The Interstices Through Which to See the Future

They were not humanist moments, but they pierced through their era: shared sovereignty and demilitarization have already been tried.

By: Germán Osmar González

We live in a moment when it seems natural that the only way to organize ourselves is to compete for scarce resources behind armed borders. Multilateralism is creaking: the Security Council paralyzed by vetoes from the U.S., China and Russia, wars resolved outside any rules such as Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan, and an escalation of sanctions, tariffs and rearmament that reaches as far as the South Atlantic and Antarctica. Inwardly, that fracture translates into destructuring and the everyday imposition of every man for himself.

Faced with this climate, New Humanism proposes rescuing experiences that accompany us to this day. Not as an inspiring slogan or new age aspiration, but as concrete political facts that managed to pierce through that logic.

From a Siloist perspective, it can be observed that there are periods when a new sensitivity bursts forth and makes visible that another form of coexistence is possible. Universalist Humanism calls these periods “humanist moments”. And it also emphasizes that they only become consolidated when others take them up and deepen them in different places, spreading through recognition and not through imposition. That direction does not move toward the uniformity imposed by a center to unify markets, but toward the opposite: peoples who, without renouncing their diversity, weave cooperation and tend toward convergence. Without a doubt, the image that guides this process is the Universal Human Nation.

If we follow that trail, it is worth asking whether two events from the twentieth century that opened another way of reaching agreements can be read along that same historical path. Although they are not strictly humanist moments, we can take them as indicators of moving in that direction.

The first is the Svalbard Treaty, signed in Paris in 1920. It recognizes Norway’s sovereignty over an archipelago that was terra nullius, but with two unprecedented conditions: total demilitarization and equal rights for the 46 current signatories to reside, work and exploit resources.

The second is the Antarctic Treaty, signed in Washington in 1959. It reserves an entire continent for peaceful and scientific use, prohibits military bases and weapons testing, freezes territorial claims and, since 1991, prohibits mining. Today it is upheld by 58 countries, 29 with a voice and vote.

It is important to clarify this: these are not humanist moments in the strict sense given to the term by Universalist Humanism, because they did not arise from the social base. Silo does not include them among those he mentions from the twentieth century. Svalbard arose from a mining problem and the need to organize more than a hundred claims. At the Peace Conference, with Germany and Russia excluded, England and the U.S. found it preferable to hand it over to a neutral and harmless ally rather than leave it as a rival naval base.

Antarctica arose from a similar Cold War calculation. Following the success of scientific cooperation during the International Geophysical Year of 1957, Eisenhower proposed freezing the sovereignty dispute and demilitarizing the continent to prevent it from becoming a nuclear testing ground with the USSR.

As we said, since these are not pure humanist moments, that is precisely why they matter. Since, in order to solve immediate problems, they had to invent forms that did not exist: sovereignty without exclusion, a continent without an army, shared resources.

Now, the fact that these formulas have survived does not mean that they are free of tensions or that they have no limitations; for example, Svalbard is strained by the NATO-Russia dispute and by the revenue from its sea, and Antarctica by elitist governance. Nevertheless, that form survived. More than one hundred years for one, more than sixty-five for the other. They weathered the Second World War, the Cold War and unipolarity.

If, from above, even for strategic purposes, it was possible to agree on globalizing actions of this kind and sustain them over time, the question arises as to whether we are not facing indicators that point to the possibility of the Universal Human Nation.

Although they are not models to copy, we can take them as interstices through which to see the future.

Redacción Argentina