Gideon Rachman at the Financial Times, writes on the prospect of a world government. Not the sort of black-helicopter United Nations world government so beloved of conspiracy nuts, but an EU-style global economic and trade government to push forward action on the recession, trade, climate change, and other global issues.
This sort of huge political engineering is not an immediate prospect, of course, but Rachman sees pressure for it building in the next few decades, as economic and environmental pressures increase.
My own reaction is, first, that it’s not entirely impossible. The barriers to world government, though still very high, are not insurmountable. The Internet is one of the essential precursors, as Rachman acknowledges:
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.”
Also pushing in the direction of world government are the strong pressures that the fight against climate change will bring, and the globalisation of trade (which seems likely to slow, but unlikely to go into reverse). A global government, or EU-style government superstructure, could make a useful contribution on those big world-scale issues.
My second reaction is that, even if possible, to be desirable a global union would need to be democratic; and that’s a very hard thing to achieve.
Let’s start by looking at the European Union, the possible model for the GU. All EU member states sign up to a comprehensive list of human rights and democracy obligations before they’re allowed to begin discussions about joining, let alone get in. These don’t just cover the basics, such as holding free elections, but go down to detail around press freedoms, corruption, and so forth. Once a member state is in the club, it gets representation in the European Parliament, which is directly democratically elected, and representation on the European Council/Council of Ministers, which is indirectly democratic through the mandates of the national governments.
Now imagine doing that in a community that included Russia, China, Zimbabwe and Swaziland.
Even beyond, that, consider the advantages that Europe has as a supergovernment area:
- Closely intertwined nation states with long history of co-operation and conflict
- Shared historical background of Christianity (everywhere) and the Roman Empire (in the south and west)
- A founding myth (“World War II never again”) that encourages people to put aside nationalism
- Advanced democracies with strong educational systems and a tradition of liberalism and human rights
- Broad agreement on social attitudes
- Similar levels of economic development
Even with all those similarities, it has been hard to construct a European demos, or to bring democratic legitimacy to the European project. Only with two generations of existence, the single market and the single currency is Europe starting to feel like a political entity. Remove the EU’s advantages, start from scratch and scale up by 12 or 13 times to understand the nature of the problem.
Even if global democracy is the aim, efforts to create a GU will surely start by replicating the least democratic elements of the EU – its bureaucracy and intergovernmentalism. Intergovernmental institutions are poorer democracies than directly elected institutions at the best of times, and intergovernmental institutions where non-democratic countries are allowed to participate are worst of all. Norman Geras rightly says:
the democratic legitimacy of a world government could not be trusted or respected so long as some of its component national units, so to say, had no democratic legitimacy themselves. As things are, the norm of the international community is universality of participation, permitting undemocratic regimes a voice in the councils of nations. This norm would have to be amended in the way a world government related to the separate nation-states. Why should the citizens of democratically governed countries – just to take an example at random – wish to subject themselves to rules concerning freedom of speech and belief drawn up by a body in which regressive ideas on this matter might win a majority influence?
It’s hard to see that any world government can escape the traps of “League of Democracies” imperial condescension on one side, and undemocratic bureaucracy on the other. If the choice is between global government with Mugabe in the room, or no global government, I think we may need to muddle along as we are.