National sovereignty is . . .

National sovereignty is the enemy of international law. Its affirmation is the negation of law above the national level. The people must abandon the false doctrine of national sovereignty if they are to unite in a world government of law. They must assert and exercise the sovereignty vested in each of them as human beings. So, and only so, can men of many nations form an enduring union of laws superior to their own national laws, for the protection and regulation of the interests they, as human beings, have in common.

U. S. Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts
"Sovereignty" in The New Federalist
Roberts, Owen J., John F. Schmidt, and Clarence K. Streit
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 12-13.

Nations will learn . . .

Nations will learn that they cannot conquer other nations without losing their own liberty; that permanent confederations are their only means of preserving their independence; and that they should not seek power but security. Gradually mercantile prejudices will fade away; and a false sense of commercial interest will lose the fearful power it once had of drenching the earth in blood and ruining nations under the pretext of enriching them. When at last the nations come to agree on the principles of politics and morality, when in their own better interests they invite foreigners to share equally in all the benefits men enjoy either through the bounty of nature or by their own industry, then all the causes that produce and perpetuate animosities and poison national relations will disappear one by one; and nothing will remain to encourage or even to arouse the fury of war.

Organizations more intelligently conceived than those projects of eternal peace which have filled the leisure and consoled the hearts of certain philosophers, will hasten the progress of the brotherhood of nations, and wars between countries will rank with assassinations as freakish atrocities, humiliating and vile in the eyes of nature and staining with indelible opprobrium the country or the age whose annals record them.

Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet
Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1793)
June Barraclough, trans. (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 194-195.

Now does it mean that to annex a state . . .

Now does it mean that to annex a state and destroy an army, injure and oppress the people, and throw the heritages of sages into confusion will benefit Heaven? But to recruit the people of Heaven to attack the cities of Heaven is to murder the people of Heaven, smash altars, demolish shrines, and kill sacrificial animals. In this way, on the higher level no benefit to Heaven can be attained.

Mozi (ca.470-ca.391 BCE)

Chan, Wing-Tsit. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 227

But how do we know . . .

But how do we know that Heaven loves all the people in the world? Because it enlightens them all. How do we know that it enlightens them all? Because it possesses them all. How do we know that it possesses them all? Because it feeds them all. I say: within the four seas (the world) all grain-eating (civilized) people feed oxen and sheep with grass and dogs and pigs with grain, and cleanly prepare pastry and wine to sacrifice to the Lord on High and spiritual beings. Possessing all people, how could Heaven not love them?

Mozi (ca.470-ca.391 BCE)

Chan, Wing-Tsit. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 220.

In the first century BCE, Cicero . . .

In the first century BCE, Cicero proclaimed a vision of respublica totius orbis - the republic of the whole world.

Strobe Talbot, The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 47.