What is going on with the World Health Organisation? In December 2021 it began to talk about a global pandemic treaty. And now an International Treaty on Pandemic Preparedness, Prevention and Response will be presented to the 77th World Health Assembly between May 27th and June 1st: that is, next week. In the Daily Sceptic David Bell has done good work in going through the articles of the draft treaty, and also noting that we should read the amendments to the International Health Regulations too. But I want to ask a broader question. Is this a world state through the back door?
No one spoke about a world state much — except dismissively — until the early 20th century. H.G. Wells was fond of the idea. It was a modish subject at around the time of the formation of the League of Nations and again around the time of the formation of the United Nations, though, interestingly, it was usually dismissed. In the last 30 years the question of a world state has returned, though the answer is usually still negative.
However, one of the fundamental laws of politics is, and has been ever since Thucydides — or Augustus — that a thing can be one thing and yet can be called another thing. Politics is, as everyone has known since before Socrates, a rhetorical art: and the art of rhetoric involves all manner of minimisations, exaggerations, substitutions, reversals, redescriptions.
So what has happened in the last 30 years is not that we have become enthusiasts for something called a world state, but that we have become enthusiasts for something that we by and large do not want to call a world state while hoping — consciously, unconsciously — that it will be a world state.
Consciously: here I refer to the hypocrites, who want a world state but know they should not say so.
Unconsciously: here I refer to the idealists, who believe that one could have an ‘international society’ or ‘global democracy’ or ‘global governance’ — all vogue phrases of the last half century — without a state (specifically, without coercive power).
I have waded through the academic literature on ‘cosmopolitanism’. Many scholars, especially since the end of the Cold War, have strained to tell us exactly what we should do to have peace, redistribution, representation, rights, capabilities, all over the world. You know the sort of people I mean: earnest, irritating, the sort of professors who try to overcome their own presumable Weltschmerz by sketching visions of Weltharmonie: those tweeded 1950s Lucky Jim types or leather-jacketed 1970s History Man types, or, nowadays, the open-necked and scarved 2000s glass-ceiling breaking types, all of whom love the sound of their own grandiose normativity.
Normative: a word I have always disliked. It doesn’t mean ‘normal’: it means ‘concerning norms’, especially ‘concerning the norms that should be established’. It is a stipulative, imperative, finger-wagging word. The emphasis is on the word ‘should’: an innocent word, until it alarmingly comes to sound like ‘must’ and then, finally, ‘shall’.
The academics who write about cosmopolitanism most often speak about it as if everything could be achieved by law or federation or that mystical thing called ‘global governance’. ‘Governance’ is yet another dubious word: it means ‘government’ without exactly meaning anything as clear as ‘government’. (Governance murders us without leaving any marks on the body.) But with the advent of ‘climate change’ there has been a growing sense that something less democratic and more technocratic is required. And, of course, COVID-19, especially for those who believed that it was what it was said to be (those innocent folk who forgot that politics was a rhetorical art), was the most emphatic and startling arrival of an opportunity to respond to something collectively and coercively — in fact, in the manner of a world state.
The WHO declared COVID-19 a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on January 30th 2020 and, more memorably, a ‘pandemic’ on March 11th 2020. But the definition of a PHEIC is worth examining. It refers, I discover, to “an extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other states through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response”. The most important words in that sentence are determined and coordinated.
Determined: someone decides that there is risk.
Coordinated: the response to the risk is a singular one.
And if we ask who is to do the determining and the coordinating the answer is not a world state, but instead an international agency with treaty powers. COVID-19 was the best thing that has ever happened to the World Health Organisation (and its cluster of corporate allies). The back door opened. While the WHO strode through that back door, the IPCC looked on jealously; and I daresay Stonewall wondered how they could get involved.
But of course the WHO got there first, not letting a good crisis go to waste. The first thing it did was get us all on side rhetorically. Consider the word ‘pandemic’: it is derived from Greek: pan = all, and demos = people. Think about it. It isn’t a medical word. It’s a political word. From now on, they (‘They’) want us to be a pandemos, to be ordered about by those-who-know-best.
The European Union is also an influence here. For what is the history of the European Union but a history of bait-and-switches? First we hear: “It is just an economic community.” But in come the hypocrites and the idealists, and then we hear: “It is a political community.” Or first we hear: “We’ll have a referendum on the constitution.” But the people vote ‘No’, and the hypocrites and idealists have to change tack. So then we hear: “Here’s a treaty to get the constitution through the back door.” The international agencies have learnt much from the EU: which, in the later history of the world, will seem to have been nothing more than an early and useful and small-scale experiment in How To Do It.
There are two really profound problems with a World State.
The first is that it is a logical impossibility. States are like demons in the New Testament: their name is Legion. They are necessarily plural. For thousands of years we had empires with frontiers; then, in the 16th and 17th centuries, we invented states with borders: lines exactly drawn. A line can only be exactly drawn if we are no longer fighting over territory but coming to some agreement: where this agreement involves what modern lawyers call ‘recognition’: each side recognises the right of the other to exist. States are plural: they recognise others. I don’t know how we could live in a world where there was one state which recognised only itself. Whatever such a thing would be, it would not be a state in the usual sense. It would be an unlimited state, whereas it is part of the idea of a state that it is limited.
The second is that it is an abstraction. It is a fantasy, a fiction: it exists in the mind of lawyers. It could exist in law, of course: everything can exist in law. But there would be no culture or society to back up that law: so it would be backed up by force. Lord Sumption writes books about how we are coming to depend too much on law and not enough on convention. David McGrogan in the Daily Sceptic tells us the same thing. It was Burke’s point in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which remains the paradigmatic book of our time. I heard Eric Weinstein say it recently too. (His illustration: Law = you may not say something objectionable. Convention = you may say it, but the convention is that you would not say it.) Our cultures have usually depended on conventions which have emerged through long, troublesome but shared histories. If we have no shared history, then there is no culture, no conventions, only law. So a world state would be an unreal thing: something no one would believe in, except the people paid to believe in it, i.e., its functionaries — the bossy WHO, IPCC, Stonewall types.
Neither of these profound problems is enough to stop the thing happening. So I’d say that though this WHO treaty might not be a very clear revelation of a world state, it is certainly an important dry run for it. It is a sketch, part of a work-in-progress: and we should be wary of all the quislings who are opening the back door for it.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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