The Business of Mankind
On the purpose of the World Assembly
By the Chief Editor of the Van der Putten Institute, Hartstad, 9 October 2026
The General Assembly is currently voting down the abolition of capital punishment by a heavy margin. The Secretariat advised against it, reasoning that the death penalty is a national matter. Whatever one thinks of capital punishment, that reasoning changes the question. It no longer asks whether a state may kill, only whose business it is, and its answer is: nobody's but the state's.
I have argued since 2012 that the old Assembly deserved to end, as it answered every possible grievance with an all-powerful committee. The new Assembly cleared that away, and much of what has been put in its place is sound.
But the first resolution, Daybreak, promised a General Assembly that “centers the needs and sovereignty of its constituents”, and its constituents are national governments. The second, National Sovereignty, lists obligations the World Assembly owes its members and none it owes anyone else. Reserved Powers goes further and declares that member nations are “not constituent subdivisions of an international federation”. The new General Assembly has spent a great deal of time establishing what it is against. It has seemingly never asked what it is for.
I. What the Assembly is for
A modern polity has different levels of government. The people nearest a problem usually understand it best, and a national government should not be in the business of setting timetables for a city’s refuse lorries from the capital. That principle is called subsidiarity. It describes a relationship between levels of government. A matter belongs with the smallest community able to handle it well. A larger community takes up only what smaller ones cannot. Federalism is subsidiarity written into a constitution.
Subsidiarity leads me to ask two questions about every resolution. The first is a question of capacity: what is the smallest community able to handle it? The second is a question of reach: whom does it affect? A city may run its own waterworks, but the river is used by everyone downstream, and a city that poisons it has acted beyond its reach, however competently it ran the plant.
Some matters exceed the level of the national government on the question of capacity, because no nation can handle them alone. Other matters exceed that level on the question of reach, because the consequences of their actions extend beyond any one nation. Subsidiarity therefore requires a level above that of the nation state. The new General Assembly has, to its credit, written something like these questions into its own law. World Assembly Governance Standards permits binding action on collective action problems, transboundary concerns, and “fundamental rights that transcend national sovereignty”.
Under subsidiarity, sovereignty is a relation between different levels, with the power to act organised at a particular level for a specific purpose. Under the reading that has now become fashionable, sovereignty is the sole possession of one level, that of the nation state, and its privileges must be defended for their own sake.
Hendrik Gerrit van der Putten (1866–1946) spent his life asking what Humanity might yet make of itself. In The Fate of Nations (1938) he argued that people first raised themselves up from barbarism by organising themselves into governments. He despised those who imagined that cooperation would arise from self-interest alone, and argued that the state can earn its authority by making things possible that could not otherwise be done.
His argument applies to the World Assembly too. If states are justified by what they make possible for their peoples, and through them for Mankind, then a world body inherits the same purpose at a larger scale, wherever action lies beyond the reach of any single state.
Every person belongs to Mankind, a community shared with every sapient being, under whatever flag they are born, whether now living or still to come. Every delegation in the General Assembly therefore carries two charges. The first is its nation’s interest, which no delegation should be expected to forget. The second is its share of the trust held for Mankind, which can be discharged only by asking of every proposal what it does for the whole, and following the evidence where it leads.
The new General Assembly has made the first charge the only one. When thousands of governments vote only for the preservation of their own narrow privilege, the result is a faithful record of the interests of governments and a poor guide to the interests of Mankind.
II. The common works
What, then, is the business of Mankind? Most of what nations do is rightly theirs: how they tax and spend, how they organise their courts, when their shops open. Mankind’s business is narrower than that.
1. The measures of the world
The most fundamental work concerns the measures by which we understand one another: the clock by which every network agrees what time it is, the frequencies on which a ship in distress should call for help, and the standards that make a dose of medicine mean the same quantity at home and abroad. Here is work for agencies staffed by scientists and engineers rather than politicians, and the Spectrum Allocation and Coordination Act is a modest start.
2. The common dangers
Then there are the dangers that threaten everyone at once. The planet boils for every nation, whoever burned the fuel. A pandemic can cross oceans at supersonic speeds. The orbits around the planet are filling with the debris of a thousand launches. And somewhere in the depths of space, an asteroid is already on a course that will one day meet ours. In each case, every nation gains when the danger is averted, and gains a little more if a different nation pays to avert it. Left to their own interests, the nations wait for one another, and the danger arrives while they wait. This is a collective action problem, and resolutions that merely monitor and advise do nothing to solve it.
3. The common inheritance
More important still is everything Humanity has made and learned: museums and libraries, paintings and songs, the seeds of every crop, the records of every science. A nation that burns libraries within its own borders destroys a part of our shared inheritance. The General Assembly has already said a little about common heritage by passing a resolution about world landmarks whose clauses do less than its preamble promises, and has repealed a resolution about seed banks. It should go much further.
4. The great works
This century has put within reach possibilities that were science fiction in van der Putten’s day: thinking machines, mastery over our own genes and those of every living thing, a near-unlimited source of clean power and, at the far edge of the century, the conquest of the stars themselves. Much of this work belongs with nations, universities and companies competing with one another. Mankind’s business begins only where a work exceeds what any nation can raise, or where one nation doing it alone puts everyone else at risk.
Large corporations are racing to build more intelligent machines, cutting corners to do so. Such a race is won by whoever is least careful. The terms on which these minds are built, tested and released are Mankind’s business, because the consequences will land on all of us.
The conquest of the stars and the biological and technological improvement of Mankind are the furthest objects of the Cause of the Future. Both spring from the conviction that Mankind is unfinished, a thing still becoming rather than a thing fully made. What we leave unfinished, those who come after us will have to finish, and so the generations not yet born have a claim on the efforts of this one. We owe it to them to leave Mankind wiser, healthier and more capable than we found it. The common works described so far are the foundations of that cause. Where a great work lies beyond any nation, or small group of nations, it should be undertaken by all Mankind, presently if imperfectly united in the World Assembly.
5. The free mind
Every one of these works begins in the mind of a single individual. Mankind knows nothing except what some person has learned, and does nothing except what some person has done. All of it depends on the freedom and ability to learn, to know, and to act upon what one knows.
Many governments still legislate against the free mind. They bar girls from going to school, or release children into the wild so that they must fend for themselves. They ban books, block broadcasts or forbid the teaching of a theory. Each of these laws takes from a person the means of becoming more than they are, and each is defended as a national matter, because the individual is held to be subservient to the nation state.
The costs fall on everyone. What a person is forbidden to learn is lost to every nation, and people kept in ignorant bondage become everyone’s danger: the recruit of every fascist demagogue, the carrier of the rumour that turns a conquered disease back into an epidemic, the crowd that cheers an invading army across a border. A connected world can be governed by Reason only as far as its most unreasonable parts allow.
The Assembly's own law recognises “fundamental rights that transcend national sovereignty” in World Assembly Governance Standards and holds in Reserved Powers that political communities “ultimately derive their legitimacy from the societies that they represent”. Legitimacy that derives from a society requires a society able to grant or withhold it, and a people forbidden to learn and to know can do neither. The freedom of the mind is therefore the precondition of every government’s claim to rule. It transcends sovereignty because sovereignty depends on it, and no government may abolish it in the name of a claim that rests upon it.
III. The unfinished Assembly
The world is in a bad way. Yet in the General Assembly, the prevailing view seems to be that all is broadly well, that national governments can manage, and that cooperation is an optional extra, so long as it is not too burdensome. The majority entrenched by the new rules follows the mood of the time, and the refounded General Assembly has so far followed their lead faithfully.
After witnessing the power of the first atom bombs, Van der Putten wrote that Humanity might have reached the limit of its power to adapt, and that the forces it unleashed had outgrown its capacity to direct them. Eighty years later, we cannot yet prove him wrong. We stand on the threshold of great changes, yet we remain ignorant, divided, belligerent and seemingly determined to annihilate ourselves. This century may be remembered as the one in which Mankind first lived among the stars, or it may leave nobody to remember anything.
These are van der Putten’s ideas, and they are old. I make the case for them again because the dangers have only grown, and the sole institution meant to guard against them has just been ‘reset’ around a set of principles that hinder it, overcorrecting against the flaws of a General Assembly that no longer exists.
The General Assembly must speak for all of Mankind. It is the only body in which the whole of Mankind is present, even if it sits divided into nations. Every delegate is a citizen of Mankind before they are anyone’s envoy, and no nation should join a World Assembly to talk only to itself. Van der Putten once wrote about a world intelligence conscious of itself. The General Assembly, for all its flaws, is the nearest thing we have to it.
I appeal first to those who draft the General Assembly’s resolutions: write with purpose. Endow the common works with the means to actually achieve their ends. Write protections for the free mind on the foundation of the Assembly’s own recognition of fundamental rights. The best response to a majority that has defined itself solely by what it is against is a body of drafts that show what this Assembly could be for.
Those who share that purpose should find one another and draft and debate together, until the opinions that carry votes in the General Assembly are argued from Reason, and for all Mankind.
I appeal also to every member state to vote with that purpose in mind. Treat any opinion that offers “national sovereignty” as its only argument as a claim to be interrogated, rather than a verdict to be obeyed. Interrogate with the same care the objections raised by those who wish to avoid a vote on the merits of the cause, by making opposition to a resolution or its repeal seem like a mere technical matter. Recognise the pattern: warm praise for the aim, followed by a demand for more definitions, the ‘discovery’ of a loophole only a reader in bad faith would find, ambiguities that would pass unremarked in a more welcome text, and ‘better’ replacements promised but never drafted.
Nothing in history has been inevitable. The new General Assembly was built by delegations who decided what they wanted and then acted until they got it. A World Assembly that serves all of Mankind must be built the same way, by people who decide to build it, or it will not be built at all.
