The Quest For World Harmony

(From Andrew Strauss & Richard Falk, For a Global Peoples Assembly, Stanford Journal of International Law, 2000, excerpted by Mary Anneeta Mann).

We wish to make the case that civil society is now capable of founding the Global Peoples Assembly, and that, because of its basis in popular legitimacy, the GPA would have the potential tol play a major role in global governance.          

 The Global Peoples Assembly might be come to be seen as but one of several giant steps on the path leading to the emergence of humane governance for all the peoples of the world, incorporating the ideas and practice of global democracy. 

How tremendously energizing it will be when people of democratic spirit and ethos in the world realize the full promise of this venture. After the great suffering of the last century, it would provide a auspicious beginning of this new millennium to have a vision as bold as the GPA put forth in a serious manner that captured the imagination of many people.  

Even before the ultimate goal of a GPA could be achieved, the international agenda would give a concrete and positive vision around which those who have voiced their objections to the anti-democratic nature of global institutions such as the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank could organize. Independent of the specific merits of a global popularly elected assembly, the general cause of furthering global democratization, could only be aided by the advancement of a concrete proposal around which media and public attention could be focused. 

Modern democratic beliefs hold that the ultimate source of law is the citizenry, because the citizenry rather than the sovereign is the fundamental source of political authority. Citizens can act directly to create an international organization. The global citizenry acting through representative process, can create an international organization that could exercise lawmaking powers. .It is the citizens themselves that have the right and perhaps responsibility to found their own assembly. 

Interested parties would become accustomed to viewing the GPA as a place to resolve differences and mechanisms for doing so would become established, familiar, and accepted.  As the GPA became a center of activity, press coverage of its proceedings and pronouncements would expand, thereby deepening public awareness and reinforcing its influence.

 The GPA has the potential to become more influential than the United Nations.. The GPA would be constituted without direct dependence on states, it would be less vulnerable than the United Nations to damage from the strategic oscillations of states. 

The GPA’s authority to create binding law would correspondingly gain gradual acceptance.  The argument that the GPA – the only body to represent the peoples of the world – has the power to create binding transnational law would have a wide acceptance at grassroots levels.  Civil society must necessarily take the lead in creating the GPA.  The dynamics of globalization create more and more of a one-world awareness among people everywhere.  

If enough individuals, advocacy groups, foundations, churches, labor unions, and other organizations with resources were to get behind the GPA, the task could be accomplished.                                                  

End of excerpt from Strauss & Falk