We propose a REAL PLANETARY PROJECT

 

Today a situation has arisen in the world when, as never before, a great many people daily hear and learn so much about the rest of the world. For the first time in history a considerable part of mankind is united by at least a common virtual image of reality. Transiting from the virtual image of unification toward real unification is the most significant task for mankind. This starting idea penetrates the entire complex of our proposals aimed to substantiate the necessity to set the task of transiting from the necessity to implement the conception of sustainable development toward the necessity to implement the conception of harmonious world development. These conceptions have much in common. The main distinction is connected with interpreting the development process itself and the scope in which one conception or the other can be realized in practice.

Below follow several explanatory notes.

 

First, any economic, political, and social transformations can be of different scale, meaning, for example, the size of a territory or population undergoing their influence. Talking of the harmony of world development, we imply precisely the scale, i.e. we assume that the implementation of our ideas and proposals of economic, political, and social nature will fruitfully affect the Earth’s geo-, bio- and sociospheres and thereby exert positive influence upon the life of nearly 6.5 billion. people of our planet regardless of their age, race or nationality, social or economic status that people have.

 

Secondly, our project ideas and proposals on the harmonization of world development are of economic, political and social nature. But we put them forward in their interrelation as a single complex.

 

Thirdly, an indication to the complex nature implies that developmental work and bringing our ideas and proposals to ultimate practical use will result from interdisciplinary studies shared by representatives of modern science such as economics, sociology, politology, ecology, culturology, ethnology, social philosophy, history, jurisprudence, social and political psychology, demography, etc.

 

Transiting to harmonious world development implies the working out and implementation of all-planetary projects. Precisely today, in the early XXI century, the necessity to develop complex (joint social, economic and political, and the like) planetary projects of this type is caused by many reasons. They are well known and much written about. It is common to call them “global problems”, “global challenges” and the like. Virtually all of them are of a complex nature, and developing a solution to them requires efforts on the part of representatives of different science branches. Probably, one should even agree with A.I. Kostin’s opinion that “… in the second half of the XX century, mankind entered a new phase of evolution - the Era of risk. It is associated with the growing danger that civilization will destroy itself as a result of some global catastrophe: atomic in the aftermath of a nuclear war or use of APPs; ecological in consequence of environmental pollution, exhaustion of resources, energy crisis; nutritional in connection with the growing deficit in foodstuffs and diseases and epidemics related therewith; demographic resulting from uncontrolled growth of the population; and others.” [1, p. 236]. In this case, it is a question of excessive utilization of natural resources, which becomes one of the factors of planetary cataclysms; then the tsunamis in the Indian Ocean that carried away thousands of human lives; hurricanes in the USA with enormous material damages; floods and fires in Europe and earthquakes in Asia. It is as if nature itself appeals to the sense of mankind – unite!.

Bloody terror actions in Moscow and Beslan, New York and London, in Spain and Indonesia became an extreme manifestation of the unipolar world disturbed by inequality and injustice in which the “golden billion” confronts the pauper and hungry billion. Only the united mankind can suppress terrorism and its social roots. Once more this emphasizes the need to more actively change from the unification idea to developing and practically implementing a consolidating planetary project.

 

The more so that objective preconditions for this do exist. As is justly noted by A. Etzioni [2, p. 241], today three important phenomena are obvious that make it possible to revise views on the future word system:

“1. National states and the old system based on them turn out to be increasingly inconsistent in the face of global problems.

2. The newest technologies have immeasurably expanded possibilities of communications, coordinated actions and, thus, the power on global scale.

3. It has long since been asserted that the world can unite in the face of a global thread…”

He notes today’s paradox that “… if in the theory of international relations more and more widely establishes an approach according to which even modest initial forms of global state power and new global community are considered a utopia; in practice, conditions are forming that make the development in this direction increasingly real. It is twice as true if one proceeds from the assumption that the incipient global nation will possess unique features rather than just amplitudinously copy attributes of national states, i.e. that it will have an architecture of its own” [3].

 

The experience of UN activities and practice of integration processes in Europe and other regions enables us to roughly formulate the following basic principles of a planetary project:

Social equality of all races, religions and states.

 

Active popular diplomacy and civil control over official interstate organizations.

Forming and adjusting the activities of supra-state institutions of global civilization.

Every kind of assistance to developing, financing and implementing social, ecological, economic and political planetary projects and programs of the Earth’s development which favor transition from realizing the principle of stability to realizing the principle of harmonious development of the Earth (probably, J. Bhagvati [4, p. 212] is just to note: sustainable development is a notion that “even God does not know what it means…).

 

We believe that real process of a unified mankind’s coming into being, with the whole accumulated cultural diversity preserved, primarily implies the creation and development of a planetary institutional infrastructure. Some planetary institutions already exist, but require a serious modernization. These are the United Nations Organization (UN), its committees and commissions; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); World Bank; World Trade Organization; and others.

 

In the opinion of many politicians and scientists, the existing planetary institutions are insufficiently effective or low effective. Suffice it to mention attempts at modernizing the UN made at the 60^th jubilee session in 2005. The weakness and organizational friability of planetary institutions is conditioned by bloc (group) interests, extremely dangerous inequality in economic development and living standard of regions of the world, US and NATO striving for the unipolar world strategy supported by the sword and local wars (Afghanistan, Iraq).

 

Uniting the existing planetary institutions into a single infrastructure system beneficial to all nations and states is both necessary and possible. There are global information networks like the Internet. There is a 50-year experience of activities of many institutions. There are cadres of diplomats and specialists in world economy and politics. A common will and clear, comprehensible and nations-wide accepted program of consolidation processes is needed along with a unified consolidating planetary project to harmonize the world development.

 

As a first approximation, the coordinated planetary institutional infrastructure can include the following institutions:

1.1. World Academy of Sciences.

1.2. World-wide educational information space (system).

1.3. World Council of Churches.

2.1. Modernized UN.

2.2. World Parliament.

2.3. Continental parliaments (Europarliament and others).

2.4. Planetary political parties and public movements.

3.1. Planetary property institution.

3.2. Unified planetary budget.

3.3. System of planetary and continental programs and projects.

4.1. Planetary (noosphere) Council.

4.2. Security Council.

4.3. Regional councils for economic and social development (e.g., OECD).

 

As was noted, forming and developing planetary institutions is hampered by the existing real contradiction between national and supra-national interests common to all mankind. A hypertrophied understanding of the priority of national-state interests over international ones is an obstacle to adopting many planetary projects and programs. National political elites and political leaders yet have to work out and put into practice a mechanism for delegating regulatory powers to supra-national authorities. UN experience and experience of European Commission’s activities can serve as a starting basis for developing such mechanism and fixing it in international conventions.

 

Any institute or organization can work effectively when sufficiently funded. Activities of the UN, its committees and commissions testify to the need to draw additional sources of financial resources, including those independent of decisions made by national states. An economic mechanism for financing activities of planetary institutions can be simplistically presented as follows (see figures 1).

 

A principally new and important source of incomes for funding planetary projects and programs can become an institution of planetary ownership of resources of outer space and atmosphere, world ocean, fertile land, minerals (raw material), energy resources, intellectual resources of mankind. A considerable part of these resources is in private, corporate or national-state ownership; consequently, private persons, corporations or states acquire profits from the use of this part of resources.

 

In our opinion, however, an essential part of these resources belongs to the whole mankind and, hence, to every inhabitant of the planet Earth. Let us consider resources of the earth’s atmosphere. Air makes winds and hurricanes circulate across the entire globe. It is impossible to establish national borders of atmosphere, though the regime of using airspace above the states is regulated today. Every man and enterprise uses atmosphere, consuming oxygen and polluting it with noxious discharge.

 

The Kyoto Protocol ratified by Russia and the required number of states should be considered a first attempt to introduce an internationally recognized mechanism for using the earth’s atmosphere. According to this document, quotas of harmful emissions are established in each country. For the exceeding of a quota a country must pay penalties, whereas it can sell the unused part of the quota to other countries or firms. Disputable as criteria for determining quotas and measuring actual emissions in dynamics, prices of ecological damage, etc. may be, this mechanism reflects one of the ways to withdraw and concentrate planetary ecological rent.

It is necessary to grasp and work out practically operating mechanisms of appropriating planetary rent for the use of resources of the outer space (solar energy, planet gravitation), World ocean (bio-resources, energy, transportation space, minerals on sea bottoms), reserves of mineral raw materials and hydrocarbon, intellectual resources of mankind (fundamental science, systems of natural and humanitarian knowledge, human capital).

 

The real value of planetary rent is so far difficult even to assess, but according to our as yet rather rough estimates, its sizes are sufficient both for overcoming poverty and for financing investments in the development of countries and nations lagging behind. After all, in the above-mentioned A. Etzioni’s opinion, mankind must unite, primarily, in order to extirpate misery and aimless life the mankind’s great part is prone to nowadays.

 

We give an approximate calculation of planetary rent for extraction, transportation and burning of hydrocarbons (oil). In 2005, over 4 billion tons of oil will be produced in the world. At the average price of $200 per ton, proceeds will amount to $800 billion, whereas aggregate wages of the firms will be around 400 bn. Of  $300 bn. of oil rent, some part is appropriated by firms and some part goes to the budgets of national states. But a portion of this rent must be allocated directly for the needs of the whole mankind as the right to income from planetary property.

 

Oil is transported in huge tankers or is transferred by pipes. The facts of large-scale accidents confirm actual damage to the environment, which is to be compensated for, including in the form of payment for transportation.

 

600 million automobiles worldwide burn gasoline, consuming oxygen and polluting atmosphere. All must pay an ecological rent for atmosphere reclamation if we are to preserve oxygen for ourselves and future generations. Thus, only a rent from production, transportation and use of oil and petroleum products can reach 150-200 bn. a year. It is necessary to evaluate the potential of possible rental incomes from other planetary resources as well.

 

On the other hand, the need for financial resources to solve the acutest global problems is to be assessed. Thus, to maintain viability of poor people, whose number in states unable to cope with the problem of poverty themselves amounts to 400-500 mn. people, food aid alone in the amount of $1.5 a day per capita requires annual expenditures of $200-250 bn. Also high are investment expenses aiming to boost economic activity of the third-world countries’ population. The struggle against international terrorism requires increasing expenditures.  Costs of restoring ecological balance on continents and the entire planet are very high.

 

All this testifies to the extreme urgency of dealing with problems connected with the formation of an economic mechanism for realization of planetary property and further modernization of planetary institutions.

 

References:

Kostin A.I. Ecopolitology and globalistics. Moscow, 2005.

Etzioni A. From empire to community: A New Approach to International Relations. Moscow, 2004.

Ibid.

Bhagvati J. Witness for globalization. Moscow, 2005.