By
Prof. Louis René Beres
Africa-Press – Lesotho. If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be. ” -Yogi Berra
It may still sound silly and “unrealistic,” but acknowledging global “oneness” represents humankind’s only plausible path to survival.
Unless we finally pull back from the time-dishonored dynamics of “balance-of-power” world politics,[1] there will be no viable world legal order of any sort.
Today, this unvarnished diagnosis is more compelling than ever because our planet’s self-defiling rush toward nuclear weapons and nuclear war remains “full speed ahead.
” At its core, releasing international law from a “state of nature” is not a new problem. From the beginnings of such fundamental law, human civilization has required global unity and interdependence.
From these beginnings, however, we have tried to reconcile legal order with belligerent nationalism and rancorous disunity. Continuously, it has been a vain and catastrophic effort.
Ultimately, there is one fact that makes species “oneness” incontestable. This fact is our unalterably common human mortality – the elementary truth that we all must die.
Reciprocally, it is our universal search for power over death[2] that gives rise to humankind’s most recalcitrant violations of law. These derelictions include war, terrorism[3] and genocide,[4] empirically interrelated forms of mega-violence associated with “martyrdom,” expiation and “redemption.
”[5] To proceed, these are all glaringly complex issues, not ones ordinarily explored in governments, universities or law schools. Presently, nothing is more conspicuous than the incapacity of traditional world political and legal processes to ensure species survival.
No other credible conclusion could reasonably be drawn from the relentless barbarisms[6] of balance-of-poweror “Realpolitik” thinking. [7] To wit, this condition “indicts” the force-multiplying “crimes against humanity”[8] still being committed by Russia against Ukraine.
In formal jurisprudential terms (i. e. , international law), Vladimir Putin has become hostes humani generis, a “common enemy of humankind. ” Non-Biological Foundations of Human Oneness
There is more.
Human oneness is not exclusively biological. Instead, it “carries over” to fulfilling the variously intersecting needs of communities, nations and planet.
[9] If this task-defined commonality could be fully understood in time, we might all still stand an eleventh-hour chance of creating a law-based “cosmopolis.
” Here, of course, such chance will depend in part on what exactly would be “in time.
”[10] A tangible starting point is necessary.
Where do we actually stand on world law and world legal order? Are legal scholars ascertainably sincere about finally getting beyond high-sounding exegeses that can never ever work?
This is not a silly question. Virtually all nation-states, including major world powers, remain oriented toward the antithesis of planet-wide solidarity.
[11] Ultimately, this ill-fated orientation has no basis in codified or customary[12] international law.
[13] Though American politicians would likely suggest otherwise, these are not matters of “common sense.
” In 1758, in The Law of Nations, Swiss legal scholar Emmerich de Vattel affirmed the primacy of human community and interdependence. Observed the classical jurist: “Nations….
are bound mutually to advance human society…The first general law …is that each nation should contribute as far as it can to the happiness and advancement of other Nations.
”[14]
Vattel’s visionary ideals have never held any discernible sway in global politics (instead, they have always been regarded as fanciful or utopian), but today, especially after Russia’s aggression[15] against Ukraine, they warrant a serious look.
Vladimir Putin’s “crime against peace” is enlarged by the derivative crime of genocide. Inter alia, deporting Ukrainian children to Russian facilities represents a textbook example of genocide and related crimes against humanity.
Some key questions are simply no longer being asked. Why should a “powerful” country seek geopolitical advantage without expecting any reciprocal benefit? Left unmodified, the most palpable effect of “traditional” orientations must be a rapidly accelerating global tribalism.
[16] To the extent that the corollary effects of false communion would sometime ignite a nuclear conflict,[17] these effects (whether sudden or incremental) could propel our legally-disordered planet toward an irreversible chaos.
[18] In the final analysis, if we humans are going to survive as a species, historical truth must prevail over political manipulation. An unavoidable conclusion here is that any continuance of national safety and prosperity should always be linked with its wider global impact.
It is foolish to suppose that the American nation – or, indeed, any nation – could expect long term law-based security at the expense of other belligerent nations.
“Oneness” and Species Vulnerability The bottom line of global “oneness” is stark and unambiguous. Metaphorically, we (individuals and nations) are “all in the soup together. ” Not to be forgotten, the Covid pandemic was universal.
Its recent history, therefore, ought to provide an impetus not only for subsequent mitigations of disease pathology but also for wider patterns of global legal cooperation.
In such existential matters, the evidence is clear. By its very nature, any celebration of belligerent nationalism is crude and injurious to law. The only sensible posture for the United States and the wider world must ought now to be some plausible variation of a singular planetary future.
[19] Such an improved vision might not be all that difficult to operationalize if there were some antecedent political will.
[20] This vision of singularity is supported not only by millennia of international law thinking, but also by historical evidence, accumulated science and even formal logic.
The most basic idea behind a gainful human “oneness” is discoverable in the words of Pierre Teilhard De Chardin: “The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of everyone for himself,” summarizes the French Jesuit scientist and philosopher, “is false and against nature.
No element can move and grow except with and by all the others with itself. ”[21] The key message here is straightforward and illogical to contest. It communicates, among other things, that no single country’s individual success can be achieved as a zero-sum calculation.
No narrowly national success is sustainable if the world as a whole must expect any corresponding failure. Credo quia absurdum, said the ancient philosophers: “I believe because it is absurd.
” In principle, at least, expectations of pandemic could help bring discrepant civilizational matters into sensible focus.
No conceivable re-configuration of Planet Earth could prove gainful if the human legions which comprise it would remain morally, spiritually, economically and intellectually segmented.
Nonetheless, it would be ironic if not paradoxical to base improved legal reasoning on expectations of pathogen-based mass dying. In such urgent matters of international law, illness is most clarifying when adapted as metaphor.
Accordingly, for the world as a whole, chaos and anarchy[22] are never the genuinely underlying “disease. ” That more determinative pathology remains rooted in certain “great and powerful” states that stubbornly refuse to acknowledge what is most important: human interrelatedness.
This unforgivable incapacity to acknowledge our species’ biological and behavioral “oneness” has already become the core existential problem. “Oneness,” “Planetization” and “Cosmopolis”
In the end, what should we expect concerning law-based world community or “planetization”? If left fractured and unimproved, world politics will further encourage an already triumphant human deficit.
This is the incapacity of singular citizens and their respective states to discover authentic self-worth as individuals. Such an enduring liability was prominently foreseen in the eighteenth century by America’s then-leading person of letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Today, unsurprisingly, the still-vital insights of Emerson’s “American Transcendentalism” remain recognizable only to a tiny minority of citizens. But how could it be different? In present-day United States, almost no one reads serious books of literature, science or philosophy.
This lamentable observation is offered here not in any offhanded or gratuitously mean-spirited fashion, but merely as a verifiably simple fact of American life, one most famously commented upon during the first third of the nineteenth century by French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville (See Democracy in America).
This same observation led the Founding Fathers of the United States to rail against “mass” in the new nation’s governance. [23] Though known to only a few, the United States was never imagined as a democracy.
[24] Back in the 18th century, creating a republicwas revolutionary enough. And that republic has been allowed to languish within a society that literally loathes intellect.
Looking ahead, our relevant focus should be on world law and getting beyond belligerent nationalisms. From pandemic control to nuclear war avoidance, such nationalisms remain indecent and misconceived.
Russia’s ongoing crimes against Ukraine are an especially obvious and intolerable case in point. Left to fester in its own intellectual derangements, the atavistic mantra of “America First” would do little more than harden the hearts of America’s recalcitrant state enemies.
What we need now, as Americans, as citizens of other countries or as worried inhabitants of an imperiled planet is a creative broadening of support for global “oneness.
” However implausible and visionary, such a broadening ultimately represents a sine qua non of species survival. In essence, what we require to nurture human “oneness” is “cosmopolis. ”[25]
From the 1648 Peace of Westphalia,[26] which ended the last of the religious wars sparked by the Reformation, international relations and international law[27] have been shaped by an ever-changing but perpetually unstable “balance of power.
” Hope still exists, more-or-less, but today it must sing softly, in an embarrassed undertone, sotto voce.
Though counter-intuitive, the time for any visceral celebrations of militant nationalism and military technology is at least partially over. Significantly, artificial intelligence (AI) won’t save us. Quo Vadis? What is to be done? Macrocosm follows microcosm.
In order to survive on a fragmented planet, all of us, together, must seek to rediscover a consciously individual life, one that is wittingly detached from all pre-patterned kinds of nationalistic conformance. Above all, there should be no further tolerance of any falsely imagined tribal happiness.
United States legal obligations to peace and justice in the short run require policies that can respond purposefully to Russian aggression and related crimes, but even the most successful of these policies would ignore a more overriding human obligation. To use a popular metaphor, these policies could only “kick the can” of law-based global civilization further “down the road. ”
What then? Inter alia, we could finally learn that the most suffocating insecurities of life on earth can never be undone by further militarizing global economics, by building larger missiles or via traditionally “realistic” definitions of national security.
Nonetheless, the insufficiencies of “Westphalian” international law need not necessarily callfor world government. [28] As an immediately obvious weakness of any such call, we need only consider the problem of institutionalized reconciliations with bitterly law-violating adversaries, e.
g. Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In the end, whatever happens in the endlessly crumbling world of politics, sovereignty and nationality, truth would remain exculpatory.
In a promising paradox, disease pandemic could help us to see a much larger truth than ones we have wrongly cultivated for centuries. This broadly relevant legal truth is that “world citizens” should become more explicitly conscious of human unity and relatedness.
Such a substantially heightened consciousness is not a luxury we can reasonably choose to accept or reject. “Civilization,” declares Lewis Mumford In the Name of Sanity (1954), “is the never-ending process of creating one world and one humanity.
”[29] Visionary prophets of world integration and human oneness ought no longer be dismissed out of hand as “unrealistic” or foolishly utopian. More than ever, they define the invariant wellsprings of human survival. [30] There is more.
What we must ultimately accomplish is not “only” the survival of Homo sapiens as a species, but also humanitas, each person’s dignity as a living individual.
The world legal system’s continuing reliance on geopolitics suggests the plausible prospect of coinciding extinctions. Macrocosm follows microcosm. All things human must be seen in their totality.
By itself, the corona virus pandemic was uniformly harmful. At the same time, because it represented a lethal threat to the world as a whole, it could be viewed as a potentially life-affirming human unifier.[31] Existential Risks and Final Responsibilities
“In the end,” Goethe reminds us, “we are creatures of our own making.
” Every national society, the United States in particular,[32] will need to embrace leaders who can finally understand the steeply complex meanings of human interdependence.
In this auspicious embrace, all will need to understand the differences between a “freedom” that is uniformly beneficial and one that selectively disregards the needs of billions.
What we require most desperately are not refractory affirmations of homicidal indifference, but renewed awareness that true knowledge represents much more than vocational preparation.
Going forward, public policy will need to follow more disciplined logic and rigorous theorizing. [33] Anything else would represent an inexcusable “wizardry,” leading us even further astray from residually unifying world law opportunities.
[34] The prescribed task before us is complex, daunting, many-sided and bewildering; still, there are no sane or defensible alternatives.
Whatever policy particulars we might ultimately adopt as a nation, America’s initial focus should remain steadfast on calculated considerations of human interrelatedness and human “mind.
”[35] The seat-of-the-pants Trump paradigm of gratuitous rancor and endless conflict could drive us still further from species survival and humanitas.[36] That paradigm, especially its overtly-aggressive emphases on Realpolitik or power politics, has always represented a dissembling blueprint for legal fragmentation.
The anarchic or “Westphalian” world legal order in which humankind has endured for centuries is no longer tolerable.[37] Trapped in the crosscurrents of nuclear proliferation and belligerent geopolitics, this crumbling global architecture is destined for incremental dissolution or catastrophic collapse.
To avoid both possibilities, an entire planet will finally have to embrace law-based institutions of a singularizing human civilization. Such a civilization, though necessarily imperfect,[38] would represent the “never-ending process of creating one world and one humanity.”[39] Of necessity, it would represent an intellectual rather than political task.
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