When I was still teaching high school, I was asked to teach a subject on dissent to a group of year 11 girls. As part of the subject, we studied Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, and I wanted to make it relevant for the girls, so I asked them to read this article from The New Yorker about an American General’s dissent against the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. We also read some of the transcripts from the McCarthy hearings in the US Senate. In our discussion, once they got their head around the idea that people within the army knew about the torture in Cuba and were silenced, they could not understand why the US was allowed to continue torturing people while the whole world knew about it. I can remember one of the girls shouting: “They should stop the US from doing that!”

My response: “Who is ‘They’?”

The students imagined that there was some way to enforce the gloablly-agreed-upon standards of the Geneva Conventions. Inherent in their concept of the world, I think, was the idea that internationally-expressed norms would be backed up by a body to enforce those norms. When I indicated to them that such an enforcement body did not exist, and that the US government could do what it wished if there weren’t powerful internal or external pressure to stop them, the girls basically responded with a demand for a world governing body.

I thought of this incident as I was reading this article in the New York Review, which touches on the development of the UN and the calls, at various though not recent times in its history, for it to develop into a ‘world people’s assembly’ to which the Governments that make up the UN would be responsbile. There are, as the article mentions, numerous practical blocks to the emergence of such an assembly, not the least of which are the vested interests of the currently powerful nations in maintaining veto power in the Security Council. I thought about what it might take to overcome those blocks, and one thing I thought would help–which made me think of my students–was a gradually emerging sense at the grassroots that our current system for governing world affairs is inadequate to the complex and increasingly inter-connected reality in which we live.

Of course, making feasible any sort of internationally administered system of democratic representation would be almost startlingly difficult. That said, there are models on which to work. One is an idea advanced here in Australia by Lyn Carson and Brian Martin, which they call demarchy. This is democracy by the drawing of lots, and operates at the grassroots level by enlisting citizens to govern by panels. How it would work internationally, I’m not sure. Another model with which readers of the Neocrats would probably be familiar is the Administrative Order of the Baha’i Faith, which works as a series of elected bodies, from the local, to the regional, to the national, to the international, with the local communities electing their own local governing bodies and the members of the local bodies electing the regional bodies, while differently grouped localities select electors to elect the national bodies, the members of which in turn elect the international body. Both of these systems do away with any type of campaigning or electioneering, which is one of the great problems with modern democracies.

In both of these models, the members of the bodies specifically do not represent any particular group of people, but represent the whole community and are enjoined to decide on what is in the interest of that community. This, it seems to me, is one of the things currently missing from the political order in most places on the planet: a sense that a government represents its entire people, rather than the members of that government understanding that they represent constituencies with that whole people. This is also, in a different way, one of the difficulties with the UN. The ambassadors there represent their governments and do not seek what is in the best interests of the world as a whole. Under the current system, this makes sense. Given, however, our increasingly common planetary destiny, that system seems outmoded. We need some sort of system in which the representatives are responsible for making decisions that will lead ot the welfare of the entire planet, rather than any subdivision thereof.

As the Nobel committee this week acknowledged the substantive link between two issues of global scope–climate change and peace–and as my students showed in their passionate responses to torture, the world continues its movement toward being ready for the next stage in its political evolution.

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