If you read the texts of Andrei Sakharov – forgetting for a moment his fame as a dissident, a Nobel laureate and a repentant father of the hydrogen bomb – then an unexpected character will appear.

In his writings, Sakharov blasted both capitalism and ‘pseudo-socialism’ and advocated for environmental awareness no less passionately than Greta Thunberg. He considered human rights to be the only relevant basis for a world order.

Sakharov died in 1989, but his thought is unexpectedly relevant for this epoch. His background as a researcher into the baryon asymmetry of the Universe and other complex objects allowed him to answer any questions as if from a cosmic vantage point, from the perspective of the Big Bang. And Sakharov’s main question was as follows: how can colonies of organisms on a tiny planet arrange life so as not to kill each other?

After World War II and Hiroshima, the best minds of Earth thought about what a new political order should be like so that a nuclear war would not start. The young nuclear physicist Sakharov had access to a special repository of Western newspapers with statements by Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Bertrand Russell on the subject — and he read them.

Sakharov’s colleagues developed the idea of a world state, which arose even among the Stoics and was continued by Dante Alighieri, Ferdinand Tönnies, Thorstein Veblen and others. In addition, Sakharov notes in his diaries that he had read Immanuel Kant’s treatise Towards Eternal Peace, where a single global state was seen as a means of ending wars and uniting the countries into the ‘union of peace’.

One way or another, in 1968, in the article Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, he stated the need for a gradual unification of all the states of the Earth into a confederation.

‘Any action that increases the disunity of mankind, any preaching of the incompatibility of world ideologies (except fascism) and nations is madness, a crime,’ Sakharov wrote. ‘Only worldwide cooperation in conditions of intellectual freedom, high moral ideals of socialism and labor, with the elimination of factors of dogmatism and the pressure of the hidden interests of the ruling classes is in the interests of preserving civilization.’

However, Sakharov did not believe in the model of a single world state, which was followed by the first federalists, and offered a ‘horizontal’ option—a confederation of independent countries. In 1989, as a member of the Soviet parliament, he drafted the Constitution of the European-Asian Union of Republics, into which the USSR was to be transformed.

In modern Russia, Sakharov would have been brought to trial for extremism, because he proposed to divide the country’s territory into four parts: European Russia, the Urals, Western Siberia and Eastern Siberia. And most importantly, the Constitution Sakharov devised declared the complete autonomy of the republics, districts and regions.

The problems of that moment—specifically, the ethnic conflicts in Armenia and Azerbaijan—implied the division of territories precisely along ethnic lines. But according to Sakharov’s model, each subject of the new Union was supposed to have a local parliament that could disagree with the confederal law and improve its own legislation. The number of ‘general’ laws was to be kept to a minimum, and the President of the Union could veto only those laws that had been adopted by a third or fewer of the votes in the union parliament.

What can be said about this idea now—when privacy is being attacked by states on the one hand, and private tech giants on the other? If you look closely, this Confederation does not imply the replacement of local bureaucrats with international ones, but, on the contrary, a flexible multi-level political system in which officials perform as regularly replaced delegates. These delegates are appointed by local politicians and their constituents, who act as political actors more often than once every four years. A confederation is horizontal in nature, because it seeks not to concentrate power, but to de-concentrate it.

Sakharov hoped that the path to such a model would not be long. At the same time, he understood that it harmed the ruling factions, for whom it was more profitable to be first in the village than second in Rome. Moreover, Sakharov foresaw that the problem of nuclear confrontation between the post-empires would have to be solved while simultaneously facing grandiose climate problems.

Sakharov’s enviromental message was that mankind faced not only a military but also an ecological catastrophe, which necessitated global confederation. The solution to this would have to go much further than the UN, given that such tremendous problems will fall upon humanity that it would be better to come now to agreement on fair principles of governance, mutual assistance and autonomy.

In 2022, the problems mentioned by Sakharov have all returned in force. The prospect of nuclear war no longer seems unrealistic. Vladimir Putin orders strategic weapons to be put on duty. Xi Jinping is in no hurry to stop him. Global warming, inequality and hunger are pushed aside. Politically, Sakharov believed in ‘convergence’—a system that would take the best elements from Communism and capitalism.

The path to such a system, and to a confederation of countries, will be littered with unpleasant compromises and a major fight over the redistributon of world trade. But it’s better to argue for these ideas  than to retire to bed every night, thinking about a world full of nuclear missiles held by embittered rulers.