“We the Peoples” Was a Promise. It Could Become a Procedure.

The UN’s deepest crisis is not its empty treasury. It is that the institution has no constituency of its own — no door through which a people, as distinct from a state, can walk. Some people have started building that door outside the building. Here is how one of them actually works, and where the argument is weakest.

In its eightieth year, the United Nations is quietly going broke. The United States owes more than 3.9 billion dollars in unpaid dues and did not pay its regular-budget assessment for 2025 at all. In January 2026 Washington announced its withdrawal from dozens of UN and international bodies. China, now assessed at roughly a fifth of the regular budget, has stretched its payments later and later each year, as the Financial Times and others have reported. The Secretary-General’s own austerity program, UN80, is cutting the Secretariat budget by up to a fifth and shedding thousands of posts; the 2026 budget is about seven percent smaller than the year before. The headlines call it a liquidity crisis.

It is not, at root, a money problem. It is a legitimacy problem wearing the mask of a budget line.

Consider the mechanism. The UN draws every dollar, and every ounce of authority, from member states. Its entire design assumes that representing governments is the same thing as representing the world. For most of the twentieth century that assumption held well enough. It is failing now, because the states that fund the institution are the same actors walking away from it. An organization whose only constituency is governments cannot be rescued by more government money. The hand that feeds it and the hand that starves it are the same hand.

The gap written into the first line

The Charter does not open with the words “We the high contracting governments.” It opens, famously, “We the Peoples of the United Nations.” Those three words have always named an aspiration the institution was never actually built to deliver. There is no door in the UN through which a people, as distinct from a state, can walk. Civil society enters through accreditation granted, and revocable, by states. Individuals enter as petitioners, witnesses, experts — never as a constituency with a standing mandate. The “Peoples” of the preamble are present as a moral reference, not as a body that can be counted, consulted, or answered to.

The clearest recent proof arrived in June 2025. After the Summit of the Future and its Declaration on Future Generations, the Secretary-General proposed a modest new post: a Special Envoy for Future Generations, a single voice inside the building for the people who are not yet born and so cannot lobby, vote, or pay dues. Member states, sitting in the budget committee, declined to fund it. It was struck from the 2026 budget and referred to a working group, where, as of this writing, it remains: unfunded, unappointed, unresolved. The most uncontroversial constituency imaginable — the future itself — could not get one envoy past the governments of the present.

That episode should be read carefully, because it is not a story about stinginess. The sums involved were trivial against an 80-year-old global institution. What the governments declined to fund was not a cost. It was a precedent: a permanent seat inside the building accountable to someone other than them. The budget line was the polite form of a structural refusal.

Why the century needs a constituency the state cannot supply

This is the deeper story behind the empty treasury. The problems that now define the century — climate, pandemics, the governance of artificial intelligence, the integrity of the information space — are planetary by nature and generational in their timescale. None of them respects a border. None of them can be voted on by the people who will live longest with the consequences. The constituency with the largest stake in these decisions — future generations, and the present-day humanity that thinks in their terms — has no formal way to be a party to them.

Meanwhile, the way human beings actually organize has slipped the borders of the state. People coordinate, fund, build, and belong across the planet through networks that carry no flag. The state system remains essential and is not going anywhere; this is not a prediction of its decline. But it no longer holds a monopoly on how humanity acts together, and it never had a mechanism for representing the unborn. The UN was built for a world in which states were the only organized actors and the future could be left to look after itself. Both assumptions have quietly expired.

So the real choice in the institution’s eightieth year is not between austerity and collapse. That is a managerial argument inside a shrinking box. The deeper question is whether anything can supply what the UN has never had: a direct, structured relationship with people, and with the future, not mediated entirely through the governments that happen to hold a seat. An institution that could point to a body of human beings who chose it — rather than only to governments that are leaving it — would have something money cannot buy and no member state can withdraw.

What such a constituency actually looks like

It is worth knowing that people are already building working models of this, outside the UN and without asking its permission. Earthlings is one such experiment: a voluntary, non-territorial community of people who take on a planetary identity in addition to — never instead of — their citizenship. It claims no territory, no sovereignty, no jurisdictional supremacy, and no right to speak for anyone who has not freely joined. So far this is the language of every manifesto. What makes it worth a researcher’s attention is the part underneath the language: a set of procedures designed to make “membership” mean something verifiable, and to behave like an institution with internal due process rather than a mailing list. The design is worth describing concretely, because the concreteness is the argument.

The first principle is one person, one participation. Membership is a single verified human presence — not anonymous mass signup, not one-dollar-one-vote, not a follower count. The point is to make representation auditable: to be able to say who exactly expressed a given collective will, on what basis, and how that can be checked. This rules out the two failure modes that make most “global citizen” projects unserious — the petition that anyone can sign a thousand times, and the token sale where weight tracks money. Membership is voluntary and confirmed through defined procedures; it is added to citizenship, never substituted for it; it is non-territorial and makes no sovereign claim.

Around that principle sits the apparatus you would expect of an institution rather than a movement: founding texts, decision procedures, mechanisms of appeal, and ethics and legal oversight. The founding layer is fixed and public: a Declaration of Self-Determination that actually constitutes the people and grounds it, openly and with citations, in the right of peoples to self-determination — the same right the UN Charter and the human-rights Covenants already recognize — and a Constitution of Humanity that places future generations and the limits of the biosphere above any institution, including its own. Decisions run through published procedures; there are routes to contest them; there are bodies charged with reviewing conduct against the founding texts. None of this is exotic. It is ordinary institutional due process, deliberately imported into a space that usually has none.

The most important distinction, and the one a sophisticated reader will probe first, concerns the role of technology. Digital tools here are used only as a means of provability, transparency, and accountability of participation. They are explicitly not a source of right or authority. The technology does not produce the people and does not create the mandate; it makes an already-existing collective will harder to fake, easier to audit, and more resistant to manipulation. This matters because it pre-empts the crypto-utopian dismissal in advance: the claim is not that a clever protocol confers legitimacy. Legitimacy, if there is any, comes from human beings freely joining. The cryptography is a ledger, not a sovereign.

Finally, there is a structural feature that determines how any of this touches the real world: a two-loop design. Loop A is the people themselves — the source of identity and mandate. Loop B is ordinary legal entities, constituted under national law, that act as the procedural “hands”: they file submissions, enter partnerships, hold funds, and carry accountability under the jurisdictions where they are registered. The people are not a legal person and do not pretend to be one. Engagement with any institution therefore runs through proper legal mechanisms, not around them. An international foundation registered in Georgia (in the Caucasus) is one such hand; it is a non-commercial legal entity, fully inspectable, doing the procedural work that a body of people cannot do directly. The mandate lives in Loop A. The liability and the paperwork live in Loop B. Keeping the two distinct is what lets the project make a claim about peoplehood without making a claim about sovereignty.

The honest objections

This is where most advocacy writing stops, having described its model in its own favorable terms. A researcher will not stop there, so neither should this essay. The strongest objections deserve to be stated plainly and answered without spin — including where the answer concedes something unresolved.

Isn’t this just another NGO, or an online petition with better branding? No, and the difference is the whole point. The NGO-like legal entities are Loop B — the procedural hands — not the thing itself. The thing itself is an attempt to constitute a subject: a people with verifiable membership and a mandate, distinct from the legal vehicles it uses to act in the world. A petition aggregates signatures; an NGO aggregates a mission and a board. Neither tries to be a constituency. This does. Whether it succeeds is a fair question. That it is attempting a different category of thing is not in doubt.

Self-selected membership has no legitimacy. Who are you to speak? This is the sharpest objection, and the honest answer is to narrow the claim, not defend a bigger one. The project represents only those who freely joined. It claims no right to speak for humanity as a whole, or for anyone who has not joined. Its legitimacy is bottom-up and bounded — the legitimacy a voluntary association has over its own members — never the top-down legitimacy of a body claiming to represent everyone. What it does claim is narrower and older than it first appears: the right of people to determine, freely and without coercion, the forms of association they belong to — a right international law already recognizes, even though it has never settled an exhaustive definition of “a people,” and nowhere forbids new ones from forming. That is a real limit, and it should be stated as one rather than hidden. A self-selected group of the willing is not a parliament of mankind. It is, at most, a demonstration that a verifiable, accountable, planetary constituency can exist at all — which is precisely the thing the UN has never been able to point to.

Doesn’t a planetary identity fragment the world further, or threaten states? It is built to do the opposite. The identity is additive and complementary: it claims no territory, no sovereignty, no jurisdictional supremacy, and it does not replace or weaken citizenship. A member loses nothing they had and owes their state nothing less. There is no rival flag and no competing passport that displaces a national one. The honest risk here is not secession; it is dilution — that a “planetary” framing could be read as flattening the specific, hard-won rights of indigenous and stateless peoples. The founding texts address this directly by subordinating the planetary claim to those specific rights rather than absorbing them. A reader is entitled to hold the project to that commitment in practice, not just on paper.

Isn’t this utopian, or grandiose? It is small and early, and pretending otherwise would forfeit the argument. This is a young community in its founding stage, not a mass movement — and emphatically not the millions that the phrase “planetary constituency” might evoke. The claim here is deliberately modest: this is a running, inspectable prototype of one specific thing the UN keeps failing to do — constitute a verifiable, accountable constituency of people and of the future — not a solution to the UN’s budget, its politics, or its Security Council. It does not scale to global governance by wishing. What it offers is an existence proof: that the door named in the Charter’s first line can be built, and what it looks like when someone builds it.

When a preamble becomes a procedure

The institutions that survive their crises are rarely the ones that cut the most. They are the ones that rediscover whom they are for. The UN has spent eighty years representing the governments of the world and calling it representing the world. The bill for that confusion is now arriving — denominated in dollars, but written in a currency that is harder to repay.

“We the Peoples” has been a preamble for eighty years — a sentence the institution admires but cannot execute, because it was never given the machinery to do so. The interesting question is no longer whether the phrase is true. It is what the phrase looks like once it is made operational: a verifiable membership, a published procedure, an appeal you can file, a mandate you can audit, a constituency that can be pointed to rather than merely invoked. That is a smaller and more answerable question than world government, and it is already being tried, in the open, by people who are happy to be inspected and corrected.

The renewal of the international order will not be found in the budget committee. It will be found, if it is found anywhere, in the moment “We the Peoples” stops being a promise the institution makes about itself and becomes a procedure that people can actually run.