Events since war’s end in 1945 have marked out the steps which the human race might take in the immediate future to deal with the new problems arising out of the world revolution of 1750-1970 and to stabilize human life on the planet.

   Step 1.  Revise the United Nations Charter to make all citizens
   of member nations also citizens of the United Nations
   and therefore under its direct jurisdiction.

   Step 2.  Delegate to the United Nations authority to levy taxes
   or otherwise provide its own income.

Step 3.  Call a planet-wide convention of delegates from all nations, authorized to draft a world federal constitution and submit it for ratification by all member states.

Step 4.  When approved by two thirds of the states represented at the constitutional convention the constitution so adopted would became the basis for world law and the administration of world affairs.

Step 5.  Inaugurate a world government that would be responsible for maintaining and promoting peace, order, stability, justice, equality of opportunity and general welfare at the international level.

Heretofore, the nearest approach to a universal state has been an empire like that of Egypt or Rome built by conquest and maintained by military authority exercised by the imperial nucleus over its associated and subordinated territories.  The universal state described above would be an association of sovereign states, each delegating a sufficient measure of its sovereignty to enable the World Federation to act as a responsible planet-wide government.

The probable consequences of these five forward steps have been summarized by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos (Only One World N.Y.  Nostrom 1972 pages 28-29).  “In every case the needed steps take us away from division, from single shot interventions, separatist tendencies and driving ambitions and greeds.  We have to grasp and foster more fully the truly integrative aspects of science.  We have to revise our economic management of incomes, of environments, of cities.  We have to place what is useable in nationalism within the framework of a political world order that is morally and socially responsible as well as physically one.”

Up to this point in social history, critical situations have usually been dealt with on the battlefield.  Might measured right.  The victors carried the day, won the right to exploit their defeated rivals and weaker neighbors.  The result was planet-wide political chaos, and an economic free-for-all, in which political power and economic superiority bestowed upon their possessors the right to plunder and exploit geographic areas limited only by existing means of communication and transportation.  At no known point in social history were conquerors and exploiters able to unify the earth politically and exploit its total economic resources.