“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.
[1]In historical terms, these anarchic dynamics were codified at the Peace of Westphalia, the 1648 treaty that concluded the Thirty Years War. See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119. Together, these two treaties comprise the “Peace of Westphalia.”
[2] The idea of death as a zero-sum commodity is best captured by psychologist Ernest Becker’s paraphrase of Elias Canetti: “Each organism raises it head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.” (See Ernest Becker, ESCAPE FROM EVIL 2 (1975). Similarly, according to Otto Rank: “The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed.” (See: Otto Rank, WILL THERAPY AND REALITY 130 (Knopf, 1945) (1936).
[3]Eexplicit applications of the law of war to insurgent combatants’ dates to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949. As more than codified treaties and conventions must comprise the law of war, the obligations of jus in bello (justice in war) are part of “the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations” (from Art. 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice) and thereby bind all categories of belligerents. (See Statute of the International Court of Justice, art. 38, June 29, 1945, 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. 993). Further, Hague Convention IV of 1907 declares that even in the absence of a precisely published set of guidelines regarding “unforeseen cases,” the operative pre-conventional sources of humanitarian international law obtain and still govern all belligerency. The related Martens Clause is included in the Preamble of the 1899 Hague Conventions, International Convention with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War by Land, July 29, 1899, 187 Consol. T.S. 429, 430.
[4] See Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, opened for signature, December 9, 1948, entered into force, January 12, 1951, 78 U.N.T.S. 277. Although the criminalizing aspect of international law that proscribes genocide‑like conduct may derive from sources other than the Genocide Convention (i.e. it may emerge from customary international law and be included in different international conventions), such conduct is always a crime under international law. Even where the conduct in question does not affect the interests of more than one state, it becomes an international crime whenever it constitutes an offense against the world community delicto ius gentium.
[5] Swiss psychologist Carl Jung once defined civilization as “the sum total of individual souls seeking redemption.”
[6] See Chapter 12, “The Barbarism of ‘Specialization,’” Jose Ortega y’Gassett, The Revolt of the Masses (1930).
[7] See, by this author, Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order (1984). Throughout history, geopolitics or Realpolitik has sometimes been associated withassurances of personal immortality. In his posthumously published Lecture on Politics (1896), for example, German historian Heinrich von Treitschke observes: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.” Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel opined, in Philosophy of Right (1820), the state represents “the march of God in the world.” This “deification” of Realpolitik, a transformation from mere principle of action to a sacred end in itself, drew originating strength from the doctrine of sovereignty advanced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Initially conceived as a principle of internal order, this doctrine underwent a specific metamorphosis, whence it became the formal or justifying rationale for international anarchy – that is, for the global “state of nature.” First established by Jean Bodin as a juristic concept in De Republica (1576), sovereignty came to be regarded as a power absolute and above the law. Understood in terms of modern international relations, this doctrine encouraged the notion that states lie above and beyond any form of legal regulation in their interactions with each other.
[8] For definition of crimes against humanity, see AGREEMENT FOR THE PROSECUTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS OF THE EUROPEAN AXIS POWERS AND CHARTER OF THE INTERNATIONAL MILITARY TRIBUNAL. Done at London, August 8, 1945. Entered into force, August 8, 1945. For the United States, Sept. 10, 1945. 59 Stat. 1544, 82 U.N.T.S. 279. The principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal were affirmed by the U.N. General Assembly as AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly, Dec. 11, 1946. U.N.G.A. Res. 95 (I), U.N. Doc. A/236 (1946), at 1144. This AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL (1946) was followed by General Assembly Resolution 177 (II), adopted November 21, 1947, directing the U.N. International Law Commission to “(a) Formulate the principles of international law recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the judgment of the Tribunal, and (b) Prepare a draft code of offenses against the peace and security of mankind….” (See U.N. Doc. A/519, p. 112). The principles formulated are known as the PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED IN THE CHARTER AND JUDGMENT OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Report of the International Law Commission, 2nd session, 1950, U.N. G.A.O.R. 5th session, Supp. No. 12, A/1316, p. 11
[9] We may recall the pertinent metaphor from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: “What does not benefit the entire hive is no benefit to the bee.” Unless we take meaningful steps to implement an organic and cooperative planetary civilization – one based on the irremediably central truth of human “oneness” – there will be no civilization at all.
[10] Add reference to Beres articles on time.
[11] In the Phenomenon of Man (1955), French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin writes of “planetization.” In this seminal idea, acknowledgment of worldwide interrelatedness is central.
[12] Customary international law is an authoritative source of world legal norms identified at Art. 38 of the UN’s Statute of the International Court of Justice. International law, an integral part of the legal system of all states in world politics, assumes a general obligation to supply benefits to one another and to avoid war wherever possible. This core assumption of jurisprudential solidarity is known formally as a “peremptory” or jus cogens expectation, that is, one that is not subject to any reasonable question. It can be found, inter alia, in Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis, Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace (1625) and Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations or Principles of Natural Law (1758).
[13] Regarding the incorporation of international law into US domestic law, Mr. Justice Gray declared (delivering the judgment of the US Supreme Court in Paquete Habana ;1900):
“International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction….” (175 U.S. 677(1900)) See also: Opinion in Tel-Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic (726 F. 2d 774 (1984)). The specific incorporation of treaty law into US municipal law is expressly codified at Art. 6 of the US Constitution, in the so-called “Supremacy Clause.”
[14] A particular presumption of this “general law” has given rise to the legal principle of “universal jurisdiction.” It is mentioned in the Corpus Juris Civilis; Grotius, THE LAW OF WAR AND PEACE (1625), Bk. II, Ch. 20; and also in Emmerich Vattel, LE DROIT DES GENS, Bk. I, Ch. 19 (1758). The specific case for universal jurisdiction, which is strengthened whenever extradition is difficult or impossible to obtain, was also built into the four Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, which unambiguously impose upon the High Contracting Parties the obligation to punish certain grave breaches of their rules, regardless of where the infraction was committed or the ascertainable nationality of the criminals.
[15] For the crime of aggression under international law, see: Resolution on the Definition of Aggression, adopted by the UN General Assembly, Dec. 14, 1974. U.N.G.A. Res. 3314 (XXIX), 29 UN GAOR, Supp. (No. 31), 142, UN Doc A/9631 (1975) reprinted in 13 I.L.M., 710 (1974). Significantly, this aggression is arguably irrational in the sense that it is not in the genuine geopolitical interest of the Russian state.
[16] There is no longer a virtuous nation,” warns the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, “and the best of us live by candlelight.”
[17]See, by this writer, at JURIST: Louis René Beres, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2022/07/louis-rene-beres-international-law-genocide-human-rights/
[18] Though composed in the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan still offers an elucidating vision of chaos in world politics. During chaos, says the English philosopher in Chapter XIII, “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, as concerning their Felicity, and Misery,” a “time of War…. every man is Enemy to every man… and…. the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes believed that the condition of “nature” in world politics was less chaotic than that same condition among individual human beings because of what he called the “dreadful equality” of individual men in nature – that is, being able to kill others – but this once-relevant differentiation has effectively disappeared with the spread of nuclear weapons.
[19] As we may learn from ancient Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, “”You are a citizen of the universe.” A broader idea of universality or “oneness” followed the death of Alexander in 322 BCE, and with it came a coinciding doctrine of “universality.” By the Middle Ages, this political and social doctrine had fused with the notion of a Respublica Christiana, a worldwide Christian commonwealth, and Thomas, John of Salisbury and Dante were looking at Europe as a single and unified Christian community. Below the level of God and his heavenly host, all the realm of humanity was to be considered as One. This is because all the world had been created for the same single and incontestable purpose; that is, to provide background for the necessary drama of human salvation. Only in its relationship to the universe itself was the world considered as a part rather than whole. Observes Dante in De Monarchia: “The whole human race is a whole with reference to certain parts, and, with reference to another whole, it is a part. For it is a whole with reference to particular kingdoms and nations, as we have shown; and it is a part with reference to the whole universe, which is evident without argument.” Today, the idea of human oneness can be justified and explained in more purely secular terms of understanding. An indisputable example is the biological interdependence of all peoples during a viral pandemic.
[20] In modern philosophy, the evident highlighting of this useful term lies in Arthur Schopenhauer’s writings, especially The World as Will and Idea (1818). For his own inspiration (and per his own express acknowledgment), Schopenhauer drew freely upon Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Later, Nietzsche drew just as freely (and perhaps more importantly) upon Schopenhauer. Goethe. also served as a core intellectual source for Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y’ Gasset, author of the prophetic work, The Revolt of the Masses (Le Rebelion de las Masas (1930). See, accordingly, Ortega’s very grand essay, “In Search of Goethe from Within” (1932), written for Die Neue Rundschau of Berlin on the occasion of the centenary of Goethe’s death. It is reprinted in Ortega’s anthology, The Dehumanization of Art (1948) and is available from Princeton University Press (1968).
[21] Teilhard also coined a new term to denote the under-utilized human sphere of “mind.” It is “noosphere,” and builds upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s admonition (especially in Zarathustra) that human beings must continuously challenge themselves to “overcome” their otherwise “herd”-determined yearnings.
[22] Anarchy, unlike chaos, is the “official” structural creation of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the treaty that ended the Thirty Years’ War and created the modern state system.
[23] “The mass-man,” we may learn from Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’ Gassett’s The Revolt of the Masses (1930), “has no attention to spare for reasoning; he learns only in his own flesh.”
[24] Nurtured by the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and the religion of John Calvin, the American Founding Fathers began their Constitutional deliberations with the core notion that a citizen must inevitably be an unregenerate being who has to be continually and strictly controlled. Fearing democracy as much as any form of leadership tyranny, Elbridge Gerry spoke openly of democracy as “the worst of all political evils,” while William Livingston opined: “The people have been and ever will be unfit to retain the exercise of power in their own hands.” George Washington, as presiding officer at the Constitutional Convention, sternly urged delegates not to produce a document to “please the people,” while Alexander Hamilton – made newly famous by the recently popular Broadway musical – expressly charged America’s government “to check the imprudence of any democracy.”
[25] See W. Warren Wagar, The City of Man (1963) and W. Warren Wagar, Building the City of Man: Outlines of a World Civilization (1971).
[26] Reference here is to the world system creating Peace of Westphalia, which concluded the Thirty Years War in 1648. See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119. When compared to “Westphalian” anarchy, any impending chaos could be more expressly primal, more primordial, perhaps even self-propelled and “lascivious.” We may think here, for further elucidation, of the near-total “state of nature” described in William Golding’s prophetic novel, Lord of the Flies. Before Golding, the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (see Ch. XIII of Leviathan) had warned that in any such rabidly dissembling conditions, the “life of man” must inevitably be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
[27] For the authoritative sources of international law, see art. 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice: STATUTE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE, Done at San Francisco, June 26, 1945. Entered into force, Oct. 24, 1945; for the United States, Oct. 24, 1945. 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. No. 993, 3 Bevans 1153, 1976 Y.B.U.N., 1052.
[28] Regarding world government, Sigmund Freud noted: “Wars will only be prevented with certainty if mankind unites in setting up a central authority to which the right of giving judgment upon all shall be handed over. There are clearly two separate requirements involved in this: the creation of a supreme agency and its endowment with the necessary power. One without the other would be useless.” (See: Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, cited in Louis René Beres, The Management of World Power: A Theoretical Analysis, University of Denver, Monograph Series in World Affairs, Vol. 10 (1973-73), p, 27.) Interestingly, Albert Einstein held very similar views. See, for example: Otto Nathan et al. eds., Einstein on Peace (New York: Schoken Books, 1960).
[29] But Fyodor Dostoyevsky inquires: “What is it in us that is mellowed by civilization? All it does, I’d say, is to develop in man a capacity to feel a greater variety of sensations. And nothing, absolutely nothing else. And through this development, man will yet learn how to enjoy bloodshed. Why, it has already happened….Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.” See: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground 108 (Andrew R. MacAndrew, trans., New American Library, 1961)(1862).
[30] See, on these “prophets,” Louis René Beres, Reordering the Planet: Constructing Alternative World Futures (1974); Louis René Beres, Transforming World Politics: The National Roots of World Peace (1975); Louis René Beres, People, States and World Order (1981); Louis René Beres, America Outside the World: The Collapse of US Foreign Policy (1987); W. Warren Wagar, The City of Man (1963); and W. Warren Wagar, Building the City of Man (1971).
[31]See by this writer, Louis René Beres: https://globalejournal.org/global-e/march-2020/virulent-pathogens-and-global-solidarity-unseen-benefits-covid-19
[32] Sigmund Freud, however, was always darkly pessimistic about the United States, which he felt was “lacking in soul” and was therefore a place of great psychological misery or “wretchedness.” In a letter to Ernest Jones, Freud declared unambiguously: “America is gigantic, but it is a gigantic mistake.” (See: Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (1983), p. 79.
[33] “Theory is a net,” says Karl Popper, “only those who cast, can catch.” This apt metaphor is generally attributed to Novalis, the late 18th-century German poet and scholar. See, for example, introductory citation by Karl R. Popper, in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). Ironically, Novalis’ fellow German poet, Goethe, declared in his early Faust fragment (Urfaust): “All theory, dear friend, is grey. But the golden tree of life is green.” (Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, Und grűn des Lebens goldner Baum.)
[34]The concept of “world order” has its contemporary jurisprudential origins in the work of Harold Lasswell and Myres McDougal at the Yale Law School, Grenville Clark and Louis Sohn’s WORLD PEACE THROUGH WORLD LAW (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1966) and the large body of scholarly writings by Richard A. Falk and Saul H. Mendlovitz. Also, see works by the present author, who was an original participant in the World Law Fund’s World Order Models Project at Princeton in the late 1960s: Louis Rene Beres and Harry R. Targ, CONSTRUCTING ALTERNATIVE WORLD FUTURES: REORDERING THE PLANET (Cambridge MA: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1977); Louis Rene Beres and Harry R. Targ, eds., PLANNING ALTERNATIVE WORLD FUTURES: VALUES, METHODS AND MODELS (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975); Louis Rene Beres, PEOPLE, STATES AND WORLD ORDER (Itasca, IL: F.E. Peacock Publishers, 1981); and Louis Rene Beres, REASON AND REALPOLITIK: U S FOREIGN POLICY AND WORLD ORDER (Lexington MA: Lexington Books, 1984).
[35] The Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin coined a new term to denote the vital sphere of intellect or “mind.” This term is “noosphere;” it builds upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s stance well-known (especially in Zarathustra) that human beings must always challenge themselves, must continuously strive to “overcome” their otherwise meager “herd”-determined yearnings.
[36]Basic legal rights assured by the Declaration and Constitution can never be correctly confined to the United States. This is because both documents were conceived by their authors as codifications of a pre-existing Natural Law. Although generally unrecognized, the United States was founded upon the Natural Rights philosophies of the 18th century Enlightenment, especially Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu and Rousseau. Thomas Jefferson was well acquainted with the classical writings of political philosophy, from Plato to Diderot. In those early days of the Republic, an American president could not only read serious books, but could also write them.
[37] The core of this world legal order is the presumed “sanctity” of the state. Recalling the philosopher W.F. Hegel: “The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth…We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth, and consider that, if it is a difficult to comprehend Nature, it is harder to grasp the Essence of the State….The State is the march of God through the world….” See: See: Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as quoted by Karl R Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 4th ed., 2 vols. (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), vol. 2, p. 31.
[38] Recall the Yogi Berra epigraph above: “If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.” Yogi’s point is that a perfect world is impossible, and that we will all need to optimize our individual and collective lives amid certain manifold imperfections. For international law scholars, the overarching task must be to supplant “Westphalian” world order with one rooted in an ineradicable human “oneness.”
[39] See: Lewis Mumford, In the Name of Sanity (1954)
