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Sunday, July 04, 2010

MundiMuster! Endorse the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly


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4 comments:

Mitchell said...

It's funny, there was a time (long ago) when I saw the idea of a single global democracy, a UN world parliament, etc, as self-evidently worth pursuing, whereas now I'm like: what's the point? It seems like it would only be of interest to people who have a global agenda of some sort and who want a political instrument capable of producing global outcomes. (I was definitely in that category, though again these weren't views informed by much reality.) But the fact is that everyone on Earth already has a government. Why do we want a super-government to govern the governments? Is it really necessary to bring the whole world under the dominion of a single political assembly? Again, the only reason at all I can think of in favor of such a development, is that it would provide a person or a political coalition with the means to legally press for desired changes in some part of the world which would otherwise be a separate sovereign polity.

Dale Carrico said...

Why do we want a super-government to govern the governments?

Global government already exists, the struggle now is to democratize it. People should have a say in the public decisions that affect them: that is what democracy means. Corporate-militarist oligarchs don't want to be held accountable to the people, but you have nothing to lose but your chains -- stop buying their bullshit.

Mitchell said...

But even if we're all groaning under an evil empire, why is the answer to make it a good empire instead? Can't I just kick out the oppressor and celebrate when they go home? Why do I need to federate my freedom with yours? Does civilized coexistence require political union?

Dale Carrico said...

Well, as for your last question, I am not an anarchist and my patience with anarchists is not unlimited.

I want not to smash the state but to democratize it. I regard the endless recurrence to fantasies of "spontaneous order" on the part of anarchists a parade of functional facilitations of oligarchy.

Equity-in-diversity is not attainable in the absence of good government, and unless we create and maintain institutions for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes the permanent possibility of violence inhering in human plurality will prevail.

The red thread of inequity and violence undertaken by tyrannical and corrupt governments is painful to contemplate and should bolster the resolve of democrats, but anarchists just throw the baby out with the bathwater (a metaphor complicated by the fact that in their assumptions about politics most seem themselves to be babies, with all due respect to babies).

I abhor empire, and it is a deep confusion to identify all government with with empire, or to insinuate that those who would struggle to make government of by and for the people more convivial pine after a "good empire."

As for why governance now needs to be planetary in scope, our environmental problems are planetary and the nation-state system is inadequate to cope with them while the public realm has been likewise rendered planetary through p2p-media formations that are the register in which contemporary citizenship makes its play. There is much more to say about that topic, but that should suffice for the present.

Plurality exists, interdependency is a fact of life, that we are obligated by the voices of those with whom we share the world is no less true when we deny it or rationalize it away, equity, diversity, consent are fragile but indispensable to human flourishing and must be accomplished through civitas -- until these fundamentals are grasped one cannot expect to talk sensibly for long about politic matters.

Please don't expect to draw me into a politics 101 discussion with an online libertopian of the right or the left, if either you may be, or any such nonsense -- I have learned the hard way that it's a waste of my time and to little purpose.