THE BIRTH OF THE GLOBAL NATION by Strobe Talbott

미 국무부 부장관이었던 Strobe Talbott이 Time지에 1992년 6월 20일에 기고한 것으로 세계연방정부에 관한 사설입니다.

물론 유대인 - 프리메이슨의 세계지배 야욕과는 하등 상관없지만, 음모론자들이 멋대로 일부 구절만 퍼와서 자기들 멋대로 사기 날조하는 근거 문헌으로서 종종 오역되기에 사실을 밝히고자 한번 가져와보네요.

원문입니다.
THE BIRTH OF THE GLOBAL NATION by Strobe Talbott

The human drama, whether played out in history books or headlines, is often not just a confusing spectacle but a spectacle about confusion. The big question these days is, which political forces will prevail, those stitching nations together or those tearing them apart?

Here is one optimist's reason for believing unity will prevail over disunity, integration over disintegration. In fact, I'll bet that within the next hundred years (I'm giving the world time for setbacks and myself time to be out of the betting game, just in case I lose this one), nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century -- "citizen of the world" -- will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st century.

All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary. Through the ages, there has been an overall trend toward larger units claiming sovereignty and paradoxically, a gradual diminution of how much true sovereignty any one country actually has.

The forerunner of the nation was a prehistoric band clustered around a fire beside a river in a valley. Its members had a language, a set of supernatural beliefs and a repertoire of legends about their ancestors. Eventually they forged primitive weapons and set off over the mountain, mumbling phrases that could be loosely translated as having something to do with "vital national interests" and a "manifest destiny." When they reached the next valley, they massacred and enslaved some weaker band of people they found clustered around some smaller fire and thus became the world's first imperialists.

Empires were a powerful force for obliterating natural and demographic barriers and forging connections among far-flung parts of the world. The British left their system of civil service in India, Kenya and Guyana, while the Spaniards, Portuguese and French spread Roman Catholicism to almost every continent.

Empire eventually yielded to the nation-state, made up primarily of a single tribe. China, France, Germany and Japan are surviving examples. Yet each of them too is the consequence of a centuries-long process of accretion. It took the shedding of much blood in many valleys for Normandy, Brittany and Gascony to become part of France.

Today fewer than 10% of the 186 countries on earth are ethnically homogeneous. The rest are multinational states. Most of them have pushed their boundaries outward, often until they reached the sea. That's how California became part of the U.S. and the Kamchatka Peninsula part of Russia.

The main goal driving the process of political expansion and consolidation was conquest. The big absorbed the small, the strong the weak. National might made international right. Such a world was in a more or less constant state of war.

From time to time the best minds wondered whether wasn't a hell of a way to run a planet; perhaps national sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all. Dante in the 14th century, Erasmus in the 16th and Grotius in the 17th all envisioned international law as a means of overcoming the natural tendency of states to settle their differences by force.

In the 18th century the Enlightenment -- represented by Rousseau in France, Hume in Scotland, Kant in Germany, Paine and Jefferson in the U.S. -- gave rise to the idea that all human beings are born equal and should, as citizens, enjoy certain basic liberties and rights, including that of choosing their leaders. Once there was a universal ideology to govern the conduct of nation toward their own people, it was more reasonable to imagine a compact governing nations' behavior toward one another. In 1795 Kant advocated a "peaceful league of democracies." But it has taken the events in our own wondrous and terrible century to clinch the case for world government. With the advent of electricity, radio and air travel, the planet has become smaller than ever, its commercial life freer, its nations more interdependent and its conflicts bloodier. The price of settling international disputes by force was rapidly becoming too high for the victors, not to mention the vanquished. That conclusion should have been clear enough at the battle of the Somme in 1916; by the destruction of Hiroshima in 1945, it was unavoidable.

Once again great minds thought alike: Einstein, Ghandi, Toynbee and Camus all favored giving primacy to interests higher than those of the nation. So, finally, did the statesmen. Each world war inspired the creation of an international organization, the League of Nations in the 1920s and the United Nations in the '40s.

The plot thickened with the heavy-breathing arrival on the scene of a new species of ideology -- expansionist totalitarianism - as perpetrated by the Nazis and the Soviets. It threatened the very idea of democracy and divided the world. The advocacy of any kind of world government became highly suspect. By 1950 "one-worlder" was a term of derision for those suspected of being wooly-headed naïfs, if not crypto-communists.

At the same time, however, Stalin's conquest of Eastern Europe spurred the Western democracies to form NATO, history's most ambitious, enduring and successful exercise in collective security. The U.S. and the Soviet Union also scared each other into negotiating nuclear-arms-control treaties that set in place two vital principals: adversary states have a mutual interest in eliminating the danger of strategic surprise, and each legitimately has a say in the composition of the other's arsenal of last resort. The result was further dilution of national sovereignty and a useful precedent for the management of relations between nuclear-armed rivals in the future.

The cold war also saw the European Community pioneer the kind of regional cohesion that may pave the way for globalism. Meanwhile, the free world formed multilateral financial institutions that depend on member states' willingness to give up a degree of sovereignty. The International Monetary Fund can virtually dictate fiscal policies, even including how much tax a government should levy on its citizens. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade regulates how much a nation can charge on imports. These organizations can be seen as the protoministries of trade, finance and development for a united world.

The internal affairs of a nation used to be off limits to the world community. Now the principal of "humanitarian intervention" is gaining acceptance. A turning point came in April 1991, shortly after Saddam Hussein's withdrawal from Kuwait, when the U.N. Security Council authorized allied troops to assist starving Kurds in northern Iraq.

Globalization has also contributed to the spread of terrorism, drug trafficking, AIDS and environmental degradation. But because those threats are more than any one nation can cope with on its own, they constitute an incentive for international cooperation.

However limited its accomplishments, last month's Earth Summit in Rio signified the participants' acceptance of what Maurice Strong, the main impresario of the event, called "the transcending sovereignty of nature": since the by-products of industrial civilization cross borders, so must the authority to deal with them.

Collective action on a global scale will be easier to achieve in a world already knit together by cables and air-waves. The fax machine had much to do with the downfall of tyrants in Eastern Europe. Two years ago I was assigned an interpreter in Estonia who spoke with a slight southern accent because she had learned English watching Dallas, courtesy of TV signals beamed over the border from neighboring Finland. The Cosby Show, aired on South African television, has no doubt helped erode apartheid.

The ideological and cultural blending strikes some observers as too much of a good thing. Writing in the Atlantic, Rutgers political scientist Benjamin Barber laments what he calls "McWorld." He also identifies the countertrend, the re-emergence of nationalism in its ugliest, most divisive and violent form.

Yet Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Czechoslovakia we part of the world's last, now deceased empire. Their breakup may turn out to be the old business of history, not the wave of the future. National self-assertiveness in the West can be mighty ugly, especially in its more extreme Irish and Basque versions. But when Scots, Quebecois, Catalans and Bretons talk separatism, they are, in the main, actually renegotiating their ties to London, Ottawa, Madrid and Paris.

They are the disputatious representatives of a larger, basically positive phenomenon: a devolution of power not only upward toward supranational bodies and outward toward commonwealths and common markets, but also downward toward freer, more autonomous units of administration that permit distinct societies to preserve their cultural identities and govern themselves as much as possible. That American buzzward empowerment - and the European one, subsidiary - is being defined locally, regionally and globally all at the same time.

Humanity has discovered, through much trial and horrendous error, that differences need not divide. Switzerland is made up of four nationalities crammed into an area considerably smaller than what used to be Yugoslavia. The air in the Alps is no more conducive to comity than the air in the Balkans. Switzerland has thrived, while Yugoslavia has failed because of what Kant realized 200 years ago: to be in peaceful league with one another, people-and peoples -- must have the benefits of democracy.

The best mechanism for democracy, whether at the level of the multinational state or that of the planet as a whole, is not an all-powerful Leviathan or centralized superstate, but a federation, a union of separate states that allocate certain powers to a central government while retaining many others for themselves.

Federalism has already proved the most successful of all political experiments, and organizations like the World Federalist Association have for decades advocated it as the basis for global government. Federalism is largely an American invention. For all its troubles, including its own serious bout of secessionism 130 years ago and the persistence of various forms of tribalism today, the U.S. is still the best example of a multinational federal state. If that model does indeed work globally, it would be the logical extension of the Founding Fathers' wisdom, therefore a special source of pride for a world government's American constituents.

As for humanity as a whole, if federally united, we won't really be so very far from those much earlier ancestors, the ones huddled around that primeval fire beside the river; it's just that by then the whole world will be our valley.

위 글을 한번 간략하게 훑어 보았지만, 어디에서도 유대인 및 세계지배 음모론과 연계되어 있다는 흔적은 없습니다.
유대인 - 프리메이슨 음모론 신봉가들과 여기에 편승하는 황색언론들, 주권국가가 절대적인 것이라고 생각하는 일부 국가주의 및 민족주의자들의 악의적인 선전문구입니다.

글을 요약해보자면..
먼저 자신의 긍정적인 예측으로서, 통합이 분열보다 나으며 21세기 말엽에는 세계연방정부가 세워질 수도 있을 것이라는 예측을 제시합니다.

그 근거로서
과거 국가의 역사를 원시시대 -> 제국(Empire)의 시대 -> 국민국가의 시대로 이어지는 역사로 훑어 나가고있으며, 오늘날(1992년)에는 186개의 국가군 중 단 10% 만이 단일민족(ethnically homogeneous)임을 언급하는 것으로 시작합니다.

이러한 역사언급과 함께, 과거 국가의 주 정치적인 목표는 정복이었음을 언급하고 있습니다.
단테나 에라스무스와 같은 전근대 시대의 지성인들도 이러한 문제를 인식하고 국제법에 대해 구상하였으며, 18세기 계몽주의 시대의 위대한 사상가들은 국가 지도자를 고를 권리를 포함한 천부인권에 대하여 주장하였고, 20세기의 위대한 지성들도 국가를 초월하는 이러한 것에 대해여 관심을 가졌었다는 것을 주장하며, 마지막으로는 각 국가 지도자들에 의해 UN이 1940년대에 세워졌다는 것으로 마무리짓네요.

또한 최근에는 세계화가 진행되면서 테러리즘이나 AIDS와 같은 문제들이 전 세계적으로 일어나고 있으며, 이를 해결하기 위해 각 국가들은 협력을 더해 나가고 있다는 것을 언급하며, 케이블과 팩스등으로 인해 세계적인 연결망이 강화되었으며, 이러한 연결의 발전이 공산주의의 붕괴에 기여하였고, 인종차별을 감소시키도록 기여하였다는 사실을 제시합니다.
다른 한편으로는 스위스와 유고슬라비아를 비교하며 스위스는 서로 다른 지역들의 연합체가 되어 성공했지만, 유고슬라비아는 분열을 선택하여 몰락할수 밖에 없었다라는 사례도 제시하고 있습니다.

마지막으로 위의 내용들을 정리하며.
현재 미국이 많은 문제들을 안고 있기는 하지만 그래도 가장 성공적인 정치 체계 중 하나로서 여러 국가(state - 원래 초창기 미국에서는 각각의 주가 일종의 국가와 마찬가지였습니다.)의 연방제로 운영되고 있다는 사실을 언급하며, 세계정부가 미국과 같이 민주주의에 근거한 연방제 정부로 성립된다면 큰 문제가 없을 것이라고 마무리짓네요.