Prospects for a Future Whole World

The notion of the “world as a whole†is becoming increasingly prominent in the thinking and pronouncements of international prog-nosticators. Yet “globalism†, its functional expression, is a relatively new approach in the United Nations. In fact, it has hardly arrived. This statement is not paradoxical or even surprising. Globalism is not the same thing as internationalism as we have known it up to the present. There is more involved here than a matter of semantics. Traditional internationalism is derived from the dictates of political wisdom and a sense of human solidarity in a world of growing interdependence but of unlimited horizons opened up by tech nology. Globalism is associated today with the ambivalence of technology, its negative effects on the degradation of the environment, the destruction of ecological balances, the limited capacity of the biosphere, the possible depletion of natural resources, the population explosion, the finiteness of the planet, and perhaps even the finiteness of knowledge.