The idea of a single political entity to govern and unite the whole of humanity is so old that it is hard to say when it first emerged. Socrates reportedly said around 400 BCE, “I am neither Athenian nor Greek, but a citizen of the world.” A century later, the Stoic philosopher Zeno of Citium expanded on the notion, saying, “We should all live not in cities and tribes, each distinguished by separate rules of justice, but should regard all men as members of the same tribe, and fellow citizens of one order.”
The Roman Empire created a single political authority for most of Europe and parts of Africa and Asia, and in 426 CE, Augustine of Hippo suggested in The City of God that an expansion of the empire to encompass the entire world could result in all humans living together in peace and harmony. But the western empire would collapse just 50 years later.
After nearly a millennium of conflict among continuously warring local principalities, Dante Alighieri in 1313 recalled how the political unity of Rome had forged a robust peace extending vastly over both space and time. In De Monarchia, Dante observed that when two equal sovereigns would come into conflict, there was no “third party of wider jurisdiction who rules over both of them.” Dante argued that “universal peace” could come to pass if all of humankind “can be ruled by one supreme prince.” Yet far from the universal tyranny that image might invoke, the great poet envisioned both that a multitude of local matters might be governed by local officials, and that those local leaders might be “raised to office by the consent of others.”
A genuine worldwide social movement started to emerge, proclaiming that world government was the only possible solution to the new problem of nuclear weapons, and the ancient problem of war itself.
As chaos gave way to nation-states in Europe and empires rose and flourished all over the world, philosophers and statesmen continued to refine the idea of global political unification, in works including the French King Henry IV’s Grand Design of 1610, Hugo Grotius’s On the Law of War and Peace of 1625, William Penn’s Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe of 1693, Charles Irenee Castel de Saint-Pierre’s Project For Rendering Perpetual Peace in Europe of 1713, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s A Lasting Peace Through the Federation of Europe of 1756, Jeremy Bentham’s A Plan for a Universal and Perpetual Peace of 1781, and Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace of 1795. In 1863, Baha’u’llah made world union a central concept of the new Baha’i Faith in The Call of the Divine Beloved; in 1914, with the world on the edge of a cataclysmic war driven largely by the twisted entanglements of a multi-state system, H.G. Wells published The World Set Free.
Wells died in 1946, shortly after the end of an even more devastating war, and deeply despondent about the human prospect. But with that war fresh in the world’s memory, something unprecedented and quite remarkable began to take place. A genuine worldwide social movement started to emerge, proclaiming that world government was the only possible solution to the new problem of nuclear weapons, and the ancient problem of war itself.
The first steps had been taken after the first war, with the idealistic but deeply flawed League of Nations. After the second war, a stronger United Nations was created, but it fell far short of an institution able to keep the peace, with a Security Council that could only act if unanimity prevailed among its five permanent members. World federalists felt more was needed.
The movement for a democratic federal world government that arose in the late 1940s was a political force as wide-ranging and influential in the U.S. as the civil rights and women’s rights movements a half-century ago or the climate movement today. Though it is hard to imagine now, at the time the world government idea was avidly discussed in classrooms, cocktail lounges, dinner parties, and symposia of every sort — with advocates from across the political spectrum:
- A 1947 Gallup poll showed that 56% of Americans supported the proposition that “the UN should be strengthened to make it a world government.”
- A Students for Federal World Government rally that year at Chicago Stadium, keynoted by Albert Einstein, drew such a crowd that it was standing room only.
- The “World Citizen Registry” established by American veteran Garry Davis — who had pitched a tent on a small patch of UN territory in Paris and declared himself the first World Citizen, renouncing his U.S. citizenship — attracted more than 500,000 enrollees.
- Prominent figures including Winston Churchill, Henry Fonda, Mohandas Gandhi, Jean-Paul Sartre, and John Steinbeck publicly advocated and elaborated upon the idea of world government, as did former Vice President Henry Wallace. University of Chicago Chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins assembled some of the leading social and political thinkers of the day to create the Committee to Frame a World Constitution.
- The majority of U.S. state legislatures passed resolutions endorsing U.S. participation in a future world government, and in 1949, the U.S. Congress declared that “it should be a fundamental objective of the foreign policy of the United States to support and strengthen the United Nations and to seek its development into a world federation, capable of enacting, interpreting, and enforcing world law to prevent war.” Three future presidents — John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford — would endorse at least one resolution along these lines.
U.S. support for world federation even reached the White House itself. Two days after signing the UN Charter in San Francisco in June 1945, President Harry Truman gave a speech in Kansas City in which he talked instead about someday creating “a republic of the world.” Three weeks later, during the Potsdam summit with Churchill and Stalin, a reported asked Truman about that statement.
Truman took a small piece of paper from his wallet and read aloud from Tennyson’s 1835 poem Locksley Hall: “Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d, In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.” Truman told the reporter that he had carried these words around in his wallet since he was a very young man.
Many members of Citizens for Global Solutions do similar things to this very day.