It's Time to End the Suffering!

 

Our world is being crushed under the torrent of cascading crises. In the past two years alone, we have been buffeted by the twin crises of a global pandemic and a global economic recession which continue to plague us on top of the increasing ravages of climate change. Just as we thought things couldn’t get worse, we find ourselves in the grip of a war in Ukraine that has spawned a massive refugee crisis, severely disrupted energy markets, spawned a global food crisis, contributed to a looming global economic recession, and is likely to trigger a Third World War that could involve nuclear weapons.

 

It beggars belief that our 21^st century world allows one leader to hold the entire world hostage given that humanity’s unprecedented interconnectedness and interdependence has made it a single body with its multiple nations serving as its limbs and organs. Just as it makes no sense for us to stand back and allow malignancy in one part of the body to magically heal itself, so too, it makes no sense for the community of nations to abdicate responsibility by standing by as one nation is ravaged by war; for, in the end, the well-being of the world is dependent on the well-being of its constituent nations and vice versa. The Ukraine war provides us with ample evidence of this principle: it has already spurred a massive refugee crisis, triggered a global shortage of energy resulting in a spike in the price of oil and gas, inflation is running rampant, decimating economies in its wake and poised to tip the world into an economic recession, and the UN estimates that 828 million people go to bed hungry while 50 million are on the brink of starvation as we stand in the grips of a global food crisis caused by shortages of wheat, barley, corn and fertilizer. Last, but not least, it is increasingly evident that the risks of miscalculation in this war could lead to a global war that could well include the use of nuclear weapons. 

 

Any use of nuclear weapons will be catastrophic. Experts tell us that even a limited nuclear war (confined by geography and duration) is likely to result in 10 years of no summer, destroying crops and resulting in 1 billion of the world’s population starving. The stakes are unacceptably high. The time for apathy is over. The international community can no longer abdicate its responsibility. We, the world’s citizens, must do our part and urge our leaders to act with ceaseless energy to build a system of global governance fit to serve humanity’s needs at this stage in its collective growth that is founded on two insights: firstly, the fundamental interests of all nations are fused, it is therefore futile to continue attempting to maintain an equilibrium of competing interests; secondly the moral obligation enshrined in globally-accepted principles like the Responsibility to Protect are meaningless if there is no institution to embody and apply them.

 

Our first step should be to press our leaders to enter into a global agreement creating a viable system of collective security. This agreement would limit the amount of arms each nation can possess to what is necessary to maintain order within its borders. All other weapons must be destroyed under a system of international supervision to be devised. Similarly, all nuclear weapons must be eliminated in phases over a set period of time. Nations must agree to forego war as a tool of international relations. Most importantly, they must agree that if any one nation breaches any of the provisions of this agreement thereby threatening the world’s peace, all would arise against it and bring it to heel. Ultimately, this is the only untried yet effective way to stand up to a bully on the international playground. 

 

It should immediately be apparent that such a rule-based system of collective security is useless unless backed by a robust system of enforcement which is why the second action step has to be the establishment of an international standing force made up of troops and equipment contributed by all the nations of the world. This force would function at the behest of a global legislature directly elected by the peoples of the world and in accordance with predetermined rules laying out the conditions for its use. Its primary aim should be to maintain or restore peace for example in cases of proven genocide, or unlawful territorial aggression, or illicit nuclear weapons programs. It could also be used to assist populations in times of natural disaster like earthquakes, tsunamis, or pandemics.  

 

By taking the steps proposed here we will ensure that the suffering of the people of Ukraine and many others like them whether in Yemen, Tigray, Sudan, Syria, or Myanmar, to name a few will not have been for naught. We will have responded to the observation and call of President Zelensky in his address to Congress: “We need to create new tools to respond quickly and stop the war . Today, the world does not have such tools.” He went on to say the institutions we created in the past don’t work and “So we need new ones, new institutions…” Let us heed his words and build a viable system of collective security and a standing international force to ensure that the world will never again experience such horror.

COVID-19 and the Global Economic Crisis: Stumbling Blocks or Stepping-Stones Toward an Effective System of Global Governance?

We humans are strange creatures. We often tend to put off making important decisions and taking vital action until we hit a crisis point. We do this in both our individual and collective lives. The problem is that in today's world some of the decisions we have steadfastly refused to make can spell the difference between life and death. We are learning this the hard way with the coronavirus pandemic and its twin, the growing global economic crisis. 

And yet, there are still constructive choices we can make. Rather than stumbling blocks, we can choose to treat these crises as stepping-stones helping us build an effective system of global governance fit to respond to our collective needs in the 21st century and beyond. We have known for a long time that climate change poses a dire threat to life on earth in many different ways. We have also known that the continuing proliferation of nuclear weapons increases the threat of a nuclear war, which, whether deliberate or accidental, will have horrific consequences. Yet, we have been content to stick our heads in the sand and abdicate responsibility for making collective, global decisions that will ensure that these nightmares are mitigated or never come to pass. 

We have made the same mistake with respect to the looming threat of pandemics. For years, we have talked about the possibility of such an event, and yet we have failed to take the necessary steps to ensure that we were prepared to tackle such a crisis swiftly and effectively. While some voices have for many years been calling for the creation of a limited form of global government, most of our leaders have been unwilling to countenance such an idea. Yet, finally, in the face of the enormous physical, economic, and mental suffering we have begun enduring in the wake of the coronavirus, we are starting to hear voices among the world's leaders calling for the creation of some kind of system of global governance that is capable of responding to the needs of the 21st century. Such voices should be encouraged and applauded.

Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, Arancha González Laya, expressed her view in a piece published by The Washington Post today that it is "time to be bold and envision new ways forward for our international institutions." She clearly articulated the goal: "to find ways to reinforce the institutions that work, replace those that do not, create those that are missing and, overall, promote simplicity, effectiveness, coherence and cohesion." 

What an incredible call to action! This is precisely the kind of leadership we need — one that is willing to acknowledge and dispense with systems that are not working and no longer ensure the well-being of those they were created to serve. And one that recognizes the need for collective consultation in order to conceive of new global structures: capable of managing collective problems that impact humanity as a whole.

Also today, the views of Gordon Brown, the former prime minister of Britain were clearly laid out in an article published by The Guardian.  He cut straight to the chase, urging world leaders "to create a temporary form of global government to tackle the twin medical and economic crises caused by the Covid-19 pandemic." 

He highlighted the obvious yet often unacknowledged fact that "this is not something that can be dealt with in one country," rather it is something that requires "a coordinated global response," starting with "some sort of working executive." 

This kind of call confirms world historian Arnold Toynbee's predictions in the last century that — despite our strenuous resistance to any notion of a world government — once we faced an existential threat, we would rapidly,though reluctantly, abandon our resistance in favor of a world government, albeit limited in scope to what is absolutely necessary to effect the global management of global challenges.

We, the people of the world, have a choice to mitigate our global suffering and to ensure that our hardships have not been in vain. It is up to us, one and all, to demand of our leaders that they seize this opportunity to demonstrate the statesmanship, vision, and courage required to build those global decision-making and enforcement institutions we so desperately need to meet the urgent needs of an inextricably interconnected world.

The Coronavirus: Looming Disaster or Golden Opportunity?

Over the past year there has been no shortage of looming disasters that pose a serious threat to humanity including uncontrollable wild fires and forest fires precipitated by climate change, and the dangers of an accidental plunge into nuclear war as a result of miscalculation and brinksmanship.  The recent outbreak of a novel coronavirus, known as COVID-19, is now likely to become the pandemic that we have been fearing for some time. Although much is still unknown about the virus, what experts do know is that it is extremely contagious, like the infamous 1918 Spanish flu that infected approximately one third of the world's population and killed between 20 and 50 million people, and that the new virus' likely mortality rate is 1% to 3% of those infected. While the threat to human life is already engendering fear and anxiety, knock-on impacts to the global economy are likely to be just as severe. To contain the virus borders are being closed, flights canceled, whole towns locked down, factories and schools closed, and sporting, entertainment, trade-show, and other large events canceled. In a world as interconnected as ours is, such restrictions disrupt manufacturing and retail supply chains, with the dual effect of threatening access to supplies and potentially causing a global recession.

It is no wonder that our typical response is either to feel fearful, helpless, apathetic, and sink into despair or to feel angry, frustrated, and quick to blame someone else -- the people of some other country, health officials, or even our neighbors and friends who unwittingly carry the infection and expose the rest of us to it. While such reactions are understandable given the level of risk associated with the spread of the coranavirus, and the many uncertainties that accompany its spread, in reality both reactions are destructive and do not serve us. Moreoever, when we feel helpless or angry and blame others, our perceptions of the options available to us tend to be blinkered. When we need to be most creative and energetic in crafting constructive responses and solutions, we become apathetic, depressed, and anxious. We also become more prone to a fight-or-flight response and to conflict with others. All of these emotions ultimately lead either to inaction, delayed or half-baked action with too little done, too late, or to endless blame-games that, in the end, also do not help us meet the challenges at hand.

What if instead of viewing these same events, including the spreading coronavirus, as looming disasters, we were to view them as a supreme opportunity for humanity to finally learn to communicate in a spirit of goodwill and transparency, and to cooperate and collaborate on finding workable solutions that benefit us all? What if instead of viewing other nations and their actions as enemies and threats, we viewed them as indispensable and valuable allies with whom to join forces in the fight against a global threat? Commentators like David Ignatius of the Washington Post and experts like the editors of Nature Medicine are starting to suggest that the coronavirus presents us with a unique opportunity to do just this. For this to happen we need to change our perspective on social reality from seeing disparate nations each concerned exclusively and foremost with its own well-being to seeing a single global organism, a single global community that is interconnected in much the same way that the limbs and organs of the human body are connected. Just as it would be nonsensical and futile for the liver to claim that it was not concerned about the health of the kidneys because it was focused first and foremost upon its own well-being, and just as the heart could never be truly healthy in a body where the lungs were riddled with disease, so, too, is it nonsensical and futile for individual countries and social groups to claim and act solely or even primarily without regard for the consequences and benefits to other countries and groups. What if we understood that the only way to guarantee the well-being and health of any one of our nations requires ensuring the well-being of all nations? Such a shift in perspective would reveal new ways of organizing our global community, of decision-making and behavior that open up new and effective pathways to addressing the seemingly intractable challenges of our time.  

Such a shift in perspective requires both awareness and acceptance of the reality of our unprecedented interconnectedness as a global community of nations and of the imperative to act together collaboratively in order to solve collective challenges. It also requires us to acknowledge that we have the power to make different, more empowering choices. I will elaborate further on these thoughts in subsequent weekly blogposts that are part of a new series about indispensable mindsets and habits that will bring us the global peace we so dearly want.  Please stay tuned.