World Peace under a Union

Humanity has never known true peace. That has made many people believe that it can never be achieved. In fact most people have resigned themselves to the view that war is something we just have to live with. But do we give up on peace, or change the world order to enable it?

At present, most individuals hypocritically consider nationalist violence acceptable and even justified while deploring it for other groups. There are countless differences among human beings, yet only one of them—national identity—has the recourse to violence. Why should nations have this special privilege? In the world there are people who like apples and those who prefer oranges, but do they go to war over this? Imagine an ‘Apple Army’ possessing nuclear warheads, fighter planes, and missiles; and an ‘Orange Army’ drafting all orange-lovers for mandatory military service. Sounds ludicrous? So is nationalist conflict.

Most plans for world peace, however, seek to accomplish it within the national system. Some advocate strong international institutions, others disarmament treaties and so on, underpinned by the expectation that nations will voluntarily renounce violence. These noble ideas sought practicality in retaining the nationalist system, but that is exactly what rendered them impracticable. One cannot continue smoking and want to not get cancer. The nature of the national system makes conflict inevitable. World peace is not compatible with world piece.

The nationalist system pits subsets of humanity against each other in a confrontational world, with humans’ primary allegiance being to their national group and its selfish interests. As nations compete to further their own ends, there is nothing stopping them from using violent means as they are sovereign powers on earth. Thus conflict remains a perpetual feature of this system; we cannot eliminate the effect without tackling the cause.

Even when there is temporary peace between nations, it is a tense one based on deterrence and with the possibility of war in the future. Peace here is merely ‘not war’. Even this kind of peace, though, has never been present across the globe; some subsets of humanity are always at war with each other. Surely, if humanity as a whole can never have one moment of peace, there is much to be desired in our socio-political organization.

To achieve peace, it is necessary to disrupt these tendencies of the world order. Instead of sovereign nations, we need a world level political institution with its own strong authority. But to end the intergroup hostility that underlies international conflict, all humans need to identify with each other as one group. This political and social unification of humanity entails a World Government and the dissolution of national identities.

The reason why a world government would have peace is, quite simply, that there is no one to fight. With no hostile extra-terrestrial threats known, a world state will have no enemies. Conflict at the state level would be made impossible. War involves two or more parties, and with just one entity it cannot take place. The disposition of humanity to mass conflict would itself decrease sharply, without the trigger-happy jingoism often seen today.

Some people would be sceptical of this, however, seeing conflict as arising fundamentally from competition over scarce resources, and believing that humanity is doomed to war while scarcity remains. Earlier other states and groups would clash, now it is nations, and for them changing the world order will only result in different forms of conflict. But even in today's world this is not necessarily the case. Each nation independently controls some resources, which are also scarce and must be distributed among competing sections of the population. Yet most nations are not plagued by perpetual unrest and violence, as states have mechanisms to ensure the peaceful manifestation of this competition. Moreover, when nations fight today, rarely is resource-grabbing the primary consideration. It is ‘national interest’, whether real or imagined. This implies two things—that at present the primary cause of conflict is not scarcity but nationalism, and that humanity can attain peace under a world union rather than being stuck in a constant state of violence.

Another viewpoint is that conflict stems from the many disagreements among humans, assuming that these will necessarily manifest themselves through violence. But, returning to the earlier example, people who prefer apples and oranges do not go to war; only those differences which people make confrontational lead to conflict. Even then, as argued previously, nations today are not all plagued by conflict. Just as with competition, successful states allow differences to be expressed peacefully. But when these differences have no scope of expression within the system, violence results. It is important to keep in mind that for every difference humans fight over there are hundreds more that they do not.

Besides eliminating inter-state conflict, a world government would also reduce other forms of violence. For example, political rebels and terrorists would be less active and less successful when faced with the strength of the entire world. One reason for this is that many of these groups are separatists or identity-based, and a world union undermines their entire premise. Another reason is that these groups tend to operate more in weak states, as do gangs and other groups that use violence. But with a world union, the entire world will be governed by one unified authority, without any weakly governed spaces (Fed. 10). Also these groups often rely on the support of nations trying to create trouble for each other, but this too will come to an end with world government. On a more fundamental level, the elimination of nations’ legitimacy to use violence would also dissuade other groups from using it as a means, since it will cease to be acceptable to the population.

For the maintenance of peace within the world, the world government would still have a police and some paramilitary forces. In case these turn out to be insufficient, it could also set up a small military. So long as it maintains a monopoly over the production of military equipment, no serious threats should arise. But there is no need for destructive capabilities on the scale nations have today, which can destroy humanity many times over. For the entire purpose is different: nations’ militaries are to promote their own interests and guard themselves against others doing the same, while the world government’s forces are only to deal with smaller internal threats.

Therefore, even if humanity is never truly able to read itself of all conflicts, world government will greatly reduce their scale. And finally humanity can have a future without some of our greatest fears: no nuclear holocaust, no World War Three, no more cities laid to waste, no more genocides... Let us create for ourselves a world free of mass conflict, where no one should have to fear war. Too many humans have been lost already; let us not inflict anymore suffering on ourselves.