Case for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly:

A Personal History of the Idea

by Dieter Heinrich, Councillor, World Federalist Movement-Canada

I am told by Canadian world federalist Larry Kazdan, who has an historian’s interest in the origin of things, that it would interest posterity to know what led to the writing of the booklet The Case for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly.

Since that booklet was first published by the World Federalist Movement in 1992, the idea of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA) has been smoldering like a fire in a coal seam. Now, a decade-and-a-half later, it seems to be ablaze with fresh energy, thanks to the work of others in the intervening years. I might mention in particular Andreas Bummel and the Committee for a Democratic UN in Berlin. In under a year, Bummel's Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly has inspired a network of individuals and organizations in over 115 countries to actively promote the idea, and some 500 current members of national parliaments have publicly endorsed it.

To what extent my initial writing of that thin booklet so far back has contributed to what’s happening today, I will leave for others to determine. Here I will simply answer Larry’s question, for what it may be worth.

In the 1980s, I was a nearly full-time, volunteer activist for world federalism, heady with the idea that I was an agent of evolution and a co-creator of the world, which is how I liked to frame the work of social activism. Activists are artists who work with people, agendas, meetings, and brochures to create the future.

The 1980s was the period of Ronald Reagan’s “reign of error.” During that this clamorous, calamitous time of heightened Cold War tension, the larger peace movement that arose was focused on arms control and disarmament. I was choosing to work with the World Federalists of Canada because its focus was on the underlying conditions that would make disarmament possible, namely the institutions that could replace war and the rule of force with the rule of law.

What the peace movement was missing was that war has a function — it is a decision-making mechanism for determining who will govern in a particular place or prevail in a conflict. World federalists reasoned there would continue to be war (and a commensurate, irrepressible demand for armaments) until humanity succeeded in replacing the decision-making function of war with an alternative, peaceful mechanism. That great mechanism is, of course, a regime of laws and courts.

Our long term vision was of uniting the world in a democratic federation, but world federalists are realistic idealists. We saw the ideal in practical day-to-day terms as a kind of polaris, rather than a goal to be imminently achieved. It was an epochal vision to be approached over generations in a maturing world. Guided by our polaris, our immediate work was around strengthening and democratizing the United Nations, where we regarded progress as feasible.

For most of the 1980s, I worked out of Toronto with my partner Kit Pineau, but in 1987 our commitment to this work took us to New York where I joined the staff of Parliamentarians for Global Action (PGA) as a writer. This was an organization that had grown out of the world federalist movement by cobbling together the handful of extant parliamentarian world federalist groups clinging to life within various national parliaments. The driving force for this was an unlikely twenty-something-year-old Nicholas Dunlop, a wunderkind world federalist from New Zealand who had come to the United States and bedazzled with his ability to speak luminously in complete paragraphs, and who could use said abilities to charm politicians and donors alike into action around global security reforms.

Originally known as Parliamentarians for World Order, this was the group that orchestrated the Six Nation Peace Initiative, bringing together leaders of six middle power countries (India, Sweden, et al) to attempt to nudge the US and Soviet Union toward better relations. The PGA was no longer explicitly world federalist, but its mission remained strongly focused in that direction, especially while Nick was Secretary General. The organization was intellectually courageous on the big questions of global system change. How do you get political reform in the global system? Who were the actors? What were the levers to start the process of moving the UN toward becoming more democratic and more empowered?

PGA, being made up of members of national legislatures and congresses, was uniquely able to get through to political leaders at the highest levels to engage them on various ideas and initiatives. My task was drafting many of the documents for this, the letters, speeches, calls to action, etc. From the vantage point of PGA, I was able to see fleetingly behind the curtain of government into the machinery that made the sausages of foreign policy, and what I saw could be quite disheartening.

It became clear that even when the leaders of government supported a proposal, it did not necessarily mean action would be forthcoming. The diplomats and bureaucrats of the foreign ministries had a power of their own working for them: inertia. They could subvert the best intentions of the leaders by simply going limp.

Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, for example, was a leader PGA was close to. Nick remembers a meeting with Gandhi where, on hearing a PGA proposal, he turned to his foreign ministry officials and asked in a pointed aside, “Why can’t I support this?”

Gandhi once incorporated some PGA ideas into a groundbreaking speech to the UN General Assembly calling for a global security system. PGA followed up with the Indian Mission to the UN, and got nowhere. Just dissembling, prevarication, and uncomfortable looks from the officials, co-mingled with hints of hostility at our meddling with their leader.

Gandhi had been free-thinking instead of reading from the Indian foreign ministry’s script, and in response his officials were determined to miss every opportunity to implement whatever it was he had been on about. This was a big lesson, at least for me, about the institutional momentum of bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are made up of people, and people can have agendas, pride, career goals, and beliefs.

Even if the highest leaders of government, like Gandhi, were persuaded about some bold initiative, if it was too fresh and bold, and the civil service did not like it, the leaders were easily thwarted. Leaders could give grand speeches, but they couldn’t flip the switch at their United Nations missions or foreign ministries that could deliver the results. Gandhi’s global security system withered out. We saw other initiatives meet the same fate.

If change had to come through the agencies of foreign ministries, it could take a long time, perhaps decades, to inculcate in a civil service such a major directional shift, one which asked of them that they work toward reducing their own power by creating authoritative global institutions. People being people, they don’t easily change paradigms mid-career, nor do they get motivated by shifting control to institutions not their own.

If we wanted to move the world from a war system based on national sovereignty to a rule-of-law system based on common security, that might well require in many countries replacing a large part of the foreign ministries with new people in tune with the new direction. And that too would meet with resistance from the institutions’ old cultures. Change would necessarily require a sustained pressure on the foreign ministries to steer a new course. What field of force could accomplish that?

Sometime after this, in the spring of 1988, I had a fateful discussion with Saul Mendlovitz, an academic with the World Policy Institute and a leading world order thinker in the United States, going over yet again the question of how to get the United Nations reform process started. As I remember, he was test-flying a new initiative for converging the world’s non-governmental organizations into a coherent driving force on governments to act on UN reform.

And as I listened, I suddenly felt overcome by a great weariness. I may have aged a few years in those moments as a kind of preemptive despair set in. I heard myself pessimistically doubting that there were enough world-order minded people or enough resources in the NGO sector to provide for the kind of sustained campaign we knew would be needed. The NGOs, especially in those pre-Internet days, were balkanized into their various issue bailiwicks and were lacking in everything. Above all they lacked any consensus that UN reform of the kind we were talking about was even something to pursue.

That discussion set me to wondering again about the European example. How had the Europeans been able to succeed in creating their institutions?

At about precisely that time, as I was floating around with such thoughts, a European magazine happened across my desk at the PGA. An article talked about the role of the European parliament in the creation of the European Community. The light went on.

I read with new eyes about the sustained influence the European Parliament had brought to bear, even from its earliest years when it was simply made up of sitting members of national parliaments. It began with no formal powers. But by bringing parliamentarians together as it did, it allowed a kind of political chemistry to occur. Galvanized by their experience, many of these parliamentarians went home and began working for the European project. Behind the scenes or otherwise, they helped keep governments and their ministries on the course of reforming Europe’s institutions, including the parliament itself.

The parliamentarians — supported also, certainly, by civil society organizations — were the real engine of change. They were the essential influence on the governments over the years, with the result that the European Union stands today as a towering achievement of supranational institution-building. It is delivering the benefits of unity that its people now welcome and support and would not wish to undo. Most of all, their work has been vindicated by a deepening confidence that enduring peace has been achieved in Europe — peace for the first time ever on a continent that has known recurring war for many thousands of years. How large an accomplishment is that?

I concluded the single best thing we UN reformers could do would be to stop dissipating ourselves in trying to promote this or that isolated policy to deaf governments and their equally unhearing, unimaginative and unambitious foreign ministries. Instead we might try uniting our meager energies behind just one common goal that would serve all our causes, that of creating a consultative assembly at the UN. We could hope that once founded, even if only as a subsidiary body by means of a very simple mechanism in the UN Charter, it could recapitulate for us at the UN the course of events followed by the European parliament. Such an assembly of parliamentarian actors, if we could just get it established, would provide the onward momentum (and oversight of the foreign ministries) necessary to its further evolution as a house of the people at the UN.

What I saw as new in this was not the idea of a world parliament per se. That was as old as Tennyson, and there had been plenty of “people’s assembly” proposals over the years, all of them blithely assuming the availability of rivers of political will in a time of drought. In fact, I was engaged during that period in batting away some of these very proposals that circulated like flies around the margins of the world federalist movement, precisely for being politically unrealistic and tactical missteps toward predictable dead ends.

What shifted for me was seeing a possible parliamentary body not as a final tree but as something able to be begun from a small seed with the most modest of steps. This made it achievable even in a time of low political will. Once established, it could be its own best advocate, generating its own creative force from within as it all the while drove the process of UN reform itself.

I went from seeing it as a goal to seeing it as a method.

I found an early friend for this idea in Keith Best, formerly an officer of PGA when he was a member of parliament in the UK. At that time we were both serving as officers with the World Federalist Movement (known then as the World Association for World Federation, the international umbrella organization of world federalists).

Keith subsequently contributed a variation of the idea, that of having a consultative assembly attached to a subsidiary body of the UN, perhaps one yet to be established, or even to the World Trade Organization, if it became apparent that attaching it to the UN was still too ambitious. Keith’s support for the parliamentary assembly idea encouraged me, and helped with getting it quickly up the flag pole at WFM.

I was also interested to learn, once I began hunting through the annals of UN parliamentary proposals of yore, that an idea very similar to what I was thinking had already been proposed in the 1960s. I was just reinventing a wheel after all, but that didn’t surprise me either. What was new were the times. Our contribution was seeing the new opportunity to give fresh articulation and promotion to an idea from other contexts and other times in the new environment of a post-Cold-War setting.

I left New York at the end of my stint with PGA in 1990, and returned to Toronto to continue researching and writing. After the booklet was published, there followed a string of encouraging successes, including a commendation by an all-party committee of the Canadian government the following year.

As I write this in 2008, we dare to hope that we are building toward a “tipping point” when the idea becomes unstoppable. I continue to hope it will happen soon, and that soon does not prove to be too late in a world so beset with crisis and need.