When war causes thunder to rumble somewhere in the world, when a crisis of global proportions breaks out, when nature is unleashed at the end of the oceans, then our contemporaries launch their pleas to the "international community". As if this misty concept was supposed to represent the conscience of humanity and form a kind of guarantee of a certain moral order of the world.
Now, more often than not, the international community finds itself helpless; its echo chamber, the UN, is nothing more than an assembly of the world's 192 co-owners, a place of necessarily contrasting and discordant words. As for the Security Council, it suffers from chronic paralysis because of its congenital right of veto.
So what do these pathetic appeals to the "international community" mean? Why appeal to it, knowing that it is at best a mirage, at worst an illusion?
● In order to understand, we must appeal to the idea of the "survival unit" and go back a few millennia. In ancient times, the social group of our prehistoric ancestors was probably no more than forty or fifty people. It constituted a sufficient survival unit, limited to a few families. In order to move from these primitive units to the state and supra-national forms of the contemporary world, a slow and profound process of evolution towards the integration of mankind had to take place.
The process of integration of humanity corresponds to an evolution of our species from little differentiated and not very complex survival units to ever larger, more differentiated, more complex units with an ever increasing number of individuals. Tribes have lost their function as autonomous survival units all over the world, and states are absorbed, with their sovereignty, in forms of increasing integration. Unless there is an abrupt break in this evolutionary process - which is always possible - we are moving towards a stage where all the states making up humanity will eventually be merged into a basic social unit. We are not there yet, far from it, but we feel confusedly the beginnings of it.
Why not enjoy unlimited reading of UP'? Subscribe from €1.90 per week.
● The confusion of today's world comes from the fact that we are in an evolutionary movement of which we know neither the meaning nor the instructions for use. We are in a learning phase in the passage from the current level to the next level. In this phase, the lower level group sees its functions of guaranteeing the survival of the group, functions that are ancestrally attached to it, gradually fade away.
At the same time, the higher level group, too distant, still poorly organized, is not considered capable of fulfilling this major role of survival unit. The trouble with contemporary individuals is that they are confusedly aware that their chances of survival already depend, to a large extent, on what happens at the highest level, which they call the 'international community' without knowing that they are in fact calling for a new form of world configuration.
● Today we are at exactly this point of transition between two levels of integration. We are in the in-between. The stakes are global, the organizations are global, the flows are global, as are the dangers. But, despite a few sporadic spasms identified in the great planetary compassionate waves or the embryos of awareness of being all part of the same spacecraft, individuals and states are not yet able to detach themselves from their belonging to their original survival unit. Everyone feels confused about the need for the emergence of a higher unit of survival, taking into account humanity as a whole; but everyone also perceives the resistances and difficulties of this inevitable passage. This is what makes pathetic the discursive convolutions of the current actors of the world, stuck on their stato-national references and paralysed at the idea of conceiving, other than in the form of a mirage, the next level of integration of humanity.
