Ordinarily, one reads stories of one-world governments on the pages (real or virtual) of fringe publications, not on the Financial Times website. And ordinarily, the people who write about such things are far from welcoming our global overlords. But this is far from ordinary:
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.
First, it is increasingly clear that the most difficult issues facing national governments are international in nature: there is global warming, a global financial crisis and a "global war on terror".
Second, it could be done. The transport and communications revolutions have shrunk the world so that, as Geoffrey Blainey, an eminent Australian historian, has written: "For the first time in human history, world government of some sort is now possible." Mr Blainey foresees an attempt to form a world government at some point in the next two centuries, which is an unusually long time horizon for the average newspaper column.
But - the third point - a change in the political atmosphere suggests that "global governance" could come much sooner than that. The financial crisis and climate change are pushing national governments towards global solutions, even in countries such as China and the US that are traditionally fierce guardians of national sovereignty. [...]
So, it seems, everything is in place. For the first time since homo sapiens began to doodle on cave walls, there is an argument, an opportunity and a means to make serious steps towards a world government.
But let us not get carried away. While it seems feasible that some sort of world government might emerge over the next century, any push for "global governance" in the here and now will be a painful, slow process.
There are good and bad reasons for this. The bad reason is a lack of will and determination on the part of national, political leaders who - while they might like to talk about "a planet in peril" - are ultimately still much more focused on their next election, at home.
But this "problem" also hints at a more welcome reason why making progress on global governance will be slow sledding. Even in the EU - the heartland of law-based international government - the idea remains unpopular. The EU has suffered a series of humiliating defeats in referendums, when plans for "ever closer union" have been referred to the voters. In general, the Union has progressed fastest when far-reaching deals have been agreed by technocrats and politicians - and then pushed through without direct reference to the voters. International governance tends to be effective, only when it is anti-democratic.
The world's most pressing political problems may indeed be international in nature, but the average citizen's political identity remains stubbornly local. Until somebody cracks this problem, that plan for world government may have to stay locked away in a safe at the UN.
I guess "Think globally, vote locally," isn't going to catch on as a slogan anytime soon. But this is scary stuff:
In the first place, the problems identified as global ones seldom have global solutions. You may have a "global war on terror," but terror strikes, intelligence efforts, military involvement, law enforcement, and the like are all local efforts. The same thing is true with regard to economic concerns and environmental action--there are no truly global solutions to any of these problems, and creating an extra layer of bureaucracy around them is more likely to hinder than to help solutions emerge.
In the second place, the issues of democracy, national sovereignty, and local interests can't help but be raised in the context of essays like this one. Why should the people of one country be forced to act against their interests or the liberty of their citizens for the sake of the agenda of a majority of other countries? While the structure of hypothetical global governments is always based on democratic ideals, nothing could be more profoundly against the principles of democracy than to reduce the will of an entire nation to a single vote, against which the other nation-members in the global Congress have a seemingly unlimited veto.
But finally, and perhaps most importantly, we come to the matter of localism. It is taken for granted by many that globalism ought to trump localism, that the needs and concerns of the world are clearly and obviously more important than the needs and concerns of one's neighbor. What is called "stubbornly local," though, is one of the really good qualities people have developed since the cave-decorating days; in fact, though the "since homo sapiens began to doodle on cave walls" phrase might seem like a throwaway line, it contains the perpendicular lines of the crux of the matter.
Because cave dwellers drew on their own cave walls. They told their own stories, the tales of tribe and family, recording what was important for the ones, intimately and familiarly connected with them, who would follow. When tribe and family became city-state and nation, the sense of history, of belonging and ownership, that was characterized by those "doodles" remained, even if the drawings themselves were lost to time. So what was done for the good of the city-state, or to protect the nation, was done for the sake of tribe and family; it wasn't too hard to see one's own people in the faces of one's countrymen.
And even today, in our vast but shrinking (thanks to technology) world, this is still inclined to be true. Two Americans meeting in London will whisper about the hideousness of the coffee; two British subjects sojourning in the American South will raise polite eyebrows hurling messages of unspoken amusement at the sight of tall glasses of syrupy, mint-laced, iced tea--in February. Even if they're total strangers, for that moment, they are kin; their countries are no bigger than those caves of old, and the stories they carry in their blood can't be replaced with international edicts demanding coerced brotherhood with everyone on earth.
It's true that no man is an island. But it's equally true that no man is a global collective. The stubborn localism that endures despite modernity is proof of that reality.
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1) EuroGummint doesn't work now, and the Irish have (so far) refused to join--to their eternal credit.
2) You think the "bitter clingers" were buying guns and ammo just because of Obama's election? You think wrong!
Of course we identify more with our countrymen than those in another country. We also identify more with those from our own region of the country than from other regions, with our family more than with the neighbors, with our immediate family more than Uncle Bob and his weird crew. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't identify with Uncle Bob, or the neighbor, or the dern Yankees, or the Somalian- it just means that it is harder, the less we are in contact and the less we have in common.
I think we should absolutely expect people to subsume their own interests and sometimes the interests of those close to them in the interest of the whole. That's what we expect parents to do on a daily basis. It's what we expect the wealthy to do on behalf of the needy. It's what a society is made of. Why is it different on a global scale? Do we really need a new, extra-human Other to be afraid of before we can think about humanity as one community?
Worry about the economy. Worry about the fact that we are always under surveillance, that the "global village" means that anyone can find us anywhere at any time, that all our electronic communications (phone, e-mail, instant messaging, twitter, facebook, etc) are subject to scrutiny even years after-the-fact.
Worrying about those go hand-in-hand with the concentration of power which allows the global NWO to take shape under the moneyed elites.
Thank God I live in Oklahoma -- the ruby reddest of red states -- where something like 9 out of 10 households have firearms.
As a friend of mine likes to say, the U.S. military -- inarguably the strongest and best equipped in the world -- struggled to control a country the size of Pennsylvania.
Oklahoma? Not so much. Bring it on, One-worlders. My fellow countrymen will send you home in body bags.
Worrying about those go hand-in-hand with the concentration of power which allows the global NWO to take shape under the moneyed elites.
That's what Castro said back in the 50s-60s-70s. I'd like to think that the quality of our conspiracy theorizing had improved since then, but apparently not.
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