How Democracy Survives by Michael Holm & Deese R. S

Author:Michael Holm & Deese, R. S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2022-11-30T11:07:17+00:00

He added a bold statement: “If it hadn’t been for Union Now, I don’t think that there would have been a NATO Treaty.”

After the disappointment of 1945 with the UN, Union Now had kept alive this hope of Achilles’ generation that the door to world organization through democracy was still open and could eventually lead to federation. The prospect of a federal union of democracies, Achilles (1972) reported, was the reason for his and Hickerson’s “shared enthusiasm for negotiating a military alliance and getting it ratified as a basis for further progress towards unity.”

Back when he started as a correspondent at the League, Streit gained international attention in 1932 with a provocative report on freedom of the press and the League’s role in contributing to “false news” (Streit, 1932, 16–27). Two years later, the reflection on truth and peace at the core of that report was particularly relevant for the moral and ethical foundations of his proposal for a union of democracies. Federalism in international organization would eradicate the moral dilemmas in the otherwise mandatory choices among peace, truth, and democracy. The participatory processes of federation allowed internal reconciliation of perspectives; they also transformed the outlook of the external “enemy” relation. At the other end of the spectrum from a Carthaginian peace was peace by federation, resting on validation and inclusion of the “other’s” truth in the formation of the shared rule of the whole. This prospect offered a qualitatively different incentive to democratization, which stemmed, Streit maintained, from the natural aspiration that our truth, individual and societal, be given agency.

Streit (1939, 155) believed that the “provision for ultimate universality on the basis of equality among all the citizens” would break the cycle that, through “despair or offended pride,” led unstable democracies back “into the hands of the absolutists.” The nucleus “would need no propaganda bureau.” Endogenous democratization would occur with freedom of the press and methods of world organization could either facilitate or undermine its emergence. “Would not the establishment of genuine freedom of the press,” Streit asked, “in, say, Soviet Russia, be hastened by the wish to join this world organization?”

If history can serve as an indicator, however incomplete, Streit’s predictions seem somewhat vindicated. Peace with Germany, Italy, and Japan, consolidated through institutional integrative bonding, immediately following WWII, eliminated the enemy-relation. In contrast a high-powered enmity relation reemerged with Russia, following a lack of institutional integration after the end of the Cold War. In 1954, Streit (p. 254) warned against the likely resurgence of “aggressive dictatorship and war” if “before the free are organically federated, revolution should sweep through Soviet Russia and its satellites and replace the Communist dictatorships with Western-type democracies or chaos.” That scenario, he commented, “would not end the basic tension of our time.” It would reinstate, rather, a situation of international anarchy similar to that in existence after WWI, when, years ahead of the lead-up to WWII, he wrote Union Now. In calling for a federal union of democracies, then and again in 1954,

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