Why World Government Is Inevitable…And Desirable

Save for a few forwarded emails I periodically receive decrying conspiracies by communists, environmentalists, and President Obama, world government is an idea that almost nobody takes seriously.  And for my entire educated life, I never took it seriously either.  My response to the crazies was that nations love their sovereignty and are as hesitant to cede it as you are.  Well, you can lump me with the crazies—world government is on its way.  But when it comes, unlike the crazies, I don’t believe it will be so bad.  Actually, I believe it will be good for all of us (upon writing this, whatever political career I might have contemplated is now over).

Let me begin with a few general statements.  First, our paradigm of national sovereignty is actually quite new.  Substantially, it originated in the conclusions of the Thirty and Eighty Years’ Wars—that is, from the Treaty of Westphalia signed in 1648 by delegations from Spain, France, the Netherlands, England, Sweden, agreeing to mutual recognition of each other’s right to self determination, particularly with regard to religion.  Prior to that, the Western world had either been ruled by empire (Greeks, Romans, Holy Roman Empire) or by nobody at all (the Dark Ages).  I use the qualifier “western” because, despite many impressive eastern empires such as Babylonia, Persia, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, the east has had significant exceptions such as China and Japan which closely resembled modern sovereign states.

Empire by no means ended with the ratification of the Treaty of Westphalia.  Great Britain renounced empire only within the last ninety years; France renounced empire only within the last seventy years; and Russia renounced empire only within the last twenty years (although recent events call its sincerity into question).  Make no mistake, nationalism and self determination are very powerful and even growing forces.  My only point here is that breaches of self determination, and even accepted ones, are not as alien to our world as many think.

My second observation: Globalization is alive and well and is not going anywhere, in turn making our world practically minuscule.  Our youth are growing up in a world of daily advances in transportation and telecommunications.  Never in history have so many goods and services traversed such long distances as they do today.  Of the Forbes Global 2000 in 2009, United States corporations occupied 551 slots—an impressive number and a clearly dominating one, but tellingly 200 less than in 2004.  Japan occupied the number two slot with 288 corporations followed by Great Britain with 102, and China with 91.  Also in 2009, United States MNCs’ assets valued at around 27 trillion dollars, UK’s 14 trillion, Japan’s 13 trillion, France’s 11 trillion, and China’s 5 trillion.

My third observation: With the exception of the United States and now China, nations large and small, humble and proud, and violently suspicious of each other have demonstrated unbelievable willingness to give up sovereignty to each other in various ways.  The most obvious example is the European Union.  The willingness of the Europeans to cede monetary policy to a centralized body seems unthinkable to Americans.  Yet, if you were tell a Frenchman 100 years ago that France would voluntarily cede monetary policy to an entity governed in part by Germans, the reaction would have been even more pronounced than Americans’ reaction today.  And with the Treaty of Lisbon, the EU has become even more consolidated.

So how do we get from where we are today to the stratospheric heights of world government?  It certainly does not follow that the newness of national self determination, the ascent of globalization, and the willingness of many nations to cede some sovereignty lead to world government.  The answer lies in trends we are already seeing and institutions that are already well established.  As powerful as forces adverse to world government are, other forces will hamstring nations into giving up sovereignty in ways that seem beyond contemplation today.

Globalization has changed every single country it has touched; once it enters a country, that country is never the same.  Along with incredible prosperity, globalization necessary proliferates and augments conflicts.  Presently, the globalization’s conflicts tend to implicate issues such as human rights and dependency—conflicts that harm the powerless.  However, as more and increasingly diverse and adverse interests increasingly compete, collide, interfere, and impede; as vulnerability and harm become increasingly pervasive; as the world become less certain; and as these conflicts involve increasingly powerful actors, the globalized institutions that now seek de facto protection and immunity through state sovereignty will begin to demand that their nations of domicile give up some of that protection in exchange for supranational enforcement of contractual agreements and tort liabilities.

After all, what is a security company incorporated in Turkey supposed to do when a large French software company doing business in throughout eastern Europe subcontracts specific programming duties to a software company in Greece and that programming contains defects causing the Turkish security company’s security systems to fail, leading to a loss of millions of dollars for banks in South Africa and India?  As it is, the bank, the bank’s investors and depositors, and the security company would have little recourse—whether through the international system or through the courts of their own domiciles.  This is a problem for which Americans have little regard because, as long as an implicated foreign entity has minimum contacts with this country, that entity can be served with process to appear in an American court.  Most of the time, these entities appear because, after all, what global company could ever survive pending the sanction of denied access to United States’ markets?  For the rest of the world, the raw economic power to muscle foreign entities into their domestic courts is hardly present.  And these kinds of examples like the one I just provided will become increasingly common.  Because of this, supranational judicial power will begin as an exo-American phenomenon.  There is reason to believe that this is a coming endeavor of the EU.

America’s hegemony is the principal obstacle to my envisioned supranational power.  But, as stated earlier, the world vis-á-vis the United States is becoming increasingly powerful.  American corporations will require basic supranational judicial recourses as globalization potentiates.  They will need enforcers of contracts, assigners of tort liability, and protectors of property rights—the invisible infrastructure for economic activity that corporations take full advantage of here at home.  And so, the United States will be forced to join the rest of the world as it takes advantage of these empowered international courts and will even get used to the power arrangement.

Like any entity with power, these courts will become increasingly powerful and influential, possibly even expanding its jurisdiction to environmental and human rights issues.  But before you think that international courts will dictate our domestic policies, I can assure there will be plenty of nationalism to check that.  Actually, my big and scary “world government” will be quite small and limited.  You will still be able to carry your guns.