II. Introduction

Context and Proposal

In our present times of globalization all of humankind is facing the same set of problems.

Domination by the few and the indifference of the many allows, among other disasters, extreme poverty to coexist with opulence, war to end to the lives of millions of innocent people, and the environment to become fragile. An overwhelming sense of individualism encourages us to cast off responsibility and hypnotizes society with a false paradise of consumption. Even worse, all these and other deep disorders are increasing exponentially. Consider, as just one example, the United States’s stand-alone policy, which adds, to the unfairness of global free trade, the irrational and unjustifiable law of the strongest.

Our planet is drifting with no juridical and normative dimension. Despite our best efforts, we have still not been able to develop common solutions.

The absence of a global regulation of politics facilitates and provokes distortion, perversion, and even the collapse of most of the cultural, economic, technological, and interpersonal interaction offered by the present times, which were originally meant to empower people in a world of peace, well-being, freedom, and justice.

In this complex crisis that needs multifaceted, concrete answers, one of them is calling to us but, in a way, also frightens us: building a legal and political organization at the global level.

More than ever, we need to set up a political response in the face of the irresponsible globalization that has been increasingly forced upon us over the last decade, with nothing but the market as an alternative to the former bipolar order.

We need to lay the foundations for an ethical revolution, to be developed through many generations, for a world where respect and harmony are fundamental values. In addition, a short- or medium-term political revolution is imperative, first, in order to avoid the worst, and then, to facilitate other, slower behavioral metamorphoses.

All of this brings us to an opening question: What is the best environment for the regulation of global affairs? The Alliance for a Plural, Responsible and United World, an international network of constructive thinking and action assembling thousands of people from all continents and all social and professional categories, has a dozen years’ experience in drawing up proposals for political and social transformation. Among many other proposals, we are suggesting that a World Parliament could be the main institution in a possible and desirable future legal and political dimension at the service of the global community.

As an example of our commitment in this direction, the previous dynamics of the Alliance recently culminated in the experience of the final meeting of a World Assembly (in Lille, France, in December 2001). In addition, our vision is also supported by such close experiences as the Global People’s Assembly Network (GPAN), the Assemblies of the UN of the Peoples (Perugia, Italy) and the Millennium NGO Forum (New York, May 2000).

We are convinced that a World Parliament, despite all of its predictable and unpredictable imperfections, could provide a necessary and viable alternative to submit the blind forces of the market to the forces of life. As such, a World Parliament would constitute the natural outcome of a process begun in the last century, which saw a departure from a purely anarchical world ruled by individual nation-states to a more complex system striving to be increasingly democratic and more just. Evolution has been slow but progress has been made. More than half a century after the birth of the United Nations, an International Criminal Court is being set up. For all these advances, however, the international system is still largely governed by the rule of power rather than by the rule of law.

While the U.N. has had an important impact on world politics, it has also shown its limits. While its role will still grow in the future, it is not likely to be able to enact, on its own, the reforms necessary to improve upon and fix the system. Individual states, even the more democratic ones, have shown that their governments all too often make important decisions without consulting their constituencies and define their policies according to a narrow definition of national interest.

Other institutions must be set up to fill the void.

Along with the community of states, the United Nations and a strengthened International Court of Justice, a World Parliament could act as representative of international civil society. In the past decade, civil society has emerged in full force. It has re-organized itself and is now a key international player. Civil society has brought down traditional borders and expands in a world without frontiers. However, from an institutional perspective, civil society has not yet been formally given the home that it deserves. A World Parliament could provide such a home. Let us see if we can envision it, and perhaps try to build its foundations together.

Following this reasoning, we are inviting you to participate in a new stage of this evolutionary process: an electronic debate on the World Parliament for the Twenty-first Century. Through this e-forum you could join with us in exploring, querying, and shaping the many underlying values, many present challenges, many organizational structures, and many probable real uses and ways of application, all of them concerning both substantive World Parliament proposals and other global-governance issues.

Features of the e-Forum

This e-forum will take place during six months, from October 15, 2002 to April 30, 2003. Participants are expected to come from all the regions of the world, from diverse professional areas — politicians, researchers, activists, teachers, religious personnel, entrepreneurs, etc.— different, too, in their political preferences, gender, and age.

A weekly or biweekly summary of the messages will be published on the list, as well as a monthly summary of the contributions for each topic area. These summaries will be especially useful for people having little time to read and to introduce newcomers to the conversation and outcomes.

You will receive each contribution in three languages: English, Spanish, and French. You will be able to write in any one of these languages and also in two others: Arabic and Chinese. For these two additional languages, only the summaries will be available. If you, or those you know of, would like to volunteer, we would also be interested in having the documents and discussion translated into other languages, including Esperanto.

The forum is an initiative of the Alliance for a Responsible, Plural and United World. It is run by three facilitators and financed by the FPH (Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation for the Progress of Humankind).

Moving into the Subject Matter

To conclude this invitation, here are some additional thoughts that may be useful for moving into the subject matter and eliciting your first reactions.

The proposal for a World Parliament could be seen from different approaches.

The first might take an evolutionary point of view, highlighting the idea of a progressive increase in scale of size of human societies (local-based prehistory, urban- and regional-based Ancient History and Middle Ages, continent-based modern age, and our global present times). Such an approach presumes that a future institutionalization will take place at the global scale, in a later stage that could consolidate and democratize globalization beyond the present global economic system.

Second, we are confronted with the urgent task of stopping, after the September-11 attacks, the "globalization" of terrorism and its subsequent international wave of security-oriented politics. This new two-sided form of globalization has produced a swing in recent history and has hurried the road to chaos.

Third, the spread of modernity in the broad sense of the word, and particularly the multiplication of migratory movements, has given rise to the emergence of “cross-cultural” thinking and practices: in the future, each of the cultural traditions of the world will have to confront and own this modernity. Dialog over the common management of our planet should be first of all a dialog among cultures and on such a global scale, the so-called, in Western tradition, “parliament,” is probably the sort of institution most suited for a balanced cross-cultural dialogue.

We are convinced that some type of a parliamentary structure is in any case the most appropriate for managing, in all its complexity, the common problems of a community of more than six thousand million people. Contrary to a more centralized structure, such as a global executive power, and contrary to a fragmented structure such as that of the current nation-state system, a parliament could be the best common place for representing the diversity of cultural, political, and professional forces of the whole world.

Such an agora would represent society in a miniature scale, seeking consensus among all of its forces. On the other hand this common and permanent dialogue would serve to share knowledge and experiences, improving the quality of normative production. Last but not least, this process could take place as openly and interactively as possible, with broad citizens participation: each member, each commission or cross-sectoral group, could multiply, consolidate, and diversify the dialogue with other actors and bodies and could generate, along with them, places for common decision making.

In line with this reasoning, this institution should not become another “traditional” parliament, even if it has a typical parliamentary structure. Thus, besides discussing the building process for its juridical and political dimension at the global level, this forum will face the challenge of inventing a new kind of parliament that would be able to solve many problems.

The World Parliament is a blank page that will be filled with your comments and suggestions. What will be your contribution to help to give it form?

The World Parliament is an indispensable and collective project to assure social harmony on our planet. It is a desire for continuous dialogue in safety, conviviality, and justice for all people. We hope that you will be among us soon so we may join forces to build our future.

Rob Wheeler, Arnaud Blin, Germà Pelayo
Facilitators for the WP21 e-forum
World Parliament for the Twenty-first Century