Most of our infant international bodies share a common structural weakness - they lack any system of enforcement, writes Tony Kinsella.
WE HUMANS are quite good at building new institutions in response to changing circumstances.
Unfortunately, we can be a bit slow about dismantling older ones, and often focus more on the institution than on the job it is supposed to do.
Historians are forced to use terms like "the loose federation that would one day become France" when seeking to describe earlier societies. Real power was vested in the local nobility. The actions of the local laird affected local people much more than his links to some remote monarch.
The industrial revolution with its new sources of wealth, its burgeoning cities, and its transport systems transformed our political realities.
The once-pivotal local structures became marginal components of the new political entity - the nation state. Land was no longer the main basis of wealth, and the transition from monarchy to democracy began.
The last 200 years have literally seen an explosion of nation states across our planet. Most of them, like our own, are relatively new.
Seventeen of the 27 EU member states did not exist in 1808, and 11 of them, including Ireland, had yet to emerge in 1908.
The United Nations, which grew out of the second World War Allied powers, counted 51 members at its foundation in 1945. Today, just over 60 years later, it is composed of 192 sovereign nation states, and there are possibly a couple of dozen more in the pipeline.
The legal basis of these completely sovereign 200-and-counting states comes to us from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Recent events have provided us with two glaring examples of the shortcomings of this 360-year-old system, Burma and Zimbabwe.
Burma's paranoiac military junta preferred the deaths of over 100,000 of its citizens to risking even a potential threat to its own survival by admitting foreign aid workers. Robert Mugabe preferred oppressing the citizens of Zimbabwe and threatening them with civil war to losing his grip on power.
We cajoled, criticised and condemned, but at the end of the day there was precious little we could do.
Despite the alarmist rubbish peddled by some opponents of the Lisbon Treaty, our planet has no international force, and none is proposed.
The ink was hardly dry on many a national constitution when we began to understand our need to act together within international structures.
Most of our infant international bodies share a common structural weakness. They are like Ireland's old Brehon Laws in that they lack of any system of enforcement.
Those who won judgments before the Brehon courts then had to go out and enforce them. The essence of those courts' power was something akin to that of today's UN General Assembly: naming and shaming, but no sanction or sentence.
The more effective international bodies are those that do exercise some agreed elements of power. The best known of these is the young EU. Another is the world's oldest international organisation, the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, established in 1816.
Transferring sovereignty upwards is obviously sensitive. The fact that we are the first generation that has had to democratically address this means, somewhat awkwardly, that we have only ourselves to turn to for guidance.
Sovereignty flows from us, the people. We have long understood that it is in our common interest to pool our individual sovereignties into collective bodies, local authorities, national governments and, more recently, into international structures.
That sovereign power is ours to pool and delegate as we see fit. A local authority, or a nation state, draws its fundamental validity from our consent, from our votes - not from its statutes, by-laws or constitution.
Those are merely the instruments that structure our individual transfers of sovereignty, and hold no sovereignty in their own right.
We naturally began our international efforts with what we had - national governments. This means that most of our international bodies hold indirect mandates, what some observers call "carbon copy democracy".
We vote for a prime minister or president. The successful candidate then nominates the members of a government that must win majority support in parliament, but we do not directly select our ministers.
Those indirectly selected ministers may then collectively form bodies like the European Council or the UN General Assembly.
So these bodies operate on a twice-removed democratic mandate.
The European Parliament is unique in that it is directly elected by the citizens of the 27 member states, but it remains the junior EU institution.
Real power in the EU is held by the council of national ministers and its twice-removed democratic mandate.
We could of course decide that the parliament should become the central European institution, but that would involve removing considerable power from national governments, and therein lies the rub.
If, as seems likely, the nation state model is reaching the end of its central existence, rather as duchies, baronies and provincial kingdoms once did, we will probably develop more directly mandated international structures. As we do so, the strength of national institutions is likely to wane, and local governments will be the other major beneficiary.
If we mandate international authorities to tackle global challenges, we will need to balance that by strengthening the role and power of our local and regional bodies.
In the meantime, we will have to muddle along with our current transient, and therefore messy, mixture of local, national and international bodies.
Quite how we move through this transition is something we have yet to figure out. It is also something we have to figure out for ourselves as it is a trail which has been previously blazed.
We are quite capable of doing so, but we first we have to face the challenge.