By: Mar Teret, Heavens Reach

THE overall reset and change in procedure of the Assembly offers us a distinct opportunity to reconsider not only what it should legislate, but also to reexamine how such legislation is formulated. Among the seven principles that the collective Sovereign Seven has laid out in the Daybreak statement, the Unitary Principle offers us the ability to do just that. The Unitary Principle states that proposals should interact with member states and regions en bloc, as opposed to micromanaging individual institutions.

At a glance, the change in formulation could appear merely technical, but the difference is stark. Every member is a sovereign nation and deserves such treatment, not merely a vehicle for international administration. The Assembly, beholden to this truth, possesses no inherent or expressible authority to deploy enforcers to the streets of our capitols; it has no claim nor authority over licensing, inspecting businesses, prosecuting criminals, or administering schools. The Unitary Principle highlights that obligations imparted to the General Assembly must ultimately be executed on member nations’ terms, not dictated by remote and disconnected international bureaus.

While to many this may appear an obvious conclusion, given the purpose of the Assembly, for years, this has been grossly disregarded. Before the reforms of the Sovereign Six, now the Sovereign Seven, the Assembly’s direct interference in the actions of employers, corporations, schools, hospitals, charities, consumers and countless other private or public institutions had been endlessly snowballing. The Assembly had essentially abdicated working in cooperation with governments in favor of dictating how they operated under an ever-growing bureaucracy.

The World Assembly is not, and has never been, understood or given carte blanche by its members to be a world government, and treating it as such is a degradation of the representative will of the citizens of member nations, who understand themselves as members of a nation, who can directly appeal to their representatives about local problems and local issues.

That understanding does not detract from the mission of the Assembly, which ultimately concerns interpreting and safeguarding universal rights as the consensus of member nations enshrines them. When these universal rights enumerate specific rights, such as when freedom of movement and of association are enumerated by the right to personal liberty, they serve as anchors for a particular implementation of international law. A resolution proscribing human trafficking, for instance, may serve such an implementation while giving due deference to member nations to self-govern whereas one that regulates the breeding of farm animals can not.

This distinction matters because, at its very core, governance at a multiversal level is incapable of implementing a one-size-fits-all approach. The endless quirks and circumstances that make up the realities faced by member states of the World Assembly are too numerous for any one resolution to take into account, and when international obligations fail to take into account this variety of circumstances, they can not help but cause a net harm. This places a hard constraint on what issues the Assembly can effectively address, to areas where a broad approach is appropriate, to the maintenance of universal rights or marshalling the collective capabilities of member nations to achieve a common goal.

Similarly, regions are political units with their own traditions, institutions, and methods of administration. The Unitary Principle ascribes to them an equally inalienable Sovereignty. Resolutions must accordingly yield to their prerogative to self-govern.

Therefore, the Unitary Principle guides a new, more accurate appreciation for the role of the General Assembly. That, inherently, while nations may consent to certain international obligations, the Assembly does not — is unfit to — govern directly. When the means of fulfilling these obligations rightfully rests in the hands of the regions and nations responsible for their fulfillment, they are better understood by, of greater benefit to, and appropriately reflect the mandate granted by their constituencies.

The Plains of Perdition stands with the Sovereign Seven in emphasizing that General Assembly lawmakers must abandon the misguided habits of a now-departed and lamentably long-suffered state of affairs. From this point on, proposals put before member nations for their consideration ought to forgo the micromanagement so common of their forebearers. Instead, legislation ought defer to national and regional governments with their mandate to govern.

The values of our region, these being an ecumenical brand of fraternity and the championing of self-determination, make imperative our participation in the World Assembly at large. These same values occasion our discernment that the laws of the Assembly possess legitimacy only insofar as they honor the raison d’être of the Assembly, that being reconciling the wills of, and advancing the interests of, the nations comprising it and the regions they occupy. Thus, the Unitary Principle, the position that nations are the baseline of governance, serves as one of the seven pillars upon which this model of the Assembly is built.