Source
A vectorized illustration made by Aatox with a low resolution screenshot as a guide. Will be removed on request
As a small child I found the idea of the European Broadcasting Union quite exciting and futuristic. To me, it presaged a future, probably to the soundtrack of ‘Telstar’, of world unity and Thunderbirds. The reality, of course, is of a rather unexciting collection of bland songs which only seem to stand a chance of winning if they include a lot of nonsense mouth music or are in English. This makes me wonder whether, if the human race ever did achieve unity, it would be through blandness rather than anything particularly visionary.
In ‘Are The Illuminati The Good Guys?’, I note that the Illuminati-based conspiracy theory, since it’s a concern held mainly by conservative fundamentalist Christians, actually depicts quite a positive world from anything other than a fairly paleoconservative perspective (neoconservatives are in a sense actually doing it), although there is the money issue. It isn’t clear to me why someone not involved in an area where they benefit from conflict such as the arms trade would prefer the world not to be unified in some way, except that there are in fact good reasons for not wanting it. If there is only one state across the whole of the human race, there is no genuine way to opt out of it, and if you believe government is legitimised by consent, this becomes problematic and means that world government can become despotic. There’s nobody else to police them, sanction them or do anything else to keep them in check. Then again, maybe there isn’t now either.
The idea of a global political union, or World State, seemed to be particularly popular in the inter-war period, clearly stimulated in the European mind by the horrors of the Great War. Hence ‘Brave New World’ and its dystopian baby factories with standardised human beings, and of course the case which comes to mind most for me, Stapledon’s various depictions of a unified species including the First World State. Stapledon contrasts the more visionary version of globalism with what he sees as the more likely outcome. After a series of increasingly brutal wars between 1914 and 2300, an American businessman and Chinese man whose identity isn’t entirely clear sit down together on a Pacific island and conspire to overthrow the Chinese and American governments, thereby achieving world unity led by a World Financial Directorate. This continues for five thousand years until fossil fuel resources are exhausted and civilisation collapses into a hundred millennium long stone age. The big issue with the World State as it came about in the ‘Last And First Men’ timeline is that it was not really spiritually aspirational but substituted dishonest pseudo-spiritual and pseudo-scientific frippery, and was motivated by a desperate desire for unity and the end of war without any higher aim in mind. It’s a little concerning to me that those do actually sound like fairly high aims and that makes me wonder if we have indeed lost something. Aldous Huxley’s world state is similarly vacuous, and like Stapledon’s version contrasts spirituality and authenticity with the ethos of the state, although interestingly Huxley also has religious-like rituals within the world state and portrays the superstition of the Savage Reservations as equally unhelpful.
Hence the vacuity of the Eurovision Song Contest? Is banality the path to world unity? In fact it seems the contest isn’t so much about unity as a seething mass of political undercurrents generated by international enmity, but even if it is, I suppose it’s better that they fight through song rather than bullets. Maybe there should be a Palestinian entry.
Another organisation touted to us as children as a step towards world unity was the British Commonwealth. This probably follows a similar attitude taken towards the British Empire a few decades previously. I remember seeing a non-Mercator map projected from a slide by a man from Afrika talking about the way this confederation was the beginning of the end of individual nation-states. From this I get the impression that the idea of the Commonwealth back then was much more popular globally, at least within it, that it is now, and I can also see that such a disparate collection of countries could be a positive influence on each other to introduce some kind of fairness. However, in fact this doesn’t seem to be how it operates. In the late ’50s, the British government considered inviting the Common Market countries to join the Commonwealth but nothing came of it. That would’ve been interesting as the current population of the British Commonwealth is 2 419 million and the EU’s is 450 million, so that would’ve made it the largest political entity on the planet. However, the two are very different today, and it seems really that the Commonwealth has kind of failed. It seems to have no function, has always seemed quite vague to me, and it also seems to hark back to the imperial age, although I suppose it could also be seen as an attempt to make amends for it. One of the unfortunate aspects of British attitudes towards it was the racism shown to immigrants from the New Commonwealth, which was a factor in making it less popular here. France made many of its former colonies a full part of the nation itself, and this sounds like it would’ve been a better approach, particularly if the Common Market had in fact ended up joining or the UK as a global, discontinuous nation, perhaps with its capital in India, had joined that organisation in such a form.
Now for the EU. As I’ve said before, I’m only very reluctantly in favour of this organisation. My biggest problem with it is that it is not a federal republic. It seems to me that it would be to the advantage of people within Europe for this continent to become a single nation, economically and politically. If it was a republic with proportional representation, it would also mean that Britain itself would be more democratic. However, they chose not to go in that direction, but instead to promote its power as a relatively non-accountable economic entity which sets low standards for working and encourages trade across the entire sub-continent, and let’s remember that Europe is not a continent any more than “Sub-Saharan Africa” is physically beneath the Sahara. As it stands, the EU is disturbingly similar to Oswald Mosley’s white homeland. GIven the United States’ attitude towards its southern border, even if the EU did become a federal republic it could easily behave as badly as the US. The union is a neoliberal club, not particularly accountable as far as I can tell, consisting substantially of faded imperial powers which have plundered and oppressed the rest of the world historically and are now continuing to do so by other means. However, the alternative this country is now committed to is remarkably similar, making me wonder what the point of leaving was in the first place. Presumably there’s a subtle distinction which makes the conditions for the poor even worse than they are already, which is presumably why we’re out. Nonetheless, I am in favour of being in a real EU because I think it would be better than being in a constitutional monarchy with a nobility and first-past-the-post electoral system and nothing to counteract that, although I’m also aware that a European government would probably end up giving a lot of power to the extreme right because of the situation in eastern Europe, so from a pragmatic perspective it may be better for women and many minorities in Western Europe, but most emphatically not Eastern, that this is not the situation. Therefore it’s a question of wanting an independent Scotland to rejoin the EU, but being very unenthusiastic about the whole thing.
Then there’s the UN. Like the EU, this was founded in the wake of the Second World War, and is much criticised. The funding is uneven and whoever has the gold makes the rules. Opinions I’m familiar with on the UN range from the belief that it’s well-intentioned but biassed towards the perpetrators of imperialism to the belief that it’s entirely oriented towards pursuing neo-colonialism by other means. There’s presumably a more sympathetic view but I’m not familiar with it.
There are other ways in which globalism or internationalism are being approached. One example is Antarctica, which is internationally agreed to be off-limits to territorial claims. Another is “Outer Space”, as they call it, i.e. everywhere except here, which again is governed by a treaty ruling out territorial claims. Finally, there are international waters, which is most of the planet’s surface. Consequently we could almost say that the majority of the world is already united. International waters, more legally known as the “high seas”, are actually smaller than one might expect at only fifty percent of the planet’s surface, leaving almost as big an area as the land surface as territorial at 21%. Antarctica is the second smallest continent, after Australia and ignoring Europe, comprising 8.9% of the land surface, but that’s just enough to nudge the portion of Earth’s surface not belonging to anyone over fifty percent. As far as the sea is concerned, there’s a twelve mile limit and a two hundred mile exclusive economic zone, which is often shared because of coastlines often being less than four hundred miles apart. Here in the “U”K we have the current dispute between the Channel Isles and France going on, the idea of a maritime border with Ireland and in recent history the Cod War. Of course if we were all vegan we wouldn’t’ve had the Cod War or the dispute with the Channel Isles. Just saying. Vessels and structures in or on the high seas are governed by the countries governing them, and there’s also something called universal jurisdiction, which means that any government can consider itself responsible for policing such things as smuggling and people trafficking. The problem with this, of course, is that countries have different laws. To me, it isn’t clear if landlocked countries are technically allowed to do this. Then there’s the UN Convention on the Law Of The Sea, which replaced the previous idea of the Freedom of the Seas. This seems to be substantially connected to the idea of what is territory rather than what isn’t, so for example it tends to emphasise continental shelves as belonging to particular countries, which makes British “territory” considerably larger, I’m guessing more than twice the size of the land surface, than it would be otherwise. It also means that the United Nations seems to be operating with tacit consent as a state would. The absurdity of the British continental shelf and the fact that by this convention we simply have no room for a meaningful exclusive economic zone between us and France illustrates the absurdity that, should the EU exist in the first place, we wouldn’t be part of it, in purely geographic terms. There’s also a massive hole in the EU between the German Ocean and Ireland.
Beyond that is Outer Space, a term which sounds quite 1950s to me, which is above the Kármán Line, a spheroid which I presume is a hundred kilometres higher, and therefore wider, than sea level. I presume also that it follows the geoid and is not influenced by the likes of mountains or basins. Otherwise Bolivia would be able to claim that certain objects impinge on its airspace. I’ve always thought the Kármán Line was a bit low, because the atmosphere continues for hundreds of kilometres beyond it, and simply merges into cis lunar space. It’s at about the level aurora polaris occurs and is in the low thermosphere. Much thought has been given to the question of what happens to politics in space, notably by Iain Banks, who makes a couple of salient points. One is that space has three extensive dimensions rather than the two we often consider territory to involve, meaning that it’s not as easy to surround a sphere of influence as it would be on the land surface of a planet. This is a game changer. Consider, for example, three-dimensional Go. Another is the necessary self-sufficiency and difficulty in policing a distant outpost of people. If a group of people are pioneers, that entails that in order to assert control over them, the nation state would have to develop an equally advanced method of getting to them. Psychological control is of course possible, and might be the answer. However, we don’t need to consider these questions as it’s unlikely anyone will ever again leave Low Earth Orbit. I explored the issue of coercion in space in my story ‘Packed Away’, which depicted an astrophysicist renting her spleen off her employer, having had all her bone marrow removed and body fat converted to soap, which would of course be sold back to her for a reasonable charge. I’m not convinced nowadays that Iain Banks got it right, but it’s only a technicality so far as I can tell because it is never going to happen.
This brings me to what seem to be the most successful international organisations on this planet, the multinational companies. I want to make my position clear on these. They are not evil, but the reason for that is that evil is not, at least in human terms, a significant problem in comparison with indifference and insensitivity to people’s and the planet’s needs. The functions of a MNC are growth, survival and profit. They are, like cancer, dysfunctional and not related to the needs of the body, i.e. the planet. As such, they are successful in the short term although in their current form, i.e. neither nationalised nor coöperative, or at least some other rational and democratic form of organisation, they will guarantee the extinction of the species. For some reason people don’t see this as a problem. One thing they do, though, is prove that globalism is feasible, because in fact we live in a globalised world. Recalling Stapledon’s World State, the multinationals basically ran everything, but he failed to appreciate how much damage we could do to the biosphere in the short term, so for us this situation merely allows them to preside over our demise as a species.
Another global vision can be found in the form of the Caliphate. or خِلَافَة This is of course an Islamic vision of Shari`a law being general and applying to the whole species, or at least every Muslim. To someone with liberal values, this sounds undesirable, but I don’t feel I can comment on this from an informed perspective even though I’ve written a degree-level dissertation on Islamic society. Although it may be valid to focus on the patriarchy and homophobia of Shari`a, it shouldn’t be forgotten either that it would not be capitalist, because of the absence of usury, and the existence of zakat also provides a social security system. Probably the longer I talk about this the more likely I am to say something crass.
Related to Islam is of course Judaism, and sometimes I’ve wondered if the solution to the Israel-Palestine issue is to have a secular world government based in Jerusalem. Inherited from Jewish Zionism is the Christian idea of the Kingdom of God, which seems to be articulated fairly well by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, one of whose apostates described it as a world where everyone is vegan and speaks Esperanto. To a limited extent, this sounds good to me. Veganism is unequivocally a good thing. Esperanto has the issue of being somewhat Western in form, having imponderable grammar, as with its six participles, sexist vocabulary and no attention to sandhi. However, many non-Westerners seem entirely happy with it.
Then there’s Pan-Africanism (sic). This is the idea that those of Afrikan descent have common interests and should be unified. There is a slight problem with this concept in that technically everyone is of Afrikan descent, but of course some of us are more recently so than others. There are also many people who have no idea they have relatively recent Afrikan descent. I can’t pretend to know too much about pan-Africanism, but it seems to me to have two major issues. One is that it seems to erase cultural differences which could be important to the people concerned, because the continent is vast and extremely varied. The other, and this is not necessarily a negative point, is that the identity of Afrikans are defined here in opposition to imperialism alone, which seems pragmatic but possibly rather Western-centred. This, like the Caliphate, is something I’m culturally distant from. The narrow view of Pan-Africanism is the idea of a unified Afrikan homeland a little like a vast version of Israel, to which all people of (presumably recent) Afrikan descent have a right of return. One possible reason for the rather culturally homogenous idea is that the ideology is significantly influenced by Afrikan-American thinkers. Once again, the longer I talk about this the more likely I am to say something racist, so I will stop at this point.
There is a final way in which world unity has been approached: extremely large countries, either in area or population. These would currently include India, China, Russia, Canada, the United States, Australia, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan and Brazil. If the EU were a state, it would also be on this list and given its wealth also a potential superpower, so it’s a little surprising it isn’t also unified for all the wrong reasons. Among these Australia is unique in being a nation which is also a continent, not forgetting Tasmania, although its population is very low and Papua and parts of Indonesia also count as being part of Sahul, the name for the complete continent including the continental shelf. Several of these territories seem to constitute a kind of “land grab”, since Canada and Russia both have very sparse populations over most of their area, as does Australia, and the same could be said of Brazil, the western part of China and even parts of the US. I sometimes contemplate the idea of a United States of North America, including Canada, the US, Greenland and Mexico, with a rather un-American culture where there is for example no death penalty, stringent gun control, proportional representation and a wider range of mainstream political parties. In other words, more like Western Europe. This would of course be very unpopular with some American citizens, and there is a converse idea, particularly in science fiction, of the world basically becoming America, which is also Olaf Stapledon’s vision, though in his case not a positive one.
Contrasting Zion, the Caliphate and the Kingdom of God illustrates a problem with the idea of one world government: there are different visions of the same thing depending on where in the world one comes from. This is not very encouraging. It seems appropriate to end this survey with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr: “We live together as rational human beings or die together as fools.” So in fact world unity probably isn’t far off. We will achieve it as part of our post-apocalyptic condition, which is due to set in any day now.
A Box Of Chocolates 