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Quote by Thomas C. Schelling

“If one really believed in the reliability and permanence of an international arrangement, such schemes for providing the authority with 'hostages' might be more efficient, even more humane, than providing it with bombers and shock troops. One could even go further and let the force have a monopoly of critical medicines to use for bacterial warfare on a transgressor country. As soon as it starts an epidemic, it send its medical units in to make sure that no one suffers who cooperates.”

Quote by Thomas C. Schelling

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Thomas C. Schelling

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“Page 180: A fascinating contemporary parallel, and another example of destruction through centralization if a federal union harbors a single disproportionately large power, has been furnished by the short-lived United States of Indonesia. When it was created in December 1949, it was composed of sixteen member states of which one was so large that its subordination without its own consent was impossible … Page 183: … if our present unifiers really want union, they must have disunion first. If Europe is to be united under the auspices of the European Council, its participating great powers must first be dissolved to a degree that, as in Switzerland … none of its component units is left with a significant superiority in size and strength over the others. Page 187: This is why such attempts at international union as the European Council or the United Nations are doomed to failure if they continue to insist on their present composition. Compromising with their framework a number of unabsorbably great powers, they suffer from the deadly disease of political cancer. To save them it would be necessary to follow Professor Simons who said of the overgrown nation-states that: ‘These monsters of nationalism and mercantilism must be dismantled, both to preserve world order and to protect internal peace. Their powers to wage war and restrict world trade must be sacrificed to some supranational state or league of nations. Their other powers and functions must be diminished in favor of states, provinces, and, in Europe, small nations.’ This is, indeed, the only way by which the problem of international government can be solved. The great powers, those monsters of nationalism, must be broken up and replaced by small states; for, as perhaps even our diplomats will eventually be able to understand, only small states are wise, modest and, above all, weak enough, to accept an authority higher than their own. Page 190 But war is fortunately not the only means by which great powers can be divided. Engulfed in a swamp of infantile emotionalism, and attaching phenomenal value to the fact that they are big and mighty, they cannot be persuaded to execute their own dissolution. But, being infantile and emotional, they can be tricked into it.”

GlobalizationWorld GovernmentBalkanizationBreakup Of UsaCanada And MexicoMerger Of UsaNorth American Union
Book:The Breakdown of Nations
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“One of the curious difficulties in the way of world federation is the necessity of developing a planetary loyalty as a substitute for, or a complement to, national loyalty. In the United Nations of the World there will be no foreigner to make fun of, no outsider to feel better than. A citizen of the U.N.W. must take pride in the whole world; that, for some people, is going to be a very large thing to get excited about.”

GovernmentHumanityUnityWorld Government
Book:The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters
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“For the first time in our lives, we can feel the disturbing vibrations of complete human readjustment. Usually the vibrations are so faint as to go unnoticed. This time, they are so strong that even the ending of a war is overshadowed. Today is not so much the fact of the end of a war which engages us. It is the limitless power of the victor. The quest for a substitute for God ended suddenly. The substitute turned up. And who do you suppose it was? It was man himself, stealing God's stuff. We have often complained that the political plans for the new world, as shaped by statesmen, are not fantastic enough. We repeat the complaint. The only conceivable way to catch up with atomic energy is with political energy directed to a universal structure.”

GovernmentPowerWeaponsNuclear WeaponsWorld GovernmentAtomic Energy
Book:The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters
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