Exactly a century ago, the world was engulfed in the Great War that led to the death of tens of millions but most importantly, the death of global peace. According to the Immanuel Kant’s concept of perpetual peace, the Great War never ended and thus had been going on for over a century. According to this concept, war has not really ended as long as there remains a reason to fight in the future (Kant, 2003). The reasons that arose in the Great War led to the Second World War, then the Cold War and now the War against terror. There is also no telling what other reason for war the 21 st century will bring with it but it is almost obvious that there will be a reason and a war. To end the perpetual war, it is imperative that the entire world comes together and forms one united entity without political boundaries, which are the cause of war.
Global citizenship, from the perspective of the instant debate is taken literary in that a global citizen does not owe allegiance to any nationality, but rather to humanity and the world at large. Globalization thus means eliminating any boundaries so that instead of Canada, the US and Latin America, there is only the continent of America with the same applying to the other continents around the world. All the countries would be dissolved and all administration superintended by a global body such as the United Nations. The idea behind the unification of the world into one would be the avoidance of wars. Both civil wars and international wars would come to an end if political boundaries also came to an end.
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Modern war involves two or more strangers trying to kill one another either from close proximity or great distances depending on the nature of the war. In most cases, the two strangers trying to kill one another have nothing against one another, no differences in ideal and no animosity as they are just following orders. In the infamous Battle of Verdun between the French and the Germans, men were sent to kill one another without any tactical objective in a battle of attrition. The general idea was to kill so many French soldiers that the French would eventually surrender (Andrews, 2016). Every day for months, strangers met one another in an open field for the simple reason of trying to kill one another because their generals said so. On Christmas day, these men would meet in the no man’s land between trenches for a game of football then continue killing one another the following day. What if there was not France and no Germany, would this people have been killing one another? As long as boundaries exist, political affiliations will also ensue and because of political affiliations, people will find a reason to go to war. Ending political boundaries will also end current and future wars.
A contrary argument can be based on the question of why there are civil wars within countries if it is political boundaries that are causing global conflicts. Admittedly, some of the most deadly modern conflicts are local in nature, such as the Rwanda genocide, the Congo War, and the Syrian War. However, although these wars are local, they only happen because the respective countries are an entity in themselves. The Syrian conflict seeks to remove the Syrian president from office, the Congo War is all about who will rule Congo, so was the Rwandan genocide. Eliminating political boundaries will create a united world where there no local presidents thus eliminating even the need for civil wars.
Currently, the world has enough weapons to almost vaporize the earth along with everything within it with some of the weapons being held by unstable regimes. Unless and until a reason to end both the current and impending wars, a future war might result in global extinction. According to Kirk (2017), there is enough nuclear weapon to kill everyone and more are being developed. Creating a global world with global citizens will definitively come with major challenges and impracticalities but it will be much better than a global Armageddon caused by nuclear weapons. The world needs to unite as one global entity to avoid war.
References
Andrews, E. (2016, February 19). 10 things you may not know about the Battle of Verdun. Retrieved from https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-battle-of-verdun
Kant, I., (2003). To perpetual peace: A philosophical sketch . Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing
Kirk, A. (2017, July 04). How many nukes are in the world and what could they destroy? Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/many-nukes-world-could-destroy/
