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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.

 

But this may be one of those cases when the flaky are closer to the truth than the sober. Much power now vested in the nation-state is indeed starting to migrate to international institutions, and one of these is the WTO. This doesn't mean that two or three decades from now we'll see world government in the classic sense of the term – a single, central planetary authority. But world government of a meaningful if more diffuse sort is probably in the cards. It follows from basic technological trends and stubborn economic and political logic. And, what's more, it's a good idea. Among other virtues, it could keep a sizable chunk of the liberal coalition from veering off toward Buchananism.

 

If the political forces driving the WTO toward firmer and broader authority seem less than overwhelming, one reason is that the key political players have a love-hate relationship with world government and tend to dwell on the hate part.

 

Many on the left, when denouncing the WTO, talk as if national sovereignty were sacred. The WTO, Nader has long complained, "means foreign regulation of America." It means any two dictatorships can out-vote us...It means secret tribunals can rule against our laws." Yet Nader and most of the Seattle left would gladly accept a sovereignty-crushing world body if it followed the leftish model of supranational governance found in the European Union. Indeed, it was partly to please the Seattle activists that President Clinton espoused a future WTO whose member nations would meet global environment and labor standards or else face sanction.

 

Many centrist and conservative free-traders also talk as if national sovereignty should be inviolable. They were aghast at Clinton's proposal to take the WTO "beyond its proper competence," as an editorial in The Economist sternly put it. But they can live with sovereignty infringement of a less leftish variety – the kind that erodes a nation's power to erect subtle trade barriers via environmental or health policy. They certainly didn't lose sleep over the famous 1998 case in which the United States, under threat of WTO sanction, relaxed its ban caught on shrimp caught in nets that kill sea turtles.

 

Of course, these free-traders deny that this sort of ruling amounts to world government. The Economist editorial said that "the WTO is not a global government" but merely a place where nations "make agreements, and then subject themselves to arbitration in the event of a dispute." But isn't that a large part of what a government is: a body whose constituents agree to respect its authority, to accept punishment if they're deemed to have broken the rules?

 

Assorted other players, such as human rights hawks, also have mixed feelings about world government. After Seattle, William Safire wrote a column backing Clinton's view that the WTO should someday punish nations that exploit child labor. This is quite a turnaround: Safire, a longtime free-trader and something of a libertarian, now believes that foreigners in Geneva should decide whether you can buy a soccer ball made in Pakistan. Struggling to contain his cognitive dissonance, Safire issued a disclaimer: "I am not a global warmnik.... Indeed, laissez-fairies have always been dancing in my garden." If I were Safire, I'd peek out at my garden to see whether the fairies are still in a festive mood.

 

For all these people – traditional leftists, centrist and right-wing free-traders, and assorted sigle-issue agitators (everyone except the Buchananites, basically) – the fundamental question has been settled. They agree that sometimes nations should surrender an appreciable chunk of sovereignty to a central authority. They just disagree on when. Even as they heap scorn on the otion of world government, they're really arguing about what kind of world government we should have.

 

The evolution of world government has two basic engines – stubborn economic logic and stubborn political logic, both fueled by technology's relentless shrinking of the economic distance between nations.

 

The economic logic is pretty simple. You could describe it as a series of non-zero-sum games – a series of cases in which nations, to achieve win-win outcomes or avoid lose-lose outcomes, enmesh themselves in common governance. The series starts with that elementally human non-zero-sum game, mutually profitable exchange. Nations trade with one another. Then they see further gains in agreements that will mutually lower tariffs (game number two). Then they decide all would benefit by dampening quarrels over what constitutes a violation of the rules, so they set up a way to handle disputes (game number three). Crossing this last threshold – forming an inchoate judiciary – is what turned the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade into the World Trade Organization.

 

But adjudication entails tricky questions. For example: How do you handle covert trade barriers? When a country makes it illegal to import shrimp caught in nets that kill sea turtles, is that just an environmental law? Or is it de facto protectionism, as the WTO claimed when it demanded that the United States quit barring shrimp imports from several Asian nations? In theory, the United States could have ignored the ruling. All the WTO would have done in response would have been to approve retaliatory tariffs by aggrieved countries. Still, the United States has benefited from so many WTO good government works: A central authority, by solving non-zero-sum problems, gives out in benefits more than it exacts in costs, thus justifying its existence. This net benefit is why WTO ruling will probably become more binding, whether thought sheer custom or through tougher sanction.

 

The WTO isn't breaking new ground here. It's following in the footsteps of a body that's much further down the road of supranational governance: the European Union. Europe is the most geographically dense conglomeration of high-tech nations in the world. So, as technology shrinks economic distance, Europe is on the leading edge of the trend. That doesn't mean that its political present is the world's political future. The EU has been shaped by various elements peculiar to European history (including a dogged post-1945 desire to avoid war). Still, it may offer a hint of things to come.

 

For example: With transnational commerce growing, all of Europe's national currencies became a bother. There was costly currency conversion and uncertainty about exchange rates. So the EU opted for a single currency. And one currency meant one central bank; each nation lost its autonomous central bank and, at a more symbolic lever, its currency (or, as they aptly say in Britain, its sovereign). At this point – with nations surrendering control over their monetary policy – the line between a loose association of nations and an outright confederacy has arguably been crossed.

 

As Europe was unifying its currencies, The Economist published an article called "One World, One Money," noting the analogously powerful logic behind global monetary union. The article stressed the political difficulty of such a goal, and some economists doubt its economic wisdom as well. Still, as exchange rates gyrated after the Asian financial crisis, there was talk in both Argentina and Mexico about adopting the U.S. dollar as official currency.

 

The EU also gets involved in regulatory issues, from food labeling to health and labor law. (It decided that member states could – and, indeed, must! – permit the sale of Viagra.) Right-wing free-traders claim there is no sound economic rationale for this sort of meddling. They say that the EU's attempt to specify everything from cheese labels to the maximum length of the workweek represents the triumph of interest-group politics. In some cases, at least, this is true; a maximum workweek doesn't follow from Econ 101 principles about maximizing GDP. But so what? Interest-group politics has always been part of governance. At the local and national levels, much of government consists of services rendered to various groups in order to maintain their support for the larger governmental enterprise. The question is whether at the global level, too, politics will dictate the construction of a substantial body of law.

 

There is reason to think so, and much of it was on display in Seattle. Well-organizaed interest groups in affluent nations fear – correctly, in many cases – that they'll be hurt by the continued lowering of trade barriers. So they want to thwart further lowering unless they get global rules that will blunt its impact, such as the rules Clinton has now embraced.

 

Can these groups really hold trade liberalization hostage to their agenda? Absolutely. In 1997, Clinton introduced fact-track legislation, which denies Congress the power to amend negotiated trade deals before voting on them – and which, practically speaking, is a prerequisite for passing most trade accords. Bowing to Republican pressure, Clinton phrased the legislation narrowly: it wouldn't have allowed U.S. negotiators to include labor and environmental rules in trade agreements. Liberal interest groups responded by defeating the bill. So for now, at least, America's real-world political choice seems to be either trade liberalization that invites lefty supranational governance or no trade liberalization. Both Democratic presidential candidates seem to favor the former option, and, if elected, each of them would presumably seek the leftish fast-track authority that Clinton didn't seek.

 

In the short run, this authority would yield little. Developing nations generally oppose global environmental and labor law, which raises production costs and thus dulls their factories' competitive edge. Still, there are two reasons this obstacle will probably prove temporary. First, the United States and other rich nations, with markets that poorer nations lust after, have tremendous bargaining power. Second, as time passes, the developing nations will themselves develop strong constituencies for left-leaning world law.

 

This second point was lost in the post-Seattle commentary. Negotiations for developing nations went on television and alleged that American union leaders, with their poignant pleas for better working conditions abroad, were phonies; there were at heart worried not about protecting foreign workers but about making foreign labor more pricey and hence less competitive internationally.

 

Absolutely true. In fact, many American workers would love to price foreign workers out of the market entirely. But they never will. A more realistic goal is to slightly raise labor costs abroad. And, if they do that, they'll have most foreign workers on their side. Sure, a few children will lose their jobs if child labor is regulated. And, sure, if workers in poor nations are guaranteed the right to organize, the result could be a minimum wage that has the same effect, and most workers still support it, for quite rational reasons.

 

So, in coming years, expect workers in poor nations to link up with Western labor groups to pursue their common cause: higher wages in poor nations. The groups won't see eye-to-eye on everything. American workers would like to raise environmental standards abroad as a way to increase production costs, whereas foreign workers will prefer the sort of raised production costs that mean higher wages. Still, there will be enough common interest that, to some extent, workers of the world will unite – if not exactly in the context Marx envisioned.

 

Other international coalitions will also blossom. Western environmentalists, for example, share an interest with Third World tourist industries in cleaning up Third World cities.

 

As international lobby groups acquire power and start doing the things national lobby groups have long done, economists and industrialists will grumble about the costs. Te special interests, they'll say, are gumming up the works, dulling capitalism's edge, slowing down globalization!

 

And it will be true. But is that so bad? Globalization has polluted developing nations, dislocated workers in developed nations, and radicalized some environmentalists and religious fundamentalists. And radicalism is a special problem when, thanks to advancing weapons technology, any two or three highly alienated people can create a pretty lethal terrorist cell.

 

Don't get me wrong. Globalization is great. On balance, it makes the world's poor people less poor (a fact that doesn't seem to have penetrated the brain of the average Seattle protester). And it fosters a fine-grained economic interdependence that makes war among nations less thinkable. But these benefits are all the more reason to keep globalization from getting derailed by the reactionary backlash it incites when it moves too fast. And derailment is possible. As Paul Krugman recently noted in the New York Times, the "First Global Economy" – the one that took shape in the late nineteenth century – foundered early this century in part because its constituency didn't extend very far beyond a cosmopolitan elite.

 

Nor is the derailment of globalization per se the only thing to worry about. Some historians trace the virulence of twentieth-century German nationalism to the nineteenth century, when industrialization swept from west to east, leaving bewilderment in its wake. And Russia, even more than Germany had to fast-forward from an age of serfs into the industrial revolution – and, in a sense, it never recovered, never got fitting governance. It got Stalin instead.

 

In a way, it's a misnomer to speak of slowing globalization. After all, the things that might do the slowing – supranational labor or environmental groups, global bodies of governance – are themselves part of globalization. What is really happening is that political globalization is catching up to economic globalization.

 

This has a precedent on a smaller scale. In the United States during the early twentieth century, as economic activity migrated from the state to the national level, the national government grew powerful enough to regulate it. Some of these regulations made simple economic sense, but some of them – labor laws in particular – were political in rationale and had the effect of subduing capitalism, dulling its harsher edges. This was, among other things, a preemptive strike against Marxist revolution – against the turmoil that unbridled modernization can bring – and a successful one. Enlightened capitalists realized that giving labor a seat at the table would help make the world safe for capitalism.

 

By the same token, enlightened capitalists should today invite the Seattle protesters indoors. One way or another, people who feel threatened by globalization will make their influence felt. Either they'll modulate globalization by linking up with like-minded groups abroad to help shape international rules or they'll take the economic-nationalist route and lobby for the sort of trade barriers that, in addition to starting trade wars, often involve xenophobia and nativism. The way to keep these people from being sheer protectionists – and, in some cases, from morphing into full-fledged Buchananites – is to turn them into WTO lobbyists, which means making the WTO a body worth lobbying. Put suits on those scraggly rabble-rousers and send them to Geneva!

 

The WTO, though the topic of world governance du jour, is hardly the only global institution with real economic power. The International Monetary Fund makes loans to troubled nations to prevent panics – the rough analogue of a nation's bank-deposit insurance – and in return asks for sound management and transparent bookkeeping. This may not sound very forceful, but to lend when the private sector refuses to do so is to subsidize, and with subsidy comes power. Much of the U.S. government's power over states, after all, consists not of legalized coercion but of strings attached to subsidies.

 

After the Asian crisis, some economists argued that the IMF had been too heavy-handed – that it shouldn't demand fiscal austerity so single-mindedly and that by too readily bailing out bad investors it encouraged more bad investment. But almost no one is saying the IMF should quit lending altogether, and almost no one is saying it should quit using its lending as leverage of one sort or another. As with the WTO, the mainstream argument isn't about whether to have a form of world government but about what form of it to have.

 

And, as with the WTO, the reason to expect the IMF's ongoing solidification is simple, Its authority results from shrinking economic distance. This shrinkage is the reason economic downturns can be contagious, the reason rich nations suddenly care about the financial soundness of poor nations. And if there is one thing the basic direction of technological change clearly implies, it is continued shrinkage – more interdependence among nations.

 

For that matter, the shrinkage of noneconomic distance will also continue. A decade from now, global laws regulating the prescription of antibiotics could make sense, if the too-casual use of these drugs creates strains of super-bacteria that can cross oceans on airplanes. And then there is cyberspace, that notorious distance shrinker and sovereigntysapper. It empowers offshore tax-evaders, offshore libelers, offshore copyright-violators. Nations will find it harder and harder to enforce more and more laws unless they coordinate law enforcement and, in some cases, the laws themselves.

 

But, even given all these reasons for firmer and broader global governance, will it ever get as firm and broad as the governance of nation-states? Probably not. World government may well always rely on member states to levy its sanctions. It will probably never inspire the patriotic fervor nations do. And it may always be diffuse, consisting of lots of partly overlapping bodies: some regional, some global; some economic, some environmental; some comprising national governments, some comprising nongovernmental organizations.

 

Why won't world government ever be as taut as old-fashioned national government? For one thing, governments have traditionally drawn internal strength from external opposition. If you scan the historical and prehistoric record for distant parallels to the current moment, the nearest approximations you'll find are when agrarian villages have united to form "chiefdoms" or when chiefdoms evolved into ancient states. And there are no clear examples of such transitions happening in the absence of external hostility. For a full-fledged global political conglomeration to take place without the threat of a war against a common foe would mark a contrast with all of the known past. And, barring an invasion from outer space, no such threat will be available.

 

Still, we do face what you could call planetary security problems, and they will help sustain the current drift toward real, if loose, world government. Impending climate change may not have quite the viscerally galvanizing effect of troops massed on your border, but it does qualify as a common peril best combated by concerted action. Terrorism is also a common peril (and, actually, a pretty galvanizing one). As more compact, lethal, and long-range weapons make terrorists tougher, national governance will become less and less adequate to the task of national security.

 

Already, with the Chemical Weapons Convention, the United States has agreed to international inspections intrusive enough to have filled the Senate chamber with plaints about surrendered sovereignty. But the surrender (a minor one, in truth) was rational; permitting such inspections on our soil is the only way to get them to happen on foreign soil. And chemical weapons are just the beginning. Biological weapons are orders of magnitude more lethal and much easier to make covertly. The encroachment on sovereignty that combating them will require is, to current sensibilities, shocking. But the idea of trauma – say, 20,000 deaths in an American city – has a way of making the unthinkable widely thought.

 

As technology pulls and pushes nations together, it highlights an irony: world government, which for so long was a pet cause of the idealistic left – the "wooly minded one-worlders" – isn't getting much support from the left. True, some Seattle activists profess a willingness to work with a left-leaning WTO. But when Naderite Lori Wallach declared, "We're the coalition that's going to tell the WTO, 'You're going to be fixed or you're going to be nixed," her heart seemed to be with the "nixed" part. Certainly that was the sentiment of the average Seattle protester.

 

But, even if nixing were within the left's power, it would be a mistake. Stopping the WTO in its tracks wouldn't turn back the clock. Under current tariff levels, globalization would continue (and, beside, tariffs would probably keep dropping via bilateral trade deals). The various problems that exercise the left – environmental decline, an exodus of low-skill jobs from high-wage nations, human rights violations – would persist.

 

And these problems are just about impossible to solve without an enforcement mechanism – without the power of sanction that the WTO, more than any other world body, has to offer. The Rio accords on global warming, for example, lack an enforcement mechanism and are notable for the blithe disregard with which various signatories have treated them. The history of international labor accords tells the same story. After the Seattle talks, a New York Times editorial said that "the administration can urge other groups, like the International Labor Organization, to pursue the issue with or without the WTO's participation." Which is to say, with or without effect. The ILO has been in existence for 81 years and, lacking the force of sanction, has been unable to do much of anything.

 

One oddity in contemporary political nomenclature is the tendency of leftist economic nationalists, who favor raising tariffs, to call themselves "progressives." Early this century, progressives were people who realized that communications and transportation technologies were pushing the compass of economic activity outward, from individual states to the United Stated. In response, they pushed economic regulation from the state to the federal level. The modern-day successors to these progressives should be advocating supranational regulation, not impeding it with unilateral tariffs.

 

Seattle may have moved them in that direction. At the end of the week, however virulent the anti-WTO rhetoric remained, the "progressive" left was thinking more seriously about using the WTO as a vehicle for its agenda. One big reason was Bill Clinton. For an American president to say that global laws on the treatment of workers should be enforced with real sanctions authorized by a worldwide body was a milestone in the evolution of global governance.

 

Clinton's remarks have been dismissed as a transparent ploy to lock up the labor vote for Al Gore, as a nostalgic effort to bond with 1960s-esque protesters, and as a tactical blunder that alienated negotiations from poor nations. All of this may be true. But it's also true that these days Clinton is said to be preoccupied with his legacy, trying to pave the way a thumbs-up verdict from historians a generation hence. If so, then one-worlders should be cheered by his seattle performance. No one has ever accused Bill Clinton of not knowing which way the wind is blowing.