Thursday 15 February 2018

In the Place Where There is No Darkness



In the Place Where There is No Darkness



‘Global government’ in this paper shall refer to an international institution which has the authority to make decisions regarding all agents within the system, and the power to see its decisions through. The closest thing to global government today is the United Nations (UN). The UN is thought to have the capability to prevent future massive conflicts. Following, however, is an argument to the contrary of that belief. I will argue that the UN fails to meet the necessary requirements for a proper global government. We will first examine the need for such an institution’s presence, looking at transnational issues (issues which ignore the borders of states, and so too ignore state sovereignty). Thereafter I will integrate case studies into the areas of security, the developmental world, and climate change to demonstrate the failings of the current system (the UN). Finally I will suggest a few possible evolutions the global population might take to rectify the need for, and lack of, a world government.


Transnational Issues and the Need for Global Governance

The need for global governance has been apparent for quite some time. Especially in the last century or so there has been a very sharp rise in the number and variations of transnational issues. Herein we will focus on: security in Syria, developmental Africa, and climate change in the United States. The UN is the sworn moderator in the areas of such issues, and yet there is little being done about them. As we will discover, it is less that the UN is not doing anything and moreso that the UN lacks the authority to enforce its own decisions. The UN is no longer feasible, it is well past the time that the hall-monitor of the Earth could sway the hands of fate in its favour. The world desperately needs a behemoth actor to materialize and take rigid control of the chaos in the world for the betterment and prosperity of all humankind. This behemoth will be an overarching global officialdom comprised of a neutral bureaucracy and enforcement structure. The bureaucracy will be swift-acting and efficient, and the enforcement structure will be uncompromising and authoritative in executing the preventions and redemptions assigned to it by its bureaucratic counterpart.


Security and the Scandalous Syrian SNAFU

It is March of 2011 and violence suddenly erupts throughout Syria. The autocratic al-Assad regime is now in the midst of civil war. The chaos and unrest throughout the region allows a breeding ground and training camp for radical Islamists, and almost overnight the country becomes a quagmire of devastation and bloodshed. The UN was quick to react to the outbreak of violence, and began to attempt to mediate in 2012. Three attempts were made by three distinct, UN-appointed, mediators to resolve the conflict (Lundgren, 2016). It has now been six years, and yet war continues to dominate the country. Four-hundred-and-seventy thousand dead, eleven million displaced, and one million living in besieged areas (Human Rights Watch, (n.d.)), what could the barrier to resolving such a Hobbesian state of conflict possibly be?


It appears to be the fundamentally flawed nature of a democratic institution operating at an anarchic level. The UN Security Council had decided on a path forward as early as February 2012, agreed to by a majority three fifths of the permanent members. The blockage came from the minority two fifths: Russia and China (Lundgren, 2017). Who are able to, each, single handedly belay any action they disagree with due to the unrestricted freedom of veto held by each of the five permanent members. While the ‘Tyranny of the Majority’ is a valid concern, it seems to be a much more fundamental flaw when we experience the ‘Tyranny of the Minority’. Such has remained a massive issue throughout the UN attempts to defuse the Syrian situation. In fact, the first of the three UN-appointed mediators, Kofi Annan, became sorely dismayed and resigned his position whilst “criticizing the international and regional powers for failing to join up behind his effort and provide the kind of leverage that the execution of his plan required” (Lundgren, 2017). Lundgren goes on to determine that “repeatedly, the inability of the USA and Russia to join around a common approach for Syria pulled out the rug under UN mediation efforts”.


WHO Can It Be Now?

The UN document entitled Guidelines for the designation of Goodwill Ambassadors and Messengers of Peace states that individuals invited to serve as Goodwill Ambassadors or Messengers of Peace shall: possess widely recognized talent, support the purposes and principles of the United Nations, possess the dignity required for such high level representative capacity, and promote the values of the United Nations (United Nations, (n.d.)). Contemporary dictator Robert Mugabe does not seem to fit these qualifications. Nonetheless Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) declared that Robert Mugabe would now act as the WHO ‘Goodwill Ambassador’ on NCDs in Africa.


Robert Mugabe, the current President of Zimbabwe, has held a tyrannical power for thirty-eight years. Coming into power through democratic process in Zimbabwe’s annexation from Britain in 1979 - 1980, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) immediately executed what is known as the Gukurahundi campaign, in which his forces carried out techniques of intimidation and systematic violence against his primary political opposition at the time, the Zambian African Peoples’ Union (Tendi, 2011). Furthermore, “in 1999 Mugabe ordered the invasion of white-owned commercial farms . . . in order to ward off [a] new political threat . . . the disastrous economic consequences that followed the farm seizures can certainly be put down to Mugabe's toxic decision to risk economic prosperity for the sake of retaining political power” (Tendi, 2011).


The world, fully aware of the autocracy and ruthlessness of Mugabe’s reign, was outraged and decried the announcement of his new position in the WHO. Ghebreyesus took this outrage under consideration and hastefully rescinded his decision to follow through with such an appointment. The question remains, however: how did such a decision get made in the the first place? Luke Allen, of Oxford University, speculates that the decision was made based on the Director General’s platform of universal health care, which coincided with Zimbabwe’s national policies of universal healthcare (2017). Some aspects of this ‘alignment’ that seem to have been overlooked include factors such as the WHO’s own assessment of the Zimbabwean state, finding that less than half the population is satisfied with the performance of the health system in place and further arguing that such a discrepancy is “mainly due to the deteriorating economic environment of the last decade which resulted in unavailability of essential medicines and critical health care workers” (World Health Organization, (n.d.)). Also looking at the World Bank’s data for Zimbabwe we can see that they have an extremely low life expectancy of 60 years, which actually took a significant hit for a stretch of 15 or so years from 1995 through 2009, during which it dipped as low as 44 years (World Bank, 2015) and has only recently begun to incline once more. This does not seem to correlate with a country who has a universal healthcare system worthy of such ‘goodwill’ recognition in the world’s most prominent international health institution.


All of this, seemingly satirical, business thus makes one wonder just how learnéd the UNWHO is when it comes to matters of their own device. The UN is the architect of human rights and development. Yet, here we have a savage violator of such rights being (nearly) praised with recognition and a position of status and power within the very organization which his actions so vehemently contradict. How could such a blunder possibly occur? Allen, who works as a consultant for the branch of the WHO that put on the fateful conference, alleges that “[i]t does not seem that the Director General shared his intention with any senior WHO staff; my colleagues were as dumbfounded as the international community” (2017), but further supposes

[h]is years of experience pragmatically overseeing significant health improvements within an oppressive [Ethiopian] government may explain his willingness to engage with other unsavoury regimes. This is a difficult line to tread. Non-communicable diseases advocates sympathise with his inclusive inclinations, but have drawn the line at having Mugabe as their figurehead (2017).


Even bearing such in mind, one would be hard-pressed to find a less suitable candidate for such a position. So, while likely well-intentioned, the UNWHO has done a very poor job in this case of advocating for and enforcing their own decrees in regards to the developmental indices of the African peoples. In this attempt to advocate for NCDs they have made a massive blunder and caused harm to the areas most in need of such advocacy. The failing of the UN in this case does not amount to anything foundational, yet rather to the poor potentiality for effective communication at such a mass and intricately interwoven level as is global governance. With so many departments, and sub-departments of sub-departments, it becomes difficult to blame Ghebreyesus for not bothering to clarify his intent.


Climate and the American Hot Topic

Our planet is changing, and with it we must change alongside, lest we risk becoming disharmonious with nature and the natural order. Should such a disharmony occur it would pit humanity against nature itself in a battle to the death. Therefore, when humankind’s most prominent and respected body of technical knowledge --science-- begins to say that the actions of our species are leading to such a disharmony, and so too begging the end-times, then there ought to be an institution in place to prevent such a catastrophe from occurring. Such preventative measures would necessarily require two stages of enactment. The first would be to define the problem and the according action plan to avoid it, and the second would be to enforce those measures should certain areas of the world choose not to comply.


The world currently has such a problem of potential disharmonization: emissions-driven climate change. The system we currently work with, the UN, realizes only a single of the two necessary stages to prevent the incoming heat-death-apocalypse. This first stage is realized by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the ultimate objective of which is the “. . . stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system . . .” (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, (n.d.)). From this convention spawned both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. Each of which are multilateral agreements to alter the way in which states operate, and allow their citizens to operate, such that the world as a cohesive unit can avoid catastrophic ecological meltdown in the near future. The issue, however, is that the signing of such documents is voluntary. Furthermore, even for those who do sign, the UN is incapable of enforcing the mandates of these agreements. Savasan reinforces this standpoint by arguing “in fact, [the Paris Agreement] can have a binding character only for those states expressing their consent to be bounded by the treaty . . . [and] regardless of its binding status that eventually it will take, the related party can resist to be in non-compliance with its commitments under the Agreement despite the existence of response measures it can come across with, because there is no enforcement mechanism under international law” (Savasan, 2017).


Alas, we find ourselves looking into the eyes of such an ignorant nation and wondering, fruitlessly, which seminar it was that they missed. By the estimates of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in 2014 there was a global emission count of greenhouse gases (GHG) summing 9855 million metric tonnes (MMT) (Boden, 2017), of which the United States was responsible for approximately 6740 MMT (Environmental Protection Agency, (n.d.)). One would expect them, based on this predominant percentage of contributions, to further contribute in taking a leading role in reducing the chances of our species dying an untimely death as a result of GHG-driven climate change. But, much like Honey Badger, America does not seem to care (Randall, 2011). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been around since 1988, and within its nearly 30 year lifespan it has made two gargantuan efforts at stabilizing climate change. The first effort was in the late 1990s with the declaration of the Kyoto Protocol (KP). To begin with there were 84 signatures on the protocol, the United States was one of them. This meant that the United States promised to go back and ratify the changes within its national governmental structures. The action stage of the KP came around in 2005 and at that time only 55 of the signatory countries had followed through with ratification of the protocol, the United States was not one of these. Presently there are 192 countries which have followed through with ratification, a grouping within which the United States is not included (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, (n.d.)). The second effort by the IPCC is referred to as the Paris Agreement (PA). The PA came into being in 2015, and was signed, ratified, and brought into force by the United States on November 4, 2016 (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, (n.d.)). However, they have now declared their intent to discontinue observation of the PA (Crilly, 2017. Harrington, 2017. Liptak, 2017). This decision is justified based on the argument that a reduction in GHG emissions would threaten the prosperity of the U.S. economy. Here we are able to see more clearly that the seminar that America seems to have missed was the one in which it was posited that the ability to make money is irrelevant when the scorching heat of the Sun has dried up all the fresh water, and the hundreds of millions of displaced coastal peoples march inland to avoid the catastrophic rising sea, causing disease and crime to embark on a malignant campaign throughout the over-dense urban centers. Still, even such misinformed terrorism is to be expected now and then in a world of seven billion and growing. The issue is not that such uninformed opinions continue to occur, but rather that such unfounded opinions are permitted to proliferate!


A Brave New World

Based on the aforementioned shortcomings on the UN as a form of global government, I now propose a solution. This solution may seem slightly radical, and too jarring to properly implement, but it should be viewed as a normative approach to fall piece-by-piece into place over an extended period of time.


It will be necessary to dissolve the notion of the state, and thereby the notion of sovereignty. Sovereignty is an archaic concept that no longer serves this globalized community we now all live within. Sovereignty and statehood are notorious at creating problems simply by their definition of ‘us and them’; and in fact the rising prevalence of transnational issues attests to this onwards progression past the ‘Age of the State’. This is especially apparent when looking through a realist lens, but is just as plain coming from other lenses as well: constructivism sees that by defining differences we therefore create and perpetuate them, liberalism has this notion of ‘freeing’ the others, which can be justified in certain cases, such as the responsibility to protect, but becomes quickly tarnished when looking at America’s efforts to violently democratize and liberalize the globe (Poh Phaik, 2009. Cordesman, 2014). What we should have left after such a dissolution of state is a single cohesive ‘state’, namely Earth; with a single cohesive ‘ethnicity’, namely Human.


This begs the question of just how we would go about governing such a unified world, and the answer is as plain as the problem: we do not govern ourselves. Rather we allow ourselves to be governed by an arbiter of equality and righteousness, an arbiter who is not twisted, and corrupted, and led astray by passion and emotion. This arbiter would be an artificial intelligence neural network (AINN), a computer which can think and learn for itself. Google has developed an AINN that, itself, builds other AINN, and in fact has begun to write code which surpasses human capability (Lant, 2017). While this technology is still very young, one can foresee a future in which an AINN could program another AINN which was free from all human bias and subjectivity --the perfect governor-- An AINN such as this would also be capable of always knowing what every other part of itself was doing.


But what good is a government that cannot enforce the decisions it makes? It is for this reason that this new global government structure which I propose is to be supported by its own enforcement structure: an army of robots sporting the non-bias AINN software from the governmental super-network. These robots would only activate should the need for enforcement of some type arise. Gone are the days of financing a standing army, this brave new world will have divisions of the most highly trained super soldiers --imagine ‘SuperTroop Battledress’ without the human inside (Jacobsen, 2015)-- prepared to deploy ad hoc, and for no more than the cost of materials and production.

Conclusion

We have spent the last number of pages discussing the UN in its various elements, and looking specifically at three case studies demonstrating its failings as a global government. We discussed Syria and the UN’s inability to effectively combat the vast suffering and abuses of human rights due to the faulty veto structure of the Security Council. Thereafter we discussed the foolhardiness of the WHO in its recent selection of an advocate for NCDs in Africa. Finally, we talked about climate change and America. To these problems was suggested an encompassing solution: the dissolution of the state and the introduction of a global non-aligned artificial intelligence neural network government, backed up by a politically-neutral robot enforcement structure. While seemingly science-fictitious, this solution is actually within reach technologically. The only real problem will be convincing the dark overlords of our current political climate to cede their power and subject themselves to a greater good.




References


Allen, Luke. (2017, October 25). Robert Mugabe as WHO goodwill ambassador – what went wrong?. News24. Retrieved from http://www.news24.com/Africa/Zimbabwe/robert-mugabe-as-who-goodwill-ambassador-what-went-wrong-20171025

Boden, T.A., G. Marland, and R.J. Andres. (2017). Global, Regional, and National Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center. doi 10.3334/CDIAC/00001_V2017

Cordesman, Anthony H. (2014). Russia and the “Color Revolution”: A Russian Military View of a World Destabilized by the US and the West (Full Report). Center for Strategic and International Studies. Retrieved from https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/legacy_files/files/publication/140529_Russia_Color_Revolution_Full.pdf

Crilly, Rob. (2017, June 02). Donald Trump pulls US out of Paris climate accord to 'put American workers first'. The Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/01/trump-pull-paris-accord-seek-better-deal/

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Human Rights Watch. (n.d.). Syria Events of 2016. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/syria

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Liptak, Kevin. (2017, June 02). Trump on Paris accord: 'We're getting out'. CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/01/politics/trump-paris-climate-decision/index.html

Lundgren, M. (2016). Mediation in Syria: initiatives, strategies, and obstacles 2011-2016. Contemporary Security Policy, vol. 37, iss. 2, pp. 273 - 288. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13523260.2016.1192377

Poh Phaik, Thien. (2009, July 31). “Explaining the Color Revolutions”. E-International Relations: Students. Retrieved from http://www.e-ir.info/2009/07/31/explaining-the-color-revolutions/

Randall. (2011). The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger (original narration by Randall). Youtube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg

Savasan, Zerrin. (2017). A Brief Assessment on the Paris Climate Agreement and Compliance Issue. International Relations, vol. 14, iss. 54, pp. 107 - 125.

Tendi, Blessing-Miles. (2011). ROBERT MUGABE AND TOXICITY: HISTORY AND CONTEXT MATTER. Representation, vol. 47, iss. 3, pp. 307 - 318. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00344893.2011.596439

World Bank. (1960 - 2015). Life expectancy at birth, total (years). Retrieved from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=ZW

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