The word “community” has many uses within a general “family resemblance” of meanings. We can speak of our local neighborhood community, of various “artistic communities,” of economic and political communities, even of the “community of nations,” or “the human community.” The word embraces all sorts of recognized human relationships and commonalities. It allows for the possibility of greater or lesser degrees of “community,” meaning people bound together with greater or lesser bonds of solidarity and cohesion.

In Natural Law and Natural Rights (2011), philosopher of law John Finnis points out that a central binding factor recognizing and establishing communities on our planet is the territorial nation-state. Each nation binds people together in an exceptional way through the rule of law over all its citizens. This rule of enforceable law, he declares, makes each territorial nation-state a “complete community.” All complex societies require the rule of law, and the function of law in nations is to allow for flourishing among the citizens by coordinating and regulating their activities. The government of each nation, therefore, has a “common good” that it strives to actualize and protect. However, a problem immediately arises: does this mean that there are some 194 different “common goods” operating in today’s world?

To have a “common good” means recognizing that there is, indeed, a good to be realized in human affairs. Extreme skepticism or nihilism erases all ideas of a common good. In nation-states, such nihilism can result in political power being used for the benefit of a few rather than any recognized good of all. Tyranny, of course, can be the result of an ideology claiming to have special knowledge of what society should be and where it needs to go (as occurred under Stalinism). But tyranny can also simply be the cynical grabbing of power for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. These few will deny that they are bound by any “common good” (which would necessarily impose moral demands upon their government).

The dominant tradition in Western thought, nevertheless, recognizes a dignity inherent in being human that demands governments pursue a universal justice (a common good) for their citizens. Morality was conceived as a “natural law” given to humanity by God, to which the laws of a society must conform. The primacy of this ethical dimension was recognized by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, St. Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Finnis, and many others. The moral law meant that there was such a thing as human dignity that must be recognized and respected by governments and their laws.

Kant’s work in the 18th century emphasized that every person is “an end in themselves,” meaning that humans possess a special worth that he called “dignity,” and therefore no human being can be used “merely as a means” for the purposes of another person or group. To have dignity and to be uniquely valuable in this way means that a person has rights that cannot be legitimately violated by others. Kant argued that a legitimate government is one that recognizes the dignity of citizens and institutes laws to maximize both their freedom and their equality before the law.

Through the articulation and elaboration of the idea of human rights, the 18th-century Enlightenment in general articulated this natural law tradition, recognizing our human dignity to which governmental laws must conform. John Locke argued that each person has “God-given rights” inherent in our personhood, prior to government and law (such as life, liberty, and property), and that legitimate governments were formed in order to secure and protect these rights. Governments formed for any other purpose were therefore illegitimate. Thomas Jefferson repeated these ideas in the U.S. Declaration of Independence in 1776.

In December 1948, this Enlightenment theme culminated in the monumental United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This comprehensive listing of 30 itemized rights elaborated the opening premise of the UN Charter, which was “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” The then-President of the UN General Assembly and one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration, H.V. Evatt, stated that this Declaration of Human Rights “is the first step in a great evolutionary process” in which human beings can use the document to move into the future by progressively conforming institutions and governments to its principles.

The Declaration recognized the idea of government as promoting the common good of citizens, understood as a collection of rights and duties as mentioned above. Article 29.2 declares that:

In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

It is because law embodies a regime of rights and duties that it defines the “limitations” necessary on individual rights so that everyone can equally enjoy those same rights before the law.

For this reason, Article 29.1 declares that “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.” Both citizens and governments have the same duty to promote the common good while respecting the dignity, freedom, and equality of every citizen. As philosopher Jürgen Habermas summed this up: “The individual cannot be free unless all are free, and all cannot be free unless all are free in community.”

This is the meaning of “the general welfare in a democratic society.” It is the function of government to foster this common good that maximizes both the freedom and equality of all citizens before the law (as Kant declared in the 18th century). However, the United Nations was founded on a fundamental contradiction. It recognized the universal character of moral principles (human rights and dignity) and the universal obligations of government to recognize human dignity and organize legal systems to protect, preserve, and coordinate the flourishing of persons in dignity before the law.

Yet, at the same time, the UN was founded on the principle of the absolute sovereignty of each member nation within the organization. “Sovereignty,” in the current understanding among nations, means that each nation recognizes no binding authority above itself. Its laws govern citizens within the nation and do not govern citizens of other nations. There is nothing universal about any nation’s effective, binding laws. The world is divided into roughly 194 territorial systems of law, none of which recognize any binding law above themselves. In Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (2003), human rights scholar Jack Donnelly reminds us that “current norms of state sovereignty still prohibit states from acting coercively abroad against torture and virtually all other violations of human rights.” The result is that “the modern state has emerged as both the principal threat to the enjoyment of human rights and the essential institution for their effective implementation and enforcement” (pp. 34–35). Today’s world system is fatally crippled by this exact contradiction.

In spite of this fragmentation of sovereign nation-states, our world—at least since the 20th century—has become economically and culturally globalized and unified. Citizens of each nation are in constant communication with those in other nations, especially since the 21st-century digital revolution that has connected the entire planet through smartphones, computers, and satellite communications. Citizens, businesses, civic groups, and nations interact with one another constantly within a global economic and communications framework that is largely lawless. There is nothing that binds their interactions together within a lawful, common-good matrix providing for freedom, flourishing, and equality before the law.

We saw above that John Finnis defines the most “complete” form of community as any group delimited by binding universal laws directed toward the common good. Yet such “complete” communities have hitherto been limited only to national governments. The purpose of laws within governmental frameworks is to secure and enhance the dignity of individual persons in relation to the equal dignity of all other persons. However, given some 194 competing claims to be “complete communities,” the globalized world has become a chaos of mistrust, deceit, spying, clandestine operations, and endless wars precisely because it has no binding framework of law directed toward the common good of all. The common good in which each person is entitled to participate can no longer be found within individual nation-states.

A person’s rights are diminished each day as human-made climate catastrophes assault nearly every region of our planet. A person’s rights to governmental transparency and truthfulness in the service of the common good are also disrupted daily by the necessity of governmental secrecy in a world of economic and military competition. A person’s rights to economic sufficiency and flourishing (as per UN Declaration Article 25) are destroyed by the immense waste of governmental funds on militarism, defense, wars, and “security” operations. A human-rights regime promoting the common good of citizens is impossible in today’s world because the true locus of any possible common good has become planetary, not territorial.

As Finnis expresses this:

If it now appears that the good of individuals can only be fully secured and realized in the context of international community, we must conclude that the claim of the national state to be a complete community is unwarranted and the postulate of the national legal order, that it is supreme and comprehensive and an exclusive source of legal obligation, is increasingly what lawyers would call a ‘legal fiction’. (p. 150).

Nation-states have become “legal fictions” because they cannot, within their borders, actualize the necessary and legitimate functions of government, which are to maximize the common good of their citizens.

Habermas gives us a similar understanding emerging from the phenomenon of globalization. The nation-state, he argues, was once considered the legitimate institutional form for a dialogue that made possible a progressive realization of democratic ideals. That dialogue, of course, was directed at how best to realize human flourishing within the framework of the common good. But today the nation-state can no longer be the sole carrier of dialogue concerning the good, since the fate of the Earth and humanity now involves global issues that transcend all nation-states: “Today,” he writes, “developments summarized under the term ‘globalization’ have put this entire constellation into question.”

The common good is now planetary, and it calls for the ratification of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. Nation-states have lost the moral and conceptual legitimacy that they may have once enjoyed. This Earth Constitution not only embraces the idea of universal human rights and dignity, it also recognizes—as the UN Universal Declaration does not—the rights to planetary peace and to a protected planetary environment, rights that belong to every human being.

Within a war-system such as the militarized nation-state system, the right to peace is violated daily and hourly everywhere on Earth. Within a collapsing planetary climate scenario, supposedly addressed by the (non-binding) UN Sustainable Development Goals, the human right to a flourishing life with economic sufficiency is everywhere violated. The UN Sustainable Development document declares in its Introduction that, “We reaffirm that every State has, and shall freely exercise, full permanent sovereignty over all its wealth, natural resources, and economic activity.”

In this statement, we have a prescription for the destruction of the planetary ecosystem and the failure of all governments on the planet with respect to their ability to foster the common good of their citizens. The resources of the planet necessary for its sustainability belong to everyone, just as every person has a right to clean air and fresh water within a framework of equal rights before universal laws premised on our planetary common good. This assertion of absolute national sovereignty in the Sustainable Development document also reveals why an emerging “multipolar” world system will not and cannot work.

Many so-called “progressive” thinkers today applaud the demise of the USA’s global economic and military empire (enforced by some 800 military bases situated worldwide, costing the people of the USA more money than the military spending of all other nations combined). The BRICS movement, today involving more than half the world’s nations, is developing economic relationships that bypass the U.S. dollar with its monopoly on financial interactions planetwide. The goal, they assert, is a “multipolar world system” in which all nations freely trade with one another free of external monopoly or coercion.

That this vision is an illusion is attested to by the understanding developed in this essay. Unless the ultimate sovereignty claim of governments is transferred to the people of Earth—as it is under Article 2 of the Earth Constitution (with national sovereignty becoming derivative from the Earth Federation government)—there cannot be any result other than the further deterioration of human rights and dignity worldwide. Will the collapse of the Antarctic Ice Shelf and rising ocean levels planetwide submerge Hong Kong and affect the dignity of the people of China and their right to a flourishing, secure existence? Yes, certainly—but no more than it will affect the dignity of people everywhere on Earth who have a right to live under a government dedicated to the common good of all persons everywhere.

Our common dignity is articulated both by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by Articles 12 and 13 of the Earth Constitution (which include the additional rights to peace and a protected planetary environment). The only way to secure that dignity under the reign of legitimate government is through an Earth Federation that establishes enforceable laws on the basis of the planetary common good, binding over all persons and governments. Human beings have evolved and matured throughout the past 12,000 years of human civilization.

This evolution resulted in the Enlightenment of the 18th century, with its understanding that all persons have human rights and dignity. This evolution reached a high point in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which correctly articulated this vision and declared in Article 28 that “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.”

But that social order was and is not possible within the structure of the UN Charter, which predicated the international system on the absolute sovereignty of every nation-state—meaning that none recognized any binding authority above themselves. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirmed universal human rights and dignity within a framework that fundamentally contradicted its universality. There could be no protection of the common good of each person within a global community, but only a fragmentation into some 194 territorial sovereignties, each supposedly dedicated to its own separate common good.

Article 28 likely made its affirmation that every person is entitled to “an international order in which their rights and freedoms could be fully realized” without fully comprehending the contradiction within the UN system that made this impossible. Today, that contradiction becomes ever more starkly visible as the world finds itself unable to effectively address climate collapse and the breakdown of the UN system, accompanied by the endless generation of wars, hostilities, economic blockades, scorn for “international law,” and regimes of spying and mistrust.

Without this understanding of human dignity (in relation to the absolute sovereignty of nations), the human phenomenon is looked upon as simply a set of valueless facts in which the wiping out of enemies in war is of little significance. This nihilism, so forcefully predicted by Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century, has expanded to infect the governments of many nations, leading toward planetary wars and chaos. This will not end with the ascension of a multipolar world, because the underlying denial of human dignity will persist in the contradiction between the claim to absolute sovereignty and the universal moral force requiring government to operate as a regime dedicated to protecting individual human flourishing within a framework of enforceable laws predicated on the common good and equality before the law for all persons.

The Constitution for the Federation of Earth can easily be ratified by the governments and citizens of Earth under the protocols set forth in its Article 17. For decades now, many citizens from around the world have pledged and are pledging their loyalty to this Constitution and to the solutions to our planetary meta-crises that it represents. Under the authority of Article 19, these same World Citizens have already activated the Provisional World Parliament, which is vigorously promoting the rule of effective law for the Earth and, hence, the recognition of human dignity and the collective common good for all.

Any so-called multipolar world remains a world in direct contradiction to our common human dignity and our right to live within a legal community that protects and empowers that dignity. A realized Earth Community is only possible under the authority of a single sovereignty embodied in a democratic Earth Federation Government legislating enforceable laws for the whole of humanity. Such an Earth Community is both morally and cognitively necessary, and it appears as the only viable way forward within our planetary meta-crisis that portends possible human self-destruction and extinction.

The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared correctly that “everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.” The contradiction at the heart of the UN system is now exposed, and the demand for a unified Earth Federation is becoming apparent to all. The Earth Constitution Movement has already taken many steps toward such a unified world system, while the horrific consequences of the outdated system of absolute national sovereignties are clear for all to see. It remains imperative that we join and support this movement on behalf of the common good of humanity.