The big idea: is world government possible?
Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian
Today’s challenges transcend borders. Can history show us how to cooperate?
Global
problems require global responses. And we have plenty of global
problems. Is a single, unified authority – a world government – required
to solve them? Is that even feasible? It rather depends, doesn’t it, on
what we mean by the phrase. An emperor with a single empire? Some form
of democratic federal government of the world? Star Wars features a
galactic republic, but then that’s science fiction.
It
is hard to imagine a global government with global citizens in a world
with such strong local identities and such different political and
social systems. As we have realised since the end of the cold war, the
nation state is not only alive, it is kicking. The EU struggles with its
members; think of that on a world scale. One person, one vote won’t
work either when in certain countries a single leader would cast the
votes for millions.
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If
we accept, however, that government can be the exercise of power over
the peoples of a particular area with or without their consent then,
yes, it is possible to imagine some hegemonic power or a collection of
powers governing the world, perhaps even benevolently. The Roman empire
controlled its known world for centuries. Chinese emperors claimed the
“mandate of heaven”, which, they assumed, gave them authority to
maintain order on Earth. After the Napoleonic wars, the great powers
formed the Concert of Europe to settle disputes peacefully and maintain a
largely conservative order.
As
our knowledge of each other expanded over recent centuries, so too did
our capacity to imagine a truly global order. The European empires
justified themselves by claiming to bring civilisation to their
subjects. Supporters of an earlier version of the Anglosphere dreamed of
a condominium of the British empire (especially its white parts) and
the United States to govern the world. Lenin, Stalin and Mao had a still
different vision, where a single communist state dissolved national
borders.
Immanuel Kant dreamed of another
possibility, where nations sharing liberal values cooperated willingly
and peacefully. In the aftermath of the first world war, the US
president Woodrow Wilson spoke for millions with his vision of a more
liberal and democratic world order where nations worked together against
common threats to humanity, from disease to war. Its embodiment was the
League of Nations, which, with its council, assembly and bureaucracy,
mirrored democratic governments but lacked their monopoly of force or
ultimate authority.
If Hobbes and his followers are right, a state of anarchy among nations is all we can hope for
The
League did not prevent the second world war, but lessons were drawn
from its failure, perhaps most crucially that international unity from
the start could prevent the spread of aggression. The shattered world of
1945 faced enormous challenges, both to rebuild and to prevent a third,
even more catastrophic war. As head of the world’s strongest power,
President Roosevelt was able to insist that the new United Nations have
more power and more authority than the League.
The
UN’s founding conference in San Francisco created a body that
incorporated authoritarianism and democracy. Roosevelt’s Four Policemen
for the globe – Britain, China, the US and the Soviet Union – were
permanent members of the security council (France was added as a
courtesy) with, as the UN charter says, “primary responsibility for the
maintenance of international peace and security”. By 1948, the UN had
created its own peacekeeping forces, something the League was never able
to do. It also oversaw a host of agencies, such as the World Health Organization
or the International Labour Organization, that created international
standards and policies in areas such as health and labour, and became
centres of global expertise.
Roosevelt also
insisted on a general assembly where all nations from the biggest to the
smallest would sit as equals. In time it developed its own blocs that,
on issues such as the dissolution of the European empires, were able to
mobilise world opinion and exert pressure on the powerful. At the very
least, the general assembly is a forum for 193 nations, from North Korea
to Sweden. It is fashionable now to write off the UN, but its existence
helps us to think globally. The other key lesson the world’s leaders
took from the 1930s was that reacting to the Great Depression by
erecting trade and other barriers prolonged the misery and poisoned
international relations. The Bretton Woods institutions of the World
Bank, International Monetary Fund and, eventually, the World Trade
Organization, have helped manage the world’s economy and foster
development. And, yes, there is much to criticise but, as with the UN,
we would be worse off without them.
However, as the American academic Anne-Marie Slaughter
argues, world governance involves far more than formal institutions.
Rather, it exists in the thickening networks of special agencies and
interest groups from police forces to charitable NGOs that operate
across and in spite of borders. Whether they are fighting crime,
managing international flows of capital or helping refugees, such
networks are sustaining a global order, even spreading shared values and
norms.
Will Covid-19 encourage us to make that
order even stronger? Past great catastrophes made us think differently.
New ways of managing international relations came out of the Napoleonic
wars and the two world wars. The pandemic has highlighted weaknesses,
for example in supply chains, and exacerbated inequalities. The world’s
nations have too often resorted to blaming each other, and the
distribution of vaccines to poorer countries has been shamefully slow.
Yet there was an impressive international effort to develop and
administer vaccines. Are we going to learn some lessons?
We
had better do so quickly, for we face more pandemics, more global
turbulence and, above all, the existential threat of climate change. Can
we start, as Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan recently suggested in an
article for Foreign Affairs, with a new Concert of Powers,
with the limited goal of maintaining stability? The obstacles are
formidable. Rogue nations defy world opinion. Regional rivalries
threaten to spill over into war. Powerful leaders act as if there is no
tomorrow, leaving long-term damage. Donald Trump betrayed and insulted
allies. Britain continues to alienate its neighbours and biggest trading
partners. “Donnez-moi un break” is not going to bridge the gulf that
has opened up with the French.
You have to be
an optimist at the moment to believe in a world government built on
cooperation and shared values. If Hobbes and his followers are right, a
state of anarchy among nations is all we can hope for. Or does the
future hold one of those other models? A Concert of Great Powers, or
something else? We thought the age of empires was over; maybe it has
merely been resting.
Margaret MacMillan is Engelsberg chair in history and international affairs at LSE and author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us.
Reading list
Governing the World: The History of an Idea by Mark Mazower (Penguin, £12.99)
A New World Order by Anne-Marie Slaughter (Princeton, £32)
The World: A Brief Introduction by Richard Haass (Penguin, £23.99)