George Monbiot
It was first proposed, as far as I can discover, in 1842, by Alfred Tennyson. Since then the idea has broken the surface and sunk again at least a dozen times. But this time it could start to swim. The demand for a world parliament is at last acquiring some serious political muscle.
The campaign for a UN parliamentary assembly is being launched this week on five continents. It is backed by nearly 400 MPs from 70 countries, a long and eclectic list of artists and intellectuals – among them Gunter Grass, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Alfred Brendel and Arthur C Clarke – several government ministers and party leaders, including our own Ming Campbell, six former foreign secretaries, the president of the Pan-African Parliament and a former UN secretary general. After 160 years of ridicule, Tennyson’s crazy idea is beginning to look plausible.
Those of us who want a world parliament are often accused of trying to invent a system of global governance. But there is already a system of global governance. The UN security council, the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation make decisions that affect us all. They do so without our consent. The best that can be said for any of them is that they operate by means of photocopy democracy. We vote for an MP, and this vote is then deemed to communicate our support for his party. That is then presumed to legitimise the government, which in turn assumes the right to appoint a prime minister. He then delegates ambassadors and bureaucrats to represent us globally, and their decisions are deemed to express our wishes. With every presumed transfer of democratic consent, the imprint of our cross on the ballot paper becomes fainter. Though the international bodies operate in our name, we have no more influence over them than the people of Burma have over the military junta. Global governance is a tyranny speaking the language of democracy. …
What jumps out as you read the list of signatories is the number of African names. There is a growing recognition in Africa that a world parliament offers the best chance – perhaps the only chance – that the unmediated concerns of the poor will reach the ears of the rich. A global parliament ensures that the voices of the poor world can no longer be ventriloquised by Bob Geldof and Bono and the leaders of the G8. The people will be able to speak for themselves.
For this reason, reactionaries all over the world will oppose the new campaign for an assembly. And the rest of us should support it.