 11 Jul 2006 @ 15:12, by Roger Eaton
The world is experiencing a tremendous surge towards human unity. Necessity drives us and we are pulled by a vision of a friendly world that has its act together and does the smart thing. But we have a big hurdle to get over, and that is figuring out how to make "unity and diversity" really work. This is what Josep L.I. Ortega is addressing in his congenial "Statement for Unity of Action", which also, by the way, provides us an excellent map of the movement for world citizenship and democratic global governance. His main point is that the various trends within that movement need to support each other and unite on an agenda in an umbrella organization. Only in this way can the movement achieve the numbers and credibility it needs to succeed.
The task before us is not simply the unifying of the world citizenship organizations, though. There is a much larger global reform movement which has many adherents who have not explicitly signed on to any idea of global governance. The global governance movement is only part of this larger movement, a necessary part, to be sure, since the logic of the world situation clearly requires some form of global governance.
As Ortega says, "There are a host of urgent and important issues... Solving these issues requires a concerted response which can only be achieved via new mechanisms of global governance..." That is indeed the case, and the global governance movement can therefore trust that a larger umbrella organization, of which it is only a part, will take the path of global governance out of necessity. While unifying the world citizenship movement is definitely an excellent step, that unification is best seen in the context of helping to build an even more inclusive organization. Indeed, the most inclusive possible coordination of networks, groups and individuals is the one that can bring in the numbers we need.
Moving towards such an all-inclusive umbrella for world reform, the long established Unity-and-Diversity World Council (UDC) out of Los Angeles is about to test a new internet process of voting on messages called the Eaton Model of Collective Communication. In this Model, members of a group write messages and then vote to select one of the messages to represent the group. UDC plans to use the Eaton Model to bootstrap the creation of a Global Assembly along the lines of the People's Congress as described in Josep L.I. Ortega's paper. As an innovation, the Global Assembly will use the online process to instruct a Nonviolent Action Arm.
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