Suchergebnisse

Over the past 20 years, Saul H. Mendlovitz has been actively engaged in research, teaching, dialogue, advocacy, and political action in the struggles for a just world peace. Recently, he has been involved in the work of the Committee for a Just World Peace (CJWP). The CJWP's primary purpose is stimulating various grass-roots, social action, and citizen movements throughout the globe to interact in ways which will contribute to the formation of a global social movement in the struggles for a just world peace. More recently, with his initiative, the World Order Models Project in collaboration with the Soviet Political Science Association and with the cooperation of four institutes in Chile, India, Japan, and the United States, embarked on a new project called "The Coming Global Civilization: Challenges to Polity." The project seeks to develop cross-cultural and multidisciplinary perspectives on the coming global civilization, to analyze the consequent challenges to existing forms of polity, and to articulate both a normative vision and practical guidelines for action in a period of rapid transition. This essay is a result of these various engagements. We publish it here in the hope that it will encourage further dialogue and generate some response.

It is a basic premise of my remarks here today that it is necessary to take quite seriously not only the rhetoric but the reality of the term "the global village." That is to say, it is now clear that 98% of humankind sees the entire world as human society. This phenomenon, it should be underscored, is a psycho-historical first, and has had a drastic impact on the images and the attitudes we have in regard to authority structures within domestic societies, as well as within the international community. One of the implications of saying that there is a "global village" is that sometime within the next two decades many people throughout the globe are likely to begin to discuss quite seriously the governance of that global village in ways perhaps which we previously had eschewed. I should like to address myself initially to that theme and then come back to the role of the United Nations and some specific recommendations.

The authors here discern a "humane" impulse rising against the prevailing tendencies of market-driven opportunism-an impulse rapidly becoming manifest in international law. With focus on the United Nations and the norms, processes, and institutions with which it responds to militarism and war, poverty and maldevelopment, ecological imbalance, social justice, and alienation, they suggest workable initiatives and procedures through which relevant United Nations agencies might be reformed and/or transformed to effectively meet the new challenges of the next century. CONTRIBUTORS: Hilary Charlesworth, Kenneth K.S. Dadzie, Richard Falk, Hilary F. French, Bjöern Hettne, Robert C. Johansen, David W. Kennedy, B.G. Ramcharan, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Peter Weiss. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint

This essay examines the need to supplement national self-help in enforcing desirable global norms, explains the potential contributions of a transnational enforcement agency to the creation of a more just and peaceful world polity, describes how such an agency might function, and explores steps for establishing such an agency. The proposed transnational enforcement agency is discussed within the context of a comprehensive process of change that aims to domesticate international politics and transnationalize national politics. By gradually reinforcing preferred norms through more effective monitoring and enforcement of them, it is possible to increase the governability of and to humanize world society, as well as to increase the governing ability of political institutions at all levels. The authors examine the problem of unequal enforcement and emphasize that the proposed transnational agency, even imperfectly functioning, holds more promise for helping to establish justice and keep the peace than do present diplomatic and military practices. The agency's long-range utility for transforming the international system is no less important than its short-term potential for alleviating structural and direct violence.