I have discussed various environmental aspects of what has been called the 'global crisis'. As we have seen, various attempts at a solution to the cluster of problems contributing to the 'crisis' have been proposed, all involving some form of 'high tech fix' or attempt to reconcile economic growth with environmental conservation. We have seen that these strategies are failures. The situation is indeed a grim one. As Harwood has argued despite good evidence that humanity is hurtling towards the precipice of ecological collapse and that 80-90 per cent of the population of Australia, for example, are 'very concerned' about the environment, 80-90 per cent of the population still support the two party system. He notes that when either of these two parties are in power, they typically take environmental action only after a catastrophe. Yet to seriously deal with the environmental crisis requires making a political u-turn. However it is time to admit that this won't happen: "Given forty five years" support for mutually-assured destruction, it is utterly unrealistic to suppose that the prospect of irreversible global warming in the next century will radically alter current voting trends in time to break the "fossil fuel cycle". Indeed, none of this should be surprising if we are, according to Ornstein and Ehrlich, biographically programmed to respond to immediate local threats rather than global threats. If global action is needed to save humanity, then surely we are doomed.

But the problem here is an epistemological one. Why should effective strategies for survival be based upon global consciousness? If there is a dominant ideology in the world today, it must be the ideology of internationalism, globalism or 'one-worldism'. This is the philosophy of international capitalism and global financial alchemy, of transnational technocracy and global hyperactive programmed capitalism - but also of international socialism and environmental consciousness. Let us explore this issue in more depth. Within it lies the secret of our survival.

Henderson, a notable environmentalist, sees economic management questions as based upon "outdated concepts of national sovereignty". Marien also laments that "as globalism proceeds, the countervailing force of national and sub-national identity remains perhaps as strong if not stronger than ever" and in particular, poorer countries "are likely to embrace nationalism or regional self-reliance as an alternative". J.Porritt in Seeing Green: The Politics of Ecology Explained, sees the need of renewed internationalism to achieve a 'new international economic order'.

The position of internationalism or globalism is a common characteristic of green/environmentalist thought. In particular internationalism or globalism is often adopted as a consequence of acceptance of the limits-to-growth position. For example, Mankind at the Turning Point: The Second Report to The Club of Rome rejected "narrow nationalism" claiming "Global issues can be solved only by global concerted action" and by the development of 'world consciousness'. This would involve "a new world economic order and a global resources allocation system". This would seemingly require in the long term a world government, but the report denies this "Diversity of tradition and culture, a feeling for one's own place under the sun, is essential in order to mobilise the moral strength surely necessary for the required magnitude of change". No attempt is made to show how this is consistent with the emerging new world order and global consciousness.

The third report to The Club of Rome: Reshaping the International Order, looked forward to the creation of a global 'humanistic socialism' based on 'universal human values'. There needs to be a "voluntary surrender of national sovereignty" for the pooling of all the world's resources, material and non-material, for effective management of the world economy. Citing the example of French nuclear tests in the Pacific, violating Australia's sovereignty, this report whilst recognising the need for self-reliant development, points out that for national sovereignty to be effective requires international agreements and cooperation - which of course is true. From this however they then conclude on the basis of defending national sovereignty that what is required is "the progressive internationalisation and socialisation of all world resources - material and non-material-based upon the "common heritage of mankind' principle" This conclusion, needless to say, does not validly follow from its premises. This same theme, of 'one-world or no world' is repeated in Goals for Mankind and Our Common Future. The ABC's Radio Australia beams to the Pacific and Asia a weekly environment program called 'One World' which carries the same sub-text as the above examples.

The Brandt Commission report Common Crisis contained in summary many of the demands made by the South for the establishment of a 'New International Economic Order'. The report launched a savage attack against protectionism and proposed the following: that official debt be waived for the least developed countries, and an international revenue generation system or income tax be implemented; the elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers; the world control of the production and distribution of foodstuffs and the creation of a World Central Bank and international reserve currency. These are centralist policies of enormous significance to the sovereignty of nations.

The New International Economic Order (NIEO) was first raised at the second summit meeting of the Nonaligned countries at Cairo in October 1964. The first concrete demand for the NIEO was at the Algiers Nonaligned Summit which adopted an Economic Declaration and an Action Programme of Economic Co-operation, which called for a special UN session on North South problems. Every Nonaligned Summit since then has stressed the need for a NIEO. But the first formal international recognition of the need for a NIEO at the UN was during the sixth Special Session of the UN General Assembly. On May 1, 1974 the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order and the Programme of Action on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, were adopted with majority support. The idea was to establish new world order based upon equity, inter-dependence, common interest and co-operation, for the present international economic order was seen to be in direct conflict with the interests of the developing world. Important proposals were made about the reduction of armaments, the end to mass hunger and poverty, that industrialisation endangers the global environment and that population growth endangers the environment and threatens the survival of future generations. However proposals were also made for a rapid industrialisation of the Third World and the end of the protectionism.

These objectives were given strong assertion at the Second General Conference of UNIDO held in Lima in 1975. There the target set for the share of developing countries in world industrial production by the end of the century was to be up to 25 per cent. To achieve this there would be a net transfer of technical, financial and capital resource from the developed countries to the developing countries. There should also be a progressive elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers and other obstacles of trade, and the adoption of trade measures designed to ensure increased exports of manufactured products from the developing to the developed world. Further, structural adjustments would be required within developed countries encouraging "their industries which are less competitive internationally to move progressively into more viable lines of production or into other sectors of the economy", with "redeployment of the productive capacities of such industries to developing countries". The consequences of this are enormous as Corea notes:

"The realisation of a target of this magnitude has major implications for the pace and pattern of industrial development in the developing countries in the period ahead. It implies that industrial expansion will accelerate from the rate of some 6-7 per cent per annum attained in the 1960s to about 10 per cent per annum in the next twenty years. Such a rapid expansion must be accompanied by changes in strategies that pay attention not only to the volume of industrial output but also to its structure and content, with particular emphasis on meeting the essential needs of the mass of consumers. These changes must seek to overcome past deficiencies and ensure that industrial development contributes more directly to the relief of such major social problems as widespread poverty and unemployment. They must also seek to exploit to the full the potential linkages between agriculture and industry, so as to ensure that growth and development in the different sectors of the economy are mutually reinforcing. Above all, they must make a massive contribution towards enhancing the technological capacity of the developing countries and the technical and managerial skills of their people. The rapid and accelerated expansion of industrial capacity will have major implications of the transfer of technology to developing countries and the growth of their technological self-reliance. On the one hand, it will generate an increasing demand for technology, while, on the other hand, the resulting diversification of the structure of production could contribute to the process of creating a self-reliant technological base."

The absurdity of such a proposal is easy enough to see. As Mesarovic and Pestel note, if "an economy grows at a 5 per cent annual rate, it would, by the end of the next century, reach a level more than 500 times greater (or 50,000 per cent higher) than the current level". Supporters of NIEO have not explained how this is consistent with their assertion that industrialisation endangers the environment. Nor for that matter, have supporters of the NIEO, reconciled their endorsement of national self-reliance (that each nation do as much as it can for itself with the obvious centralising tendencies of many NIEO proposals. The issues will be discussed in more detail below.

Other arguments in support of globalism have a more sociological or politico-philosophical flavour, seeing humankind as a species-community, and advocating world citizenship where the entire world becomes a single 'place'. The situation today, is much the same as that described by Polybius in his Universal History in the second century BC with respect to the rise of the Roman Empire: "Formally the things which happened in the world had no connection among themselves. But since then all events are united in a common bundle". The creation of an integrated world system has led many intellectuals to support the creation of a world government. Within classical social theory we find Saint-Simon with a vision of the creation of integrated Europe and ultimately of global socialism; Comte with a vision of global citizenship: Kant advocating an international order involving mutual regulation; Hegel embracing universalism in his theory of the evolution of World Spirit, where the history of the world is the development of the idea of freedom; Marx condemning nationalism as a reactionary force and Weber expressing a vision of global rationalisation and the de-mystification of the world to produce a single rationality.

H.G. Wells in the Open Conspiracy, published in 1928, also supported the concept of a world government, but by 1933 in The shape of Things to Come, he had become desperate, arguing that intellectuals should seize control of the world by force. However by 1945 in The Mind at the End of its Tether, Wells had concluded that all was hopeless and that there was no way out of the impasse. Norbert Elias in volume 2 of The Civilising Process, published in 1939, wished to see a worldwide monopoly of physical force for the 'pacification of the earth', a world government. However by 1985 he believed that this was unlikely. Lewis Mumford, whilst being a sharp critic of modernity, advocated the creation of a 'world culture', where the 'destiny of mankind' will become 'one', "expressed in a world government that will unite nations and regions in transactions beyond their individual capacity". None of these collectivists however is a match for the metaphysical holism of Pierre Teihard de Chardin who wrote about the formation of an organic-social, supercomplex field, a 'noosphere', connecting us all. This thesis has been taken up by 'new age' writers, some of who have positions at the UN.

Carroll Quigley in his Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, offers an intersecting interpretation of history which supports the idea of the emergence of a new world order consisting of a Universal Empire. Civilisations tend to pass through a common life cycle. The civilisation is born and expands in power and size until a 'crisis of organisation' develops. If the civilisation survives the crisis, it becomes stabilised until internal crises occur again. This time, Quigley says, "there appears for the first time, a moral and physical weakness which raises...questions about the civilisation's ability to defend itself against external enemies". The result of this internal conflict is typically catastrophic; "weakened by loss of faith in its order of ideologies and by the challenge of newer ideas incompatible with its past nature, the civilisation grows steadily weaker until it is submerged by outside enemies, and eventually disappears".

Western civilisation is different from this pattern in so far as many past civilisations, the Age of Expansion was followed by an Age of Crisis and then by a period of Universal Empire, where a single political unit ruled the world of civilisation. The Age of Conflict is a period of declining expansion of power and size, of growing conflicts and internal tensions, of violent imperialist wars and growing irrationality and otherworldliness. The Age of Universal Empire arises by the triumph of one political unit in the imperialists wars. The West itself did not pass to a stage of Universal Empire, but was able to reform itself and continue expansion. However, if previous arguments in this book are correct, physical expansion of capitalism is not possible, bar the colonisation of other planets. Hence if Qigleys theory is correct, the West should enter into the Age of Universal Empire-or else disintegrate. A number of intellectuals and elites would seem committed to the former position.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the first director of the Trilateral Commission, noted in his 1970 book Between Two Ages the emergence of transnational elites, business people, intellectuals and public officials, constituting a 'global community', who make extensive use of a global information grid. Ultimately a community of nations will emerge embracing the Atlantic states, the advanced European Communist states and Japan. However, in less than twenty years, intellectuals and business elites have looked beyond even this trilateral vision. Reich in The Work of Nations sees more radical transformation occurring in the world order:

"We are living through a transformation that will rearrange the politics and economics of the coming century. There will be no national products or technologies, no national corporations, no national industries. There will no longer be national economics, at least as we have come to understand that concept. All that will remain rooted within national borders are the people who comprise a nation. Each nation's primary assets will be its citizen's skills and insights. Each nation's primary political task will be to cope with the centrifugal forced of the global economy which tear at the ties binding citizens together, bestowing ever greater wealth on the most skilled and insightful, while consigning the less skilled to a declining standard of living. As borders become ever more meaningless in economic terms, those citizens best positioned to thrive in the world market are tempted to slip the bonds of national allegiance, and by so doing disengage themselves from their less favoured fellows".

The theme of the dissolution of nationalism, and the creation of a 'borderless world' is developed further by Kenichi Ohmae in The Borderless World. But this fate is usually reserved for Anglo-Celtic nations, not Asian nations. Kotkin and Kishimoto recommended a rapid Asianisation of Anglo-Celtic countries and America with the passive acceptance of massive Asian migration. (They do not recommend the mass immigration of millions of Americans, Australians and Third World people to Japan.) Of course, any opposition to the swamping of these countries by this tidal wave of migrants is seen as 'racist' by a fifth column of internationalists in the host countries, for to be ideologically sound in Canada, Australia and the US is to long for the passing of one's own dominant cultural heritage. Japanese, Chinese, Indians and Africans typically do not act in this way, but this is no excuse for slackness or self-interest, on the part of those who aspire to the pinnacles of political correctness. They have a holy mission, to expose the sins of the West, before quietly passing out of existence with their dying culture to take their place with the gods in a multicultural heaven. But they are not the cause of the globalisation of their countries, let alone the world. They are the symptoms of a deeper disease.

Many have speculated that the internationalisation of the world and the breakdown of national sovereignty is the result of some form of global conspiracy. Now as we have seen, there are certainly many intellectuals and elites working for an internationalist agenda because the pay and conditions are good, but it is incorrect to speak of a conspiracy in this matter for their agenda is not hidden and information is readily accessible to those who wish to inquire into the nature of this matter. And if there was a conspiracy, we wouldn't know about it!

The erosion of national sovereignty and the creation of a global culture is largely the product of economic and technological forces. Herbert Schiller has pointed out that the dollar value of the economic activity of the leading transnational corporations, exceeds the entire GDP of many of the world's nations. Communications and information technologies have been of vital importance to the growth and maintenance of the transnational corporations' centrally controlled empires, supplying international information transfer through computer-to-computer communications systems. This power, and the centralisation of economic might, have directly contributed to the erosion of national sovereignty-the capacity of a nation to make policy-decisions reflecting internal interests. Schiller points out that whilst this is primarily a structural outcome of the process of transnationalisation, spokespersons for the transnationals do what they can to ideologically discredit the concept of national sovereignty. The reason for this is that in principle, national sovereignty, in the form of economic nationalism, is a force that places a limit upon capital's freedom to pursue profits without restriction. Governments in the past have made decisions to protect 'vulnerable' elements of the population, such as the young, the unemployed and the aged, which have not been consistent with unrestrained capital accumulation. These measures of protection and equity are under threat as the power of transnational corporations to make resource allocation decisions grows-along with their ability to escape national jurisdictions. As Schiller notes; "with the existing means of communication, capital can, with relative ease, shift production from one site to another and play off one (national) group of workers against another. The outcome of these tricks is job insecurity, lower wages all round, and increased transnational corporate profits and authority".

The ability to shift capital, data and production across national borders effortlessly, undermines economic nationalists attempts to protect home industry and the domestic economy. The internationalist Maurice Estabrooks in Programmed Capitalism: A Computer Mediated Global Society, recognises this in these words:

"The essentially free and uncontrolled flow of investors' and speculators' capital across national borders now represents a force over which few if any national governments have any control. Central banks and national governments are in a position whereby they are forced to look for new ways to accommodate and cope with this new world. They no longer have the discretionary-fiscal and monetary power they once had, and they can not operate as they have in the past to pursue and achieve their previous noble social and economic objectives. Instead of activist policies, they are forced to take reactive policy measures.

The rise of the computerised global infrastructure even jeopardises the power exercised by national governments through their ability to tax their citizens and their businesses. Global invisible money, capital, wealth, and other factors of production are highly mobile and know no political or geographical boundaries. They move to political regimes where their rate of return is highest and at the least risk. They put governments in a position of having to compete with one another for tax revenue, investment, and growth.

National governments no longer have the effective control they once had over domestic investment, employment creation, and economic growth. They no longer can control exchange rates and interest rates in the ways they did in the past. The best they can do is

coordinate what power they have left over the thousands of individuals, traders, institutions, and corporations that are playing their games, doing business, investing capital, and speculating in the global computer-medicated marketplace".

Toffler in Powershift: Knowledge. Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, carries this scenario through to its logical conclusion. Multinationals are non national global corporations that have no loyalty to any nation.

There is no reason why these 'global gladiators' will not obtain their own armies to back up their economic muscle. If we take this scenario even further , there is nothing to prevent in the 21st century, the emergence of one giant super-super-corporation, controlling the entire world's production, and ultimately, wealth, supported and defended by high technology computer robotics and advanced weaponry. It would constitute effective world government by the backdoor.

2. Against Internationalism

So much then for an outline of internationalism. As would be clear, there are many arguments that can be advanced against internationalism to demonstrate its unsatisfactoriness. Internationalism and globalism seem to many irresistible - it is therefore worthwhile to offer a concise outline of critical arguments against these positions.

The first main class of arguments against internationalism and globalism are a series of organisation and systems arguments based on the diseconomy of scale. Berry has given a concise non-technical summary of this argument in the following words:

"We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale...in making things always bigger and more centralised, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else".

Some arguments supporting this view have been given by Elgin. For there to be one world, there must be organisation, and at this scale, this is impossible without a bureaucracy. But as a bureaucracy grows past a threshold of size, a spectrum of complexity and a margin of interdependence, various effects are observed: (1) the bureaucracy becomes increasingly difficult to manage and comprehend because the rate at which problems arise, exceeds the rate at which knowledge is produced to solve them; (2) constituency participation in the bureaucracy will diminish; (3) the constituency's access to leadership will decline, in resulting in a failure of any form of representation; (4) the costs of coordinating the bureaucracy grow at a rate disproportionate to increases in size after some threshold of size; (5) the variety and diversity of constituents interacting with the bureaucracy are reduced; (6) the level of alienation and depersonalisation will increase; (7) the number and significance of unexpected outcomes of policy decisions, which could be highly adverse for many will increase because increased size results in an increase in the complexity of problems; (8) bureaucracies become increasingly rigid and inflexible: (9) the creativity and diversity of policy responses will decline; (10) the legitimacy of leadership will decline; (11) the vulnerability of the bureaucracy will increase and (12) the effectiveness of the performance of the system will decline. The common denominator to all of these problems in scale. The law of diminishing returns can be applied to scale itself by making scale the variable factor, so that increases in scale of an activity or process, will result in diseconomies of scale, past a certain threshold. As we have seen, the lust for political power and the belief that 'bigger is better', will push any attempt to globally govern the world into a diseconomy of scale situation. For example, even with respect to environmental protection, attempts to manage the environment through international agreements to restrict access to the common have been a failure and time and time again it has been shown that big business and states are ineffective in protecting biodiversity - it is the local people whose livelihoods depend upon protecting their local environment, that have the most concern about conservation of their locality. What is the world but a system of localities?

The second major problem with internationalism is one that all centralisation doctrines have faced since the time of Ploughed: who controls the controller? In the case of super powerful entities such as reinvigorated United Nations flanked by American military muscle, there is of course no external force apart from the disintegrating Soviet Union capable of regulating it-and even then, only by mutually assured destruction. The following account of this fear of centralised military power comes from a Time magazine description of the concerns of many Third World countries about the creation of a new world order:

"Tell it to the Marines-or,rather, tell it to a world that is prey to worries about where the U.S. Marines might go next. The great majority of nations that remained dubious about the gulf war, if not actually hostile to it, tend to suspect Bush of bolder designs.

In the most critical view, the new world order carries the ring of a metallic tread, the flash of an electronic eye and the wind from a sudden whirl of high-tech weapons. It conjures up an amplified voice advising overly independent countries to face the wall and assume the position. By no means have all the governments entertained such extreme fears, nor can very many sympathisers with Saddam Hussein's exploits be found outside the Arab world. But whatever the Iraqi dictator's sins, large numbers of people on every continent discount the idea that the gulf war exemplified a moral ascendancy in the making. To them, NWO is code for U.S.A., and "collective security" translates into America as Globo-Cop".

It is important to note here, that the killing of 250,000 Iraqi people by high tech weapons was done by America, Britain, France and other nations with the U.N.'s blessing. In the Western world today, this is equivalent to being backed by God. There is no doubt that if Saddam Hussein, had obtained nuclear weapons perhaps even more lives would have been lost. Yet the gulf war did not remove Hussein or solve the problem it was said to address, and 12 months later in February 1992 the same problem exists. The point to be made is that if the West was right about Hussein, surely there could been an alternative method of neutralising him, other than blasting Iraq in a high tech turkey shoot? It is ironic that the Left of the Australian Labour Party, supported the action of sending Australian forces to the gulf on the grounds that it was just to go to war for the 'new world order' and to strengthen UN power. None of these people, who mouth such phrases as 'anti-racism' and 'multiculturalism' and talk constantly about the guilt of the White Australia policy, seem to have much of the guilt complex about the loss of Iraqi life. Their hearts may bleed for 250,000 Asian business migrants who do not come to our shores, but not for 250,000 Iraqi dead. Of course this has nothing to do with 'racism' - if the gulf war was sanctioned by the UN - it could hardly violate human rights, could it? The philosophical point to be made here is that all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. A centrally controlled world is on where the controllers are not merely likely to be 'corrupt' but one where democracy and freedom will not be able to survive - if you make a problem large enough and involve a sufficiently large number of people in the solution of it, then you guarantee that the one problem soon fragments into a thousand insoluble problems.

The third and most telling criticism that can be made of internationalism is, simply, that it does not work and, indeed, can not work. The evils of human condition, the mess and strife of life is such as to prevent any such ideal being achieved, even if it was desirable. Hardin has noted that the world state would in time disintegrate as "intragroup competition would be certain to shatter a single all inclusive group". With the break up of the Soviet Union, rising ethnic conflict and warfare in what was once Yugoslavia, and an emerging Islamic unification consciousness in Muslim societies, we can see how difficult it is to unite even a part of the world, let alone the entire world! We are not one world; as humans we share the same biology, but that is about all. This is the grim lesson which has destroyed most systems of social philosophy. It is time to heed its call.

But where then does this leave the problem of the global crisis - of over population, AIDS, the resurgence of diseases, and of ecological threats and disasters? The above reasonings lead me to conclude that no solution is possible to the global crisis. This is not to say that the world is therefore doomed. In fact our only hope lies with a decentralised approach: developing a nationalist and a localist perspective. I have outlined this position in detail in The High Tech Fix. This approach is not free of troubles and nor is it perfect, but it is less problematic than internationalism. Most of the growth strategies which stand to threaten the environment, such as the industrialisation of China and the consequent use of vast coal reserves, are intimately linked with being part of an international economy and one world - and global capitalism itself must either expand or die. Creation of a self-reliant conserver society would go much further along the road of achievement of ecological sustainability that the internationalist strategies considered above.

Indeed, it may well be that we are already approaching the 'lifeboat' situation described by Hardin where not every country can survive. In this case, the way ofinternationalism, is the way of death. It is better that some survive than none, it is better that some survive even for a little while longer, than for us all to go together in one united ball of misery. However, if it is possible to decentralise the world, to reverse globalisation, to develop local self-reliance, this stark conclusion, which is almost certain to grip us on our present course, is likely to be avoided. The creation of a decentralised self-reliant, conserver group of nations and locales, with tight immigration restrictions, would force each locale to live within its means and to deal with its population, AIDS and disease problems-or perish. Nothing, it is true, would prevent war in such a world, but nothing prevents war now. Human survival, in short, requires people developing a sense of place, a sense of culture, a sense of one's roots. The conclusion of this inquiry must be that the centrifugal force which allows us to go out and meet world problems also gives us, at the same time, the benefit of centripetal energy- a return to the centre of what we are individually and collectively as part of a national group. Thus, instead of a slavish dependence on 'one world' concepts trying to solve all problems for all peoples, there is engendered a resolute independence at the local level dealing with regional crisis as they arise. This would still allow for interdependence at those times, if and when it becomes necessary, for a wider co-operative effort to be made on global scale, while giving us at the local level, freedom from the multicultural tyrannies of 'one world', 'open borders' and 'the new world order'.