Dr. Glen T. Martin

Secretary-General, World Constitution and Parliament Association

My visit to Japan for ten days through early February included giving a two-day seminar on the Constitution for the Federation of Earth in Kameoka, attending the Oomoto Grand Setusbun Festival in Ayabe, and an overnight stay in Hiroshima.   The people I met in Japan seemed more serious than people in many other countries and more insightful into the immense dangers that we human beings face on Earth. 

Perhaps this is, in part, because the Japanese people have done so well in preserving the memory and horror of the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   I was honored with personal tours from the Directors of both the Victim’s Memorial Museum and the Peace Memorial Museum.   The experience was very moving for me, even though I knew many of the factual details already.   It became emotionally real to me to be where it actually happened..   To think that nations continued to build these horrific weapons after World War Two is unimaginable to me.  

The Peace Park and the museums made me realize the many ways in which people have responded to this immense evil with the creation of beauty – many beautifully done memorials and exhibits in Hiroshima.   It also drove home for me a deeper lesson than the need for abolishing weapons of mass destruction.   For these would not likely have been developed or used if it had not been for war, war economies, war preparations, warlike attitudes, the acceptability of war as a way of solving conflicts and implementing national policy.  

Many of the Japanese people I met understand that human beings are at the end of the road now in the early 21^st century.   In the near future, we are facing not only mutual extermination by war, but planetary collapse of the environment, the rise of ocean levels with flooding of many of the Earth’s coastlines, massive poverty increase with its attendant disease and social disintegration, uncontrolled population growth leading to ever-greater scarcity of resources, the depletion and disappearance of agricultural lands worldwide, loss of fresh water aquifers worldwide, and the collapse of ocean fisheries from over-fishing.

It is this understanding that was behind the creation and development of the Earth Constitution since 1958 by the World Constitution and Parliament Association and many thousands of world citizens who participated in the process of writing the Constitution, translating it into 22 languages (including Japanese), and distributing it world wide.  We cannot wait for the world to slowly evolve toward democratic world government.   Unless we act now, there will be little or no Earth left for our children to inherit.

The Constitution is a brilliant document that creates a democratic world government based on an understanding of all the global crises I mentioned above.   It creates an effective world government that is the only option for overcoming these crises before it is too late.  There is no time for the world to “evolve” toward a constitutional convention or to slowly modify the United Nations in the direction of world government.  The impediments are too great.   The United Nations Charter is based on the old war system (to “keep the peace”) and on the failed global economic system that has transferred trillions of U.S. dollars from the poorest half of humanity to the tiny wealthy elite since the Second World War.

The Constitution creates a non-military democratic world government and abolishes the development, manufacture, transport, deployment, or use of all weapons of war, not only weapons of “mass destruction.”   War must be abolished.   It is a barbaric and stupid system that is mostly used in the service of the imperial ambitions of nation-states, not in so-called “self-defense.”   The Japanese Imperial government used it this way just as the United States imperial government is using it this way today.   Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, as wonderful as this is, will not prevent war or use of weapons of mass destruction in the world.   Only the counterpart of Article 9 in the Constitution for the Federation of Earth can do this, for it applies to all nations.

The Earth Constitution creates a parliamentary system in which the World Parliament is the supreme authority on Earth.   The World Parliament consists of a House of Peoples with delegates from 1000 electoral districts worldwide created according to population.  It includes 200 delegates in the House of Counselors chosen from 20 world regions to represent the people of Earth as a whole.  Finally, it includes a House of Nations with one, two or three delegates from Each nation depending on the nation’s population.   Japan, with 128 million people, would  have the maximum number of three delegates in the House of Nations as well as several delegates in the House of Peoples and possibly some in the House of Counselors.  (See the chart of the structure of world government on this page.)

The primary branches of the Earth Federation government are subordinate to Parliament and will not have any power to suspend the Constitution in an emergency or refuse to implement the budget legislated by Parliament.   Under Parliament are the World Court System, the World Executive, the World Police, and the World Ombudsmus.   The latter is very important since it is an independent branch of government dedicated to protecting human rights worldwide, including any violations by the world government itself.

Under the authority of Article 19 of the Constitution, the people of Earth have the right to begin development world government even if the nations are unwilling to take the lead in this.  We are all human beings and world citizens first, and only citizens of nation-states second.   The emerging Earth Federation has held eight sessions of the Provisional World Parliament to date in which we have passed about 26 powerful, insightful, and dynamic provisional world laws.   There is no time to “evolve” a decent world order.  We citizens of Earth must found a decent world order now.

Article 17 gives three stages in the process of official ratification of the Constitution by the people and nations of Earth.   These are concrete and can be achieved within the framework of our current world “disorder” within a very short time.   The World Constitution and Parliament Association (www.wcpa.biz) works with the Institute On World Problems (www.worldproblems.net) to achieve ratification as well as continue developing provisional world law and provisional world government.  A forthcoming book, edited by Eugenia Almand and myself, will describe our 47 years of work in detail:   Emerging World Law – Key Documents and Decisions of the World Constituent Assemblies and the Provisional World Parliament (Institute for Economic Democracy Press, 2005).

I am delighted that the leadership of the Oomoto religion has invited our Deputy Secretary-General, Eugenia Almand, to spend the coming year in Japan beginning in October 2005.  Eugenia Almand is Secretary and Parliamentarian for the Provisional World Parliament. She understands deeply not only the Constitution and the provisional world law legislated to date, but also the “road map” by which we hope to move our precious planet Earth toward a decent, peaceful, just, and prosperous future for all humanity.

I very much hope that both Oomoto followers and the Japanese World Federalists will take full advantage of her living in Japan by inviting her to give lectures, workshops, and seminars on the Constitution and the “road map” by which we hope to save the Earth from impending disaster.