established a strong connection to international organizations that has deepened up to the present day. The Bahá'í International Community is an agency under the direction of their Universal House of Justice in Haifa, and has consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The Bahá'í International Community has offices at the United Nations in New York and Geneva and representations to United Nations regional commissions and other offices in Addis Ababa, Bangkok, Nairobi, Rome, Santiago, and Vienna. In recent years an Office of the Environment and an Office for the Advancement of Women were established as part of its United Nations Office. The Bahá'í Faith has also undertaken joint development programs with various other United Nations agencies. In the 2000 Millennium Forum of the United Nations a Bahá'í was invited as the only non-governmental speaker during the summit. 31

Mahatma Gandhi: (1869-1948) Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was a major political and spiritual leader of India and the Indian independence movement. He was the pioneer of Satyagraha—a philosophy that is largely concerned with truth and “resistance to evil through active, non-violent resistance”—which led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. Gandhi is commonly known in India and across the world as the Mahatma, or "Great Soul" and as Bapu, or "Father". In India, he is officially accorded the honor of Father of the Nation. Gandhi first employed peaceful civil disobedience in the Indian community's struggle for civil rights in South Africa. Upon his return to India from Africa, he organized poor farmers and labourers to protest against oppressive taxation and widespread discrimination. Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for the alleviation of poverty, for the liberation of women, for brotherhood amongst different religious and ethnic groups, for an end to untouchability and caste discrimination, and for the economic self-sufficiency of the nation, but above all for Swaraj—the independence of India from foreign domination. He was imprisoned for many years on numerous occasions in both South Africa and India. Gandhi practised and advocated non-violence and truth in all situations. He lived simply, organizing an ashram that was self-sufficient in its needs. Making his own clothes—the traditional Indian dhoti and shawl, woven with the handspun yarn he spun on a charkha—he lived on a simple vegetarian and, later, fruitarian diet. He underwent long (at times over a month) fasts, for both self-purification and protest.

Gandhi and One World:

Both World Peace and One World are inherent in Gandhi's philosophy and his way of life. Even in birthing a nation, he said: “My patriotism is not an exclusive thing. It is all-embracing and I should reject that patriotism which sought to mount the distress or exploitation of other nationalities”. He once wrote: "Not to believe in the possibility of permanent peace is to disbelieve in the godliness of human nature" … "All life is one". Gandhi went to say that he would heartily welcome the union of East and West, as long as it was not accomplished by brute force.

Gandhi saw the spiritual connectedness of all life as the basis of his one world thinking: “As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves”...” It may be long before the law of love will be recognized in international affairs. The machinery's of government stand between and hides the hearts of one people from those of another. I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another”. "Through the realization of freedom of India”, he wrote, “I hope to realize and carry on the mission of the brotherhood of man." 32

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) wWas a German-born theoretical physicist who was best known for his theory of relativity and mass-energy equivalence (E=mc2). In 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” In 1999 he was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Century,” and his exhaustive body of work has made his name synonymous with genius.

It was Einstein’s now famous letter to Roosevelt warning that Germany would attempt to weaponize a nuclear chain reaction that led to the Manhattan Project and the dawning of the nuclear age. He became a U.S. citizen a year after writing that letter, and was publicly advocating that future wars could be prevented if nations would be willing to give up some of their sovereignty to an armed international federation of nations. With the nuclear attacks on Japan and the end of the war in 1945, he went into a month of sober reflection at his retreat in Saranac Lake, New York and emerged in an interview to say: “The only salvation for civilization and the human race lies in the creation of world government. As long as sovereign states continue to have armaments and armament secrets, new world wars will be inevitable.”

For the rest of his life, Einstein was actively engaged in advocacy, dialogue, and problem-solving around the issue of a governing structure for the globe. He envisioned a “supranational” authority empowered by nation states with a world legislature to regulate its monopoly on military power. With the emergence of the cold war, Einstein’s dream of radical peacemaking through one world governance slowed faded from the world scene but this great genius continued to speak out on behalf of his world vision. “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought,” he once said, “but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth – rocks.”

Ulrich Beck (b.1944) Teaches sociology at the London School of Economics and the Ludwig Maximilan University in Munich and is considered one of the leading cosmopolitan scholars in the world. He has 33 written a trilogy of volumes on the New Cosmoplitanism: Power in the Global Age: A new Political Economy; Cosmopolitan Vision; and World Risk Society: On the Search for Lost Security. In contrast to the nation-state theory, Beck cites the global economy, nation states, and a civil society as increasingly equal players on the world stage. Having coined the term “risk society,” Beck sees a world increasingly preoccupied with the future and organizing in response to risk. Beck’s cosmopolitan theory does not propose a world state, which he sees as hegemonic at best and ethnocentric at worst, but rather a distinction between sovereignty and autonomy. Nationalism equates the two, but Beck would measure sovereignty by the degree to which a state is capable of solving its own national problems. In an increasingly globalized economy and in a world where real solutions require interdependence and cooperation, the necessary loss of autonomy would actually, by this definition, increase sovereignty.

Beck speaks of “mundane cosmopolitanism” and “internal globalization” to describe the role of cosmopolitanism in the everyday lives of individuals. Like global capital, Beck believes the “political consumer” can be organized transnationally to use their buying power, and their “weapon of non-purchasing” for action across great distances and thereby become a player on the world stage. So the cosmopolitan state would rise through inner transformation via cooperation, collaboration, and a growing interdependency.

This New Cosmopolitanism does not require uniformity or homgenization. It rests instead on acknowledging the otherness of those who are culturally different, the otherness of the future (risk), the otherness of nature, and the otherness of different rationalities. Cosmopolitan tolerance is neither defensive or passive, but rather involves opening oneself up to the world of the other. In Beck’s own words: “…civilizations wish to and should remain diverse, perhaps even unique. But to put it metaphorically: the walls between them muxt be replaced by bridges. Most importantly of all, such bridges must be erected in human minds, mentalities, and imaginations (the “cosmopolitan vision”), in systems of norms (human rights), in institutions (the European Union, for instance), as well as within “global domestic politics” which search for answers to transnational problems (for example, energy policies, sustainable development, the struggle against global warming, the battle against terrorism).” Beck continues to see that since globalization is a given, not an option, the New Cosmopolitanism will emerge to replace nation state orthodoxy.

Kwame Anthony Appiah (born 1954 in London) is a Ghanaian philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history.

Biography

Appiah was born in London, raised in Kumasi, Ghana, and educated at Bryanston School and Clare College, Cambridge, where he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy. His father 34

was the Ghanaian politician and barrister Joe Appiah, and his mother was Peggy Cripps, a children's-book author. His family has a long political tradition: maternal grandfather was Sir Stafford Cripps, a Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer (1947-1950) under Clement Attlee. Sir Stafford's father was Charles Cripps, 1st Baron Parmoor, the Labour Leader of the House of Lords (1929-1931) under Ramsay MacDonald; Parmoor had been a Conservative MP before defecting to Labour.

Career

Appiah has taught philosophy and African and African-American studies at the University of Ghana, Cambridge, Duke, Cornell, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton Universities. He is currently Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton (with a cross-appointment at the University Center for Human Values) and will serve as the Bacon-Kilkenny Professor of Law at Fordham University in the fall of 2008. In 1992, Appiah published In My Father's House, which won the Herskovitz Prize for African Studies in English; among his later books are Colour Conscious (with Amy Gutmann), The Ethics of Identity, which appeared in 2005, and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006). In 2008, Appiah published Experiments in Ethics (Harvard University Press), in which he reviews the relevance of empirical research to ethical theory. Cosmopolitanism, then, is universalistic. It believes that every human being matters, and that we have shared obligations to care for one another. But what distinguishes it from other forms of universalist philosophy is that it also accepts a wide range of legitimate human diversity. That respect for diversity comes from something that also goes back to Diogenes, tolerance for other people’s choices of how to live and humility about what we ourselves know. Conversation across identities, religions, races, ethnicities, and nationalities is worthwhile because through conversation you can learn from people with different, even incompatible, ideas from your own; and it is worthwhile too because if you accept that you live in a world with many different kinds of people and you are going to try to live in respectful peace with them, then you need to understand each other, whether or not you agree.

From a lecture at the Fordham University School of Law, September 2006.

Session Two

Theme: The Rich History of Cosmopolitan Thinking

Advance reading: The Legacy of Cosmopolitanism - Pick one person to report out on

E. “Thanksgiving turkey for your neighbors vs. writing a check for Darfur” exercise. Why was this easy or difficult? What kinds of considerations came into play? (15 minutes)

F. Homework: Appiah Keynote on Gl0bal Citizenship and Campbell Craig, The Resurgent Idea of World Government

G. Reflections (5 minutes) H. Social time over coffee, unstructured discussion 36

Session Three Readings: KEYNOTE ADDRESS GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP

Kwame Anthony Appiah* So far as we know, the first person to claim that he was a citizen of the world—kosmou polites in Greek, which of course is where our word “cosmopolitan” comes from—was a man called Diogenes.1 Diogenes was the most colorful of the founders of the philosophical movement called Cynicism, and he was born sometime late in the fifth century B.C.E. in Sinope, on the southern coast of the Black Sea, in what is now Turkey. The Cynics rejected tradition and local loyalty and generally opposed what everybody else thought of as civilized behavior. Diogenes himself lived, tradition reports, in a large clay pot. It is said that he did what my English nanny would have called “his business” in public—and if you do not know what my English nanny would have called “your business,” my nanny would not have wanted me to tell you. He also did what Hugh Heffner has made his business in public, too. He was, in short, a sort of fourth century B.C.E. performance artist. In fact, Diogenes’ name in some quarters was “Diogenes the dog,” and since kunos in Greek means dog, that is where the Cynics got their name. The Cynics are just the doggy philosophers. It is no wonder that they kicked him out of Sinope. Still, for better or worse, Diogenes is also the first person who is reported to have said that he was a citizen of the world. Now, this is a metaphor, of course, because citizens share a state, and there was no world state, no kosmopolis so to speak, for Diogenes to be a citizen of. So, like anyone who adopts a metaphor, he had to decide what to mean by it. One thing that Diogenes did not mean was that he favored a single world government. He once met someone who did, Alexander of Macedon, who favored government of the world by Alexander of Macedon. The story goes that Alexander came across Diogenes one sunny day, this time, for some reason, without his usual terra cotta pot. He was actually in a hole in the ground at the time. The Macedonian world conqueror, who, as Aristotle’s student had been brought up to respect philosophers, asked Diogenes if there was anything he could do for him. “Sure,” Diogenes said—it was a sunny day—“you can get out of my light.” So Diogenes was clearly not a fan of Alexander’s or, we may suppose, of his project of global domination. (This must have upset Alexander, by the way, because one of his famous reported remarks is, “If I had not been Alexander, I should have liked to have been Diogenes.”) Diogenes did not believe in philosopher kings for Athens; why should he want them for the planet? That is the first thing I would like to take from Diogenes in interpreting the metaphor of global citizenship: no world government, not even by a student of Aristotle’s. “We can think of ourselves,” Diogenes wanted to say, “as fellow citizens, even if we are not and do not want to be members of a single sovereign political community, subject to a single sovereign world government.” A second idea we can take from Diogenes is that we should care about the fate of all our fellow human beings, not just the ones in our own polis, our own political community. Just as within your community you should care about every one of your fellow citizens, so in the world as a whole you should care for your fellow world citizens. And furthermore—this is a third idea from Diogenes—we can borrow good ideas from all over the world, not just from our own society. It is worth listening to others because they may have something to teach us. It is worth their listening to us because they may have something to learn. 37

We do not have any writings from Diogenes, partly, I suspect, because, like Socrates, he believed that conversation, which goes both ways and in which you can learn as well as teach, was a better mode of communication than writing messages to people who cannot answer back, which is what books are. So that is the final thing I want to borrow from him: the value of dialogue, conversation, as a fundamental mode of human communication, with its double- sidedness. These three ideas then, I, a twenty-first century American citizen of Anglo-Ghanian ancestry, want to borrow from a citizen of Sinope who dreamed of global citizenship twenty-four centuries ago: (1) We do not need a single world government; but (2) we must care for the fate of all human beings inside and outside our own societies; and (3) we have much to gain from conversation with one another across our differences. Diogenes’ cosmopolitanism entered Western intellectual history through the Stoics. Zeno of Citium (a town in Cyprus), who is conventionally regarded as the first Stoic, seems to have been influenced by the Cynics. Cosmopolitanism, as Diogenes understood it—with its openness to foreigners, without embracing world government—is found in the greatest of the Stoics: Cicero, in the Roman Republic of the first century B.C.E., for example, and Marcus Aurelius, the second century C.E. Roman Emperor. If anyone should have believed in world government, it was these Roman rulers of the world. But Aurelius talks about cosmopolitanism to insist on the spiritual affinity of all human beings, not to argue for a global empire. Through people like Cicero, Epictetus, and Aurelius, Stoicism entered the intellectual life of Christianity, despite the fact that, as everyone who saw the movie Gladiator knows, Aurelius spent a great deal of energy executing Christians because they were a threat to the Roman Republic as he conceived it. You can hear these Stoic echoes in the language of the Greek-speaking Saul of Tarsus, another town in Asia Minor in what is now southern Turkey. Saul was a Hellenized Jew and a Roman citizen, known to history of course, as surely nobody in this institution needs reminding, as St. Paul, the first great institutional architect of the Christian church. In his Epistle to the Galatians, he wrote famously, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”2 Much of St. Paul’s evangelism took place in Asia Minor, where he was born. One of my favorite facts is that Sinope, Diogenes’ hometown, was in Galatia. So, when he wrote those very cosmopolitan words St. Paul was writing to Diogenes’ people, to the very people who gave us the world’s first cosmopolitan, the first known one anyway. When the idea of cosmopolitanism was taken up again in the European Enlightenment, it had the same core: global concern for humanity without a wish for world government. Modern cosmopolitanism, in fact, grew with modern nationalism— not as an alternative to it, but as a complement to it—and at its heart was not just the idea of universality, concern for all humanity as fellow citizens, but also the value of different human ways of going on. That is why it does not go with world government— because different communities are entitled to live according to different standards, because human beings can flourish in many different forms of society, and no single society can explore all the human forms of flourishing. You find cosmopolitanism in Johann Gottfried von Herder, the great philosopher of German romanticism and German nationalism. Herder believed that the German- speaking peoples were entitled to live together in a single political community, but he also saw that what was good for the Germans was good for everyone else.3 So, unlike many Germans of his day, he believed in the political self-determination of all the peoples of Europe, even the Slavs—indeed, of the world. You find cosmopolitanism, too, in Immanuel Kant’s plan for perpetual peace,4 which was the origin, of course, for the idea of a League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations. 38

Cosmopolitanism, then, is universalistic. It believes that every human being matters, and that we have shared obligations to care for one another. But what distinguishes it from other forms of universalist philosophy is that it also accepts a wide range of legitimate human diversity. That respect for diversity comes from something that also goes back to Diogenes, tolerance for other people’s choices of how to live and humility about what we ourselves know. Conversation across identities, religions, races, ethnicities, and nationalities is worthwhile because through conversation you can learn from people with different, even incompatible, ideas from your own; and it is worthwhile too because if you accept that you live in a world with many different kinds of people and you are going to try to live in respectful peace with them, then you need to understand each other, whether or not you agree. Globalization has made this ancient ideal relevant, which it was not really in Diogenes’ or Aurelius’s day, because there are two obvious conditions for making citizenship real: knowledge about the lives of other citizens, on the one hand; and the power to affect them, on the other. Diogenes did not know about most people—in China and Japan, in South America, in Equatorial Africa, even in Western or Northern Europe—and nothing he did was likely to have much impact on all those other people, at least so far as he knew, either. So the fact is you cannot give a real meaning to the idea that we are fellow citizens if you cannot affect each other and you do not know about each other. In these respects, we no longer live in Diogenes’ world. In the last few centuries, as every human community has gradually been drawn into a single web of trade and a global network of information, we have come to a point where each of us can realistically imagine contacting any other of our six billion or so fellow humans and sending that person something worth having—a cell phone, an antiretroviral, or a good idea. Unfortunately, we can now also send, through negligence as easily as malice, things that will cause harm—a virus, an airborne pollutant, a bad idea. The possibilities of good and ill are multiplied beyond all measure when it comes to politics—to policies carried out by governments in our name. Together, we can ruin poor farmers by dumping our subsidized grain into their markets, cripple industries by punitive tariffs, and deliver weapons that will kill thousands upon thousands. Together, though, we can also raise standards of living by adopting new policies on trade and aid, prevent or treat diseases with vaccines and pharmaceuticals, take measures against global climate change, encourage resistance to tyranny, and encourage a concern for the worth of every human life. And, of course, the worldwide web of information—radio, television, telephones, the Internet, perhaps the U.S. Postal Service—means not only that we can affect lives everywhere, but that we can learn about life everywhere too. Each person you know about and can affect is someone to whom you have responsibilities, even if they are largely negative ones. To say that is to affirm the very idea of morality. The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops, and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have now become. The existence of global media means we can know about one another, and global interconnections—economic, political, military, and ecological —mean that we can— indeed, we inevitably will—affect one another. So now we really need a cosmopolitan spirit. That spirit thinks of us all as bound together across the species, but also accepts that we will make different choices within and across nations about how to make our lives. Notice that the cosmopolitan values diversity of this sort because of what it makes possible for people. At the heart of cosmopolitanism is respect for diversity of culture, 39 not because cultures matter in themselves, but because people matter and culture matters to people. Where culture is bad for people, for individual men, women, and children, the cosmopolitan is not going to be tolerant of it. We do not need to treat genocide or human rights abuse as just another part of the quaint diversity of the species, a local taste that some totalitarians just happen to have. Cosmopolitanism as I have been developing it is a double-stranded tradition. Its slogan might as well be universality plus difference. I have already hinted here at why cosmopolitans accept—indeed, celebrate—the wide range of human diversity, but I want to be more explicit about some of the reasons. Why, after all, should we not do, in the name of our universal concern, what missionaries of many faiths have always done? Why should we not go out into the world, guided by the truth, and help others to live by it too? A first reason is that cosmopolitans inherit from our Greek forbears a recognition of the shortcomings of our human capacity to grasp the truth. Cosmopolitanism begins with the philosophical doctrine of fallibilism, the recognition that we may be mistaken even when we have looked carefully at the evidence and applied our highest mental capacities. A fallibilist knows that he or she is likely to make mistakes. We have views, we take our own views seriously, but we are always open to the possibility that it may turn out that we are wrong. If I am wrong about something, maybe I can learn from others, even though they are, no doubt, wrong about something else. But there is an important second reason why we think people should be allowed, where feasible, to go their own ways, a reason whose roots are in more modern ideas—in particular, the idea that each human individual is charged with ultimate responsibility for his or her own life. Our pursuit of the good life is constrained by morality, but also by historical circumstances and physical and mental endowments. I was born in the wrong place to be an American President—I am inclined to say, “Thank God”—and with the wrong body for motherhood; I lack the patience to do good laboratory science. But each of us has a great variety of decisions to make in shaping our lives. Everybody has, or everybody should have, a great variety of decisions to make in shaping their own lives. A philosophical liberal such as myself believes these choices belong in the end to the person whose life it is. This means at least two things. First, the standard that determines whether I am doing well, whether I am flourishing, is, in part, set by aims that I define for myself. Second, provided I give others their moral due, the job of managing my life is mine. Thoughtful friends, benevolent sages, and anxious relatives rightly offer advice as to how to proceed, but it is advice, not coercion, that they justly offer. And just as private coercion is wrong, it is also wrong when taken up by governments interested in the perfection of their citizens. So far as government intervention goes, if I have done my duty, the shaping of my life is up to me. John Stuart Mill taught us to see this creation of our own lives as the search for individuality. But it does not take place in a social vacuum. Our lives are shaped both by existing identities and the new ones created in the daily dialectic of self and others. Each self is exquisitely sculpted by the joys and sorrows; the thoughts, true and false; the concepts, adequate or inadequate, that are the psychological harvest of our perpetual dialogue with one another. Our selves and our lives reflect our sociability, our need for company, our mutual dependence, and the fact that so much that we care about is collectively created. It is a communitarian canard that Mill’s vision of individuality denies our need for other people. Respect for individuality is not an endorsement of individualism. Chapter three of On Liberty, which is called “Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being,” is the classic English-language formulation of this notion of individuality. 40

But as Mill freely acknowledged there, his own thinking about these matters had been profoundly shaped by an essay of Wilhelm von Humboldt written in the 1790s and known to us now as “The Limits of State Action.”5 I think it is a good thing that it is known to us this way now, because the German title was actually Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen, which would be a lot harder to say. In chapter two of that work, “Of the Individual Man, and the Highest Ends of His Existence,” Humboldt wrote that it is “through a social union, therefore, based on the internal wants and capacities of its members, that each is enabled to participate in the rich collective resources of all the others.”6 In short, the dignity of each human being resides, in part, in his or her capacity for and right to self-management, which includes the right to figure out how to meet the legitimate moral demands of other people and to work in company with others to pursue our projects private and common. Because of this, it is important that human beings live by standards they themselves believe in. As Mill put it in On Liberty, some one and a half centuries ago, “If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.”7 It is best, that is, when people live by ideals they themselves believe in. If I force a man to do what I take to be right when he does not think it is right, or stop a woman from doing what I take to be wrong when she does not agree that it is wrong, I am not really making their lives better, even if what I take to be right or wrong really is right or wrong. Of course, if the wrong someone is doing harms others, I may have to stop her anyway, because the universal concern that underlies cosmopolitanism means that it matters to me that every human life should go well. But if she is of sound mind and the wrong she is planning to do affects only her own fate, then the right way to express my concern for her is not to force her to do the right thing but to try to persuade her that she is mistaken. Still, because cosmopolitanism is fallibilist, cosmopolitan conversation across cultural, political, social, economic, and religious boundaries is not about conversion. It is about learning as much as teaching. It is about listening as well as talking. Even when I am trying to persuade someone that what they see as right is wrong, I am hearing arguments that what I think is wrong is right. Now, global conversation, like global citizenship, is a metaphor. It needs construal, just as the metaphor of global citizenship does. Obviously, you and I cannot literally converse with the other six billion strangers who inhabit the planet, and they certainly cannot also all talk with each other. The mathematics of that are imponderable. But a global community of cosmopolitans will want to learn about other ways of life through anthropology, history, novels, music, and news stories in newspapers, on the radio, and through television. Indeed, let me make my only entirely practical proposal, practical for anyone with a NetFlix account. Do what people all around the world are already doing with American movies: See at least one movie with subtitles a month. * * * This Symposium is a gathering of legal academics, so you may wonder what cosmopolitanism means for law. Indeed, you are familiar, I am sure, with forms of cosmopolitanism that seek the globalization of legal standards. So you may wonder at my assumption that the cosmopolitanism I have been developing rejects the ideal of world government. It may be utopian to dream of it, but cosmopolitanism sounds pretty utopian already. 41

Why strain at the gnat of world government when you have already swallowed the camel of universal benevolence?8 Why not accept that, though we may have to wait for it, in the long run what we need is a global sovereign, a leviathan du monde? To think sensibly about this question, we must first remind ourselves how profoundly our ideas of sovereignty are shaped by the invention in the last few centuries of the nation-state. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 essentially turned the Holy Roman Empire into a collection of often-German-speaking states, each with its own sovereignty. In doing so, it set in motion a significant shift in the heart of Europe. These newly independent states inherited the principles of religious freedom established in the Reformation by the Augsburg Confession, which granted each ruler the right to determine his own sovereign religious affiliation—actually, his and hers, since large parts of the Treaties of Westphalia are about noblewomen, from queens of here to margravines of somewhere else. So the principle of cuius reglio, eius religio was applied. We speak, therefore, of a Westphalian model where each nation has its own sovereign, subject to no higher secular authority, independent both of the empire and of Rome. But to the east was still the Ottoman Empire, whose units were not nations but a variety of peoples, speaking many languages, living often in polyglot cities, where each religious or ethnic group governed itself largely by its own rules. Further east yet, Shah Jahan was ruling a Mogul empire that was also composed of many religions and peoples. In China in 1648, the Manchu rulers of the Quin Dynasty had ended Ming rule only four years earlier, in 1644, taking over a vast territory that, like the Ottoman and Mogul empires, was remarkably internally diverse in language, religion, cuisine, and the practices of everyday life. In Africa, the Ottomans ruled much of the northern coastline and its hinterland also. In the south and east the Emperor Fasilidas had recently expelled the Jesuits from Ethiopia, consolidating his hold on an empire that had persisted in various forms since the first century of the Common Era. In the west, the empire of Songhai lay in ruins, destroyed by revolts, first by the Hausas to their south, then by the Saadian sultan Ahmad al-Mansur from Morocco. But large numbers of people lived all over the continent of Africa, as elsewhere all around the world, outside even the nominal control of any state—farming, hunting, gathering plant products and honey, and regulating their lives through highly local forms of politics. The Westphalian Settlement did not by itself produce the modern nation-state. For that, some new and crucial developments had to occur. The Peace of Westphalia was about princes and bishops and the burghers of the free states, the free cities. But modern nationality requires the idea of a national culture, an identity, to take hold in the minds of the folk. Behind the nation-state, as Arjun Appadurai has recently put it, is the idea of a national ethnos. “No modern nation,” he continues, “however benign its political system and however eloquent its public voices may be about the virtues of tolerance, multiculturalism, and inclusion, is free of the idea that its national sovereignty is built on some sort of ethnic genius.”9 This was Herder’s great idea, that the nation was a cultural unity held together by a Volksgeist expressed in its language, legible both in the high canon of the poets and the popular law of the folk.10 But in Herder it was just an idea, and it is an idealistic hyperbole to suggest that the nation-state is fundamentally an idea, something made up by we scribes. The material preconditions of the development of the idea of the national ethos and its uptake by ordinary people were complex. But one crucial development, which Benedict Anderson first identified clearly, following Walter Benjamin, was the rise of print capitalism and the vast expansion of publication in the vernacular languages of Europe. As texts like the Luther Bible, the King James Bible, or the Bible de Port-Royal became more widely 42 available, ordinary people could begin to conceive of themselves as a community of readers connected by their reading together. Print led, too, to the development of standardized versions of languages that had hitherto been collections of often mutually unintelligible dialects. That made possible the rise of modern mass media, in which speakers of a printed language could read of the doings of their nation, in which Britain or Germany or France or Spain could become protagonists in a narrative, a world historical story. Print capitalism, exploding literacy, and the vernacular gave new subjective meaning to the ordinary person’s relationship to the state. It also connected the new state bureaucracies—the eighteenth century is the century in which the word Statistik was invented—and modern forms of governmentality, making it possible, in particular, for state rulers, elites, to address vast national publics almost directly, or at any rate more directly than ever before; and, at the same time, to peer ever more nosily through the statistical census into the lives of ordinary people. The idea of the cultural nation, a group defined by a shared ethos, initiated the close interdependence—sometimes hostile, sometimes amicable—between a political and a literary and cultural or intellectual leadership, an intelligentsia, that is one of the hallmarks of the modern state. This interdependence is inevitable if the nation’s identity lies in its national spirit, its Geist, for the intelligentsia are the high priests of that spirit, of the Geist. Historians, novelists, poets, philosophers, composers, and teachers—I might as well add legal academics—all create or transmit the culture that is the nation’s essence, its core, and its real meaning. Later, with the development of the non-print-based mass media—records, movies, television, the Internet—the intelligentsia were joined by the creators of mass culture and its heroes and heroines, the stars of song and sport and screen, and a struggle for the nation’s soul, which we can see now takes place between the old intelligentsia and the new protagonists of the mass media. All along, though, the poems, songs, novels, movies, and sports are nationally imagined—British rock, German classical music, French novels, Indian movies, Ghanian soccer, American studies. This picture of the world rejects world government, rejects kosmopolis, because it sees the culture-bound nation as the natural unit of government— inside law and mutual respect, outside the war of all against all. But the cosmopolitan cannot have this reason for rejecting kosmopolis, because she rejects this picture of cultural life. Literature and music and mass-mediated culture and sport are all, in fact, quite transnational in their influences and effects. The field of comparative literature began, in part, because you could not make sense of whole swathes of literature in, say, German, without understanding its relationship with writings in English, French, Latin, and Greek. Westphalia and the reorganization of Europe in the centuries that followed produced a world in which hardly any nation-states fit the Herderian picture of the homogeneous, monocultural nation living under a single government. These few states that do fit this picture, or something like it, have usually been forced into it over a couple of centuries of violent civil strife. The homogeneous nation is the result, not the precondition, of modern statehood. Eugen Weber taught a generation of French historians that, as late as 1893, roughly a quarter of the then thirty million citizens of metropolitan France did not have mastery of the French language.11 So much for the Sprachgeist. As my colleague Linda Colley argued somewhat later in her marvelous book, Britons: Forging the Nation—and she means it in both senses—“The sense of a common identity here did not come into being, then, because of an integration and homogenization of disparate cultures. Instead, Britishness was superimposed over an array of internal 43

differences in response to contact with the Other.”12 (This is Britain, so the “Other” here is France.) So much for the Volksgeist. What makes France French or Britain British? It does not matter what you say— language, state institutions, cuisine, the laicité of the republic, the empire, Protestantism—none of them was ever a very good response. The very question presupposes what you might call an organicist Herderian answer. And things have gotten even worse for the prospects of that organicist story since the end of the British and French empires. Large numbers of people have entered both countries whose language, cuisine, religion, and relation to empire are hardly those of the old imperial center. Germany struggles with the distinct political legacies of two halves separated less than a century after Germany first became a nation-state as the Deutsches Kaiserreich at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. Italy was united under the Savoyard monarchs in the mid-nineteenth century, but, like Weber’s France, contained a great variety of mutually unintelligible dialects. Even now, Italy recognizes twenty regional dialects,13 acknowledges the presence of small minorities speaking Albanian, Ladin, Friulian, Greek, Occitan, and Sud Tyrolean, as well once more of speakers of Somalian, Ethiopian, and other legacies of empire. It is conventional to describe the version of the language taught in schools and printed in most newspapers as “lingua toscana in bocca romana,” the language of Tuscany in a Roman mouth, Roman accent. If the states of Western Europe where the Herderian ideology was developed do not fit the mold of the mono-ethnic nation-state, it is, of course, hard to find it anywhere else. India, China, Nigeria—each has scores, sometimes hundreds, of languages and ethnic groups. The United States, where most people speak some sort of English, is not a place that could plausibly be described—pace Sam Huntington—as having a single national culture. Everything that is normally said to be American, from McDonald’s to Hollywood to consumer capitalism, is found elsewhere as well, and is in any case not much appreciated by large numbers of Americans. There are, no doubt, candidates for Herderian states. I will give you Japan, where ninety-nine percent of the population does identify as Japanese. There are more than one million people of Japanese descent in the Brazilian city of Sao Paolo, but they almost outnumber the non-Japanese legal residents who live among the 123 million Japanese living in Japan. I cannot forbear adding, however, that the script of Japan is Chinese, their largest religion is of Indian origin, and at Ethnologue.com there are fifteen Japanese languages, including Japanese sign language.14 By and large, people do not live in monocultural, mono-religious, monolingual nation- states and, by and large, they never have. * * * That national histories require a certain amount of blindness to reality is not, of course, news. The great French patriot and historian, Ernest Renan, wrote famously much more than a century ago in his great essay, Qu’est ce que Nation?: “Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential element in the creation of a nation.”15 We were talking about this earlier, the imagination of the past. “This is why the advance of historical studies is often a threat to the principle of nationality.” Indeed, he went on, not entirely seriously, no doubt, to say that “the essence of a nation is that all the individuals have many things in common, but also that they have all forgotten a lot of things.” What is fascinating, then, is that, despite this recognition, Renan’s definition of the nation resonates eventually with Herder’s picture: 44

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, to tell the truth, but really only one, make up this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other is in the present. One is the common possession of a rich heritage of memories. The other is a present agreement, a desire to live together, the willingness to continue to value the heritage that one has received undivided. Gentlemen, man does not improvise. The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of efforts, sacrifices, and acts of devotion. The cult of ancestors is the most legitimate of all. The ancestors made us what we are. An heroic past, great men, glory—I mean real glory—that is the social capital on which the national idea is based. And yes, he really did say le capital social. But national memory here, I have to insist again, is a metaphor. Nations do not remember; people do. The metaphor of a national memory has to be cashed out in terms of the stories that citizens tell one another about the nation, the tales they tell their children. These are produced from oral and literary traditions whose shape is the product of choices and decisions of exercises of power and acts of judgment and resistance—in short, of politics. In giving this account of the nation, Renan refers back to the acts of the ancestors, their heroism, their sacrifice, and their glory, as well as forward to the projects that the current citizens have committed themselves to pursuing. The forward thrust is a crucial addition, grounded as it is, in his view, in a current empirical reality, the common consent of contemporary citizens. But the backward-looking part of the story, the talk of memory and forgetting, risks suggesting that if we only remember to write and forgot nothing at all, all would be clear. National history is a question of what we choose to remember, not just in the sense of which facts we use for our public political purposes, but equally in the sense that we choose which facts actually count as ours. In short, while nationality, for better or worse, has become an increasingly central feature of the identities of modern men and women, the content of nationality—its meaning for each citizen—is the result of cultural work, not a natural and preexisting commonality. The cosmopolitan finds in this story two reasons for skepticism about the project of global sovereignty, the dream of kosmopolis. There are, first of all, historical anxieties. It took centuries of bloodshed to create the modern nation-state. The principle of un roi, une foi, une loi (one king, one faith, one law) underlay the French wars of religion which bloodied the four decades before the Edict of Nantes in 1598, in which Henri IV finally granted to the Protestants in his realm the right to practice their faith. The Enlightenment focused on une foi as the source of the problem, but it was also a question of the bringing of people under une loi that was causing the difficulty. In the religious warfare in the British Isles, from the Bishops War of 1639 to the end of the English civil wars in 1651, perhaps as many as ten percent of the inhabitants of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland died in warfare or the disease and starvation that came in its aftermath. Here, too, we are too inclined to think of religion as the problem. Nor did, of course, the bloodletting end with the Westphalian Settlement. From the massacres in the Vendée of 1794, which certainly murdered tens and may have killed hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children; to the American Civil War, with more than half a million military casualties alone; from the Armenian massacres to the Rwandan genocide—millions have died in attempts to homogenize nations and establish unitary sovereignties. The standard response to these historical anxieties, of course, is to offer a new paradigm—the steady, peaceful evolution of the European Union. But the European Union is not evolving towards a nation-state with a single central sovereign. It is seeing, 45 instead, the creation of a great network of diverse centers of law and authority—some super-national, many infra-national. It was European unity that made possible the creation of the Welsh and Scottish Parliaments and Catalan autonomy. What the European Union shows is that the very idea of the unitary sovereign, one center with ultimate authority over every form of social regulation, the idea whose diffusion was one of the products of the Westphalian Settlement, is an inessential feature of the rule of law. Decomposing sovereignty, allowing ultimate authority to lie in many places, has been one of the great discoveries of modern times. Europe has borrowed the principle of subsidiarity, that authority should lie at the lowest competent level of the hierarchy of authorities, from Catholics. I cannot forbear to add, since we are at Fordham, that in 1891, in the Encyclical Rerum Novarum, which many people say is the foundation of modern Catholic social teaching, Pope Leo XIII expressed the idea of the separate authority of different spheres in many ways, but here is one of them: A family, no less than a State, is, as We have said, a true society, governed by an authority peculiar to itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father. Provided, therefore, the limits which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists be not transgressed, the family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty.18 But the adoption of this idea within the European Union owes at least as much to the development of the idea of sphere sovereignty by the late-nineteenth-century Dutch prime minister and Calvinist theologian Abraham Kuyper, who resurrected the ideas of the seventeenth-century Calvinist Johannes Althusius, in whose Politica of 1614, as Daniel Elazar has written, he offered, as Elazar says, the first book to present a comprehensive theory of federal republicanism rooted in a covenantal view of human society derived from, but not dependent on, a theological system. It presented a theory of polity-building based on the polity as a compound political association established by its citizens through their primary associations on the basis of consent rather than a reified state imposed by a ruler or an elite.19 Kuyper gave the Stone Lectures at Princeton in 1898, in which he argued, like Althusius, that the family, the business, science, art and so forth are all social spheres, which do not owe their existence to the state. and which do not derive the law of their life from the superiority of the state, but obey a high authority within their own bosom; an authority which rules, by the grace of God, just as the sovereignty of the state does.20 The twentieth-century practice of sphere sovereignty in Holland, which is an idea one of whose applications is American federalism, recommends against the unitary sovereignties, the centralized states with authority over every sphere of life that inhabit a Westphalian imagination. The Peace of Westphalia granted religious freedom to princes and cities, not to individuals in general, which leads us on to the second reason for cosmopolitan skepticism about the unitary global sovereignty. Earlier, I identified the respect for individuality at the heart of liberal cosmopolitanism. Subsidiarity and the recognition of the sovereignty of many separate spheres flow, not from the idea that sovereignty supercedes that of princes, but from a much simpler thought: If people are to manage their own lives, as the ideal of individuality says they should, they need the powers to do so; and the closer those powers are to people and to small communities of people, the greater control they have over the shaping of their lives. Now, our own historical experience with subsidiarity, our constitutional federalism, should make us profoundly aware of the dangers here, of course. You can say, as the 46

Tenth Amendment does, that “[t]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”21 But if you interpret that as giving to the states the very unitary sovereignty that you have denied the union, you will have missed the point. When, in the name of the rights of the states, one state or another seeks to deny the rights of its citizens or the equality of its citizenship, subsidiarity can be another name for despotism, as many of you will have thought when I quoted the Pope’s definition of subsidiarity, which addressed it only as a question about the authority of fathers. So it is only a subsidiarity balanced by recognition of a plurality of spheres, a subsidiarity which unbundles sovereignty at all levels, that can be consistent with the respect for the dignity of persons that is the cosmopolitan’s alpha and omega. The argument, I suppose, is a kind of global Madisonianism. James Madison, you will remember, claimed in The Federalist 47 that “[t]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”22 Though he defended a stronger central government than some of his opponents, he also knew that it was essential to distribute and to oppose centers of power. The tripartite division of the functions of government, the separation of the three powers once united under the Crown, creates, as it were, three artificial factions to add to the many factions in society whose constant struggle against one another, through the divergence of interests and aims, would preserve all of us from the dangers of the accumulation of all powers in any place or position. I believe that the imperial presidency that has been crafted before our eyes—and is not, alas, only the project of the party currently in power—threatens to create exactly the kind of monopoly of powers that Madison in the Constitutional Convention, and later in office, wisely sought to avoid. If that concentration of power threatens human freedom in a nation with liberal democratic traditions, it would surely do so, a fortiori, if its imperium were not just one-twentieth of humanity on one-tenth of the habitable earth but the whole of the planet. Social life is hard, for reasons Thomas Hobbes knew. We compete for resources, only some of which, like health and economic wealth, can be increased by working together. Status, which Hobbes called the desire for “glory,”23 is intrinsically a constant-sum game and trust is hard to build. So there are always reasons for us to get in each other’s way. And as Hobbes also argued, our rough equality of individual powers gives us a powerful incentive to work together. But Hobbes had the wrong solution. Handing all the power to the leviathan risks the subordination of almost everyone. Our world is, in fact, in form if not in substance, not Hobbes’s world, but the world Althusius hoped for, a world of complex, overlapping sovereignties. The shared authority of parents within the family, the powers of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the regulations of the International Accounting Standards Board enforced by the administrative law of many nations, the rulings of the International Lawn Tennis Association, the papal Magisterium within the Catholic community—each of these is rightly respectful of the domains of the others. When a national or an international authority invades those domains, it needs a powerful reason. There is no need for the laws of tennis to be appealable to the United States Supreme Court, or for that matter to The Hague. Nor is there a need to have some ultimate authority above all the other authorities. In general, the world works just fine without one. 47

The idea that every dispute between authorities must have some procedure that settles it, the notion that we need a global rule of recognition that gives force to and ranks every valid norm, is one you can hold on to only by staying out of law school. A politics that respects individuality, tries to give people as much control over their own lives as is consistent with ensuring that they do not derail the lives of others— cosmopolitanism, as I conceive it, pays individuality that respect. The citizen of the world wants, as we all do, to make her own life. She wants to do it, as many do not, enriched by the experiences of peoples who are not at all like herself. But she also wants others to be free to make their own lives by their own lights, because their lights may be brighter, or at any rate brighter for them; but also, just because a good life is, among other things no doubt, one lived by your own lights. She wants, too, to contribute to making sure, not just that everyone has the negative liberties that this entails, but also a fair share of the world’s resources. Difference, then, but also universality—everybody matters. Having lived myself since 1989 in an increasingly unipolar world with the force fields of power radiating out from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, my conviction that Diogenes was right, that we can be cosmopolitans but oppose kosmopolis, is confirmed every day.

The Resurgent Idea of World Government [Full Text] Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 22.2 (Summer 2008) Campbell Craig July 7, 2008 The idea of world government is returning to the mainstream of scholarly thinking about international relations. Universities in North America and Europe now routinely advertise for positions in "global governance," a term that few would have heard of a decade ago. Chapters on cosmopolitanism and governance appear in many current international relations (IR) textbooks. Leading scholars are wrestling with the topic, including Alexander Wendt, perhaps now America's most influential IR theorist, who has recently suggested that a world government is simply "inevitable."1 While some scholars envision a more formal world state, and others argue for a much looser system of "global governance," it is probably safe to say that the growing number of works on this topic can be grouped together into the broader category of "world government"—a school of thought that supports the creation of international authority (or authorities) that can tackle the global problems that nation-states currently cannot. It is not, of course, a new idea. Dreaming of a world without war, or of government without tyranny, idealists have advocated some kind of world or universal state since the classical period. The Italian poet Dante viewed world government as a kind of utopia. The Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius, often regarded as the founder of international law, believed in the eventual formation of a world government to enforce it. The notion interested many visionary thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley. In 1942 the one-time Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie published a famous book on the topic, One World. And after the Second World 48

War, the specter of atomic war moved many prominent American scholars and activists, including Albert Einstein, the University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins, and the columnist Dorothy Thompson, to advocate an immediate world state—not so much out of idealistic dreams but because only such a state, they believed, could prevent a third world war fought with the weapons that had just obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The campaign continued until as late as 1950, when the popular magazine Reader's Digest serialized a book by the world- government advocate Emery Reves, while at the same time the Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Relations was considering several motions to urge the Truman administration to adopt a policy of world federalism.2 In fact, to this day the World Federalist Movement—an international NGO founded in 1947 and recognized by the United Nations—boasts a membership of 30,000 to 50,000 worldwide.

By the 1950s, however, serious talk of world government had largely disappeared. The failure of the Baruch Plan to establish international control over atomic weaponry in late 1946 signaled its demise, for it cleared the way (as the plan’s authors quietly intended) for the United States and the Soviet Union to continue apace with their respective atomic projects. What state would place its trust in a world government when there were sovereign nations that possessed, or could soon possess, atomic bombs? Certainly, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was willing to do so, and once the two states committed themselves to the international rivalry that became known as the Cold War, the impossibility of true global government became obvious and the campaign in favor of it diminished. Even after the invention of thermonuclear weaponry and intercontinental missiles in the late 1950s, a technological development that threatened to destroy all of humanity, few voices in the West (it was never an issue in the Soviet bloc, at least until Gorbachev) were raised to demand a new kind of government that could somehow eliminate this danger. There were some exceptions: a surprising one was the common conclusion reached by the two American realists Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau, who deduced around 1960 that the "nuclear revolution" had made a world state logically necessary. But how to achieve one when the United States and the Soviet Union would never agree to it? Niebuhr and Morgenthau had no answer to this question. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell, however, did: the antinuclear activist once argued that, since his preferred solution of total disarmament was not going to occur, the nuclear revolution had made global government immediately necessary and, thus, the only way to achieve it was to wage war on the USSR. There was a perverse logic to this, but we can be thankful that his demands were not heeded. The end of the Cold War, together with the emergence of various intractable global problems, has spurred the resurgence of writing about world government. In this essay I will introduce three themes that appear frequently in this writing: how the "collective action problem" lies behind many of the current global crises; the debate between those who support a softer form of "governance" and those who look toward a full-fledged world state; and the 49

fundamental question of whether world government is possible, and whether it is even desirable.

The Intensifying Dangers of International Anarchy

Certainly, one of the most evident failures of the nation-state system in recent years has been its inability to deal successfully with problems that endanger much or most of the world's population. As the world has become more globalized—economically integrated and culturally interconnected—individual countries have become increasingly averse to dealing with international problems that are not caused by any single state and cannot be fixed even by the focused efforts of individual governments. Political scientists refer to this quandary as the "collective action problem," by which they mean the dilemma that emerges when several actors have an interest in eradicating a problem that harms all of them, but when each would prefer that someone else do the dirty work of solving it. If everyone benefits more or less equally from the problem's solution, but only the actor that addresses it pays the costs, then all are likely to want to "free ride" on the other's efforts. The result is that no one tackles the problem, and everyone suffers. Several such collective action problems dominate much of international politics today, and scholars of course debate their importance and relevance to world government. Nevertheless, a few obvious ones stand out, notably the imminent danger of climate change, the difficulty of addressing terrorism, and the complex task of humanitarian intervention. All of these are commonly (though not universally) regarded as serious problems in need of urgent solutions, and in each case powerful states have repeatedly demonstrated that they would prefer that somebody else solve them. The solution to the collective action problem has long been known: it requires the establishment of some kind of authoritative regime that can organize common solutions to common problems and spread out the costs fairly. This is why many scholars and activists concerned with acute global problems support some form of world government. These advocates are not so naïve as to believe that such a system would put an effortless end to global warming, terrorism, or human rights atrocities, just as even the most effective national governments have not eradicated pollution or crime. The central argument in favor of a world- government approach to the problems of globalization is not that it would easily solve these problems, but that it is the only entity that can solve them. A less newsworthy issue, but one more central to many advocates of world government, is the persistent possibility of a third world war in which the use of megaton thermonuclear weaponry could destroy most of the human race. During the Cold War, nuclear conflict was averted by the specter of mutual assured destruction (MAD)—the recognition by the United States and the Soviet Union that a war between them would destroy them both. To be sure, this grim form of deterrence could well obtain in future international orders, but it is unwise to regard the Cold War as a promising model for future international politics. It is not at all certain that international politics is destined to return to a stable bipolar order, such as prevailed during the second half of the Cold War, but even if this 50

does happen, there is no guarantee that nuclear deterrence would work as well as it did during the second half of the twentieth century. It is well to remember that the two sides came close to nuclear blows during the Cuban crisis, and this was over a relatively small issue that did not bear upon the basic security of either state. As Martin Amis has written, the problem with nuclear deterrence is that "it can't last out the necessary timespan, which is roughly between now and the death of the sun."4 As long as interstate politics continue, we cannot rule out that in some future conflict a warning system will fail, a leader will panic, governments will refuse to back down, a third party will provoke a response— indeed, there are any number of scenarios under which deterrence could fail and thermonuclear war could occur. It is possible that the United States, if not other nations, can fight against the thermonuclear dilemma with technology. By constructing an anti–ballistic missile (ABM) system, America could perhaps defend itself from a nuclear attack. Also, and more ominously, the United States may be on the verge of deploying an offensive nuclear capability so advanced that it could launch a first strike against a nuclear adversary and disarm it completely.5 But these are weak reeds. As things currently stand, an ABM system remains acutely vulnerable to inexpensive decoy tactics, jamming, and the simple response of building more missiles. The first-strike option is even more questionable: an aggressive or terrified United States could launch a nuclear war against a major adversary, but no American leader could be sure that every enemy weapon would be destroyed, making the acute risks of initiating such a war (unless a full-scale enemy thermonuclear attack was imminent and certain) likely to outweigh the benefits. Technology is unlikely to solve the nuclear dilemma. Theorists considering world government regard the thermonuclear dilemma as particularly salient because it epitomizes the dangers of the continuation of the interstate system. As long as sovereign nations continue to possess nuclear arsenals, nuclear war is possible, and the only apparent way to put a permanent end to this possibility is to develop some kind of world government, an entity with sufficient power to stop states—not to mention subnational groups—from acquiring nuclear arsenals and waging war with them.

Global Governance versus a World State

Scholars nevertheless disagree whether an informal, loose form of governance is sufficient, or whether a more formal world state is necessary. Supporters of global governance argue that the unique dangers created by globalization can be solved by a gradual strengthening of existing international institutions and organizations, making the imposition of a full-blown world state unnecessary. Anthony McGrew, a leading scholar of globalization in the British academy, where support for global governance is particularly pronounced, suggests that global problems can be effectively dealt with by liberal international agencies, such as the World Trade Organization; nongovernmental organizations, such as Greenpeace and Doctors Without Borders; and security bodies, such as the U.N. Security Council. McGrew argues that the key is to grant increased and more formal powers to such institutions and organizations, ultimately giving 51

them greater effectiveness and influence on the international stage than nation- states. Another British scholar, David Held, stresses the importance of making international institutions accountable to democratic controls. Held maintains that the world's population must have a direct say in the composition and policies of increasingly powerful international bodies.6 Held, along with others who insist on greater democratic oversight of global institutions, worries that the current "democratic deficit" afflicting existing international bodies, such as the International Monetary Fund and the U.N. Security Council, could become far worse as they acquire and wield greater and greater power. The European Union is often offered as a model of what could happen at the international level. Gradually, once-hostile European states have cooperated to develop forms of transnational governance without subjecting themselves to the convulsive and possibly violent task of creating a European state. Nations that might refuse to accept the formation of a dominant state have nevertheless readily accepted the establishment of institutions and bureaucracies that slowly create transnational political bonds and reduce their own sovereignty. True, the process of establishing the European Union has been unsure and—for those who want to see a stronger political union—remains incomplete, but it has taken place, and in a peaceful manner. A similar process at the international level, contend advocates of global integration, would constitute a practical way to establish global government. Theorists who believe that a more formal world state is necessary do not necessarily disagree with the logic of global governance: it is difficult to dispute the claim that the gradual creation of supranational institutions is likely to be more feasible and peaceful than the imposition of a true world state. The "key problem" for the governance argument, however, as Alexander Wendt writes, is "unauthorized violence by rogue Great Powers."7 As long as sovereign states continue to exist under a system of governance, in other words, there is nothing to prevent them from using violence to disrupt the international peace for their own purposes. The European Union has created forms of transnational governance, but decision-making in the areas of security and defense is still the prerogative of its member states. Thus, the EU remains effectively powerless to stop violence undertaken by one of its own members (such as Britain's involvement in the Iraq war), not to mention war waged by other nations even in its own backyard (such as in Bosnia and Herzegovina). Until this problem is solved, world-state advocates argue, any global order will be too fragile to endure. Sooner or later a sovereign state will wage war, and the inability of a regime of global governance to stop it will deprive it of authority and legitimacy. International politics would then revert to the old state system.

In "Why a World State Is Inevitable," Wendt argues that a formal world state—by which he means a truly new sovereign political entity, with constitutional authority over all nations—will naturally evolve as peoples and nations come to realize that they cannot obtain true independence, or what Wendt calls "recognition," without one. In other words, the advent of global technologies and weaponry present weaker societies with an emerging choice between subjugation to powerful states and globalized forces or participation in 52 an authentic world government; a world state would not threaten distinct national cultures, as pluralist scholars have argued, but rather it is the only entity that can preserve them. Wendt sees this as a teleological phenomenon, by which he means that the logic of globalization and the struggle by all cultures and societies for recognition are bound to lead to a world state whether it is sought or not. Such a state, Wendt argues, would not need to be particularly centralized or hierarchical; as long as it could prevent sovereign states from waging war, it could permit local cultures, traditions, and politics to continue.8 But a looser system of governance would not be enough, because societies that seek recognition could not trust it to protect them from powerful states seeking domination. Daniel Deudney's recent book, Bounding Power, provides the fullest and most creative vision yet of formal world government in our age.9 Deudney argues that the driving force behind world government is the fact that international war has become too dangerous. Unified by a common interest in avoiding nuclear extermination, states have the ability to come together in much the same way as tribes and fiefdoms have in the past when advances in military technology made conflict among them suicidal. Unlike Wendt, Deudney does not see this as an inevitability: states may well choose to tolerate interstate anarchy, even though it will sooner or later result in a nuclear war. But Deudney is also optimistic that a world government created for the purpose of avoiding such a war can be small, decentralized, and liberal. In Bounding Power, he develops an elaborate case for the establishment of a world republic, based upon the same premise of restraining and diffusing power that motivated the founders of the American republic in the late eighteenth century. World-state theorists such as Wendt and Deudney stress the danger that advocates of more global governance often downplay: the risk that ambitious sovereign states will be unrestrained by international institutions and agencies, even unprecedentedly powerful ones, and wage war for traditional reasons of power and profit. For Wendt, military conflict of this sort will simply push along the inevitable process of world-state formation, as societies and peoples recognize that a return to interstate anarchy will only unleash more such wars, while a world government will put an end to them and so guarantee their cultural independence. Deudney is less hopeful here. Military conflict in our age can well mean thermonuclear war, an event that could put an end to the pursuit of meaningful human independence and of the kind of world government that would respect it.

Is a World Government Possible?

The initial argument against a world state, and even a coherent system of global governance, is the one that anyone can see immediately: it is impractical. How could nations of radically different ideologies and cultures agree upon one common political authority? But the "impracticality" argument disregards historical experience. The history of state formation from the days of city-states to the present era is precisely the history of warring groups with different 53 ideologies and cultures coming together under a larger entity. While the European Union is not at all yet a state, who would not have been denounced as insane for predicting a political and economic union among France, Germany, and other European states seventy years ago? For that matter, how "practical" would it have seemed forty years ago to foresee the peaceful end of the Cold War? As Deudney argues, smaller political units have always merged into larger ones when technology has made the violence among them unsustainable. The surprising thing, he maintains, would be if this did not happen at the planetary level. The more important objections to world government posit not that it is impractical but that it is unnecessary and even undesirable. According to one such argument, the world should be governed not by a genuinely international authority but rather by the United States: a Pax Americana.10 This school of thought stresses two main points: that such authority could more readily come into being without the violent convulsions that would likely accompany genuine world-state formation; and, as neoconservative writers particularly stress, that a world run by the United States would be preferable to a genuinely transnational world government given the superiority of American political, economic, and cultural institutions. The case against Pax Americana, however, can be boiled down to one word: Iraq. The war in Iraq has shown that military operations undertaken by individual nation-states lead, as they have always done, to nationalist and tribal reactions against the aggressor that pay no heed to larger claims of superior or inferior civilizations. The disaster in Iraq has emboldened other revisionist states and groups to defy American will, caused erstwhile allies and friends of the United States to question its intentions and competence, and at the same time soured the American people on future adventures against states that do not overtly threaten them. In conceiving and executing its war in Iraq, it would have been difficult for the Bush administration to undermine the project of Pax Americana more effectively had it tried to do so. The United States could choose in future to rally other states behind it if it can persuade them of a global threat that must be vanquished. But, as Wendt implies, to do that successfully is effectively to begin the process of world-state formation.

Another objection to world government was first identified by Immanuel Kant. In articulating a plan for perpetual peace, Kant stopped short of advocating a world state, for fear that the state could become tyrannical. In a world of several nation-states, a tyranny can be removed by other states or overthrown from within. At least it could be possible for oppressed citizens of that state to flee to less repressive countries. But a sovereign world government could be invulnerable to such measures. It could not be defeated by an external political rival; those who would overthrow it from within would have nowhere to hide, no one to support them from the outside. Kant concluded that these dangers overrode the permanent peace that could be had with world government, and he ended up advocating instead a confederation of sovereign, commercial states. One can raise two points in response to Kant's deeply important concern. First, he wrote in the eighteenth century, when the specter of war was not 54

omnicidal and the planet did not face such global crises as climate change and transnational terrorism. International politics as usual was not as dangerous an alternative to his vision of perpetual peace as it potentially is today. Second, as Deudney argues, there is one central reason to believe that a world government could avoid the temptations of tyranny and actually exist as a small, federal authority rather than a global leviathan.11 This is the indisputable fact that— barring extraterrestrial invasion—a world government would have no need for a policy of external security. States often become increasingly tyrannical as they use external threats to justify internal repression and authoritarian policies. These threats, whether real or imagined, have throughout history and to the present day been used by leaders to justify massive taxation, conscription, martial law, and the suppression of dissent. But no world government could plausibly make such demands. Will the world-government movement become a potent political force, or will it fade away as it did in the late 1940s? To a degree the answer to this question depends on the near-term future of international politics. If the United States alters its foreign policy and moves to manage the unipolar world more magnanimously, or, alternatively, if a new power (such as China) arises quickly to balance American power and instigate a new Cold War, the movement could fade. So, too, if existing international organizations somehow succeed in ameliorating climate change, fighting terrorism, and preventing humanitarian crises and other global problems. On the other hand, if the United States continues to pursue a Pax Americana, or if the transnational problems worsen, the movement could become a serious international cause. These considerations aside, as Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, and others discerned during the height of the Cold War, the deepest argument for world government—the specter of global nuclear war—will endure as long as sovereign nation-states continue to deploy nuclear weaponry. Whatever occurs over the near-term future, that is a fact that is not going away. The great distinction between the international system prevailing in Niebuhr and Morgenthau's day and the system in our own time is that the chances of attaining some form of world government have been radically enhanced by the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a unipolar order. This condition, however, will not last forever. ------NOTES 1 Alexander Wendt, "Why a World State Is Inevitable," European Journal of International Relations 9, no. 4 (2003), pp. 491–542. For a more extensive discussion of new scholarship on world government, see especially Catherine Lu, "World Government," in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2006 Edition); available at plato.stanford.edu/entries/world- government/. 2 See Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985); and Luis Cabrera, "Introduction," in Cabrera, ed., Global Government/Global Governance, forthcoming. 55

3 Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko, The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008). 4 Martin Amis, Einstein's Monsters (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), pp. 16–17. 5 Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, "The End of MAD?: The Nuclear Dimension of U.S. Primacy" International Security 30, no. 4 (2006), pp. 7–44. Lieber and Press do not advocate an American first strike against a potential aggressor; they simply argue that the United States has developed a capability to do so. 6 For an overview of McGrew's and Held's positions, see Anthony McGrew and David Held, eds., Governing Globalization (London: Polity, 2002), chaps. 13 and 15. Also see Andrew Hurrell, On Global Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). American scholars in favor of global governance include Richard Falk, On Humane Governance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); and Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). For an innovative treatment of the problem of global democracy, see Luis Cabrera, Political Theory of Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Case for the World State (London: Routledge, 2004). 7 See Wendt, "Why a World State Is Inevitable," p. 506. 8 Ibid., especially pp. 507–10 and 514–16. For the argument that world government would threaten cultural pluralism, see Michael Walzer, Arguing About War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). 9 Daniel H. Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). 10 For example, Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). 11 Deudney, Bounding Power, esp. chap. 6 and conclusion.

Session Three

Theme: What is our Moral Responsibility to Others?

Advance Reading: Appiah Keynote on Global Citizenship, Campbell Craig, The Resurgent Idea of World Government

A. Welcome back and group “housekeeping” (5 minutes)

B. Weekly check-in on One World in the news or personal stories of “One World moments” you’ve encountered since our last meeting (30 minutes)

F. Homework: Consolidated inventory of human rights document, Kung readings (5 minutes)

G. Reflections (5 minutes)

H. Social time over coffee, unstructured discussion.

Session Four Reading

Issue Date: September 3, 2004

Hopeful realist Hans Küng points pathway to global ethic

By PATRICIA LEFEVERE Pittsburgh

Hans Küng will mark 50 years as a priest Oct. 10. Although he has been off the church’s official radar for a quarter century -- since being stripped of his canonical license to operate as a Catholic theologian -- he has never abandoned his quest to reform the Roman Catholic church.

These days he is devoting much of his effort to global ethics and world peace and to preparing the second volume of his memoirs, My Struggle for Freedom (NCR, Sept. 12, 2003). Almost two-thirds of the first volume deals with Küng’s reform agenda.

While the Swiss priest and scholar may no longer find a hearing in Rome, heads of state, corporate executives and world leaders are paying increasing attention to him.

Case in point: On Dec. 12, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan spoke at Tübingen University, the German academy where Küng spent 30 years as a theologian and directed its Institute for Ecumenical Research, retiring as professor emeritus in 1996.

Tübingen is not exactly en route to London or Paris. Not even Brussels. But the busy Annan came after Küng handed him a note in Berlin 18 months earlier, asking him to lecture as a birthday gift to Küng on the occasion of the theologian’s 75th birthday.

Annan had to reschedule his initial talk because of the Iraq debate at the United Nations. “I cannot really think of this lecture as a gift from me to you,” the U.N. chief told Küng as he began his address. “It is you who do me a great honor, by asking me to speak on your home turf, on a subject -- global ethics -- about which you have thought as profoundly as anyone in our time.”

In 2002 Küng invited former Irish president and the then-U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson to Tübingen. In her talk Robinson noted that Küng had introduced her to the concept of a global ethic. A year earlier Küng drew British Premier Tony Blair to his university where Blair delivered the first annual lecture of the Global Ethic Foundation, which Küng heads. 58

That Küng has gained a hearing far beyond Tübingen for his decade- long drive on behalf of universal ethical norms owes much to the four books he has authored on the topic and his ability to attract experts across the professions. If the good fairy could grant him any wish, he would ask for a set of moral guidelines that could cross political, economic and religious lines, yet be morally acceptable to all -- even nonbelievers.

In the new century he has taken his campaign to academics in China, government and religious leaders in Iran, politicians across Europe and most recently to entrepreneurs, deans of business schools and top managers in the United States.

NCR caught up with Küng recently in Pittsburgh where he was the featured speaker at the Carnegie Bosch Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and where his ideas on a global ethic were the subject of a workshop and lecture attended by some 200 business and academic leaders.

On the eve of his talk, at a dinner in the Duquesne Club -- where Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon had dined a century earlier and now looked down from oil portraits onto today’s business leaders -- Küng introduced NCR to German directors of the Bosch corporation and of DaimlerChrysler, who were attending the institute.

“When I had my troubles,” it was people at Bosch -- headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany -- “who supported me. They took care of me and I was very grateful,” Küng said. Bosch sponsored his studies of Judaism and Christianity that resulted in two books in the 1990s. It also underwrote his research for a third book on Islam.

Küng’s “troubles” came in 1979 when the Vatican banned him from teaching as a Catholic theologian, largely because he had opposed the doctrine of papal infallibility. It was a period of humiliation, heartache and depression for him, but a time when he began to turn his gaze onto questions of death, eternal life and toward the other great religions.

Küng has known firsthand what he calls “the dark sides of the religions.” He encountered it personally during his jousts with the Vatican and has seen it in the treatment Christianity and other religions have meted out to their critics. He had only to open a newspaper to see religion’s “disastrous effects” on conflicts in Ireland, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, Nigeria, India and Pakistan, he said.

But Küng, who describes himself as “always hopeful” and yet “a realist,” has also beheld the bright side of what religions can do for people. As doctrines and ways of salvation and liberation, “they can make sense.” They can promote peace and reconciliation and they can “still give men and women ethical standards and personal guidelines,” he said. 59

Küng did more than immerse himself in the sacred texts of these creeds. He went to several nations where Sikhs, Jews, Baha’is, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Zoroastrians and Taoists live and keep their traditions.

Ethics in common

During his visits he experienced how little people of all religious know about one another or about what their ethical traditions hold in common. His studies and travels have emboldened him to believe that world peace is possible in his lifetime. Now 76, he hopes his remaining work can point a pathway toward universal peace.

For Küng, the road toward nonviolence does not start with disarmament, but rather with observing ethical principles in one’s private life and in the marketplace. In Pittsburgh, Küng acknowledged the “heavy responsibility” of addressing an audience of experts about economics, globalization and a global ethic. But recent scandals at Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, Global Crossing and Halliburton had simplified his task.

So too had the resignation last year of Richard Grasso, former head of the New York Stock Exchange. Grasso’s appointment of cronies who saw nothing wrong with the chairman’s amassing a $187 million pay and pension packet was “not illegal,” Küng said, but “it certainly went against morality.”

Five years earlier Grasso had been Küng’s neighbor at a roundtable in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which Küng had addressed the International Federation of Stock Exchanges concerning ethical standards for international financial transactions.

At that gathering Grasso did not disagree with Küng’s critique of the excessive self-interest, greed, bribery and corruption often associated with international commercial transactions. Nor did he take issue with Küng’s assessment of inadequate banking, finance and accounting systems that can sometimes be the nesting ground for slackness, opportunism and lack of discipline.

All this has lead Küng to conclude that ethics are not just “the icing on the cake. They’re not marginal … in shaping the global market economy,” he told the Pittsburgh meeting. In a financial world rife with fraud, lacking in loyalty and the spirit of compromise, what’s needed, he said, is a moral framework that is both “interdependent and interactive” with the economic functioning of markets, governments, civil society and multinational organizations.

Without such moral moorings, the developed world will continue to feel the effects of corporate scandals in lost jobs and pensions, and higher prices. The massive power outages that darkened North America and Italy last year demonstrate “an entirely new set of risks emerging from global capitalism” and threaten “an energy crisis of Third-World dimensions,” Küng said. Rather than 60

sharing responsibility for the breakdowns and the scandals, economists and politicians engage in a game of mutual recrimination, he said.

Beyond these economic hazards, there is the larger dimension of recent worldwide protests against globalization seen in Seattle; Genoa, Italy; Cancun, Mexico; and Davos, Switzerland. In Küng’s view the demonstrations show that the ethical framework on which the world economy is based is highly questionable.

“I strongly believe that in the long run, the global market economy will only be accepted if it is socially acceptable,” he said. But how do entrepreneurs and business schools create a global consensus for a moral framework that can influence the behavior and decisions of managers and workers alike? The job appears as daunting as reconstructing the Ten Commandments.

U.N. Global Compact

But it need not be, Küng argued. Under Annan’s leadership the United Nations initiated in 1999 a U.N. Global Compact that respects human rights, supports the elimination of all forms of forced or child labor and promotes a response to ecological challenges. Already some 700 corporations worldwide have signed on.

The contents of the compact are in line with ideas expressed in the 1993 Declaration Toward a Global Ethic, which Küng drafted for the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. In studying the Torah, Quran, the Bhagavad-Gita, Sermon on the Mount, the discourses of the Buddha and the sayings of Confucius, Küng found that compassion, love, equality and honesty are common threads embedded in the world’s religions.

All of the world’s main creeds sanction the humane treatment of each person and the observance of the Golden Rule. From these two principles stem core standards and values, which, if followed, will deliver the peace and justice the world dreams of and avoid the clash of civilizations that thinkers less optimistic than Küng have predicted.

These two sweeping ethical norms are “not utopian. They are a realistic vision of hope,” he told NCR. They play themselves out as injunctions and commitments:

• Not to murder, torture, torment or wound, but to commit oneself to a culture of nonviolence and reverence for life; • Not to lie, deceive, forge, manipulate, but to speak truthfully and act tolerantly; • Not to steal, exploit, bribe or corrupt but to work toward a culture of fairness and a just economic order; 61

• Not to abuse sexuality, cheat, humiliate or dishonor, but to commit to a culture of partnership and equal dignity for men and women.

Humankind’s darker side -- what some call “the nature of the beast”-- has made many skeptical that the harmonious behavior proposed by Küng and enshrined in the world’s belief systems is remotely possible.

Küng disagrees. Since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, he finds himself “no longer a voice crying in the dessert.” He said his message has found greater acceptability and a wider audience since 9/11 and since Annan appointed him to a Group of Eminent Persons charged with promoting a universal dialogue among civilizations.

“What now seems clear to all is that problems of global terrorism, international crime, ecology, nuclear technology and genetic engineering threaten to overwhelm the world.”

Küng insists all the more that the globalization of the world economy, technology and communications must be supported by global ethics if the planet is to escape peril. This should not be an additional burden but the basis of a support for human beings, for civil society, he said.

In an interview with NCR in his hotel lobby, he returned to the mantra he delivered more than a decade ago in Chicago and scores of times since:

• No peace among the nations without peace among the religions. • No peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions. • No dialogue between the religions without common ethical standards. • No survival of our planet in peace and justice without a global ethic.

Global Ethic and Human Responsibilities

by Hans Küng

Submitted to the High-level Expert Group Meeting on "Human Rights and Human Responsibilities in the Age of Terrorism" 1-2, April 2005, Santa Clara University

1. Global ethic - two declarations

Before going a step further, speaking to you about responsibility on human rights, let me just recall some basic principles of a global ethic:

• Global ethic is not a new ideology or superstructure;

• it will not make the specific ethics of the different religions and philosophies superfluous; it would be ridiculous to consider Global Ethic as a substitute for the Torah, the Sermon on the Mount, the Qur'an, the Bhagavadgita, the Discourses of the Buddha or the Sayings of Confucius.

• Global Ethic is nothing but the necessary minimum of common values, standards and basic attitudes. In other words:

• a minimal basic consensus relating to binding values, irrevocable standards and moral attitudes, which can be affirmed by all religions despite their undeniable dogmatic or theological differences and should also be supported by non-believers.

• This consensus of values will be a decisive contribution to overcome the crisis of orientation, which became a real global problem.

• Global Ethic is therefore a project which needs more than a decade to be fulfilled; it calls for a change of consciousness which has already made great progress in the last decade.

Anyone who is interested in seeing human rights fully respected and more effectively defended throughout the world must surely also be interested in achieving a change of consciousness concerning human obligations or responsibilities. These need to be seen in the context of global challenges and efforts to establish a global ethic, an ethic for humankind. Efforts to establish a global ethic have received widespread international backing in recent years. Two documents are of particular relevance:

• On 4 September 1993, for the first time in the history of religion, delegates to the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago adopted a "Declaration Toward a Global Ethic". 63

• On 1 September 1997, again for the first time, the InterAction Council of former heads of state or government called for a global ethic and submitted to the United Nations a proposed "Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities", designed to underpin, reinforce and supplement human rights from an ethical angle.

• In addition, the third Parliament of the World's Religions, held in Cape Town in December 1999 issued "A Call to Our Guiding Institutions", based on the Chicago Declaration.

As for the Parliament of the World's Religions I was also a senior academic adviser to the InterAction Council. I was therefore responsible for the first draft of this Declaration of Human Responsibilities and for incorporating the numerous corrections suggested by the statesmen and the many experts from different continents, religions and disciplines. Therefore I identify completely with this declaration. However, had I not been occupied for years with the problems, and had I not finally written "Global Ethic for Global Politics and Global Economics", published in 1997, which provides a broad treatment of all the problems which arise here, I would not have dared to formulate a first draft at all in close conjunction with the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights and the 1993 Declaration towards a Global Ethic which required a secular political continuation. Such Declarations are therefore not products of naivety but fruits of an intellectual effort. After having recalled the historical and personal context, let me now make some remarks which seem to me fundamental for our topic.

2. Globalization calls for a global ethic

The declaration by the InterAction Council (IAC) is not an isolated document. It responds to the urgent call by important international bodies for global ethical standards made in long chapters of the reports both of the UN Commission on Global Governance (1995) and the World Commission on Culture and Development (1995). The same topic has also already been discussed for a long time at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos and similarly in the new UNESCO Universal Ethics Project. Increasing attention is also being paid to it in Asia where they often find it problematic to speak about human rights without speaking at the same time on human responsibilities. Mahatma Gandhi, who was consulted about the UN Declaration of Human Rights, wrote: "The Ganges of rights originates in the Himalayan of responsibilities".

The contemporary background to the questions raised in these international and inter-religious bodies is the fact that the globalization of the economy, the technology and the media has also brought a globalization of problems, from the financial and labour markets to ecology and organized crime. If there are to be global solutions to them, they therefore also call for a globalization of ethic: no uniform ethical system ("ethics"), but a necessary minimum of shared ethical values, basic attitudes and criteria ("ethic") to which all regions, nations and 64 interest groups can commit themselves. In other words there is a need for a common basic human ethic. There can be no new world order without a world ethic, a global ethic.

But please do not misunderstand me: I am pleading for the rediscovery and reassessment of ethic in politics and economics. I am all for morality (in the positive sense). But at the same time I am against moralism (morality in the negative sense). For moralism and moralizing overvalue morality and ask too much of it. Moralizers make morality the sole criterion for human action and ignore the relative independence of various spheres of life like economics, law and politics. As a result they tend to absolutize intrinsically justified norms and values (like peace, justice, environment, life, love) and also to exploit them often for the particular interests of an institution (e.g. a party, church or interest group). Moralism manifests itself in a one-sided and penetrating insistence on particular moral positions (for example, in questions of sexual behavior, contraception, abortion, euthanasia and similar issues) which makes a rational dialogue with those of other convictions impossible. That is the reason why I fought successfully against mentioning these issues in the two Declarations, because there is no consensus neither among the religions nor within each single religion. Speaking out for a few common ethical standards we therefore do not want to support fundamentalists of any kind nor opportunist politicians who practice the emotive language of today's "therapeutic ethos and politicking".

And all reasonable persons would probably not object: The law needs a moral foundation! And security in our cities and communities cannot be bought simply with money nor with more police and prisons. In other words: The ethical acceptance of laws (which provide the state with sanctions and can be imposed by force) is the presupposition of any social culture. What is the use to individual states or organizations, be they the USA, the EU or the United Nations, of constantly new laws, if a significant part of the population or powerful groups or individuals have no intention of observing them? If they find constantly enough ways and means of irresponsibly imposing their own interests? Quid leges sine moribus? runs a Roman saying: what are laws without morals?

3. Human responsibilities reinforce human rights

A Declaration of Human Responsibilities supports and reinforces the Declaration of Human Rights from an ethical perspective, as is already stated programmatically in the preamble: "We thus... renew and reinforce commitments already proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: namely, the full acceptance of the dignity of all people; their inalienable freedom and equality, and their solidarity with one another." If human rights are not realized in many places where they could be implemented, this is in most cases due to a lack of political and ethical will. There is no disputing the fact that "the rule of law and the promotion of human rights depend on the readiness of men and women to act justly." Nor will any of those who fight for human rights dispute this. 65

Of course it would be wrong to think that the legal validity of human rights depends on the actual realization of responsibilities. Human rights cannot be considered as a reward for good human behaviour. This would in fact mean that only those who had shown themselves worthy of rights by doing their duty towards society would enjoy rights. Such an absurd idea would clearly offend the unconditional dignity of the human person, which is itself a presupposition of both rights and responsibilities. No one has claimed and will claim that certain human responsibilities must be fulfilled first, by individuals or a community, before one can claim human rights. These are given with the human person, but this person is always at the same time one who has rights and responsibilities: All human rights are by definition directly bound up with the responsibility to observe them. Rights and responsibilities can certainly be distinguished neatly, but they cannot be separated from each other. Their relationship needs to be described in a differentiated way. They are not quantities which are to be added or subtracted externally, but two related dimensions of being human in the individual and the social sphere.

No rights without responsibilities! As such, this concern is by no means new, but goes back to the "founding period" of human rights. The demand was already made in the debate about human rights in the French Revolutionary Parliament of 1789: If one proclaims a Declaration of Human Rights one should combine it with a Declaration of Human Responsibilities. Otherwise, in the end everyone would have only rights, which they would play off against one another, and no one would any longer know the responsibilities without which these rights cannot function. Nearly half of the Revolutionary Parliament who voted for the Declaration of Human Rights voted also for a proclamation of human responsibilities. This remained a matter of continuing debate.

And what about us, more than 200 years after the Great Revolution? We in fact live largely in a society in which individual groups all too often insist on rights against others without recognizing any responsibilities that they themselves have. This is certainly not because of codified human rights as such, but because of certain false developments closely connected with them. In the consciousness of many people these have led to a preponderance of rights over responsibilities. Instead of the culture of human rights which is striven for, there is often an unculture of exaggerated claims to rights which ignores the intentions of human rights. The necessary balance of freedom, equality and fraternity (participation) is not simply given, but has to be realized afresh time and again. After all, we indisputably live in a "society of claims", which often presents itself as a "society of legal claims", indeed as a "society of legal disputes". This makes the state a "judiciary state". Does this not suggest the need for a new concentration on responsibilities, particularly in our over-regulated constitutional states with all their justified insistence on rights?

Despite the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 we still face the reality of severe violations of human rights which spans the world. This shows how much a declaration and explanation of human rights comes up against a void wherever 66 people, particularly those in power, adopt one of the following attitudes to human rights: They ignore them ("What concern is that of mine?"), or neglect them ("I have to represent only the interests of my firm"), or fail to perceive them ("That's what churches and charities are for"), or simply pretend falsely to fulfill them ("We, the government, the board of directors, are doing all we can").

The "weakness of human rights" is in fact not grounded in the concept itself but in the lack of any political and moral will on the part of those responsible for implementing them. To put it plainly: an ethical impulse and a motivation to accept responsibilities are needed for an effective realization of human rights. Many human rights champions active on the fronts of this world who confess their "Yes to a Global Ethic" have already explicitly endorsed that point of view. Therefore those who want to work effectively for human rights should welcome a new moral impulse and framework of ethical orientation and not reject it to their own disadvantage.

The framework of ethical orientation in the Declaration of Human Responsibilities in some respects extends beyond human rights. The Declaration of Human Rights does not explicitly raise such a comprehensive moral claim. A Declaration of Human Responsibilities must extend further and begin at a much deeper level. Indeed the two basic principles of the Declaration of Human Responsibilities already offer an ethical orientation of everyday life which is as comprehensive as it is fundamental: the basic demand, "Every human being must be treated humanely" and the Golden Rule, "What you do not wish to be done to yourself, do not do to others". Not to mention the concrete requirements of the Declaration of Responsibilities for truthfulness, nonviolence, fairness, solidarity, partnership, etc. Where the Declaration of Human Rights has to leave open what is morally permissible and what is not, the Declaration of Human Responsibilities states this - not as a law but as a moral imperative.

Like the Declaration of Human Rights, the Declaration of Human Responsibilities is indeed primarily a moral appeal. As such it does not have the direct binding character of international law, but it proclaims to the world public some basic norms for collective and individual behavior which should apply to everyone. This appeal is, of course, also meant to have an effect on legal and political practice. However, it does not aim at any legalistic morality. A key feature of the Declaration of Human Responsibilities is that it precisely does not aim at legal codification, which is impossible anyway in the case of moral attitudes like truthfulness or fairness. It aims at voluntarily taking responsibility. The Declaration of Human Responsibilities should therefore be considered as morally rather than legally binding.

We need not worry: morality and community cannot be "prescribed" as obligations. And the best guarantee of peace is in fact a functioning state which guarantees the rule of the law for its citizens. But precisely because community and morality cannot be prescribed, the personal responsibility of its citizens is indispensable. The democratic state in a pluralistic society is dependent on a 67

consensus on values, norms and responsibilities, precisely because it cannot create this consensus nor prescribe it.

Those concerned with human rights in particular should know that the Declaration of Human Rights itself, in Article 29, contains a definition of the "duties of everyone towards the community". From this it follows with compelling logic that a Declaration of Human Responsibilities cannot in any way stand in contradiction to the Declaration of Human Rights. And if concrete forms of political, social and cultural articles on human rights were possible and necessary through international covenants in the 1960s, a development of Article 29 by an extended formulation of these responsibilities in the 1990s cannot be illegitimate. On the contrary, precisely in the light of this it becomes clear that human rights and human responsibilities do not mutually restrict each other for society but supplement each other in a fruitful way — and all champions of human rights should recognize this as a reinforcement of their position and their struggle. It is no accident that this Article 29 speaks of the "just requirements of morality, public order and general welfare in a democratic society".

Conclusion

The Global Ethic Project is an ongoing process. It has made tremendous progress in a very short period of time.

The Proposal of the InterAction Council should be used as a basis of discussion also in the relevant circles of the UN system and within the NGO family. Of course, as it was the case with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the debate on a Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities would first manifest various divergent points of view. But such a debate is necessary and, I am sure, it would ultimately not be divisive, but would raise the awareness of the importance of global ethical standards in the age of globalization.

The search for a global ethic which finds its expression in both human rights and human responsibilities — would indeed constitute what the UN General Assembly calls a "collective endeavour — of the international community to enhance understanding through constructive dialogue among civilizations on the threshold of the third millennium".

Let me sum up my very realistic vision in three phrases:

• There will be no survival of our globe without a global ethic: • There will be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions. • There will be no peace among the religions without dialogue and cooperation among the religions and civilizations. 68

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Preamble: Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people, Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law, Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations, Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in cooperation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms, Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge, Now, therefore, The General Assembly Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction. Article 1 All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Article 2 Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person 69

belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty. Article 3 Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. Article 4 No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms. Article 5 No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Article 6 Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law. Article 7 All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination. Article 8 Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law. Article 9 No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile. Article 10 Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him. Article 11 (1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defense. (2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article 12 No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. Article 13 70

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. Article 14 (1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. (2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations. Article 15 (1) Everyone has the right to a nationality. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality. Article 16 (1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. (2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. (3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State. Article 17 (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property. Article 18 Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. Article 19 Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. Article 20 (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. (2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association. Article 21 (1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives. 71

(2) Everyone has the right to equal access to public service in his country. (3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures. Article 22 Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international cooperation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality. Article 23 (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests. Article 24 Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay. Article 25 (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection. Article 26 (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace. 72

(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children. Article 27 (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author. Article 28 Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized. Article 29 (1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible. (2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society. (3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations. Article 30 Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

Session Four

Theme: Global Ethics and the Quest for Universal Rights & Responsibilities

Advance reading: Consolidated inventory of human rights document, Kung reading

Discussion:

E. Welcome back and group “housekeeping” admin/ground rules, etc. (5 minutes)

F. Check-in on One World “AHA” moments or One World “in the news” that week (20 minutes)

C. Facilitator led discussion on Kung reading. Some suggested discussion questions include:

8. Lets discuss his three summary statements and how you feel about each one:

G. Activity: How Easy is a Global Ethic?

Facilitator leads exercise:

2. After each person has decided, split the study circle into groups of 3 or 4 people and ask each group to negotiate an agreement on the 3 most important basic rights.

3. As time allows, ask the groups to then try and reach agreement with each other on the top 3 basic rights.

H. Discussion Questions:

E. Homework: Ulrich Beck article, Intervention Case Study

F. Reflections (5 minutes)

G. Social time over coffee, unstructured discussion.

Thirteen Basic Human Rights

1. All human beings are free and equal before the law and have the right to life, liberty, and security of person, regardless of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status

2. No one is held in slavery or servitude and slave trade in all its forms is prohibited 3. No one is subjected to arbitrary arrest, torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment

4. Everyone charged with a crime has the right to be presumed innocent and is entitled to a fair and public hearing by and impartial tribunal

5. Everyone had the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state and the right to leave any country, including her own, and to return to her country Everyone has the right to seek political asylum in another country

6. The family is entitled to protection by society. Marriage is be entered into by adults of age in free and full consent and everyone has the right to marry

7. Everyone has the right to own property and it may not be arbitrarily taken away

8. Everyone had the right to freedom of thought and religion, and to practice that religion alone or in community

9. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and to peaceful assembly and association

10. The will of the people is the authority of government and this is expressed in periodic free and open elections

11. Everyone had the right to work, to equal pay for equal work, to choice in employment and just and safe working conditions

12. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well being of herself and her family

13. Everyone has the right to education

Session Five Readings:

A new cosmopolitanism is in the air Sociologist Ulrich Beck presents seven theses to combat the global power of capital The nationalist perspective - which equates society with the society of the nation state - blinds us to the world in which we live. In order to perceive the interrelatedness of people and of populations around the globe in the first place, we need a cosmopolitan perspective. The common terminological denominator of our densely populated world is "cosmopolitanisation", which means the erosion of distinct boundaries dividing markets, states, civilizations, cultures, and not least of all the lifeworlds of different peoples. The world has not certainly not become borderless, but the boundaries are becoming blurred and indistinct, becoming permeable to flows of information and capital. Less so, on the other hand, to flows of people: tourists yes, migrants no. Taking place in national and local lifeworlds and institutions is a process of internal globalisation. This alters the conditions for the construction of social identity, which need no longer be impressed by the negative juxtaposition of "us" and "them".

For me, it is important that cosmopolitanisation does not occur somewhere in abstraction or on a global scale, somewhere above people's heads, but that it takes place in the everyday lives of individuals ("mundane cosmopolitanisation"). The same is true for the internal operations of politics, which have become global on all levels, even that of domestic politics, because they must take account of the global dimension of mutual interdependencies, flows, networks, threats, and so on ("global domestic politics"). We must ask, for example: How does our understanding of power and control become altered from a cosmopolitan perspective? By way of an answer, I offer seven theses.

Globalisation is anonymous control First thesis

In the relationship between the global economy and the state a meta power play is under way, a struggle for power in the context of which the rules concerning power in the national and international system of states are being rewritten. The economy in particular has developed a kind of meta power, breaking out of the power relations organized in terms of territories and the nation state to conquer new power strategies in digital space. The term "meta power play" means that one fights, struggles for power, and simultaneously alters the rules of world politics, with their orientation to the nation state.

The pursuit of the question as to the source of the meta power of capital strategies brings one up against a remarkable cirucumstance. The basic idea was expressed in the title of an eastern European newspaper which appeared during a 1999 visit by the German Federal Chancellor, and which read: "We forgive the Crusaders and await the investors." It is the precise reversal of the calculations of 77

classical theories of power and control which facilitates the maximization of the power of transnational enterprises: the means of coercion is not the threat of invasion, but instead the threat of the non-invasion of the investors, or of their departure. That is to say, there is only one thing more terrible than being overrun by the multinationals, and that is not to be overrun by them.

This form of control is no longer associated with the carrying out of commands, but instead with the possibility of being able to invest more advantageously in other countries, and with the threat potential opened up by such opportunities, namely the threat of doing nothing, of declining to invest in a given country. The new power of the concerns is not based on the use of violence as the ultima ratio to compel others to conform to one's will. It is far more flexible because able to operate independently of location, and hence globally.

Not imperialism, but non-imperialism; not invasion, but the withdrawal of investments constitutes the core of global economic power. This de-territorialised economic power requires neither political implementation nor political legitimacy. In establishing itself, it even bypasses the institutions of the developed democracies, including parliaments and courts. This meta power is neither legal nor legitimate; it is "translegal". But it does alter the rules of the national and international system of power.

The analogy between the military logistics of state power and the logic of economic power is striking and astonishing. The volume of investment capital corresponds to the fire-power of military weaponry, with the decisive distinction, however, that in this case, power is augmented by threatening not to shoot. Product development is the equivalent of the updating of weaponry systems. The establishment of branches by large corporations in many different countries replaces military bases and the diplomatic corps. The old military rule that offence is the best defence, now translated, reads: States must invest in research and development in order to fully maximize the global offensive power of capital. Growing together with research and educational budgets (or so it is hoped) is the volume of a given state's voice in the arena of world politics.

The power of the threat of non-investment is already ubiquitous today. Globalisation is not an option; it is an anonymous power. No one started it, no one can stop it, no one is responsible for it. The word "globalisation" stands for the organized absence of responsibility. You cast about for someone to address, with whom you can lodge a complaint, against whom you can demonstrate. But there is no institution to turn towards, no telephone number to call, no e-mail address to write to. Everyone sees himself as a victim, no one as a perpetrator. Even corporate heads (those Machiavellian "modern princes"), who want to be courted, must by definition sacrifice their thinking and behaviour on the altar of shareholder value if they want to avoid being fired themselves.

A new perspective for a different approach to action 78

Second thesis

The joke of this meta power argument lies in the following: the opportunities for action among the co-players are constituted within the meta power game itself. They are essentially dependent upon how actors themselves define and redefine the political, and these definitions are preconditions for success. Only a decisive critique of nation state orthodoxy, as well as new categories directed towards a cosmopolitan perspective, can open up new opportunities for acquiring power. Anyone who adheres to the old, national dogmatism (to the fetish of sovereignty, for instance, and to the unilateral policies derived from it) will be skipped over, rolled over, and won't even be in position to complain about it. It is precisely the costs accruing to states as a consequence of their adherence to the old, nation state rules of power relations which necessitates the switch to a cosmopolitan point of view. In other words: nationalism - a rigid adherence to the position that world political meta power games are and must remain national ones - is revealed to be extremely expensive. A fact learned by the USA, a world power, recently in Iraq.

The confusion between national and global politics distorts one's perspective, and at the same time blocks all recognition and understanding of new features of power relations and power resources. This means failing to exploit the opportunity to transform the win-lose and lose-lose rules of the meta power game into win-win rules from which the state, global civil society, and capital can simultaneously profit. It is a question of inverting Marx's basic idea: it is not that being determines consciousness, but instead that consciousness maximizes new possibilities for action (cosmopolitan perspective) by players who are engaged in global political power relations. There exists a royal road to the transformation of one's own power situation. But first you must change your world-view. A sceptical, realistic view of the world - but the same time a cosmopolitan one!

Only capital is permitted to break the rules Third thesis

It is an irony of history that the world-view discredited by the collapse of communism in Europe has now been adopted by the victors of the Cold War. The neoliberals have elevated the weaknesses in Marx's thought to their own creed, namely his stubborn underestimation of nationalistic and religious movements, and his one-dimensional, linear model of history. On the other hand, they have closed their eyes to the Marxist insight according to which capitalism liberates anarchic and self-destructive forces. It remains a mystery why the neoliberals believe things might evolve differently in the 21st century. In any event, the looming ecological catastrophes and revolutions speak a very different language.

The neoliberal agenda represents an attempt to generalise from the short-lived 79

historic victories of mobile capital. The perspective of capital positions itself as absolute and autonomous, thereby unfolding the strategic power and the space of possibility of classical economics as a sub-political, world political lust for power. Afterwards, that which is good for capital becomes the best option for everyone. Stated ironically, the promise is that the maximization of the power of capital is, in the final analysis, the preferred path to socialism.

The neoliberal agenda, in any event, insists on the following: in the new meta power relations, capital has two pieces and gets two moves. Everyone else has access, as before, to only one piece and a single move. The power of new liberalism rests, then, upon a radical inequality: not just anyone is permitted to flaunt the rules. The breaking or changing of rules remains the revolutionary prerogative of capital. The nationalist perspective of politics cements the superior power of capital. This superiority, however, is essentially dependent on the state not following suit, on politics confining itself to the eternal carapace framed by the rules of national power relations. Who, then, is the counter-power and the counter-player to globalised capital?

We, the consumers, constitute the counter-power Fourth thesis

In the public consciousness of the West, the role of the counter-power to capital which shatters the rules falls not to the state, but instead to global civil society and its multiplicity of protagonists. Stated pointedly, we might say that the counter-power of global civil society rests on the figure of the political consumer. Not unlike the power of capital, this counterpower is a consequence of the power to say - always and everywhere - "no", to refuse to make a purchase. This weapon of non-purchasing cannot be delimited, whether spatially, temporally, or in terms of an object. It is, however, contingent upon the consumer's access to money, and upon the existence of an superfluity of available commodities and services among which consumers may choose.

Fatal for the interests of capital is the fact that there exists no strategy for counteracting the growing counter-power of the consumer. Even all-powerful global concerns lack the authority to fire consumers. For unlike workers, consumers do not belong to the firm. Even the extortionist threat of producing in a different country where consumers are still compliant is an utterly ineffectual instrument. Effectively networked and purposefully mobilized, the unaffiliated, free consumer can be organized transnationally and shaped into a lethal weapon.

Fifth Thesis There is no way forward that can avoid redefining state politics. No doubt, the representatives and protagonists of global civil society are indispensable in global meta power relations, especially for the implementation of cosmopolitan 80

values. To derive an abstract space of possibilities on the basis of state-based politics and to project this onto the cosmopolitan constellation, however, leads to a vast illusion. Namely that the contradictions, crises, and side-effects of the second "great transformation" now underway could be civilized by new bearers of hope, by engagement in the context of civil society, and moreover on a large scale. This figure of thought really belongs in the ancestral portrait gallery of the unpolitical.

Essential if we are to break out of the framework of nationalism in the context of political theory and action, then, is the distinction between sovereignty and autonomy. Nationalism rests on the equation of sovereignty with autonomy. From this point of view, economic dependency, cultural diversification, and military, legal, and technological cooperation between states lead automatically to a loss of autonomy and hence of sovereignty. If, on the other hand, sovereignty is measured by the degree to which a state is capable of solving its own particular national problems, then today's growing interdependency and collaboration - which is to say, a loss of autonomy - actually results in a gain of sovereignty.

For cosmopolitanism, this insight is central: a loss of formal autonomy and a gain of contentual sovereignty can be mutually reinforcing. Globalisation means both of these things: an increase of sovereignty by actors, for instance by virtue of the fact that via cooperation, networking, and interdependencies, they are able to acquire the capacity for action across great distances, thereby gaining access to new options—while the flipside of these developments is that entire countries lose their autonomy. The contentual sovereignty of (collective and individual) actors is enhanced to the degree that formal autonomy is reduced. In other words: proceeding now in the wake of political globalisation is the transformation of autonomy on the basis of national exclusion to sovereignty on the basis of transnational inclusion.

A state towards which the nation is indifferent Sixth thesis

A political response to globalisation is the "cosmopolitan state" which opened itself up to the world. This state does not arise through the dissolution or supersession of the national state, but instead through its inner transformation, through "internal globalisation". The legal, political, and economic potentialities found at the national and local levels are reconfigured and opened up. This hermaphroditic creature - simultaneously a cosmopolitan and a national state - does not delimit itself nationalistically against other nations. Instead, it develops a network on the basis of mutual recognition of otherness and of equality among difference in order to solve transnational problems. Meanwhile, sovereignty is expanded in order to solve national problems. The concept of the cosmopolitan state is based on the principle of national indifference towards the state. It makes possible the side-by-side existence of various national identities by means of the principle of constitutional tolerance within and of cosmopolitan 81

rights without.

In the wake of the Treaty of Wesphalia in 1648, the civil war of the 16th century - which had been shaped by religion - was concluded via the separation of the state from religion. Quite similarly (and this is my thesis), the national world (civil) wars of the 20th century could be concluded by the separation of state from nation. Just as it was a non-religious state which made the simultaneous practice of various religions possible for the first time, the network of cosmopolitan states must guarantee the side-by-side existence of national and ethnic identities through the principle of constitutional tolerance. Just as Christian theology had to be repressed at the start of the Modern Period in Europe, the political sphere of action must be opened up today anew by taming nationalist theology. Just as this possibility was totally excluded in the mid-16th century from a theological perspective, and was even equated with the end of the world, change is absolutely unthinkable today for the "theologians of nationalism", for it constitutes a break with the ostensibly constitutive fundamental concept of the political as such: the friend-foe schema.

A historical example of this is the European Union. Through the political art of creating interdependencies, enemies have been successfully converted into neighbours. Chained to one another with the "golden handcuffs" of national advantage, the member states must continually re-establish mutual recognition and equality via contestation. To characterize the European Union in this sense as a cosmopolitan federation of states which cooperates in order to tame economic globalization while ensuring recognition of the otherness of the Other (meaning the European co-nations, but also Europe's neighbours worldwide): this might well be a thoroughly realistic description, albeit to some extent a utopian one.

The theory and concept of the cosmopolitan state must be distinguished from three positions: from the illusion of the autonomous national state; from the neoliberal notion of a minimal, deregulated economic state; and finally, from the irreal seductions of a unified global government, one whose concentrated power render it invincible.

Convert walls into bridges! Seventh thesis

The following objection is in the air of late. For a long time now, we have been hearing a lot about cultural relativism, multiculturalism, tolerance, internationalism - and ad nauseum - globalisation and globality. Doesn't the concept of cosmopolitanism simply mean filling new bottles with old wine? And might it not even be a question of new bottles too, since the term has been in use ever since the Stoics of Ancient Greece, not to mention Emmanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Carl Jaspers?

To this, I would reply: my theory of the "cosmopolitan perspective" describes different realities, and it is constructed differently. All of the above ideas are based on the premise of difference, of alienation, of the strangeness of the Other. Multiculturalism, for example, means that various ethnic groups live side by side within a single state. While tolerance means acceptance, even when it goes against the grain, putting up with difference as an unavoidable burden. Cosmopolitan tolerance, on the other hand, is more than that. It is neither defensive nor passive, but instead active: it means opening oneself up to the world of the Other, perceiving difference as an enrichment, regarding and treating the Other as fundamentally equal. Cosmopolitanism, then, absolutely does not mean uniformity or homogenization. Individuals, groups, communities, political organizations, cultures, and civilizations wish to and should remain diverse, perhaps even unique. But to put it metaphorically: the walls between them must be replaced by bridges. Most importantly of all, such bridges must be erected in human minds, mentalities, and imaginations (the "cosmopolitan vision"), but also within nations and localities ("interior globalisation"), in systems of norms (human rights), in institutions (the European Union, for instance), as well as within "global domestic politics" which search for answers to transnational problems (for example energy policies, sustainable development, the struggle against global warming, the battle against terrorism).

This article orgininally appeared in German in the November 2007 edition of Literaturen.

Ulrich Beck teaches sociology at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has authored a trilogy of volumes on the New Cosmopolitanism: Power in the Global Age: A New Political Economy (2002/2006); Cosmopolitan Vision (2004/2006); World Risk Society: On the Search for Lost Security (2007).

Case Study: The Intervention

Backgrounder:

1) Rwanda: The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda's minority Tutsis and the moderates of its Hutu majority. Over the course of approximately 100 days from April 6 until mid July, at least 500,000 Tutsis and thousands of Hutus were killed during the genocide . Most estimates are of a death toll nearer the 800,000 and 1,000,000 marks. The UN's neglect and unwillingness to recognise a it as a Genocide, under comprehensive media coverage, drew severe criticism. France, Belgium, and the United States in particular, still receive negative attention for their complacency towards the Hutu regime's activities and the potential for UNAMIR to save Rwandan lives.

2) Kosovo: Inter-ethnic tensions continued to worsen in Kosovo throughout the 1980s. In 1989, Milošević, employing a mix of intimidation and political maneuvering, drastically reduced Kosovo's special autonomous status within Serbia and started cultural oppression of the ethnic Albanian population. While the situation in Kosovo remained largely unaddressed by the international community, the Kosovo Liberation Army, an ethnic Albanian guerrilla group, by 1996 had started offering armed resistence, resulting in early stages of the Kosovo War. The Račak massacre in January 1999 brought new international attention to the conflict. NATO intervention between March 24 and June 10, 1999, aimed to force Milošević to withdraw his forces from Kosovo, combined with continued skirmishes between Albanian guerrillas and Yugoslav forces resulted in a further massive displacement of population in Kosovo. Roughly a million ethnic Albanians fled or were forcefully driven from Kosovo. Altogether, more than 11,000 deaths have been reported. Some 3,000 people are still missing. By June Milošević had agreed to a foreign military presence within Kosovo and withdrawal of his troops. On June 10, 1999, the UN Security Council placed Kosovo under transitional UN administration and Secretary-General Kofi Annan avoided a Security Council Veto by lobbying President Clinton for a NATO-led peacekeeping force. Resolution 1244 provided that Kosovo would have autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and affirmed the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia, which has been legally succeeded by the Republic of Serbia. Some 200,000-280,000, the majority of the Serb population, left when the Serbian forces left. There was also some looting of Serb properties and even violence against some of those Serbs and Roma who remained. The current number of internally displaced persons is estimated from 65,000 to 250,000. Many displaced Serbs are afraid to return to their homes, even with UNMIK protection. Around 120,000-150,000 Serbs remain in Kosovo.

3) Darfur: A military conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan began in 2003. Unlike the Second Sudanese Civil War, the current lines of conflict are seen to be ethnic and tribal, rather than religious. The combination of decades of drought, desertification, and overpopulation are among the causes of the Darfur conflict. The United Nations estimates that the conflict has left as many as 400,000 dead from violence and disease. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that 100,000 have died each year because of government attacks. Most non-governmental organizations use 200,000 to more than 400,000; the latter is a figure from the Coalition for International Justice. Sudan's government claims that over 9,000 people have been killed, although this figure is seen as a gross underestimate.[8][9] As many as 2.5 million are thought to have been displaced as of October 2006 The Sudanese government has suppressed information by jailing and killing witnesses since 2004 and tampered with evidence such as mass graves to eliminate their forensic values In addition, by obstructing and arresting journalists, the Sudanese government has been able to obscure much of what has gone on. The United States government has described it as genocide, although the UN has stated it is not genocide. In March 2007 the UN mission accused Sudan's government of orchestrating and taking part in "gross violations" in Darfur and called for urgent international action to protect civilians there.

4) Zimbabwe: President George W. Bush, who backs U.N. sanctions against Zimbabwe, urged the international community on July 7, 2008 to come together on ways to punish its president, Robert Mugabe, who is accused of using violence to win votes and quash his political opposition. At the Group of Eight summit of industrialized nations, Bush said he is "extremely disappointed" in Zimbabwe's violence-marred presidential election. International observers say the June 27 runoff election that kept Mugabe in power was illegitimate. "You know I care deeply about the people of Zimbabwe," Bush said. "I'm extremely disappointed in the elections, which I labeled a sham election." Bush and the other G-8 leaders met with leaders of seven African nations on the sidelines of the summit to discuss the wealthy nations' aid to the continent, but the situation in Zimbabwe also was high on their agenda. African nations are deeply divided, with many reluctant to put public pressure on Mugabe despite U.N. and Western calls for tough action. There was talk about sanctions and the prospects for a power-sharing arrangement in Zimbabwe, but no consensus was reached on what to do.

A) For each of the above scenarios your group should briefly consider some of the following questions:

1) How do these events impact the citizens of our country?

2) How do these events impact you personally?

3) How well did the nations of the world respond to these events?

4) What non-military options might have been used to intervene?

______

B) Closing Activity: For each of the four scenarios, we will conduct a

large group vote based upon these questions

Vote 1: Should an armed international peacekeeping force have been

sent?

Vote 2: Should the United States act unilaterally if not coalition force

is authorized?

Discussion Questions:

1. What did you learn form this exercise?

2. How does this relate to the challenges of global collective action?

3. How does this relate to the promise (potential) of One World? 86

The Ten Dollar Tee Shirt (optional reading)

The reading is based upon excerpts from The Travels of a T-Shirt in the global Economy by Pieira Rivoli

Introduction This case study started out as a simple test of consumer buying power that asked you to consider whether you would buy products preferentially based upon their country of origin. It turns out that for some products it may not be so simple after all. Consider the case of a ten dollar tee shirt that is “made” in China:

The world’s first factories were textile factories-launched the industrial revolution in 18th century Britain. For the first time, the poor could dress attractively. A consumer class was born. From 1815 to 1860 cotton constituted approximately half of the value of all U.S. exports and more than 70% was exported to England. Early American cotton production took place mostly on slave plantations. These slave plantations produced most of the world’s cotton by 1860. America’s early dominance of the cotton industry illustrate that commercial success can be achieved through moral failure, an observation especially relevant for T-shirts, which critics allege are produced under sweatshop conditions not far removed from slavery. The tactic of suppressing and avoiding markets rather than competing in them continues today to be a viable business strategy. This ability to suppress and avoid competition is often the result of a power imbalance between rich and poor, an imbalance that persists in world cotton agriculture today. While slavery played a large role early on in our country, the systems of governace (public policy, property rights, etc.) were in place to support large scale cotton production, even after slavery was abolished. Sharecroppers and tenant farmers had little hope of climbing out of a subsistence living when cotton growers in the south borrowed an idea from the north, the company town. Today, the area around Lubbock Texas is the hub of cotton production in the U.S. competing with cotton farms from over 70 countries. One thousand acres can produce about 500,000 pounds of cotton lint, enough for 1.3 million tee shirts. All dominance in world markets in temporary. In a baby boomers lifetime, preeminence in consumer electronics has shifted from the US to Japan to Hong Kong to Taiwan to China. Apparel production has moved form the American south to Southeast Asia to the Caribbean and back to Asia. Advantages in steel have moved from the U.S. Rust belt to Japan to South Korea. But for 200 years, the U.S. has been the undisputed leader in the global cotton industry in almost every way that can be measured, and other countries, particularly poor ones, have little chance of catching up. Our labor costs have toppled industries in this country as diverse as apparel, steel, and shipbuilding, but not cotton. Subsidies play a big part but subsidies alone do not explain our dominance. In the U.S., the farms work, the market works, the government works, the universities work, and all create a virtuous circle. The Lubbock area benefits from a highly symbiotic relationship between 87 farmers, private companies, universities, and the U.S. government. (This is what cotton growers in poorer countries are really competing with. Cotton farmers in almost all countries outside the U.S. still hand pick their crop.) Back in Lubbock, while in the past only a few gins served hundreds of cotton farmers who were at the mercy of the gin owners, today farmers own the gins cooperatively and augment their income with dividend checks from the gin. From 1900 to 1990 the number of U.S. gins fell from 20214 to 1,513 but the capacity of each gin has risen by a factor of 30. A large farm can produce 22,000 pounds of cotton from which about 5,300 pounds is the white lint that will be turned into about 13,500 T-shirts. About 9,000 pounds of bolls, stems, and leaves will have molasses added to become cattle feed and is trucked a few miles away. Some seed is kept for next year’s planting and some is plowed into the ground as fertilizer. About 16% of the seed’s weight is oil. The biggest buyer of cottonseed oil in the world is Frito-Lay. U.S. cotton farmers have wielded significant political power. On a per acre basis, subsidies paid to U.S. cotton farmers are 5-10 times as high as those for corn, soybeans, and wheat. Under the 2002 Farm Bill, cotton farmers receive a direct payment of 6.66 cents per pound of cotton. U.S. cotton farmers are also guaranteed a minimum payment of 72.24 cents per pound, almost double the world market price. West African cotton farmers outnumber U.S. farmers 18 million to 25,000 and can produce cotton at a far lower cost than Texas growers, but U.S. government subsides insure dominance of the market. While U.S. cotton farmers are embedded in a system that protects and enriches them, cotton farmers in West Africa are embedded in a system that eposes and impoverishes them. The state controls seed and fertilizer distribution to farmers who are, virtually all of them, illiterate. They often send their children barefoot down the rows with toxic chemicals and prepare food with the same implements that are used to spread poison. West African farmers receive 25 cents per pound while U.S. growers receive 72 cents per pound. In 2001 500 cotton farmers in the Andra Predesh region of India committed suicide as worms ate the last of their cotton. The farmers could hear the worms chomping, with a sickening sound that kept the villagers awake all night. Dealers had “furnished” the farmers with pesticides at 36 percent interest, but it was the wrong pesticide with the wrong directions, and the farmers couldn’t read anyway. Useless on the worms, it worked quickly as a poison as hundreds of farmers dropped twitching in the middle of the cotton fields. China is the largest buyer of U.S. cotton and consumes nearly one-third of the world’s cotton production. Demand by Americans for cheap clothing from China leads to demand from China for U.S. cotton. It takes a third of a pound of cotton lint to produce a tee shirt, maybe fifteen cents worth, so an acre of West Texas farmland can produce about 1,200 tee shirts a year. U.S. cotton shipped to China is spun into yarn, knitted into cloth, cut into pieces, and finally sewn into a tee shirt. A made in china label is sewn in and it is shipped back to the America. In 2000 one factory alone, Shanghai Knitwear, shipped about 2.5 million T-shirts to the U.S. at a price of approximately $13 per dozen. Today, China dominates the 88

global textile and apparel industries. Americans purchase nearly 1 billion garments made in China each year, four for every U.S. citizen. In The Race to the Bottom, Alan Tonelson argues that the enormous surplus of labor in China imperils workers worldwide as international competition puts incessant downward pressure on wages and working conditions, leading the apparel and textile industries to favor the cheapest and most Draconian producers. The National Labor Committee found that the apparel workers in China were: “young women forced to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day, earning as little as 12 to 18 cents an hour with no benefits, housed in cramped, dirty rooms, fed on thin rice gruel, stripped of their legal rights, under constant surveillance and intimidation-really just one step from indentured servitude…” Critics argue that cheap t-shirts from China are a victory for U.S. consumers and corporate profits, but a failure for humanity. Others argue that while generations of mill girls and seamstresses from Europe, America, and Asia are bound together by this common sweatshop experience – controlled, exploited, overworked and under paid – they are also bound together in the knowledge that it still beats life on the farm. Factory works has provided not only a step up the economic ladder and an escape from the physical and mental drudgery of the farm, but also a first taste of autonomy and self determination, and a set of choices made possible by a paycheck, however small. The irony of course, is that the suffocating labor practices in textile and apparel production, the curfews, the locked dormitories, the timed bathroom visits and the production quotas, the forced church attendance and the high fences – all of the factories throughout industrial history designed to control young women – were at the same time part of the women’s economic liberation and autonomy. Today’s globalization activists identify the multinationals pursuit of profit and free trade as the enemy of the poor and powerless, a greedy force to be stopped and never trusted. The business community, in turn, scornfully dismisses the activists as a lunatic fringe, a ragtag bunch of ill-informed obstructionists, blocking the only path available out of poverty. At first lone lunatics, and then mainstream citizens, and finally law making bodies, were gradually successful in implementing protections for children from factory work and fostering the nearly universal view that children belong in school. Likewise, a job in textiles and apparel, however unpleasant, no longer presents appreciable risk of death or maiming (Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of N.Y.C. in 1911 killed 146 people on a building with no alarms, no sprinklers, and no fire escapes). OSHA style-cotton dust standards, minimum wages, and working hour restrictions have been adopted in virtually all textile and apparel producing countries. Free market advocates would say may the best T-shirt win. But 5000 textile workers in Kannapolis, N.C. lost their jobs in a single day in 2003. Many feel they should not have to compete with Chinese factories paying their workers 50 cents an hour. The politics of protectionism are hard to resist. Quotas are not sure-fire solutions. Billions of dollars of clothing made in China is labeled as if from another country. If a T-shirt is sewn in China from fabric pieces that were cut in 89

Hong Kong but knit in Malaysia from yarn that was spun in the United States, where is the T-shirt from? The general rule is that stitching determines where it is from. Trade barriers, many argue are not the solution. The compensation principle argues that taxing the millions who benefit from chap clothing can be used to compensate those who have lost their jobs in the race to the bottom. Professor Rivoli argues that the poor suffer more from exclusion from politics than from the perils of the market, and that we should focus on including people in politics rather than shielding them from markets. 90

Session Five

Theme: Justifying Action by Intervention in the Affairs of Other Nation States and by the Coordinated Power of Consumer Choice

Advance reading: Ulrich Beck article, Intervention case study. Optional: “Travels of a Tee Shirt” excerpts

Discussion:

D. Welcome back and group “housekeeping” (5 minutes) E. Current events and “AHA” moments check-in (20 minutes) F. Facilitator leads the Intervention Case Study. The participants should discuss their opinions in preparation to vote on the following two questions for each of the 4 cases: (30) • Should the world community intervene? • Upon failure of the world community to intervene, should the United States intervene unilaterally?

E. Reactions to Beck reading 10. Do you agree with Beck’s assertion that there is an internal globalization occurring that is altering the construct of social identity? “Us” and “Them”? 91

11. “We forgive the crusaders and await the investors” - Means of coercion is not the threat of invasion – but of non-investment! 12. The threat of declining to invest in a particular country? 13. Multi-national corporations replaces military bases 14. Globalization: The organized absence of responsibility? 15. Have the rules of global power really changed? Where are we? 16. Is there an opportunity to transform the rules from win/lose/or lose/lose to win/win? 17. Are consumers the counterbalance to globalized capital? 18. Do you use the weapon of non-purchasing? Can it be organized? Can it be organized trans-nationally?

G. H.W. • Read “Moving from Talk to Action” • Do: Action Planner In the time between sessions, fill out the action plan. Be prepared to present and discuss at final session

H. Reflections (5 minutes)

I. Unstructured Social Time

Case Study: The Fifty-Dollar Tent

For the purposes of this case study please imagine that everyone in the room represents the entire global economy. You are a “country” unto yourself. Some of us, as in real life, are wealthier than others.

Your first decision is an individual one. Please write your answer on the index card provided and also write a short explanation for your choice.

Given only the information provided and that the quality and size of the tent will be the same in each choice, which tent would you purchase?

____A tent made in China that cost $50

____A tent made in Haiti that cost $55

____A tent made in New Orleans that cost $60

____A tent made in upstate New York that cost $65

Everyone should, in turn, display their index card and explain the reasons (criteria) for their choice.

Having heard all answers, has anyone changed their mind?

Small group work: each group will have five minutes to agree on a tent to buy… followed by large group report-out.

Now: All groups will have 5 minutes to come to agreement on what tent to buy…. followed by large group discussion. 93

Moving From Talk to Action

Study circles, book clubs and discussion groups are wonderful resources for our education and personal growth, but they only go so far. Leo Buscaglia wrote of a Sufi teacher who once told him, “To know, and not yet to do, is not to know”. I’ve always tried to carry that with me. Learning about One World and cosmopolitanism can be a transformative experience on a personal level. I know it was for me, but the question remains, what do we do with the transformation? We can push away from the study circle table and say “that was wonderful” and go back to our busy lives like the recipient of a good sermon. We can, instead, internalize the experience to the point that we truly are transformed in thought and in word, and in deed.

My father taught me that the easiest promises in the world to break are the ones we make to ourselves. I think sometimes it’s like that with the many good causes like One World that we bump into on life’s journey. We know it’s a good thing, we ought to do more and we promise ourselves we will, but hey we’re busy… and someone else will get it done. Ah, human nature, it’s a fascinating thing, even on a global scale.

Campbell Craig talked about the same problem in The Resurgent Idea of World Government (Ethics and International Affairs, Volume 22.2 Summer, 2008): “Political scientists refer to this quandary as the "collective action problem," by which they mean the dilemma that emerges when several actors have an interest in eradicating a problem that harms all of them, but when each would prefer that someone else do the dirty work of solving it. If everyone benefits more or less equally from the problem's solution, but only the actor that addresses it pays the costs, then all are likely to want a "free ride" on the other's efforts. The result is that no one tackles the problem, and everyone suffers.” You said it Campbell! Surely, I can’t be the only one who sees the irony here. As an educational foundation dedicated to creating change on a global scale, we have a “collective action problem” of our own. 94

So what’s to be done? It seems to me we’ll solve the global collective action problem when nations and their leaders step up and actually lead. When the recognition dawns that climate change and nuclear proliferation cannot be solved by any one nation acting alone. With NGO’s and foundations like ours, we’ll solve the collective action problem when enough of us solve our individual action problems, when we step forward and decide that One World won’t just happen. It will happen when enough of us truly believe that one person really can make a difference, and realize that person is looking back at us in the mirror each morning. So what can you do? What should you do? Sure, you can write a check. Maybe that extra million or two you’ve got laying around causing accounting problems. I know we could buy a lot of One World bumper stickers with it, and we really could use it. But no one is passing the plate. We’re interested in something more precious to us than your money. To borrow a line form Harvey Milk, I’m Jack Zaccara and I’m here to recruit you! More precious to or fledgling cause than any check you could write us is your time and your talent. Just as it would be wrong for me to tell someone how much money to give, I cannot tell you how much of yourself to give. That’s really up to you, but I can ask; how much have you got?

Let’s separate them out, time and talent that is. Isn’t it amazing how little time we seem to have? I thought all this technology was supposed to free us up to sit around thinking big thoughts and eating grapes? Instead, many of us, me included, are losing the quest for work-life balance. Trust me, I get it, but it’s a battle. Even my friends who are really retired complain they don’t know how they did it all when they had to work. So time is an issue. But the real issue is that we’re running our lives by the clock instead of the compass. We’re busy, Stephen Covey would warn us, but are we effective? Are we doing what really matters? We, and I do mean we, need to refocus weekly on our true-

north. Are we so busy being busy that the important becomes victim to the immediate? I can choose to sit here at this desk and field e-mails all day, or I can push away once in a while and doing something really important, something little that contributes to something larger than myself.. Can you find enough time to join a book club, or a Peace Circle? Start a study circle? Take two minutes to send out the next study circle announcement to everyone you know, maybe open your home to family and friends and host a study circle of your own (we’ll help I promise!)? We can and we should make time for ourselves, our families, our friends, and our community. But remember how One-Worlders define community. We could use a little of that time.

Talent, I said we want some of your time and some of your talent. So let’s talk about talent. My talents are pretty narrow, really. I can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t play and instrument, can’t…well let’s just say this list could go awhile. If I choose to focus on all those things I can’t do, I might really throw up my hands in despair. Instead, I can use what meager gifts I have to make a difference. I can learn, and I can teach others what I’ve learned. I can stand up for what I believe in, even when others laugh at the dreamer or sneer suspiciously at the idealism. I can summon the courage to overcome the inherent introvert in me and I can find my voice, but that’s me. What are your gifts? Come on, don’t be modest. This is where it gets real creative! Cooking? Hold a One World dinner party for potential recruits. Writing? What are you waiting for? Look, this is not rocket science. There is something each of us can do, perhaps many things. You might be the person makes that tosses the stone that creates the ripple that leads to One World. Unless you put in your piece to the puzzle, it may forever remain unsolved. We want you… and we need you.

Jack

I’m only one person, what can I do?

1. Attend bi-monthly meetings 2. Read more on One World 3. Stay attentive to world events 4. Host a study circle 5. Attend a peace circle 6. Host a peace circle 7. Become a peacemaker 8. Write letters to newspapers 9. Write letters to politicians 10. Write letters to magazines 11. Call Oprah 12. Donate money 13. Volunteer your time 14. Write a book 15. Talk it up! 16. Demonstrate 17. Help start a school club 18. Refer friends 19. Refer family 20. Refer coworkers 21. Refer neighbors 22. Become a facilitator 23. Hook us up with other organizations 24. Research for us 25. Typing & office work 26. Translate readings for us 27. Donate materials

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28. Model global citizenship for others 29. Check the oneworlduv.org website often 30. Send others to the website 31. Teach my children, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren 32. Look for music, art, literature that is one world material 33. Create music, art, or literature that is one world in nature 34. Be Optimistic 35. Call into radio talk shows 36. Create U tube video 37. Follow oneworlder@twitter .com 38. Start a One World poster, art, or writing contest at schools 39. Use your special talent for One World 40. Be more creative that this list and come up with ideas of your own, then share them.

The point is we can all do something… What will you do?

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Session Five Action Plan

An action step is one concrete action that could be taken to, in any way great or small, move the idea of One World forward. Please make your action steps as specific and realistic as possible.

Please do not worry if you do not come up with 5 suggestions for every question. Just know that we value your ideas and the time you have out into this process.

I. Can you suggest action steps that the One World United and Virtuous educational foundation might take?

1.______

2.______

3.______

4.______

5.______

II. Please suggest action steps that can be achieved by a small group of people working together. For example, what might be done by some or all of the members of this study group or combined study groups?

1.______

2.______

3.______

4.______

5.______

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III. Please suggest action steps that you can take to move the idea of One World forward.

1.______

2.______

3.______

4.______

5.______

Any other ideas to share?

Please be sure to bring this action planner to our final meeting.

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Session Six: Moving From Talk to Action

Theme: Study Circle Members Take Action

Advance reading: Read Moving from Talk to Action, Complete Action Plan

Discussion:

E. Quick check-in and group “housekeeping” (admin/scheduling issues, if any) ( 5 minutes)

F. Reactions to “moving from Talk to Action

G. The Power of One (20 minutes) • Do you believe that one person can make a difference in the world? • Can you give some examples? • Do you believe that you can make a difference in the world? • How can this organization make a difference? • How can the people at this table work together to make a difference? • What are you willing to do?

H. Group members report on their action items and receive feedback from other members and facilitator. (60 minutes)

C. Facilitator leads discussion on Next Steps for One World United & Virtuous, things already planned for the immediate future, brainstorming with members, interaction between individual action plans and One World activities. (30 minutes)

D. The facilitator should collect all action plans and promise to email a summary to the group. Participants should be invited to the next bi-monthly meeting of One World United & Virtuous (5 minutes).

F. Closure

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Supplemental Readings

And now for a world government

By Gideon Rachman Published: December 9 2008 02:00 | Last updated: December 9 2008 02:00

I have never believed that there is a secret United Nations plot to take over the US. I have never seen black helicopters hovering in the sky above Montana. But, for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible.

A "world government" would involve much more than co-operation between nations. It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. The European Union has already set up a continental government for 27 countries, which could be a model. The EU has a supreme court, a currency, thousands of pages of law, a large civil service and the ability to deploy military force.

So could the European model go global? There are three reasons for thinking that it might.

First, it is increasingly clear that the most difficult issues facing national governments are international in nature: there is global warming, a global financial crisis and a "global war on terror".

Second, it could be done. The transport and communications revolutions have shrunk the world so that, as Geoffrey Blainey, an eminent Australian historian, has written: "For the first time in human history, world government of some sort is now possible." Mr Blainey foresees an attempt to form a world government at some point in the next two centuries, which is an unusually long time horizon for the average newspaper column.

But - the third point - a change in the political atmosphere suggests that "global governance" could come much sooner than that. The financial crisis and climate change are pushing national governments towards global solutions, even in countries such as China and the US that are traditionally fierce guardians of national sovereignty.

Barack Obama, America's president-in-waiting, does not share the Bush administration's disdain for international agreements and treaties. In his book,

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The Audacity of Hope , he argued that: "When the world's sole superpower willingly restrains its power and abides by internationally agreed-upon standards of conduct, it sends a message that these are rules worth following." The importance that Mr Obama attaches to the UN is shown by the fact that he has appointed Susan Rice, one of his closest aides, as America's ambassador to the UN, and given her a seat in the cabinet.

A taste of the ideas doing the rounds in Obama circles is offered by a recent report from the Managing Global Insecurity project, whose small US advisory group includes John Podesta, the man heading Mr Obama's transition team and Strobe Talbott, the president of the Brookings Institution, from which Ms Rice has just emerged.

The MGI report argues for the creation of a UN high commissioner for counter- terrorist activity, a legally binding climate-change agreement negotiated under the auspices of the UN and the creation of a 50,000-strong UN peacekeeping force. Once countries had pledged troops to this reserve army, the UN would have first call upon them.

These are the kind of ideas that get people reaching for their rifles in America's talk-radio heartland. Aware of the political sensitivity of its ideas, the MGI report opts for soothing language. It emphasises the need for American leadership and uses the term, "responsible sovereignty" - when calling for international cooperation - rather than the more radical-sounding phrase favoured in Europe, "shared sovereignty". It also talks about "global governance" rather than world government.

But some European thinkers think that they recognise what is going on. Jacques Attali, an adviser to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, argues that: "Global governance is just a euphemism for global government." As far as he is concerned, some form of global government cannot come too soon. Mr Attali believes that the "core of the international financial crisis is that we have global financial markets and no global rule of law".

So, it seems, everything is in place. For the first time since homo sapiens began to doodle on cave walls, there is an argument, an opportunity and a means to make serious steps towards a world government.

But let us not get carried away. While it seems feasible that some sort of world government might emerge over the next century, any push for "global governance" in the here and now will be a painful, slow process.

There are good and bad reasons for this. The bad reason is a lack of will and determination on the part of national, political leaders who - while they might

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like to talk about "a planet in peril" - are ultimately still much more focused on their next election, at home.

But this "problem" also hints at a more welcome reason why making progress on global governance will be slow sledding. Even in the EU - the heartland of law- based international government - the idea remains unpopular. The EU has suffered a series of humiliating defeats in referendums, when plans for "ever closer union" have been referred to the voters. In general, the Union has progressed fastest when far-reaching deals have been agreed by technocrats and politicians - and then pushed through without direct reference to the voters. International governance tends to be effective, only when it is anti-democratic.

The world's most pressing political problems may indeed be international in nature, but the average citizen's political identity remains stubbornly local. Until somebody cracks this problem, that plan for world government may have to stay locked away in a safe at the UN.

Published on Bahai Faith | Baha'i Faith (http://www.bahai.us/) The Destiny of America and the Promise of World Peace A statement issued by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States in December 2001 as a response to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. It first appeared as a full-page statement in The New York Times on December 21, 2001 and was subsequently reprinted in dozens of other newspapers around the country. At this time of world turmoil, the United States Baha’i community offers a perspective on the destiny of America as the promoter of world peace. More than a hundred years ago, Baha’u’llah, the founder of the Baha’i Faith, addressing heads of state, proclaimed that the age of maturity for the entire human race had come. The unity of humankind was now to be established as the foundation of the great peace that would mark the highest stage in humanity’s spiritual and social evolution. Revolutionary and world-shaking changes were therefore inevitable. The Baha’i writings state:

"The world is moving on. Its events are unfolding ominously and with bewildering rapidity. The whirlwind of its passions is swift and alarmingly violent. The New World is insensibly drawn into its vortex….Dangers, undreamt of and unpredictable, threaten it both from within and from without. Its governments and peoples are being gradually enmeshed in the coils of the world’s recurrent crises and fierce controversies….The world is contracting into a neighborhood. America, willingly or unwillingly, must face and grapple with this new situation. For purposes of national security, let alone any humanitarian One World United & Virtuous 55 Hillandale Rd Rye Brook, NY 10573 914-621-6252 www.oneworlduv.org

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motive, she must assume the obligations imposed by this newly created neighborhood. Paradoxical as it may seem, her only hope of extricating herself from the perils gathering around her is to become entangled in that very web of international association which the Hand of an inscrutable Providence is weaving."

The American nation, Baha’is believe, will evolve through tests and trials to become a land of spiritual distinction and leadership, a champion of justice and unity among all peoples and nations, and a powerful servant of the cause of everlasting peace. This is the peace promised by God in the sacred texts of the world’s religions. Establishing peace is not simply a matter of signing treaties and protocols; it is a complex task requiring a new level of commitment to resolving issues not customarily associated with the pursuit of peace. Universal acceptance of the spiritual principle of the oneness of humankind is essential to any successful attempt to establish world peace. Racism, one of the most baneful and persistent evils, is a major barrier to peace. The emancipation of women, the achievement of full equality of the sexes, is one of the most important, though less acknowledged, prerequisites of peace. The inordinate disparity between rich and poor keeps the world in a state of instability, preventing the achievement of peace. Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a whole. Religious strife, the cause of innumerable wars and conflicts throughout history, is a major obstacle to progress. The challenge facing the world’s religious leaders is to contemplate, with hearts filled with compassion and the desire for truth, the plight of humanity, and to ask themselves whether they cannot, in humility before their God, submerge their theological differences in a great spirit of mutual forbearance that will enable them to work together for the advancement of human understanding and peace. Baha’is pray, “May this American Democracy be the first nation to establish the foundation of international agreement. May it be the first nation to proclaim the unity of mankind. May it be the first to unfurl the standard of the Most Great Peace.” During this hour of crisis, we affirm our abiding faith in the destiny of America. We know that the road to its destiny is long, thorny and tortuous, but we are confident that America will emerge from her trials undivided and undefeatable. National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States

Source URL: http://www.bahai.us/destiny-of-america

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OBAMA SPEECH TRANSCRIPT: Remarks of Senator Barack Obama (as prepared for delivery) "A World that Stands as One" July 24th, 2008 Berlin, Germany Thank you to the citizens of Berlin and to the people of Germany. Let me thank Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Steinmeier for welcoming me earlier today. Thank you Mayor Wowereit, the Berlin Senate, the police, and most of all thank you for this welcome. I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen - a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world. I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city. The journey that led me here is improbable. My mother was born in the heartland of America, but my father grew up herding goats in Kenya. His father - my grandfather - was a cook, a domestic servant to the British. At the height of the Cold War, my father decided, like so many others in the forgotten corners of the world, that his yearning - his dream - required the freedom and opportunity promised by the West. And so he wrote letter after letter to universities all across America until somebody, somewhere answered his prayer for a better life. That is why I'm here. And you are here because you too know that yearning. This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom. And you know that the only reason we stand here tonight is because men and women from both of our nations came together to work, and struggle, and sacrifice for that better life. Ours is a partnership that truly began sixty years ago this summer, on the day when the first American plane touched down at Templehof. On that day, much of this continent still lay in ruin. The rubble of this city had yet to be built into a wall. The Soviet shadow had swept across Eastern Europe, while in the West,

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America, Britain, and France took stock of their losses, and pondered how the world might be remade. This is where the two sides met. And on the twenty-fourth of June, 1948, the Communists chose to blockade the western part of the city. They cut off food and supplies to more than two million Germans in an effort to extinguish the last flame of freedom in Berlin. The size of our forces was no match for the much larger Soviet Army. And yet retreat would have allowed Communism to march across Europe. Where the last war had ended, another World War could have easily begun. All that stood in the way was Berlin. And that's when the airlift began - when the largest and most unlikely rescue in history brought food and hope to the people of this city. The odds were stacked against success. In the winter, a heavy fog filled the sky above, and many planes were forced to turn back without dropping off the needed supplies. The streets where we stand were filled with hungry families who had no comfort from the cold. But in the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning. The people of Berlin refused to give up. And on one fall day, hundreds of thousands of Berliners came here, to the Tiergarten, and heard the city's mayor implore the world not to give up on freedom. "There is only one possibility," he said. "For us to stand together united until this battle is won...The people of Berlin have spoken. We have done our duty, and we will keep on doing our duty. People of the world: now do your duty...People of the world, look at Berlin!" People of the world - look at Berlin! Look at Berlin, where Germans and Americans learned to work together and trust each other less than three years after facing each other on the field of battle. Look at Berlin, where the determination of a people met the generosity of the Marshall Plan and created a German miracle; where a victory over tyranny gave rise to NATO, the greatest alliance ever formed to defend our common security. Look at Berlin, where the bullet holes in the buildings and the somber stones and pillars near the Brandenburg Gate insist that we never forget our common humanity. People of the world - look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one. Sixty years after the airlift, we are called upon again. History has led us to a new crossroad, with new promise and new peril. When you, the German people, tore down that wall - a wall that divided East and West; freedom and tyranny; fear and hope - walls came tumbling down around the world. From Kiev to Cape Town, prison camps were closed, and the doors of democracy were opened. Markets opened too, and the spread of information and technology reduced barriers to opportunity and prosperity. While the 20th century taught us that we share a common destiny, the 21st has revealed a world more intertwined than at any time in human history. The fall of the Berlin Wall brought new hope. But that very closeness has given rise to new dangers - dangers that cannot be contained within the borders of a country or by the distance of an ocean. The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.

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As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya. Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow. The genocide in Darfur shames the conscience of us all. In this new world, such dangerous currents have swept along faster than our efforts to contain them. That is why we cannot afford to be divided. No one nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone. None of us can deny these threats, or escape responsibility in meeting them. Yet, in the absence of Soviet tanks and a terrible wall, it has become easy to forget this truth. And if we're honest with each other, we know that sometimes, on both sides of the Atlantic, we have drifted apart, and forgotten our shared destiny. In Europe, the view that America is part of what has gone wrong in our world, rather than a force to help make it right, has become all too common. In America, there are voices that deride and deny the importance of Europe's role in our security and our future. Both views miss the truth - that Europeans today are bearing new burdens and taking more responsibility in critical parts of the world; and that just as American bases built in the last century still help to defend the security of this continent, so does our country still sacrifice greatly for freedom around the globe. Yes, there have been differences between America and Europe. No doubt, there will be differences in the future. But the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together. A change of leadership in Washington will not lift this burden. In this new century, Americans and Europeans alike will be required to do more - not less. Partnership and cooperation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity. That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another. The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down. We know they have fallen before. After centuries of strife, the people of Europe have formed a Union of promise and prosperity. Here, at the base of a column built to mark victory in war, we meet in the center of a Europe at peace. Not only have walls come down in Berlin, but they have come down in Belfast, where Protestant and Catholic found a way to live together; in the Balkans, where our Atlantic alliance ended wars and brought savage war criminals to justice; and in South Africa, where the struggle of a courageous people defeated apartheid. So history reminds us that walls can be torn down. But the task is never easy. True partnership and true progress requires constant work and sustained sacrifice. They require sharing the burdens of development and diplomacy; of progress and peace. They require allies who will listen to each other, learn from each other and, most of all, trust each other.

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That is why America cannot turn inward. That is why Europe cannot turn inward. America has no better partner than Europe. Now is the time to build new bridges across the globe as strong as the one that bound us across the Atlantic. Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century. It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads, and people to assemble where we stand today. And this is the moment when our nations - and all nations - must summon that spirit anew. This is the moment when we must defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it. This threat is real and we cannot shrink from our responsibility to combat it. If we could create NATO to face down the Soviet Union, we can join in a new and global partnership to dismantle the networks that have struck in Madrid and Amman; in London and Bali; in Washington and New York. If we could win a battle of ideas against the communists, we can stand with the vast majority of Muslims who reject the extremism that leads to hate instead of hope. This is the moment when we must renew our resolve to rout the terrorists who threaten our security in Afghanistan, and the traffickers who sell drugs on your streets. No one welcomes war. I recognize the enormous difficulties in Afghanistan. But my country and yours have a stake in seeing that NATO's first mission beyond Europe's borders is a success. For the people of Afghanistan, and for our shared security, the work must be done. America cannot do this alone. The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, to develop their economy, and to help them rebuild their nation. We have too much at stake to turn back now. This is the moment when we must renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love. With that wall gone, we need not stand idly by and watch the further spread of the deadly atom. It is time to secure all loose nuclear materials; to stop the spread of nuclear weapons; and to reduce the arsenals from another era. This is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons. This is the moment when every nation in Europe must have the chance to choose its own tomorrow free from the shadows of yesterday. In this century, we need a strong European Union that deepens the security and prosperity of this continent, while extending a hand abroad. In this century - in this city of all cities - we must reject the Cold War mind-set of the past, and resolve to work with Russia when we can, to stand up for our values when we must, and to seek a partnership that extends across this entire continent. This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably. Trade has been a cornerstone of our growth and global development. But we will not be able to sustain this growth if it favors the few, and not the many. Together, we must forge trade that truly rewards the work that creates wealth, with meaningful protections for our people and our planet. This is the moment for trade that is free and fair for all. This is the moment we must help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East. My country must stand with yours and with Europe in sending a direct message to Iran that it One World United & Virtuous 55 Hillandale Rd Rye Brook, NY 10573 914-621-6252 www.oneworlduv.org

109 must abandon its nuclear ambitions. We must support the Lebanese who have marched and bled for democracy, and the Israelis and Palestinians who seek a secure and lasting peace. And despite past differences, this is the moment when the world should support the millions of Iraqis who seek to rebuild their lives, even as we pass responsibility to the Iraqi government and finally bring this war to a close. This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands. Let us resolve that all nations - including my own - will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere. This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one. And this is the moment when we must give hope to those left behind in a globalized world. We must remember that the Cold War born in this city was not a battle for land or treasure. Sixty years ago, the planes that flew over Berlin did not drop bombs; instead they delivered food, and coal, and candy to grateful children. And in that show of solidarity, those pilots won more than a military victory. They won hearts and minds; love and loyalty and trust - not just from the people in this city, but from all those who heard the story of what they did here. Now the world will watch and remember what we do here - what we do with this moment. Will we extend our hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity; by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time? Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words "never again" in Darfur? Will we acknowledge that there is no more powerful example than the one each of our nations projects to the world? Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law? Will we welcome immigrants from different lands, and shun discrimination against those who don't look like us or worship like we do, and keep the promise of equality and opportunity for all of our people? People of Berlin - people of the world - this is our moment. This is our time. I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we've struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We've made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions. But I also know how much I love America. I know that for more than two centuries, we have strived - at great cost and great sacrifice - to form a more perfect union; to seek, with other nations, a more hopeful world. Our allegiance has never been to any particular tribe or kingdom - indeed, every language is spoken in our country; every culture has left its imprint on ours; every point of view is expressed in our public squares. What has always united us - what has always driven our people; what drew my father to America's shores - is a set of ideals that speak to aspirations shared by all people: that we can live free from fear and free from want; that we can speak our minds and assemble with whomever we choose and worship as we please. These are the aspirations that joined the fates of all nations in this city. These aspirations are bigger than anything that drives us apart. It is because of these aspirations that the One World United & Virtuous 55 Hillandale Rd Rye Brook, NY 10573 914-621-6252 www.oneworlduv.org

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airlift began. It is because of these aspirations that all free people - everywhere - became citizens of Berlin. It is in pursuit of these aspirations that a new generation - our generation - must make our mark on the world. People of Berlin - and people of the world - the scale of our challenge is great. The road ahead will be long. But I come before you to say that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. With an eye toward the future, with resolve in our hearts, let us remember this history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again.

Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and the nation's first African-American president Tuesday. This is a transcript of his prepared speech.

In his speech Tuesday, President Obama said America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

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My fellow citizens:

I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often, the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebearers, and true to our founding documents.

So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans. One World United & Virtuous 55 Hillandale Rd Rye Brook, NY 10573 914-621-6252 www.oneworlduv.org

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That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land -- a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America: They will be met.

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the fainthearted -- for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path toward prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

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For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again, these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions -- that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act -- not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions -- who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them -- that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works -- whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of

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113 us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account -- to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day -- because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control -- and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart -- not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: Know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort -- even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

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For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West: Know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us today, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment -- a moment that will define a generation -- it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

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Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends -- hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

This is the source of our confidence -- the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed -- why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent Mall, and why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

"Let it be told to the future world ... that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive... that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]."

America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested, we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back, nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

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The following is the conclusion of President Obama’s speech in Cairo, Egypt. Whatever your political leanings, this is a One World (and Peace circle message) if there ever was one:

I know there are many – Muslim and non-Muslim – who question whether we can forge this new beginning. Some are eager to stoke the flames of division, and to stand in the way of progress. Some suggest that it isn't worth the effort – that we are fated to disagree, and civilizations are doomed to clash. Many more are simply skeptical that real change can occur. There is so much fear, so much mistrust. But if we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward. And I want to particularly say this to young people of every faith, in every country – you, more than anyone, have the ability to remake this world.

All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort – a sustained effort – to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human beings.

It is easier to start wars than to end them. It is easier to blame others than to look inward; to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share. But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path. There is also one rule that lies at the heart of every religion – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This truth transcends nations and peoples – a One World United & Virtuous 55 Hillandale Rd Rye Brook, NY 10573 914-621-6252 www.oneworlduv.org

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belief that isn't new; that isn't black or white or brown; that isn't Christian, or Muslim or Jew. It's a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization, and that still beats in the heart of billions. It's a faith in other people, and it's what brought me here today.

We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning, keeping in mind what has been written.

The Holy Koran tells us, "O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another. "The Talmud tells us: "The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace." The Holy Bible tells us, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."

The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God's vision. Now, that must be our work here on Earth. Thank you. And may God's peace be upon you.

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Date: ______

Thank you for taking the time to give us some feedback on your One World Study Circle.

1. What was the whole experience like for you?

3. Looking at all six sessions, please comment upon:

a) Which was your favorite session and why?

b) The number of sessions (too many/too few?) & the order of topics:

c) What other topics might we discuss?

d) The readings: (which worked and which did not? What stands out for you?)

d) How might we improve the experience for future participants?

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4. What key learning, if any, do you take away from this experience?

5. Will this experience change your behavior (actions) in any way?

6. How likely is it that you would attend another One World United and Virtuous event?

7. Please comment on the qualities of your facilitator:

8. What else would you like us to know?

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