In the backwardness of those Dark Ages—curiosity, fellow feeling, mass migration, the spirit of adventure, trade, travel and the need for common action to master nature and repel enemies—broke down barriers and created fields of mutual interest and general well-being, reversing the trend toward fragmentation and replacing it by a trend toward universality which reached its high point during the closing years of the nineteenth century. The slogan of this movement was "United we stand, divided we fall. The bell which tolls for one, tolls for all. When one benefits all benefit. Peace, progress and prosperity promote general welfare."
Two general wars in 1914-18 and 1939-45, brought pre-meditated, deliberated suffering, hardships and death to multitudes. Each war led to a clamor for peace and order that resulted in a World Court, The League of Nations and the United Nations. The efforts at planet-wide united action for peace and disarmament were paralleled and supplemented by the growth of specialized public services for communication, travel, scientific interchange, arms limitation. They were further augmented by a spectacular expansion of trade, travel, capital investment and scientific research and interchange.
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."