THE PROGRESS OF PLURALISM AND THE TUG OF WAR OF CIVILISATIONS

The present world order is reflected in the United Nations as the international forum for sovereign states. The UN was founded at the moment of triumph for the Great Powers, which were just winning the greatest war in history. Consequently, it was the self-evident basis for membership of all recognised states. During the Cold War period and the decolonisations, UN membership grew and nations clustered into groups according to their economic and political characteristics: the industrialised countries, the socialist states and the developing countries. When The People’s Republic of China joined, it formed a ‘group’ of its own. After the dissolution of the socialist group, most of its former members tended to join the industrialised group while Russia is likely to follow the Chinese example and form its own ‘group’. Now a tendency is discernible whereby some of the former colonies are being regarded as ‘empires’ in the sense that they comprise entities wishing to establish independent states. There exist no criteria for UN membership status – a small island with a few thousand inhabitants is eligible, a people of millions inside some state or divided as nationals of different states are not. If every state composed of several ethnic or otherwise self-identifying groups divided itself into a number of eligible states, the consequence would be no upper limit for the number of UN members. It has been pointed out that such tribalism and fragmentation, if unchecked, is likely to gain the upper hand in many parts of the world.

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9 It can be added, that a few decades later, King Alfonso X ‘the Learned’ of Castile completed the code Las Siete Partidas, which incorporated elements from the Visigothic codes. Las Partidas was later taken by Spain to the New World, for example, to California and Texas, and the influence of this law is considered still noticeable in US law. See Robert I. Burns, ‘King Alfonso and the Wild West: Medieval Hispanic Law on the U.S. Frontier’, Medieval Encounters, Vol. 6, Nos. 1-3, Leiden, Brill, 2000.
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13 For a description of North Korean society and ideology, see Erik Cornell, North Korea under Communism: Report of an Envoy to Paradise, London, Routledge Curzon, 2002.
14 Matthew 6:33.