Emery Reves’ Quotes
(From The Anatomy of Peace)
The Anatomy of Peace and an Open Letter to the American People
Hungarian-born (Révész Imre) Emery Reves was the author of The Anatomy of Peace, a 1945 book that helped popularize the cause of world federalism. Reves argued that world law was the only way to prevent war, and the fledgling United Nations Security Council would be inadequate to preserve peace because it was an instrument of power, rather than an instrument of law. His book was endorsed by Albert Einstein and numerous other prominent figures.
The cover of The Anatomy of Peace had an “Open Letter to the American People”, signed by Owen J. Roberts, J.W. Fulbright, Claude Pepper, Elbert D. Thomas, and other dignitaries, which began:
- The first atomic bomb destroyed more than the city of Hiroshima. It also exploded our inherited, outdated political ideas.
- A few days before the force of Nature was tried out for the first time in history, the San Francisco Charter was ratified in Washington. The dream of a League of Nations, after 26 years, was accepted by the Senate.
- How long will the United Nations Charter endure? With luck, a generation? A century? There is no one who does not hope for at least that much luck- for the Charter, for himself, for his work, and for his children’s children. But is it enough to have Peace by Luck? Peace by Law is what the peoples of the world, beginning with our selves, can have if they want it. And now is the time to get it.
Social and political institutions are the result of human behavior, the product of man. Periodically they become obsolete and require improvement or even radical reform, not to change human nature, but to make it possible for men to live together, with their existing and unchangeable characteristics, in changed circumstances.
Human freedom is created by law and can exist only within a legal order, never without or beyond it.
In the eighteenth century, political conditions at last induced the fathers of modern democracy to open a crusade to destroy the sovereignty of the many kings and rulers who oppressed and enslaved the people. This crusade led to the formulation and proclamation of the basic principle that sovereignty in human society resides in the community.
[pullquote]In the middle of the twentieth century, we are living in an era of absolute political feudalism in which the nation-states have assumed exactly the same roles as were assumed by the feudal barons a thousand years ago.[/pullquote]
This principle, the very foundation of democracy, represents the political corollary of monotheism. Its triumph meant the acceptance by society of the thesis that there can be only one supreme sovereign source of law — the will of the community — and that, under this sovereign law guaranteeing security and freedom to man in society, every man is to be regarded as equal.
It is one of the great tragedies of history that the recognition and proclamation of this principle came a century too early.
When it became the dominating doctrine, the universality of sovereignty, the universality of law, the indivisibility of the sovereignty of the community as the supreme source of democratic law, was not yet feasible or technically possible. The world was still too big, it could not yet be centrally controlled, it was still an exclusively agricultural planet with economic conditions scarcely different from those of antiquity, So a substitute presented itself which permitted the new doctrine of democratic sovereignty to find immediate practical expression.
The substitute was the nation.
The multiplicity of the conflicting sovereign units in our society destroys every vestige of the freedom, protection and security originally promised and granted to the individual by the nation-states at their inception in the eighteenth century.
In the middle of the twentieth century, we are living in an era of absolute political feudalism in which the nation-states have assumed exactly the same roles as were assumed by the feudal barons a thousand years ago.
….There is nothing kings, emperors or tyrants ever did to their subjects that nation-states are not doing today.
This system of nation-feudalism has plunged the world into unprecedented barbarism, and destroyed almost all individual rights and human liberties secured with so much toil and blood by our forefathers. Modern nation-feudalism has erased, except in name, every moral doctrine of Christianity.
There is not the slightest hope that we can change the course into which we are rapidly being driven by the conflicting nation-states so long as we recognize them as the supreme and final expression of the sovereignty of the people. At ever-increasing speed we shall be hurled toward greater insecurity, greater destruction, greater hatred, greater barbarism, greater misery, until we resolve to destroy the political system of nation-feudalism and establish a social order based on the sovereignty of the community, as conceived by the founders of democracy and as it applies to the reality of today.
Violent conflicts between nations are the inevitable consequence of an ineffective and inadequate organization of relations between the nations, and we shall never be able to escape another and another world war so long as we do not recognize the elementary principles and mechanics of any society.
It is a strange paradox that at any suggestion of a world-wide legal order which could guarantee mankind freedom from war for many generations to come, and consequently individual liberty, all the worshipers of the present nation-states snipe: “Super-state!”
The reality is that the present nation-state has become a super-state.
It is this nation-state which today is making serfs of its citizens. It is this state which, to protect its particular vested interests, takes away the earnings of the people and wastes them on munitions in the constant fear of being attacked and destroyed by some other nation-state. It is this state which, by forcing passports and visas upon us, does not allow us to move freely. It is this state, wherever it exists, which by keeping prices high through artificial regulations and tariffs, believing that every state must be economically self-supporting, does not permit its citizens to enjoy the fruits of modern science and technology. It is this state which interferes more and more with our everyday life and tends to prescribe every minute of our existence.
This is the “super-state”!
It is not a future nightmare or a proposal we can freely accept or reject. We are living within it, in the middle of the twentieth century. We are entirely within its orbit, whether in America, in England, in Russia or Argentina, in Portugal or Turkey. And we shall become more and more subject to this all-powerful super-state if our supreme goal is to maintain the nation-state structure of the world.
Democratic sovereignty of the people can be correctly expressed and effectively instituted only if local affairs are handled by local government, national affairs by national government, and international, world affairs, by international, world government.
None of the dominant conceptions of political thought is more abused, more discredited, more prostituted, than “internationalism.”
Real patriotism, real love of one’s own country, has no relationship whatsoever to the fetishism of the sovereign nation-states. Real patriotism can have but one single purpose: to protect one’s own country, one’s own people, from the devastation of war. As war is the direct result of the nation-state structure, and as modern aerial and mechanized warfare indiscriminately destroys women, children, cities and farms, the nation-state is Enemy No. 1 of patriotism.
World government is not an “ultimate goal” but an immediate necessity. In fact, it has been overdue since 1914. The convulsions of the past decades are the clear symptoms of a dead and decaying political system.
EDITOR’S NOTE: A world government based on egalitarianism between member states is the only way we will banish war and exploitation from the face of the planet. And in this as in many other areas where process can be made the Right, neocons, and their henchmen are at work defeating any advance. It’s not an accident that the barbarism of the right, its sick chauvinism, found a welcome in the halls of power of the American ruling circles, especially under Bush and now Obama. Reagan did not start it all, the poison of jingoism was already deep in the maw of the American nation, but Reagan and his ilk of conservatism gave it a new impetus. For that alone, he deserves eternal damnation.—PG
