ACADEMICS FAVOR WORLD GOVERNMENT

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Two contemporary world federalists have written major books on the subject. Joseph P. Baratta's The Politics of World Federation, and Ronald Glossop's World Federation? A Critical Analysis of Federal World Government can both be found on our Books & Other Merchandise page.

 

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"Who's Afraid of World Government?"

By Prof. Lawrence S. Wittner
(From D.W.F.'s 2010 Winter Quarterly)

A few weeks ago, Glenn Beck of the Fox News Channel, with that hysterical flourish that has made him the darling of right-wing extremists, proclaimed: “America, if . . . you’re not really into that whole One World Government thing, watch out.” This kind of warning, regularly issued on Fox News, seems rather absurd today, given the obvious weakness of the United Nations and the failure of mainstream political figures to even suggest that this international organization might be strengthened to provide more effective world governance.

Nevertheless, not so long ago the idea of world government had greater influence in the United States. Amid the enormous destruc­tion unleashed by World Wars I and II, American presidents success­fully championed the establishment of the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations as instruments to curb the narrow national­ism that traditionally had led to war. During the Second World War, especially, an avalanche of books and pamphlets called for new think­ing about global governance. Probably the best-known of them was One World (1943), a best-seller by Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Repub­lican candidate for president. Serialized or printed in brief versions in more than a hundred newspapers in the United States and Canada, One World – within two years of its appearance – sold two million copies in book form. More>>

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"What Happened to the Idea of World Government?"

By Prof. Thomas G. Weiss

(Presidential Address, 50th Convention of the International Studies Association, as delivered New York, NY, February 16, 2009)

 

Le machin is what Charles de Gaulle called the United Nations, thereby dismissing multilateral cooperation as frivolous in comparison with the real red meat of international affairs, national interests and Realpolitik. He conveniently ignored that the formal birth of "the thing" was not the signing of the UN Charter in June 1945, but rather the adoption of the "Declaration by the United Nations" in Washington, DC, in January 1942. The twenty-six countries that defeated Fascism and by the way saved France also anticipated the formal establishment of a world organization as an essential extension of their war-time commitments. These were not pie-in-the-sky idealists. The UN system was not viewed as a liberal plaything to be tossed aside when the going got rough but rather a vital necessity for post-war order and prosperity.

Numerous other politicians and pundits since have made careers by questioning the organization's relevance and calling for its dismantlement, whereas my own has revolved around strengthening the United Nations; and some professional energy has gone into nurturing the IO section of ISA and the Academic Council on the UN System. This 50th ISA session in New York provides me the opportunity to examine the world organization from a particular angle, namely the desperate need for a third generation of intergovernmental organizations to move beyond the "anarchy" that Hedley Bull and all ISA members take as a point of departure for international studies.

My own research interests are not idiosyncratic among past presidents of this association. One-quarter of my 48 distinguished predecessors have written at least a book and several major articles about the UN system. Among past ISA presidents of the last few decades who have devoted substantial analytical energies to international organization in general and the UN in particular and from whose work I have benefited are my dear friend Craig Murphy, the late Hayward Alker, Bob Keohane, David Singer, Jim Rosenau, Bruce Russett, the late Harold Jacobson, and Chad Alger. More>>

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"And Now For A World Government"

By Gideon Rachman

(Published in The Financial Times, 12/8/2008)

 

I have never believed that there is a secret United Nations plot to take over the US. I have never seen black helicopters hovering in the sky above Montana. But, for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible.

 

A "world government" would involve much more than co-operation between nations. It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. The European Union has already set up a continental government for 27 countries, which could be a model. The EU has a supreme court, a currency, thousands of pages of law, a large civil service and the ability to deploy military force.

 

So could the European model go global? There are three reasons for thinking that it might. More>>

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The expectations generated by the too-formal, too-insubstantial rhetoric of democracy of North Atlantic industrial societies are interminably prone to the eruption of education, agitation, and organization for actual popular democratization. So, too, expectations of prosperity arising from unsustainable cheap oil, gunboat diplomacy via the military base archipelago, and technodevelopmental exploitation are likewise interminably prone to the eruption of unassuagable social discontent the moment their beneficiaries are forced by changing circumstances to pay the real price (nonsubsidized costs, non-duressed costs, environmental costs, etc.) of these goods and privileges.

Global information and communication networks foreground the inequities of the North Atlantic postcolonial interanational system of global governance to everyone within their reach, while disseminating the expectations of the beneficiaries of that system across the globe, exacerbating the vulnerability of that system beyond its capacaity to accommodate. Where this system has not already failed, it is presently failing.

 

Now, violence is inevitable (as has always been the case whenever and wherever human plurality emerges), but since the tools of violence at the disposal of discontent are now capable of unprecedented destructive power it is crucial that we constrain its expression within the legitimacy of democratic governance, general welfare, and the provision (via legitimate coercion) of a legible space for the noncoercive adjudication of social disputes. More>>

 

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In recent years, more and more people have raised the specter of world government. Ralph Nader, protesters in Seattle, Pat Buchanan, militiamen in the heartland – all sense an alarming concentration of planetary power in one or more acronyms: WTO, U.N., IMF, and so forth.

 

Of course, these people have something else in common: They are widely considered fringe characters – flaky, if not loony. And their eccentric visions have been punctured by legions of sober observers. "The WTO is not a world government," an economist wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month after the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization. His verdict has been echoed by various academics and pundits. More>>

 

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