The Federalist 1/1988. [antikvár]

The Problem ofSecurity in the Nuclear Age 1. To face up to the greatest politicai problems ofour age, and in particular the problem ofsecurity, we really need to think in new terms. Mankind has never befare been in the position in which it now finds itself, which raises thepossibility of mankind' s extinction both through ecologi-cal dangers and the danger of nuclear war. When we speak of "security" we must always remember that it is not, unlike the past.just a question of defending your country's independence, but much more a question of safeguarding mankind's survival and the indispensable conditions for a more advanced phase of civilization. 2. In the final instance, this requires that the current state system— in which security is achieved only with power, even in the case of neutral countries (which are heavily armed) — is replaced by a world federal system "in which," as Kant wrote, "every state, even the tiniest, can expect its own security and the protection of its rights not from its own farce and its own legal assessments, but only from this great fédération of peoples, a collective force and décisions complying with laws of common will." Once this objective has been clearly fixed, the greatest difficulty that needs to be over come in order to achieve it be cornes equally clear, namely the fact that we need to use the agencies created by the need for power (absolute sovereign states) to achieve exactly the opposite goal: security without power, security only by means of law. 3. The recent Washington agreements on missiles deployed in Europe, and the prospective development of international politics in which Gorbachev places them, nevertheless show that the "march" towards peace may be undertaken as from now. In actual fact, it is precisely