International institutions have developed (are developing) in a way different from that envisioned by early World Federalists. We used to say that nation-states would (should) unite in a world government, which would look after security matters primarily – i.e. disarm the nations, provide a world police force and offer conflict resolution services (mediation, arbitration, adjudication by the World Court). Later (in the 1970s), matters of global environment and development were added to the world government agenda (though a World Development Authority was featured already in Clark and Sohn’s book on U.N. Charter Revision in 1953). However, we always stressed that nation-states would maintain their sovereignty in internal matters, including human rights. We felt that insistence on world-wide standards of human-rights of observance would keep too many nations from signing on for world government. Regardless of the regrettable and widespread violations of human rights by many states, we felt that the preservation of world peace (especially the prevention of nuclear war) had to be uppermost, and that the world government security scheme demanded above all universality i.e. adherence of all states to its principles and institutions. World government would contain democracies and dictatorships (left and right) the saints and the sinners alike – a “come as you are” party of raw humanity.

Things did not develop that way. Now in 1992, we still do not have a world security regime. Bush’s “New World Order”, as demonstrated in the Gulf War, is not it – collective security kills too many innocent people. We are still groping to create something better – along the common security – war prevention – conflict resolution model. However, both in the U.N. and the CSCE, human rights have now been proclaimed to be the concern of all, no longer a merely domestic matter. It seems that we shall reach world unity first in the sphere which we thought would be last.

Functions of government can generally be divided into provision of security and provision of welfare. War prevention and (domestically) crime prevention falls in the security sphere, as does defence of national territory in the existing nation-state-based international system. Human rights (not only civil and political, but also economic, social and cultural) fall in the welfare sphere, as do the offerings of the welfare state, which overlap with the economic and social rights of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Adherents of conservative political opinion (i.e. believers in democratic capitalism or even libertarianism) would limit a government’s functions to the security sphere alone, excluding the welfare sphere except for safeguarding civil and political rights. Democratic socialists, on the other hand (if there are any left in this world of Reaganism-Thatcherism plus economic recession plus the demise of communism), believe in including the full sphere of welfare functions as well as the security functions within the purview of government.

At the world level, we had thought that the security sphere should come first, though we tended to include part of the welfare sphere in the guise of development and care of the environment. (The new fashion is simply to widen the definition of “security” to include economic and ecological security, but I doubt the value of wide definitions, since they sometimes obscure precise meanings, though they are politically useful for consciousness-raising.) However, with human rights now being promoted to a world concern (though still only at the declaratory level), we may be proceeding in the reverse order: welfare concerns realized before security concerns.

This is the same reversal already discussed in connection with the split in Western peace movements before 1989: should we make contact with the large official peace movements in the East, or the tiny unofficial peace movements? If we preferred the former, we put security first; if we chose the latter, we put human rights first. Rationally, prevention of nuclear war would seem to come first, but it did not turn out that way. By democratizing the East first, the nuclear war danger was diminished (though it still exists in changed form).

It is the old dilemma between peace and justice – tolerating oppression or rising up against it. We may be reenacting that drama on the world scene.