The Search for Common Interests in World Politics
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 2 Feb 2026
René Wadlow – TRANSCEND Media Service
In his reflections on the nature of political ethics in the middle of the Second World War, the U.S. theologian Reinhold Niebuhr stressed the need for a universalist ethic and the difficulty of achieving it.
“Evil is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard to the whole, whether the whole be conceived as the immediate community or the total community of mankind… The children of light may thus be defined as those who seek to bring self-interest under the discipline of a more universal law and in harmony with a more universal good… The children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice. They must know the power of self-interest in human society without giving it moral justification.
” Beyond the national community lies international chaos, slightly qualified by minimal forces of international cooperation. The problem of overcoming this chaos and extending the principle of community to world-wide terms has become the most urgent of all the issues which face our epoch.”
Reinhold Niebuhr. The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.
Along the same lines, Robert Johansen wrote in The National Interest and the Human Interest ” The challenge for policymakers now and in the future will be to bring politics, which in the past have served the national interest as traditionally defined, into harmony with the human interest in abolishing war and poverty and in halting gross denial of human rights and ecological decay.”
At a time when President Donald Trump is stressing “America First”, there is a need to reply by presenting policies which make our values explicit: human solidarity and respect for life.
We need to work out a broad framework on how to manage the planet Earth. Thus, we need effective communication among problem-identifiers, solution-developers and implementers. Such a network will enable people everywhere to share both their problems and their solutions, and to join together in collaborative efforts. This network building is one of the central aims of this journal.
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René Wadlow is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. He is President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation and problem-solving in economic and social issues, and editor of Transnational Perspectives.
Tags: Ethics, Politics
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 2 Feb 2026.
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