In today’s runaway world, Einstein’s ideal of ‘abolishing war’ becomes unavoidable rather than impractical.
Jeffrey Sachs, adviser to successive secretaries-general of the United Nations, has published an important proposal, based on ten principles, for a possible reform of the UN as its Summit of the Future looms later this month in New York. Noting that next year will mark the 230th anniversary of Immanuel Kant’s celebrated essay, ‘Toward perpetual peace: a philosophical sketch’, Sachs writes:
The great German philosopher put forward a set of guiding principles to achieve perpetual peace among the nations of his day. As we grapple with a world at war, and indeed a dire risk of nuclear Armageddon, we should build on Kant’s approach for our own time.
Although Kant could not have imagined the destructive potential of nuclear arms and other contemporary technologies—from bacteriological weapons to artificial intelligence—that make it practically impossible to draw a clear dividing line between civil society and the military arena today, the worrying international situation indeed threatens an atomic conflagration between great powers. And Sachs’ ten principles for gradually reforming the UN and promoting a peace process, based on a greater willingness to co-operate between large and small powers, are valid. But two additional considerations are necessary, to broaden the available forces and to outline more precisely the long-term institutional goal which Kant outlined—a world federation.
Economic governance
The first observation concerns the peace process, which does not necessarily have to involve the military potential of the great powers. Recall the initiative of the postwar French government for pacification with defeated Germany via what became the European Coal and Steel Community, the start of the process of European unification. The Schuman Declaration of May 1950, prepared by the senior official Jean Monnet and presented by the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, affirmed:
The pooling of coal and steel production should immediately provide for the setting up of common foundations for economic development as a first step in the federation of Europe, and will change the destinies of those regions which have long been devoted to the manufacture of munitions of war, of which they have been the most constant victims.
Today the international situation is very different. The wealth gap between rich and poor countries cannot be solved without a serious reform of the governance of the international economy—also demanded by the threat of irreversible ecological disaster. And while nuclear technology is being used by national governments to threaten a world war, the climate crisis is forcing all nations to co-operate for the salvation of their citizens.
At the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 in the United States on the postwar international financial order, the British economist John Maynard Keynes proposed a new international currency, the bancor. Keynes’ proposal was rejected in favour of the US dollar acting as a global reserve, a policy Washington abandoned in 1971. Today what is required is a reform of the International Monetary Fund—one of the Bretton Woods institutional products—to enable its Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) to act as an international reserve.
This plan was developed by Robert Triffin in the 1960s and proposed many times since. Five currencies make up the basket of SDRs: the dollar, the renminbi, the euro, the pound sterling and the yen. A world reserve currency—let’s call it the bancor—would enable global economic governance among the US, China, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Japan, which could soon be extended to other G20 countries. In addition to the IMF’s global monetary reform, a new Bretton Woods, engendered by inclusive multilateral co-operation among great powers, would make it possible to relaunch the World Trade Organization, paralysed by the failure of its dispute-settlement mechanism.
Baruch plan
The second concern is the ambiguity contained in any disarmament plan that leaves intact the system of international political and legal relations. Here the postwar resonance is the failed Baruch plan developed by the US financier and governmental adviser Bernard Baruch.
Urged by the peace movements following the explosion of the two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945, the following year the US government proposed to the Soviet Union a plan for a world authority, within the UN, to which all nuclear weapons and the resources necessary for their construction would be entrusted. This authority would have the power to inspect places of production and report to an international court individuals responsible for violating the rules it established.
The Baruch plan however soon ran aground. Washington proposed abolition of the right of veto held by the ‘permanent five’ in the Security Council, on which the Soviet government would not relent. Conversely, Moscow demanded the destruction of US nuclear weapons stockpiles—the Soviets did not then yet have the atomic bomb—which the Americans rejected. So in the end the plan failed. A historian of those events observed:
As the essence of the American proposal was limitation of sovereignty, so that of the Soviet was equality of sovereign power. The Americans demanded agreement on a control system before abolition of nuclear weapons; the Soviets, abolition before control.
Today, with a plurality of nuclear powers—some big, some small—the historical and political situation is much more complex than at the time of the Baruch plan, when there were only two superpowers. Moreover, technological development is such that even a conventional war could cause endless destruction, as with the war between Russia and Ukraine and that between Israel and Hamas. As in the two world wars, there are countless casualties among the military forces and the civilian population.
Now between war and civilian technology the boundaries are uncertain. The system of information and data transmission is based on satellite networks that are becoming a target for world governments. China has developed lasers for the destruction of satellites. Russia and the US are working on possible forms of space sabotage of satellite communication networks, through the explosion of nuclear bombs in extra-terrestrial space.
Global public good
Global security—and therefore the lives of the citizens of the world and the future of young people—has become a public good that can no longer be guaranteed by national governments. A treaty among a few great powers today could not prevent some other power from building new instruments of domination based not only on nuclear technologies (think of genetic manipulation, for instance).
When the Baruch plan was under discussion, Albert Einstein observed: ‘It is not feasible to abolish one single weapon as long as war itself is not abolished.’ His institutional proposal was inspired by Kant’s perpetual peace. In 1947 he wrote:
The nation-state is no longer capable of adequately protecting its citizens; to increase the military strength of a nation no longer guarantees its security. Mankind must give up war in the atomic era. What is at stake is the life or death of humanity. The only military force which can bring security to the world is a supranational police force, based on world law. To this end we must direct our energies.
Today, in a climate of serious international political and military tensions, Einstein’s proposals will be considered by political ‘realists’ an unattainable utopia. Utopias are however the modern formulation of the great perspectives of common life, hope and transcendence, articulated in the past in the language of the great religions and still shared by millions of the planet’s inhabitants. ‘Progress,’ said the Irish writer Oscar Wilde, ‘is the realisation of Utopias.’
Humanity has organised itself in its history into different civilisations but the civilisation of the citizens of the world does not yet exist. It is therefore necessary to initiate a dialogue among all the civilisations of the planet to identify the necessary path, step by step, to ‘abolish war’ and build a ‘supranational police force, based on world law’.
Without a compass, it is very difficult to reach the destination. Einstein’s proposal must be the North Star for all those who intend to reform the UN with the intention of guaranteeing perpetual peace to the citizens of the world.
Guido Montani is professor of international political economy at the University of Pavia. He is a former president of the European Federalist Movement in Italy. He founded in 1987, in Ventotene, the Altiero Spinelli Institute for Federalist Studies. His latest book is Anthropocene and Cosmopolitan Citizenship: Europe and the New International Order (Routledge, 2024).