Increasing integration of the
global financial and business sectors and the global need to combat climate
change by restricting carbon emissions are just two reasons why the impotence
of the UN, which has not touched the doctrine of absolutist national sovereignty,
has become increasingly problematic. The risk to nuclear technology in power-generation
from war argues strongly for not only the obsolescence of war between countries,
but also the benefits of transferring some governmental sovereignty from the
nation-states to a global-level government, which the UN has never been. The case
of the Ukrainian Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, in
the midst of Russia’s invasion in 2024 is a case in point.
In August, 2024, the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) notified the world that safety at Zaporizhzhia was
deteriorating. A drone strike had recently hit a perimeter access road used by
employees, and a fire had been set at the plant. The plant had been subject to
repeated attacks since the invasion began, with both sides accusing the other
of carrying out the attacks. So it is significant that the IAEA’s director
general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said in August, “Yet again we see an escalation
of the nuclear safety and security dangers facing . . . the power plant.”[1]
It was not as if the plant had been in a safe condition, so the escalation is
significant. With both sides of the war having been blaming the other for the
attacks on the plant, there was a real danger that both sides would see
continued blaming as a way to ignore Grossi’s call for restraint. “I remain
extremely concerned and reiterate my call for maximum restraint from all sides
and for strict observance of the five concrete principles established for the protection
of the plant,” he stated.[2]
Especially because of the option of simply blaming the other side, it could be
said to be utopian to have confidence that those principles would be upheld in
the context of the war.
In fact, as Hobbes theorized in The
Leviathan, without one sovereign, whether a single person or an assembly,
the chances for peace are nil, with life being short and brutish. It was in the
context of the wars in the 17th century that Hobbes lived, and he
wrote to obviate war by urging all political and religious power be vested in
the same person or body. In Ukraine in the midst of the war in 2024, the
country was not under the control of one sovereign, as the Russian incursions prove.
In such a state of nature devoid of an overarching sovereign power, the danger
to the nuclear plant was very real.
Given the magnitude and severity that
a nuclear accident can inflict on land and human beings, taking such a risk is
arguably so much to be avoided that it is worth it to countries to delegate
some of their sovereignty to an international body. Although Kant advocated a
world federation, by which world peace would only be possible but not probable,
it is not clear whether such a federation would have any of its own sovereignty
apart from that of countries. Without such a delegation of sovereignty, I’m not
sure peace would even be possible, given the impotence of the UN as belligerent
countries have easily been able to ignore resolutions and even verdicts from
the UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice.
Of course, even were a world
government to have some sovereignty and thus to ability to enforce its
resolutions against warring countries, Hobbes would say that unless that
sovereignty is complete, with countries no longer having any, war would be
likely. But Hobbes lived prior to the invention of modern federalism in
Philadelphia in the 18th century, and so he could not have been able
to consider the checks-and-balances feature by which a federal government and
state governments can hold each other accountable or at least within limits
such that neither devolves into tyranny. In the early 21st century,
both the E.U. and U.S. federal systems contain internal structural and procedural
checks on federal and state power, though the U.S. had come so close to consolidation
by the U.S. Government that it could hardly be argued that the state governments
could act as a constraint on the federal government. So splitting governmental
sovereignty between a world government and national governments would not be
without its own risks and weaknesses.
Even so, the conduct of war in a state of nature amid nuclear power plants is such a toxic cocktail that the impotence of the UN as against the Russian invasion (and the Israeli onslaught in Gaza) could no longer be tolerated by 2024. Dangers in advanced technology in the context of a war argue against unfettered war being tolerable by our species any longer, and the UN sans any governmental sovereignty could not be the solution, given how easy it has been for belligerent members of the UN to ignore resolutions and verdicts with impunity and even continued membership in good standing. In short, technology even aside from that which is used in weapons had fundamentally changed the danger from war to the species itself, even as the world has continued to rely on the feckless UN in failure after failure as if the status quo were working anyway. It is unfortunate that so much energy of political will is necessary for a leap in political development for the species; we are so much better at incrementalism.
2. Ibid.
