Towards a World Community: Thoughts on India and the Idea of United Nations Reform

摘要

The title of this article is derived from a famous speech made by Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, at the United Nations in December 1956. Over the previous decade, Nehru, together with his sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, and Mahatma Gandhi, had been working to build the UN into a form of global government. They termed their vision One World, and it had democracy and human rights as its basis. Gandhi and Nehru, and indeed many of the prominent figures of the Indian independence movement, were agreed that the great problem of the age was the nation-state, the normative form of social aspiration since the 17~th century Treaty of Westphalia. Nation-states, they argued, were prone to violence and wielded destructive power over their internal populations and external enemy states. The world as it was had no real mechanism to restrain an aggressive state, save for other nation-states, either alone or in alliance, responding with force.