Disarmament Diplomacy

Issue No. 78, July/August 2004

Books in View

The Sovereignty Revolution by Alan Cranston

Introduced by Kim Cranston

As we witnessed the "transfer of sovereignty in Iraq" in June, I wondered what my father, the late Senator Alan Cranston, would have thought about the situation there. A few days before he passed away in December 2000, my father completed a book called The Sovereignty Revolution. The book explored ways humanity can effectively address global challenges, from climate change to terrorism and genocide.

He concluded that our current concept of sovereignty, which is "widely and unwisely thought... to mean only national sovereignty", helped make the twentieth century the bloodiest in history, and humanity will not survive the next century unless we revise our concept of sovereignty to acknowledge the primacy of the individual and emphasise the importance of strengthening transnational organisations and international law.

My father didn't live to witness the horrors of September 11th or the ensuing "war on terror". But his book warned of a terrorist attack on the United States, and specifically named Osama Bin Laden as a possible perpetrator. If only our current leaders had had such foresight.

There is another warning my father issued throughout most of his life and emphasised in his book that our leaders must heed, and that was of the immense dangers posed by nuclear weapons.

"The creation of nuclear weapons and their proliferation into many hands is the most ominous fact that emerged from the unflowered carnage and unforgotten sorrow entombed with the remains of the twentieth century," he wrote. "It separates today and all the tomorrows from all the yesterdays. Wars once had their limits. Despite whatever horrors humans experienced through the centuries, they have always been able to say, 'Life goes on.' That may no longer be an accurate assessment of the human condition."

In his book and in many of his speeches, my father was one of the early people to identify the deadly nexus between nuclear weapons and terrorist organisations and rogue regimes, long before it became the vogue following America's awakening on September 11, 2001.

"A deliberate terrorist attack is a ... likely eventuality," he wrote. He quoted former US Secretary of Defense William Cohen, a Republican, who warned in 2000 that a terrorist attack somewhere on American soil with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons is "probable" within the next ten years. And he often quoted former US Ambassador Robert Gallucci who engaged in nuclear weapon negotiations with both Iraq and North Korea. Gallucci warned how a terrorist or rogue nuclear attack on the US could happen: One of these days one of these [rogue] governments fabricates a couple of nuclear weapons, and gives them to a terrorist group. The group brings one of these bombs into Baltimore by boat, and drives another one up to Pittsburgh. And then the message comes in to the White House. 'Adjust your policy in the Middle East, or on Tuesday you lose Baltimore, and on Wednesday you lose Pittsburgh.' Tuesday comes, and we lose Baltimore. What does the US do?

"What does any nation do?" my father asked.

"The tragic consequences of any such deed, wherever it might occur, will not necessarily be any more confined by national boundaries than is the global flow today of information, money and drugs," he wrote. "After these ghastly weapons have destroyed their targets and snuffed out the lives of nearby men, women and children, fatal radioactive fallout can seep across the borders of nations with invisible and silent stealth, like a gas stove giving off its lethal hissing as we sleep, its deadly destination determined more by the whims of the winds than by malevolent human intention."

No one is immune. There is no safe haven on earth. "Unrestrained passions and impulsive quests for new identities, powers, and independence explode in country after country and on continent after continent, driving the shattering and splintering of the world like a historical force of nature impossible to tame," he continued. "Potential clashes and conflicts loom on a scale surpassing those that are already causing so much havoc and so many deaths of innocents."

However, he believed horrors of terrorist attacks and mushroom clouds are preventable. "The answer," he wrote, "will likely be found to lie in adding one more layer of citizenship-world citizenship-to the national and lesser layers among which sovereignty is presently dispersed. This would at long last enable individuals to act upon and embrace not only their traditional national citizenship, patriotism, and allegiance, but also their global citizenship, their planetary patriotism, their allegiance to humanity."

To be sure, my father was not calling for a world government, but for something far more nuanced. He was calling for "the deliberate pooling, through democratic processes of consent, of strictly limited and carefully defined portions of the sovereignty of individuals so as to obtain what cannot otherwise be had."

Examples of this kind of "pooling" of portions of individual sovereignty date back hundreds of years. Switzerland is a striking early example of an enduring federation, dating back to 1291, when three distinct cantons signed an "eternal alliance" that has survived the subsequent centuries. Four separate ethnic entities, four cultures, and four languages - French, German, Italian and Romanch - and two religions, Catholic and Protestant, all make Switzerland their harmonious home. Its diverse people share their sovereign power with each other through a system of direct democracy. Switzerland's historical tradition of isolationism, which affected the way it dealt with refugees from Nazi terror during World War II and evoked widespread condemnation, now seems to be shifting. Switzerland finally became the second to last nation state to join the United Nations on September 10, 2002 (the Vatican maintains its Observer status, which Switzerland previously shared). In doing so, the people of Switzerland shared some of their sovereignty with that global institution.

My father identified two more modern examples of experiments in the uses of sovereignty to contain conflict and improve human relations that are especially relevant. One began just over two hundred years ago in America, and is still evolving. The other started half a century ago in Europe and is also still unfolding.

Americans replaced a government that was over them with a government that was under them. The United States' founding fathers believed that sovereignty belongs to the people, not to any government. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the American Declaration of Independence that "Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

"The greatest experiment in the peaceful expanding and merging of sovereignty that has occurred since the creation of the US is now underway in Europe," my father wrote, "the site and source of so many devastating wars over the centuries." Historical animosities have been thrust aside and war between the nations of Europe now seems unthinkable.

The European Union (EU) began in 1951 as a six-nation treaty to combine coal and steel resources. But Jean Monnet of France, the inspiration behind the movement, had something much grander in mind. "We are not forming coalitions between States," he said, "but union among people." Once the people of those six nations found they could collaborate peacefully over coal and steel matters, they began to cooperate on broader matters.

The EU has continued to expand its membership and now has its own currency and its own flag. Its citizens carry European passports (that nevertheless also denote the country), and, for the first time in history, elections for the EU are coordinated among all the member states, blurring long-established national borders. Delegates to the European Parliament, elected by the people of each country, rather than appointed by their governments, are apportioned in general accordance with the population of member states, a significant departure from the traditional one-nation, one delegation basis of most multilateral institutions. My father wrote that these unique features of the EU recognise "the dawning concept that the sovereignty of half a billion European individuals is superior to the sovereignty of a few European nations."

The United States and the European Union are models of unions that are successfully preventing violence and solving common problems within their respective borders. However, just as no nation alone can hope to address all problems of a global nature, neither can a regional union hope to solve all of the world's challenges.

"Are the lessons learned in America, Europe and Switzerland, and being learned elsewhere, applicable to the world as a whole?" my father asked.

"Certainly the differences among the people who inhabited the thirteen states when the Constitutional Convention met in 1787 were small compared to the differences among the people who inhabit almost 200 nations now," he wrote. "And certainly even the differences between the people of Europe that led to so many bloody conflicts over so many centuries are less than those among the people of the whole wide world. But great as the troubles were that led to the creation of the US and the EU, they were small compared to the troubles that cry out for global action today."

My father recognised the United Nations' distinct potential to cope with global problems: "When a nation becomes the violator rather than the protector of the rights and liberties of its citizens, it is now often the UN that is called upon by the conscience of humanity to intervene."

But the UN also "lacks the requisite tools," he wrote. The main tool the UN needs is a carefully defined share of sovereignty from each of us. Because history suggests "that nations are more likely to survive in the more orderly and stable world that they and their citizens could create by pooling a limited amount of their sovereignty than they are in the present anarchistic, lawless world of rising violence with the authority of nations waning and events spinning out of control as untamed forces work their will."

To the naysayer, my father would answer, "This is not as revolutionary as it might sound. Actually, most of the nations and people of the world have already placed a portion of their sovereignty in the UN." The only nation states other than the Vatican that have not taken this step are the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Any of the five can exercise its sovereignty to block UN actions.

My father did not necessarily see the UN as the whole answer, however. "Portions of American sovereignty and that of other nations and their people have already been delegated to other regional and global institutions.... The earliest such actions had to do not with momentous issues like war, peace, and violence but with small and routine day-to-day cross-border commercial transactions and social intercourse. Prime early examples of treaties and institutions created for such purposes were the Postal Union, the Telegraph Union, and the Patent Convention, all negotiated in the latter half of the nineteenth century when the first signs and tokens of globalism were encountered. Each of these agreements brought about limited transfers of sovereign authority to global institutions."

People's fear of a loss of sovereignty to a central global organisation may preclude the UN from being the only or even the central institution confronting global challenges in the long term. In that event, several distinct world institutions may emerge to tackle different categories of global concern. "One institution could emerge to deal solely with the apparent common need to halt global warming, and perhaps to take on other environmental threats to the quality if not the actual survival of life on earth," my father wrote. "Another could deal in a carefully limited but needed way with the economy.... Still another could deal with weapons of mass destruction...."

In any event, whether the chosen instrument is the UN or not, reforms are needed that account for the fact that "the single most significant characteristic of any organisation is how it makes decisions, how voting power is divided up among its members."

In essence, my father was calling for a long-overdue change - to make the UN and the rest of the international system more democratic. "If no giants appear to lead the way," he wrote, "then it will fall to the members of civil society to demand more of the leaders they have - if need be engaging in a supreme exercise of their own sovereignty by transforming leaders into followers who are made to understand that common people will accept nothing less than uncommon actions from them."

The Sovereignty Revolution by Alan Cranston, with Jane Goodall, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jonathan Granoff and Jonathan Schell, is edited by Kim Cranston (Stanford University Press, July 2004). For more information visit http://www.gsinstitute.org.

Kim Cranston is Chair of the San Francisco-based Global Security Institute. Alan Cranston, his father, represented California in the United States Senate from 1969-1993. Especially noteworthy were his efforts before, during and after his 24 years in the Senate in regard to world peace, nuclear disarmament, enhanced hemispheric relations, environmental protection, and reduced military spending. Alan Cranston founded the Global Security Institute in 1999.

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