The Real World Organization

At that time, the United World Federation had a full-time staff of 40 and chapters all over the U.S. Its most famous cheerleader was Albert Einstein.

The UWF was founded by World War II veterans overwhelmed by the post-Hiroshima potential for nuclear war and both hopeful and skeptical about the newborn U.N.’s ability to head off such a conflict. According to Facing Reality, the 1980 memoirs of key UWF progenitor Cord Meyer (who earlier helped Harold Stassen draft the U.N. Charter), the World Federation was primarily intended to enforce peace, by force of arms if necessary. But it would also have created a legislative entity (based on, but more representative than, the U.N. General Assembly) for other serious international issues. Such as, one might suppose, the environment, trade controversy and labor standards.

After the impressive 1949 House vote, however, the UWF’s hopes were swept away in an avalanche of events: the Soviet A-bomb, Chinese revolution, the Korean War, the McCarthy era — all the panoply of the Cold War. By the late 1950s, world federationists were being dismissed in the same breath with flat-earthers and creationists. Worse, the movement was somehow lumped with the People’s Progressive Party of Henry Wallace as a quasi-Red front. This was dishonest, since top Stalin stooge Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov had personally excoriated the UWF as "a fig leaf of U.S. imperialism" and Cord Meyer himself was recruited by the CIA, where he spent the rest of his career. (Meyer was succeeded as UWF head by California U.S. Senator-to-be Alan Cranston.)

But if the UWF was invalidated by the Cold War, it’s revalidated by the Cold War’s ending and the triumph of world commerce. The world faces hundreds of problems either disdained or abetted by the WTO — from catastrophic climate changes to destruction of the rain forests to extinction of species to the broadening employment and pay gaps between the most and least developed nations. Nor has the present U.N. shown itself effective against most of these perils.

By helping to stall this round of WTO agreements, the Battle of Seattle’s troops set back the presidential plan to initiate China, the world’s largest and most industrially problematic nation, into the organization. Their actions suggested how many people hold what WTO members term "externalities" as intrinsic survival values. But no amount of civil disobedience can, by itself, legislate international reform. For that, you need a governing authority over all the world’s nations and corporations. World federation belongs back on the progressive agenda. It’s the only rational choice, or as philosopher (and one-worlder) Bertrand Russell used to say, it’s "the category that includes all other categories."

What’s the chance of our ever becoming one world? Maybe not too bad, once the idea gets around. As Russell further put it, "Men are sufficiently rational to acquiesce in their own survival."