The arrogance of the neo-conservative power elite in full charge of American foreign policy since 2001 may seem incredible to those who grew up during the Cold War and thought of global politics as a fairly even contest between two "superpowers" and their numerous allies, buffered (at least in our imaginations) by a "Third World" of more or less non-aligned states. Historians, the guild to which I belong, know better. What they can tell us is, I think, essential to assessing the possible futures of humankind and the best ways and means of replacing the stern realities of the early 21st Century with a just, democratic, and harmonious "first people's century"-or, as I would much prefer, a first people's millennium. Let us remember what the Cold War was all about. The whole point of the struggle was that one or the other superpower should prevail. Each had grandiose hopes of stifling its rival and emerging as the sole superpower. There may have been a touch of "Doublethink" involved, as in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which three totalitarian states simultaneously believe in their own invincibility and yet tacitly conspire to limit conflict and avoid Armageddon. But we should not succumb to an overdose of cynicism. In the final analysis, the Cold War was not a charade. Each superpower took itself seriously enough, and, in the end, one did prevail and hastened, although it did not directly cause, the disintegration of the other.

So the contest was real. The goal was hegemony, American or Soviet, in the post-World War Two universe. But there is more. Historians also remind us that striving for hegemony in the world order has been the objective of various states ever since the rise of modern Europe in the 16th Century. As Immanuel Wallerstein argues in his magisterial trilogy, The Modern World-System (1974-1989), this striving has always met with failure, making possible the ascent and triumph of multinational corporate capitalism. Had one or another political aspirant for global hegemony succeeded, it would have been able to hamstring its ambitious lords of commerce and industry, and retain full mastery.

But in pre-modern times, the quest for empire often succeeded, and imperial states did retain full mastery of their middling classes. Whether one looks at the ancient Middle East, the ancient Mediterranean world, the ancient Indian subcontinent, the ancient ecumene of East Asia, or their approximate counterparts in the so-called Middle Ages (Arab, Mongol, Aztec, Incan, Sudanese, and so forth), the story is much the same. For periods of time, sometimes for many centuries, one tribe or nation took charge and forged an empire that wielded hegemonic power over a whole known world of contiguous living space. The will to empire was not invented by American neo-conservatives. They are simply the latest examples of a primordial breed.

Nevertheless, one of the greatest differences between world history before and after A.D.1500, following Wallerstein, is that the latter-day imperialists of Europe were thwarted. Ignominiously. They could not achieve hegemony because they had themselves turned the world into a radically different place. The progress of Western science and technology and commercial know-how robbed innovative centers of power of the ability to seize undisputed mastery. Such progress was readily exportable from place to place in the compact yet politically divided Lebensraum of Europe. Other states could play the same game. No single state was big or strong enough to prevent the rise of worthy competitors, thanks in fair measure to most of Europe's escape from imperial domination during the millennium that followed the collapse of Rome.

Let me interpolate, at this point, that by "hegemony" I do not mean what world-system analysts usually mean when they employ the term. As Terry Boswell and Christopher Chase-Dunn define it, leaning on the work of Gramsci, hegemony is dominance in a world-system by non-coercive leadership in the economic sphere, and a hegemon is "a state that predominates over the world economy to such an extent that it sets the major trading pattern and the political rules of the world order to match its own interests." They identify only three such hegemonies in modern history, the Dutch in the mid-17th Century, the British in the mid-19th, and the American in the mid-20th, from 1945 to 1974.. [Boswell and Chase-Dunn, p. 37] Giovanni Arrighi charts a similar process in The Long Twentieth Century (1994), but prefaces it with an era of northern Italian hegemony during the Renaissance, centered chiefly in Genoa.

But as I use the term here, "hegemony" refers to the construction of an empire (a "world-empire" in Wallerstein's lexicon) throughout the core of a world-system, typically by force, and typically resulting in the imposition of a universal economy that benefits the center. Empires may allow various degrees of autonomy in outlying provinces, or even virtual independence, but on condition that the fringes do not imperil the vital interests of the center. Note, however, that two "empires" cannot co-exist in the same geo-culturally bounded system or ecumene. The so-called Ottoman, Spanish, Dutch, French, Russian, and British Empires of modern times were not empires at all in this sense, but simply national states enlarged by colonial acquisitions overseas or overland, none of which managed to assert hegemony over the rest of the states in the system. The first great power to aspire to hegemony in Europe was the Habsburg dynasty, which at one time dominated all of Central Europe and Iberia, and hoped to enroll the rest of Europe and its overseas possessions in its cause. It raised up too many powerful enemies. Then came the Bourbons of imperial France, whose plans for grandeur were frustrated by British-led coalitions in the late 17th and 18th Centuries. French pretensions to hegemony were exploded, once and for all, when that most implausible heir of the Bourbon dynasty, Napoleon Bonaparte, departed for St. Helena in 1815. After 1871, the baton passed to imperial Germany, which failed twice, in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, to emulate the Caesars. The key to all these exasperations was the logic of "balance-of-power" Realpolitik, the economic and political and military resources of lesser states pooled and deployed to topple the temporarily ascendant would-be hegemon.

Today the world situation is quite different. Because America's Cold War partners made the mistake of relying too heavily on American power, they, in effect, opted out of the arms race some time ago and concentrated on excelling in the marketplace. As a result the America of the neo-conservatives has no rival or consortium of rivals capable of challenging its military and political ascendancy. In the smaller world of the Middle East, America's demographically minuscule ally and alter ego, Israel, is similarly unrivaled. For various reasons, both countries have committed themselves to remaining ruthlessly up-to-date and non-pareil in matters military. They cannot be defeated, except when they choose the wrong battlefields (e.g., Vietnam, Lebanon), lessons they have no doubt learned.

So we appear to have reached a moment in world history when a transition to empire is possible, when the United States in the world at large and its client Israel in the Middle East (given a green light from Washington) can, with impunity, run amok, do as they please, and dictate the immediate future of humankind. Of course empire in a "democratic" era will not come with full imperial trappings. Not even Hitler's Europe, during its brief span, required the abject submission of Fascist Italy or Vichy France or Iron Guard Romania to every whim of the Führer. For that matter, as I noted above, most of the empires in world history made provision for satellite and vassal and tributary states. Absolute and total power was rarely the objective. The end in sight was hegemony, preponderant power, the freedom to arrange the world in the best perceived interests of the hegemon. Dependent states often retained substantial discretion in managing their own affairs.

Now struts on to the familiar stage of world history the incomparably ignorant and dangerously self-confident figure of George W. Bush. But never mind his personal flaws. They are immaterial. History, in the form of a U.S. Supreme Court packed with reactionaries by earlier demagogues, has chosen him (and his dark entourage) as its latest tools, and he has risen to his role.
What matters is the neo-conservative dream of a New American Century, in which 4.6% of the world's people (an even smaller percentage than in George Kennan's time) are empowered to tell the other 95.4% what to do and how to live and what to buy and sell. There can be no thought, in the minds even of these dreamers, that they can install provincial governors in every world capital or station substantial numbers of American forces on every turf. It will not be the Rome of the Caesars or the China of the Mings, but it will come close enough, if selective military operations here and there persuade enough would-be rivals elsewhere to kow-tow to the Oval Office.

Can this ugly dream come true? Perhaps. For a short while. A unified Europe, or the nations of East Asia, or both, may in time set aside their current policies and seriously challenge American power. The sheer costs of empire will eventually crush the new pretender to hegemony, if nothing else avails. Paul Kennedy has told the story in fearsome detail in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1988). But think of the ruin it can wreak in the meantime. Think of the ruin that the United States, together with Israel, have already wreaked, the millions of lives sacrificed, stunted, or shortened by their relentless and ruthless aggression against the world's masses in the name of a "freedom" enjoyed, to the fullest, by only a few thousand piratical families.

At this point, it is natural and humane for men and women everywhere to offer the vision of an alternative century, not an American century, but a people's century, a century of all humankind, which, with fortitude and effort, can be prolonged to a millennium, and even beyond. I applaud this vision, but at the same time I know it will be much harder to translate into the real world than to glimpse in some lustral distance. Perhaps never before in recent history have the peoples of our species enjoyed less power and fewer options. The spectacle of Anglo-American forces blundering into Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001-2003, almost wholly innocent of local languages, cultures, values, and aspirations, and yet without concerted local opposition, is heartrending. But these are our times. A new empire is taking shape, a mindless empire bent on running the world in the naked economic and political interests of the masters of a single nation, a nation most of whose citizens have been indoctrinated to believe they are the heirs of the ages.

They are the heirs of nothing, except the tinsel and ashes of five futile centuries of imperialist bluster. But of course they do not know that. They have been conditioned by corporate-owned media and systems of public and private education largely controlled by corporate-owned politicians Let me turn now to my main point, which is the exploration of strategies of transition from the foredoomed imperialism of the neo-conservatives to the coming of a people's century of justice and equality. How can we forge ahead from now to then?

I share the idealism embedded in the recent "Declaration of Principles" of the PFPC, and have freely signed it. This does not mean that I agree in full with the strategy of transition implied in this declaration. I do not believe there is the slightest chance that the United Nations can be transformed into anything significantly different or better as long as it is a collection of diplomats appointed by national governments. I do not believe that the power elites of our era would ever allow local communities to be governed by authentic participatory democracy or, even if they did, that local communities as presently educated and constituted could speak and act for humankind as a whole, let alone for the long-term good of the biosphere that all of human civilization has recently placed in grave peril.

In due course, in a better world, I would agree that every community should be empowered to govern itself, by the most directly democratic processes available. I agree that no nation should be supreme, and that no race or people is "superior," whatever the vicissitudes of history from century to century. But I firmly contest the view that all nations (as now defined) should have an equal voice in deciding the fate of humanity. Some are huge, some are tiny, and everything in between. They are not, in fact, equal in any respect, and giving them all an equal say in the future would violate the most fundamental premise of democracy.

Let us be clear. Nations in today's world are artifacts of Western European imperialism and the "nation-state" system invented in Europe in the 19th Century. So we have "Iraq" and we have "Syria." We have "Nigeria" and we have "Ghana." We have "Pakistan" and we have "Bangladesh." And so forth. They are all, as Benedict Anderson has shown, "imagined communities." The cultural, economic, and social facts on the ground belie all this superficial overlay of European provenance, but when the United Nations was created, it had no other operating principle, the elites of the various so-called nations in question collaborated with it, and now we are all stuck with a system that makes little or no sense. A real people's century must find a better way. Luxembourg and Liberia cannot be the equals of China and India. The rule of "one nation, one vote" is untenable.

I am driven to the conclusion that some of the goals enunciated in our "Declaration of Principles" must be deferred until we have perfected and implemented a strategy of transition that copes with the world as it really is, and not with how we might wish it to be. The reality is that nations differ enormously in wealth, population, expertise, values, and needs. The problems they face are not just local but planetary, ensuing from their membership in a world-system that intimately connects all peoples everywhere, whether they like it or not.

So where do we begin? I shall not mince words. I am a catastrophist. With great reluctance, but I am a catastrophist. Bad as the present world-system may be, it is a system, and it feeds, clothes, and shelters most of its inhabitants most of the time. So far. No one need apologize for clinging to the institutions and mores that frame and sustain his or her daily life. In this sense, we are almost all conservatives, reluctant to abandon our frail dinghies or scanty life-boats for the vision of a splendid luxury liner far away that may turn out to be only a hallucination.

Nevertheless, our troubles may have just begun. Catastrophism, in this context, is the belief that the modern world-system, despite all its seeming wealth and might, is programmed by what Marxists call its "internal contradictions" to self-destruct. The accelerating concentration of wealth at the top of the social pyramid, documented by every serious statistical survey of economic trends, coupled with mounting deficit spending to finance a baroque military establishment with an insatiable appetite, promises that sooner or later the American-Israeli juggernaut will implode. Perhaps soon, perhaps not for decades. Much depends on the capacity of the present world-economy to replace scarce resources, delay environmental disasters, and find cheap alternatives to fossil fuels. But impregnable as the contemporary world-system, dominated by multinational corporate capital and the imperial ambitions of the United States, appears to be, I think that it will, indeed, ultimately self-destruct. I cannot guess when. Yet only when it does begin to self-destruct, with obvious and dramatic effect, can I envisage the dawning of a people's century. For now, it is much too strong and the popular support it has engineered is almost overwhelming. If we should beware of underestimating the power of this world-system, neither should we overestimate the power of the most direct strategies of resisting its sway. It will not be brought down by miscellaneous public demonstrations or by terrorism or by such neo-medieval movements as Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism or the vigilante ideologies of the racist or libertarian or Christian Far Right. Attempting to return to earlier eras forever foreclosed by modern science and technology is futile, yet understandably attractive to those who see themselves marginalized by an unforgiving modernity. The thought of a people's century, a century shared by all people regardless of heritage, is almost too much to conceive. It is the only cogent alternative, but investing toil and hope in an unproven vision is far more difficult than going along with the powers-that-be or trying to resurrect a hallowed (if mostly fictitious) past. And of course trying to resurrect a hallowed past is always divisive and anti-human because it embraces only chosen people, people of this or that holy book or high caste or sage tradition, dehumanizing if not demonizing all others.

To my mind, the first great task for the builders of a people's century or a people's millennium is to define "the people." I realize that many progressive thinkers accept, grudgingly or otherwise, that all nations and creeds are here to stay forever, that "multiculturalism" should be embraced with fervor, that underdogs are automatically and morally superior to overdogs, and all the rest. I think George Orwell, in another of his wondrous fables, Animal Farm, took care of that nonsense. If all animals are equal, but it turns out that some animals are more equal than others, then pigs can consort with human tyrants, and faithful horses can be shipped to glue factories.

My point is that until and unless an ideology takes deep hold in the conscience of most people everywhere, an ideology that respects the existential human lives embedded in all imagined communities equally, any new political or economic order will simply resurrect the fratricidal conflicts embedded in the old order and repeat the same mistakes of the past, perhaps with even bloodier consequences. We need to discover and preach an integral humanism, an acknowledgment of the full integrity and equality of all men and women of all spaces, to whom we owe our only final loyalty, and for whom alone we should be willing to shed our life's blood. Frankly, I am not sure how this can be done. Humanity may have been closer to such an ideology in the late 1940s, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was endorsed by the United Nations and world federalist organizations were converting hundreds of legislators in Western national governments to their cause. The Cold War soon put a stop to all that. But it was a moment in history that might conceivably return, through some other conjuncture of forces. I cannot say. All I know is that unconditional reliance on the initiatives of nation-states, churches, and other established institutions with supreme interest in their own self-preservation is folly. Global humanism is the bedrock on which a people's century can alone be built. If there must be empire, it must be the empire of all people, and nothing less.

In addition to a fundamental shift in loyalties, from the segmental to the universal, there must also occur a fundamental shift in our recognition of the scale of the issues at stake in threats to human security and well-being. "Homeland security" is not for the United States alone, because the whole Earth is our homeland. Many of us wander its wideness freely, and no nation today is a nation only of "homelanders," pure-bred for centuries from "native" stock. If any state possesses nuclear or biological or chemical weapons, they endanger us all. Even the simplest weapons threaten us all. Wars, like plagues, threaten us all. If some countries are exhausting their reserves of fossil fuels, and others have none, this bodes ill for all of us who need and consume energy. Acid rain, ozone layer depletion, global warming, declines in supplies of fresh water and edible ocean life and tropical forests are not national problems. If one country has a hundred times the wealth per person of another, this is not a coincidence and not tolerable in the long run for the people of the second country, given the widespread diffusion of information about conditions of life elsewhere. Extremes of wealth and poverty within and among nations make global comity and a sense of planetary brotherhood and sisterhood impossible.

Clearly, none of these problems can be solved by the democratic (or undemocratic) resolves of individual nations, which exist and necessarily exist to put their own local interests before all others. The most serious concerns of humankind in the 21st Century transcend every national boundary and can yield only to planetary remedies.

It follows that the next great revolution in human affairs, the next great revolutionary cycle in what Boswell and Chase-Dunn call the "spiral of capitalism and socialism"-the alternation between waves of capitalist advance and people's resistance in the course of modern history-must be a surge toward "global democracy," the empowerment of humankind at large to begin meaningful rebuilding of the world order.

So my concern with the Declaration of Principles of the Project for the First People's Century is not with its ultimate objectives but with its imprecision about the ways and means of bridging the gap, the wide and seemingly measureless gap, between where we are now and where we hope to be when the First People's Century actually begins. The Declaration anticipates major reform of the United Nations-changing the method of selecting the members of the Security Council, empowering the U.N. to supervise the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction, and assigning to it, as well as to "international courts," the responsibility for fighting terrorism and bringing the perpetrators to justice. At the same time, the Declaration looks forward to securing the equal right of all women and men to the wealth of the planet and to "the maximum amount of freedom of the individual" consistent with protection of the freedom of others. It envisions a future in which "all national and class distinctions shall vanish."

Yet the way thither is addressed in only one paragraph, advocating "a worldwide system of participatory democracy, in which all major political and economic decisions would be made at grass-roots levels." It is unclear whether this system would be the final outcome of a lengthy process of revolutionary change or whether it would go into effect much sooner, providing the popular and mass support needed to implement all the other reforms and transformations espoused in the Declaration.

Let us assume the latter. What if, by some miracle, every nation on Earth today-or in a few decades-became a democracy, and not just in name or form but in reality, with full citizen participation in all major decision-making? This is actually what the neo-conservatives in the current U.S. administration say they want, although clearly they would do their best to thwart the democratically expressed will of any country that adopted anti-American policies. Still, is it reasonable to expect that each of these democratic nations would adopt policies in harmony with the principles of the PFPC? With all the immense disparities and differences in wealth, size, economic systems, and culture among nations, not to mention the special problems faced by minorities in multicultural nations (and nearly every nation today is multicultural), I cannot imagine that any amount of democracy would yield the kind of global consensus implied in the PFPC Declaration of Principles. In any event, the "miracle" mentioned above would indeed require supernatural aid, since virtually all nations today are governed vertically by hierarchies of wealth, blood, or tradition that would either prevent or sabotage the building of anything like true participatory democracy.

Furthermore, the Declaration of Principles speaks of all nations as "equal partners" and would reform the Security Council by having its members elected by the General Assembly, in which each nation, whether Nauru (with eight square miles and a population of 12,000) or China (with 3,600,900 square miles and a population of about 1,300,000,000), has one vote. I see no glimmer of democracy or even common sense in such a recognition of the "equality" of nations. Of course it would be far better to have a Security Council elected by the General Assembly with no permanent members and no veto power, despite the obvious incongruities in the make-up of the Assembly, but once again the Declaration of Principles of the PFPC is reaffirming the existing state system, with all states juridically equal and sovereign. The existing nations are to re-build the world order, somehow setting aside their numberless differences once they have become participatory democracies.

The only scenario that appears credible to me is one that would project the achievement of participatory democracy with "all major political and economic decisions...made at grass-roots levels" as a long-term goal, put into full effect at the end of the interregnum between an American Century and a People's Century. We are by no means ready for the existing nations to decide their own fates. We have not constructed a global consensus on values and directions of social advance. We are still mostly capitalists, Baptists, tribal chieftains, feminists, Wahhabites, Catalonians, Zionists, trade-union members, Americans, Gypsies, Navajos, Québecois, popes, Kurds, Koreans, and a million other primary identities. The "world" and the "world's people" are remote abstractions that engage few minds and pull few heartstrings.

This can change. It must change. But I would argue that it will not change until movements emerge worldwide that preach, with conviction and urgency, the primacy of our identity as human beings, all one species and one blood; movements that recognize the impossibility of ending war, poverty, and the mutilation of the biosphere without concerted global action requiring-in many instances-great sacrifices and transfers of wealth and skill; movements that convince a steadily growing number of people everywhere of the higher logic and justice of the kind of world envisaged in the Declaration of Principles of the PFPC (or other similar declarations), a world of peace, equality, freedom, and the self-governance of voluntarily associated communities.

Such movements, which I group together under the rubric of the "World Party" in my scenario-novel, A Short History of the Future (3rd ed., 1999), may take numerous forms. In many instances a World Party might engage in electoral politics in individual existing nations, somewhat like the Green Parties now flourishing in several countries. Or its members may prefer to work through infiltration of existing parties, or devote themselves primarily to study and propaganda and education. Some members may be activists, willing to risk imprisonment for acts of civil disobedience. These are matters of tactics.

But the grand strategy must always be for members to link with one another across national frontiers, to become a World Party, a global movement or congeries of movements, with all eyes firmly fixed on the goal in sight: the creation of global democratic authorities to rescue humankind from war, imperialism, exploitation, poverty, and the ruin of the environment, tasks that cannot be achieved at the grass-roots level alone, but absolutely demand global collaboration on behalf of the world's masses. Capitalism is not a local phenomenon. In the age of the modern world-system, it is a global phenomenon. Many corporations based in one country earn most of their profits outside that country. The armed forces of superpowers are not all stationed at home in local ports and barracks, but roam over the world's land and air and seas almost at will. The environment is not just under attack at the factory next door or in the mine across town. Pollution, depletion of resources, global warming, and all the rest are planetary problems. They cannot be solved by meetings of village councils.

So I conclude that the next major step to the First People's Century and Millennium must be the establishment of a true world government. In A Short History of the Future, humanity takes an inadvertent short cut by falling into a vast pan-systemic war so lethal and traumatizing that the World Party can build a whole new world order almost from scratch, echoing to some degree what the leaders of the French Revolution accomplished in the 1790s. This is not a desirable scenario, to say the least, and I would be the last to recommend it. If catastrophe must be the midwife of the new world order, let it be a catastrophe that causes the least possible harm to the living and the not-yet-conceived, a crisis that awakens and convinces without threatening the very survival of civilization. Perhaps, to choose one of these lesser catastrophes, a colossal economic depression, triggered principally by ecological collapse, will bring massive unemployment, hunger, and suffering to billions of people worldwide in 50 years' time from now. We will still have our existing nations, although perhaps many of them have formed confederations with one another that reduce their numbers and enhance their collective stability and well-being, along the lines of the European Union (if it ever reaches its goal of authentic political and military union). In a great many of these nations, the World Party will have, let us assume, carved out a significant presence.

Boswell and Chase-Dunn, in The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism, make a powerful case for a World Party that indeed respects, endorses, and works through national entities, taking "issue with Wagar and others who claim that global governance and nationalism are irreconcilable" [p.173]. Let me take issue with "Wagar" as well, or at least with the scenario set forth in A Short History of the Future. As I have always maintained, that is but one imaginable scenario among many. The future will happen in only one way, just like the past, but we cannot know yet what the "way" will be. A pan-systemic war is all too plausible, but it is not inevitable. So it may be that the existing nations, driven to extremities by the great popular support won by the World Party and by looming catastrophe, will indeed realize that they must transform the United Nations into a democratic world government, with the power to disarm nations, keep the peace, salvage the environment, and rein in or even mundialize the leading multinational corporations, on the way to a hybrid economic system that might variously be termed "people's capitalism" or "market socialism."

Well and good. And in transforming the United Nations into a democratic world government, these nations will appreciate that global democracy is impossible without the direct election of their national delegations to the General Assembly by their own people, with the size of each delegation at least roughly proportionate to the population of each nation. In such a new world order, the existing nations would retain much of their autonomy, even if it meant-at least for many years-delaying the achievement of all the ultimate goals for humankind embodied in the Declaration of Principles of the PFPC.

How long would this new world order need to maintain its supreme authority over the peace and security of the planet? Of course I cannot say. As long as it takes? Yes, but what if the leadership of the reformed United Nations, the grandees of the bigger delegations, or whatever, decide that they want even more power, and want to pass on everything they have to their progeny, and delay indefinitely further progress toward democratization, freedom, and justice? What if they regard their stewardship as permanent?

Perhaps this would not be such a bad thing, depending on how they wield their power, but given what we know about human nature, and the extreme difficulty-excluding the simplest stateless communities of prehistory-of avoiding hierarchy, there is every reason to fear stagnation or even retrogression toward the old inequalities and inequities. Is there a remedy for too much world government?

Certainly no quick or easy remedy. The time may well come when another World Party will be necessary, a revolutionary movement akin to the "Small Party" imagined in my Short History, which began as a global force, but quickly dissolved itself as soon as its objective of full decentralization of power had been achieved. By this time, ideally, after many years or decades or even centuries of world governance, after long experience of peaceful cooperation and mutual respect, after progress in education and the evolution of more humanistic world-views, after many advances in technology rendering people no longer dependent on distant centralized systems (including, it may be, the perfection of a technology of computer-mediated group decision-making as imagined by Eduard Prugovecki in his Memoirs of the Future), better social habits will have become the norm, and communities can be entirely free to go their own way without directives from on high.

Boswell and Chase-Dunn are concerned that the world government envisaged in my Short History is too much like a "purgatory," and indeed they are right. I say the same thing when I compare it in my Foreword to the Purgatorio, the second book of Dante's Divina commedia. In other scenarios I could have written, it might be less of a purgatory. Still, I will concede this much to the world's religious traditions. Men and women have sinned. They have committed great crimes against one another and against their Earth. Civilization itself is a crime, based from its beginnings on the principle of exploitation of "man by man." As Marx and Engels have shown, it probably could have arisen in no other way, but so it did arise. A time of penance, of retribution, of making vast amends, is very much in order, although at its worst, the regime of a democratic world government would still be fairer, less violent, and more humane than anything experienced through the long millennia of civilization until now. Let us bring on the First People's Century, as soon as humanly possible. By comparison, the Project of the New American Century has all the legitimacy of Napoleon's seizure of the crown of emperor in 1804 in the Cathedral of Notre Dame or the plans for a Thousand-Year Aryan Reich outlined in the hysterical scribblings and speeches of Adolf Hitler. But I think we need to realize that the process of moving from world-empire to world-commonwealth and from world-commonwealth to what (with a belated bow to Pearl Buck) I have called the House of Earth, the House of Earth and maybe of the Stars as well, will require a strenuous and lengthy journey. Of course we all want everything to be good, all at once, here and now. Unfortunately revolutions of the magnitude envisaged in the Declaration of Principles of the PFPC do not happen in twinklings. Nor do they happen without disciplined coordination along many fronts across all frontiers. The next revolution must be a World Revolution, ministering to the needs and aspirations of all people, but they in turn must school themselves to realize that not every need can be met and not every aspiration can be fulfilled without compromising the equal rights of others. The Earth and its inhabitants are precious finite resources. We must husband them with due regard for their common dignity and infinite worth. If this means, for whatever time it takes, living in a purgatory, then so be it. The terrible alternative is easily located in the first book of Dante's Commedia.

    W. Warren Wagar
Department of History
Binghamton University

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