GENERAL INTRODUCTION

NATARAJA GURU

WHEN we think of World Law, and of somebody who is able to conceive it on concrete lines, we are at once confronted with two rival aspects of the same question. A law is made to benefit a group of people; such a group of people, whether in a particular state or country for political unit, geographically understood or merely ideological in status, must consist of individuals. Each individual is likely to differ from another individual in some detail or other at least. Temperaments and tastes, have to tally with what each man receives on deserves to receive. One man's meat could be another man's poison. What a man needs may not be the same as what a woman needs, nor what a child might need. Thus, what is called the General Good can never be the same as what is conceived as the good of each individual, or the Good of All. One has necessarily to bring in the mathematical notion of the greatest common multiple or the least common measure when thinking of any one item that caters to the needs of a group treated as comprising individuals, or else as a general totality treated as one unit.

To give a concrete example, a municipality might have Rs. 10,000 to be distributed generously. This amount might be spent in two ways: it could be used for giving a prize or scholarship to the best student at school, or else it could be evenly distributed to buy books or slates for every student in the municipality. In the latter case, it is the General Good that is behind the motive for the benefit conferred. On the other hand, in the first case of helping the best student, it is through the satisfaction of the individual that the benefit is supposed to be conferred on all the students. Thus, in formulating beneficial laws for any group, one could think in only one of these two alternative, ways. But law, has to be conceived for the benefit of the General Good primarily, and it should harmonize within its scope the Good of All secondarily.

Between these rival claims of the general and the individual, there is a subtle dialectical formula which has always to be respected. This formula could be stated in the words, "One for All and All for One." We thus arrive at the famous formula on which Rousseau's Contrat Social is based, and on which the Swiss Confederation has been conceived. A socialistically conceived law respects the same dialectical formula when it lays down the maxim "From each according to his ability and to each according to his need."

Thus, the lawmaker can take his stand on the General Good or on the Good of All when he formulates his laws. Just as an umpire cannot be a player in the game, it is not possible for one and the same person to fulfill these two roles which are necessarily dialectical counterparts. It is therefore that Rousseau says that the man who lays down the law should be oceans removed from the problems of the group itself, so that the General Good and Good of All might have a healthy interaction. What could be good for a small she group might not be good for a big country, although the overall structure of both might conform to the same pattern. Good government or law is the resultant of an equilibrium established between what represents the Good of All individuals in it and what is conducive to the General Good of the group taken as a whole.

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GLOBAL STRUCTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Keeping this dialectical secret in one's mind, World Law must conform to an abstract structural pattern within which these two rival considerations can have a full and free scope for attaining a harmonious equilibrium, where individual interests cancel out against collective interests in every walk of life coming within the scope of government.

Thus, World Government and World Law need not necessarily be thought of in terms of a world that is only geographically true. Whatever the extent of the population or government, the same structural pattern and the same dialectical counterparts are found to prevail within its total frame of reference. A World State has therefore to be conceived first as a structural abstraction, while the functions of the state and its head - who is always a singular person - with all the other ramifications constituting the functions of a government, whether de jure or de facto, have to be thought of as Rousseau has been able to do masterfully in his Contrat Social. But Rousseau remains even to this day a much-misunderstood man. Let us therefore briefly turn our eyes elsewhere to see if this same dialectical approach is found acceptable to any other tradition or civilization.

Here we are confronted with a surprising coincidence. In ancient Sanskrit literature, there are revealed norms and patterns of behaviour attributed to celebrated kings such as those of the Solar Dynasty descended from Manu, the first law giver. Kalidasa's Raghuvamsa is an epic of nineteen Cantos, each of which depicts a king who conforms to this same dialectically conceived and structurally balanced pattern of behaviour. Economics, ethics, aesthetics and education are all woven into this general political fabric inextricably in the works of Kalidasa. The King, who is a ruler on earth, is treated as a replica of Indra, the ruler of heaven and its denizens, the only difference being that of levels of value systems, each having its centre in a scale of a vertical series of points. Politics and law are thus conceived under the aegis of what is called an absolute pattern of principles as well as of behaviour. Any World Law has thus to be formulated with due respect for these relational aspects.

Besides the masterpiece on such a subject from Rousseau, it would be profitable for the modern student of World Law to scrutinize in great detail the implications of a unified World Government as revealed in the writings of such great poets as Kalidasa, more especially as such matters are brought into relief successively with reference to a long line of model monarchs in whose praise the immortal epic Raghuvamsa has itself been conceived. World Law is likely to receive a valuable original impetus when studied on the broad basis of a two-sided or dialectical interaction between the General Good and the Good of All, especially in India where holy tradition seems already to be in favour of such an approach. Rousseau's name, supplementing such a view from the Western world, would be sure to give it additional confirmation and support, even in the light of the most modern political theories. World Law thus becomes one that is unwritten, as well as being easily given to a common sense of justice in human relations. It is thus in this double perspective that we invite the attention of students to this all-important subject.

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SOME STRAIGHT THOUGHTS ON WORLD LAW

FREDDY VAN DER BORGHT

IS it possible for man to live in a state of nature, without any laws? If all laws were to be abolished in a certain country, would life be any the worse or freedom any the less? Freedom is also called liberty, which is the first and most important of the three words used in connection with the French Revolution - Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. Mechanistically understood, freedom can only mean the condition in which human beings are allowed to behave in any manner they like, without any rules regulating their conduct. After the French Revolution, we know that there still survived laws from the time of Louis XIV. Liberty did not mean that laws were abolished altogether, which might have been normal to expect after the success of the revolution. We can thus see that liberty is a misleading word, and that it could be taken to mean the mere change from one set of laws to another, rather than the absence of law altogether.

The same may be said of equality and fraternity. We should have expected after the revolution that class differences would be abolished; but equality and fraternity did not abolish the difference between master and servant, capitalist and labourer. The change was only from the feudal set-up of the ancien regime to something slightly revised. And in both cases, people could be classified under one or other of the broad divisions into which humanity is divided, known as the "haves" and the "have-nots," who have always existed in this world and still exist even now. The very fight or revolution itself involves a violation of fraternity. In Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, the desperate students had to kill the soldiers with bullets that the boy Gavroche stole from the bodies of soldiers already fallen, as he passed continuously from one side of the battle to the other until being himself finally killed. By violating fraternity on the battlefield, one is said to gain another fraternity. The incompatibility of ends and means is the objection here.

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THE TWO SIDES INVOLVED

We see, then, that words like equality and fraternity can have no meaning at all when thought of unilaterally. Liberty must necessarily imply bondage, and can be understood only when bondage is also understood. A two-sided approach is thus involved when we consider World Law.

If we take the case of the human body as an example, we can say that not being able to bend our arms backwards, as we are able to bend them forwards, means a lack of freedom. Bondage is thus implied in the very way our bodies are built; on the one side there is freedom, and on the other side an equal lack of freedom. If this is true of the physical body, it must also be applicable to the body politic. We often hear of the reference to one's own country as one that enjoys freedom, but this does not mean that there are no restrictions at all on the behaviour of individuals. It is easy to attach labels or apply nick-names to one's own or another's country, according to one's favours or fears, but all such unilateral appraisals are to be rejected by a foregone conclusion as childish errors. The subject of World Law has necessarily to be viewed in a two-sided perspective.

We have to consider on the one side the lawgiver, and on the other those who benefit by the laws. World Law would then be seen to be the resultant of an interaction between these two dialectical counterparts - the agent who formulates or gives the laws to serve the cause of the happiness of the people, and the beneficiaries or people themselves who are supposed to obey the laws.

We have already said that it is only the outward form of government which changes after a revolution has taken place. The two sides represented by the haves and the have-nots continue to exist after the revolution, and problems persist as before. All politics is an attempt to give to the haves and the have-nots something more. This division, persisting within the group of people which is to benefit from the law, is likely to cause conflict after a revolution as well as before it. The American War of Independence, the French Revolution and the Bolshevik October Revolution are milestones in the dialectical revaluation of the world of politics in modern history. We have also the two world wars which brought tangible readjustments to the overall set-up of relations between nations constituting a world community. Each of these wars brought into existence its own type of international institution. The 11th of November 1918 marked Armistice Day, the end of World War I, giving rise to the institution of the League of Nations. The League became defunct with the outbreak of World War II, and was replaced by a revised and renewed institution on a bolder scale known as the United Nations Organization, with all its ramified units for the peace and selective security of mankind. We know that even now the situation is not stable or secure, that the General Secretary is threatening to resign, and that the very existence of the organization is threatened both externally and internally. We thus travel haphazardly from one set of laws or rules to another in a self-perpetuating process that is endless. No real or lasting uniformity or peace will prevail among nations until one absolute law is recognized for the whole world.

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LAW IS LIKE A GAME

When we consider law as it is to be applied to a group of people or even to humanity in general, we have, as we have said, to distinguish clearly the position of the lawgiver from that of the haves and the have-nots. These latter two contending parties could be compared to the two rival teams in a football game, while the lawgiver, on the other hand, could easily be compared to the umpire or referee. Here, an important relational attitude emerges to view. The umpire cannot kick the ball when it comes near to him, even by mistake. Every schoolboy knows the rightness of this rule, but it is still difficult to say precisely why it should be so. Rousseau, in his Contrat Social, points out that the lawgiver should be "oceans removed" from those who are to benefit by the laws; in other words, the rules are for the benefit of the players generally, whether on one side or the other of the game, while the umpire should not be involved in either. There is hiding here a dialectical secret of the first order. The umpire or lawgiver is interested in the good of the totality of the players on both sides taken together, in terms of the general enjoyability of the game as a whole, and thus locates himself neutrally between the rival teams. Each member of each team, on the other hand, plays the game for gaining some advantage - not general, but personal. This kind of concern for particularized ends or individual benefit belongs to the context of what we could call the Good of All, while its dialectical counterpart as represented in the person of the umpire could be characterized by the term General Good.

In terms of structural analysis, we would place the two rival teams representing the Good of All on the horizontal axis - the haves on one side and the have-nots on the other, facing each other in mutual contention - and enclose the whole situation in a circle so as to make one working unit out of it. On the vertical axis, cutting through the horizontal at right-angles to it, we could place another circle, higher up from the horizontal actualities of the game itself. This locus would represent the umpire in relation to the rival teams, as standing for the General Good. Thus, the Good of All belongs to what is horizontal in terms of the actual competition taking place on the field of play, while the General Good has a vertical reference with the referee placed on the numerator side, oceans removed from the actualities of the field, and deriving no particular benefit for himself either from the play itself or from the outcome of the game which he is responsible for regulating.

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THE UNITIVE APPROACH

By the above analysis, employing the analogy of a football game, we are now able to see how World Law is to be conceived in its broad outlines, and something at least of what must be the nature of the lawgiver. Such a lawgiver can have neither any axe to grind nor aims of selfish interest to serve through the process of the law that he himself indicates or puts into force. He must have, as Rousseau puts it in the Contrat Social, "a mind of the highest order." He must "have insight into each and every human passion, and yet be affected by none." He must "be superhuman, and yet understand human nature through and through." And he must have a mind which "would be willing to concern itself with our happiness, but would seek its own outside us." He must, in short, be concerned primarily with the General Good, while the beneficiaries of the law are interested in the Good of All. Any World Law must have these two sides.

This is the important point that we thus wish to underline, that World Law is an emergent factor, written or sometimes unwritten, in which the dialectical counterparts are recognizable to us in terms of what we have tried to distinguish as the General Good and the Good of All. These two sides could be represented more shortly by the words on the famous monument of the Swiss Confederation, UN POUR TOUS (One for all) and TOUS POUR UN (All for One), representing the contrasting parties which have entered by mutual consent into a confederation in which the General Good and the Good of All are secured together, without contradiction. Such an approach to World Law, based on these two dialectical counterparts, owes its existence, again, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citoyen de Geneve.

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CONCLUSION

By way of concluding this brief and general treatment of World Law, we wish to point out that the same subtle dialectics involved herein can as well be applied as a basis of World Government, the two subjects being capable of unitive treatment under the more general heading of geo-dialectics. Whatever might be the number of unit states concerned, and whatever the nature of the individual differences between them, it is possible to bring them into a dialectical relation by which the horizontal differences and the vertical resemblances could both be treated unitively. If such an arrangement works in Switzerland today, the possibility of its adaptability to World Government should be sufficiently clear to the thinking man. World Law needs to be viewed in a certain unitive perspective so that it could become a possibility in the context of one World Government in the name of one Absolute Justice for the whole of mankind.

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