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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Leagues between Common-wealths, over whom there is no humane Power established, to keep them all in awe, are not onely lawfull [because they are allowed by the commonwealth], but also profitable for the time they last. (1651: ch. 22 [1986: 286]) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | In Hobbes, we find the first articulation of the argument that a world state is unnecessary, although he envisaged that the development of a lawful interstate order is possible, and potentially desirable. | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | In the eighteenth century, Charles Castel, Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743), in his Project for Making Peace Perpetual in Europe (1713), extended Hobbes’s argument that a rational interest in self-preservation necessitated the creation a domestic leviathan to the international realm, asserting that reason should lead the princes of Europe to form a federation of states by social contract. The contracting sovereigns would form a perpetual and irrevocable alliance, establishing a permanent Diet or Congress that would adjudicate all conflicts between the contracting parties. The federation would also proscribe as “a public enemy” (Rousseau 1756 [1917: 63]) any member who breaks the Treaty or disregards the decisions of the congress; in such a situation, all members would “arm and take the offensive, conjointly and at the common expense, against any State put to the ban of Europe” in order to enforce the decisions of the federation (1756 [1917: 61–4]). In other words, perpetual peace can be achieved if the princes of Europe would agree to relinquish their sovereign rights to make war or peace to a superior, federal body that guaranteed protection of their basic interests. | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | In his comments on this proposal, Rousseau (1712–78) acknowledged its perfect rationality: | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Realize this Commonwealth of Europe for a single day, and you may be sure it will last forever; so fully would experience convince men that their own gain is to be found in the good of all. (1756 [1917: 93]) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | To Rousseau, however, existing societies had so thoroughly corrupted humans’ natural innocence that they were largely incapable of discovering their true or real interests. Thus, the Abbé’s proposals were not utopian, but they were not likely to be realized “because men are crazy, and to be sane in a world of madmen is itself a kind of madness” (1756 [1917: 91]). At the same time, Rousseau noted that the sovereigns of Europe were not likely to agree voluntarily to form such a federation: | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | No Federation could ever be established except by a revolution. That being so, which of us would dare say whether the League of Europe is a thing more to be desired or feared? It would perhaps do more harm in the moment than it would guard against for ages. (1756 [1917: 112]) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | This consequentialist objection to the idea of world government speculates that even if it were desirable, the process of creating a world government may produce more harm than good; the necessary evils committed on the road to establishing a world government would outweigh whatever benefits might result from its achievement. | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Rousseau viewed war as a product of defectively ordered social institutions; it is states as public entities that make war, and individuals participate in wars only as members or citizens of states. Far from viewing the achievement of a domestic leviathan as moral progress, Rousseau noted that the condition of a world of entangled sovereign states puts human beings in more peril than if no such institutions existed at all. Isn’t it the case, he argued, that | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | each one of us being in the civil state as regards our fellow citizens, but in the state of nature as regards the rest of the world, we have taken all kinds of precautions against private wars only to kindle national wars a thousand times more terrible? And that, in joining a particular group of men, we have really declared ourselves the enemies of the whole race? (1756 [1917: 56]) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | In Rousseau’s view, the solution to war is to establish well-governed societies, along the lines he established in The Social Contract (1762); only in such contexts will human beings realize their full rational and moral potential. To establish perpetual peace, then, we should not pursue world government, but the moral perfection of states. A world of ideal societies would have no cause for war, and no need for world government. | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Kant tried, in his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784), to refute the claim that the development of the domestic state constituted a moral step backwards for humankind, by placing it and its trials | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | in the history of the entire species, as a steadily advancing but slow development of man’s original [rational] capacities. (1784 [1991: 41]) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Nature employs the “unsociableness of men” to motivate moral progress; thus war is a means by which nature moves states | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | to take the step which reason could have suggested to them even without so many sad experiences—that of abandoning a lawless state of savagery and entering a federation of peoples in which every state, even the smallest, could expect to derive its security and rights not from its own power or its own legal judgment, but solely from this great federation (Foedus Amphictyonum), from a united power and the law-governed decisions of a united will. (1784 [1991: 47]) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | This is the “inevitable outcome” (1784 [1991: 48]) of human history, a point Kant reiterated in Perpetual Peace [1795], when he argued that rationality dictated the formation of | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | an international state (civitas gentium), which would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the peoples of the earth. (1784 [1991: 105]) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | In present conditions, however, Kant noted that “the positive idea of a world republic cannot be realized”, thus his treatise on perpetual peace begins with the social fact of a world of distinct but interacting states. What would be required, given such a world, to achieve perpetual peace? Kant makes three arguments. First, every state must have a republican constitution that guarantees the freedom and equality of citizens through the rule of law and representative political institutions. The internally well-ordered republican state is less likely to engage in wars without good reason; | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | under a constitution where the subject is not a citizen, and which is therefore not republican, it is the simplest thing in the world to go to war. (1784 [1991: 100]) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Second, such internally well-ordered states would need to enter into a “federation of peoples”, which is distinct from an “international state” (1784 [1991: 102]). A | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | pacific federation (foedus pacificum) … does not aim to acquire any power like that of a state, but merely to preserve and secure the freedom of each state in itself, along with that of the other confederated states. (1784 [1991: 104]) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | In this context, a federal union of free and independent states, he argued, | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | is still to be preferred to an amalgamation of the separate nations under a single power which has overruled the rest and created a universal monarchy. | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | His reasons against a universal monarchy combine fears of an all-powerful and powerless world government: | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | For the laws progressively lose their impact as the government increases its range, and a soulless despotism, after crushing the germs of goodness, will finally lapse into anarchy. (1784 [1991: 113]) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Most forcefully articulating the tyranny objection, Kant argued that a “universal despotism” would end “in the graveyard of freedom” (1784 [1991: 114]). The third condition for perpetual peace in a world of distinct but interacting states is the observance of cosmopolitan right, which Kant limits to universal hospitality. Although the human race shares in common a right to the earth’s surface, Kant argued that strangers do not have entitlements to settle on foreign territory without the inhabitants’ agreement. Thus, cosmopolitan right justifies visiting a foreign land, but not conquering it, which Kant criticized the commercial states of his day to have done in “America, the negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape” and East India (1784 [1991: 106]). | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Kant’s views on the desirability of world government were clearly complex (Kokaz 2005: 87–92; Pogge 2009). On the one hand, Kant provides two of the most trenchant objections to world government. The tyranny argument posits that world government would descend into a global tyranny, hindering rather than enhancing the ideal of human autonomy (Kant 1795 [1991]). Instead of delivering impartial global justice and peace, a world government may form an inescapable tyranny that would have the power to make humanity serve its own interests, and opposition against which might engender incessant and intractable civil wars (Waltz 1979; DuFord 2017). In another argument against its desirability, the inevitable remoteness of a global political authority would dilute the laws, making them ineffectual and meaningless. The posited weakness of world government leads to objections based on its potential inefficiency and soullessness (Kant 1795 [1991]). | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | On the other hand, Kant also provides a republican vision of world government based on universal reason. His endorsement of the ideal of human unity prompted him to see a world republic, under which free and equal individuals, united by one global sovereign, would achieve a “fully juridical condition” (Pogge 2009: 198), as the ideal end of the progress of human history. At the same time, Kant’s faith in human unity through reason coexisted with his subscription to a theory of racial hierarchy in human development, and he came to be critical of the dominant modes of European expansionist policies in world politics in the late eighteenth century—through colonial wars, exploitation, and conquests—as undermining the moral progress of Europeans (Valdez 2019). More generally, Kant condemned any move towards a universal monarchy, because a monarchy, in contrast to a republic, does not guarantee, but undermines, the freedom and equality of individuals. Although a world republic is Kant’s ultimate political ideal, a universal despotic monarch that exercises power arbitrarily is equivalent to a global anarchic state of nature, which is his ultimate dystopia. In between lies his “realistic utopia” (Rawls 1999: 11–6) consisting of a federation of free (republican) states short of a world state. As Habermas has put it, | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | This weak conception of a voluntary association of states that are willing to coexist peacefully while nevertheless retaining their sovereignty seemed to recommend itself as a transitional stage en route to a world republic. (2010: 268) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Kant’s work shows that even in the eighteenth century, debates about world government were alive and well, including arguments by radical political cosmopolitans such as Anacharsis Cloots (Jean-Baptiste du Val-de-Grace, baron de Cloots, 1755–1794), who used social contract theory to advocate the abolition of the sovereign states system in favor of a universal republic encompassing all humanity (Kleingeld & Brown 2002). At the same time, philosophical projects for perpetual peace in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were Eurocentric in adopting Europe as the centre of world order, in failing to recognize non-European peoples in equal standing, and in obscuring the global inequalities and injustices being established by European commercial enterprises and states (Pitts 2018: 6–7). | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed revivals of proposals for world government that were fueled by racialized theories of progress that buttressed European-led colonial and imperial expansion over much of the world, technological developments in travel and communications, the rapid ascent of a global capitalist system, as well as the devastating impact of wars fought with modern technology. Theories of “scientific racism” continued to pervade European thought on world order: | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | White supremacist visions of global governance circulated widely in the Anglo-American world. (Bell 2018: 871) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | One of the most prominent proponents of world order, H.G. Wells (1866–1946), envisaged in 1901 a “New Republic” of Anglo-American dominance, and while he repudiated racial theories, his vision of a universal world state included a civilizing mission (Wells 1902; Bell 2018: 870). The construction of racial and civilizational hierarchies, backed by military domination, meant that the inclusion of non-Europeans and non-whites, whether in imperial projects, colonial civilizing missions, or later, in a system of formally independent states embedded in a capitalist global economy, would be marked by deep asymmetries and inequalities in standing, status, rights, burdens, and powers (Anghie 2005; Bell 2019; Getachew 2019). | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | In the Second World War, after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atomic scientists lobbied for the international control of atomic energy as a main function of world federalist government. Albert Einstein wrote in 1946 that technological developments had shrunk the planet, through increased economic interdependence and mutual vulnerability through weapons of mass destruction. Although his adherence to the idea of a world government to guarantee interstate peace preceded the development of nuclear weapons, Einstein’s advocacy gained momentum with the risk of nuclear annihilation: | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | A world government must be created which is able to solve conflicts between nations by judicial decision. This government must be based on a clear-cut constitution which is approved by the governments and nations and which gives it the sole disposition of offensive weapons. (1946 [1950: 132]; Nathan & Norden 1960) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Organizations such as the United World Federalists (UWF), established in 1947, called for the transformation of the United Nations into a universal federation of states with powers to control armaments. World peace required that states should give up their traditional unrestricted sovereign rights to amass weapons and wage war, and that they should submit their disputes to authoritative international institutions of adjudication and enforcement; world peace would only be achieved through the establishment of world law (Clark & Sohn 1958/1960 [1962]). | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Calls for world government in the post-World War Two era implied a deep suspicion about the sovereign state’s potential as a vehicle for moral progress in world politics. Emery Reves’ influential The Anatomy of Peace, is a condemnation of the nation-state as a political institution: “The modern Bastille is the nation-state, no matter whether the jailers are conservative, liberal or socialist” (1945: 270). Echoing Rousseau, Reves argued that nation-states threaten human peace, justice and freedom, by diverting funds from important needs, prolonging a global climate of mistrust and fear, and creating a war machine that ultimately precipitates actual war. The experience of the world wars thus made it especially difficult to view states as agents of moral progress. David Mitrany, perhaps motivated by such suspicions, bracketed the idea of a world federation or world state, and focused on the role that “a spreading web of international activities and agencies” could play in the pursuit of world integration and peace (1966: 38; Trachtman 2013). | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Some did not reject the nation-state per se, but only authoritarian nondemocratic states as unfit partners for building a peaceful world order. The Atlantic Union Committee (AUC), formed in 1949 by Clarence Streit, for example, called for a federal union of democratic states that would be the genesis of a | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | free world government, as nations are encouraged by example to practice the principles which would make them eligible for membership, namely the principles of representative government and protection of individual liberty by law. (1950, quoted in Baratta 2004: 470; for a critique see Rosenboim 2017) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | In the context of the Cold War (1945–89), however, the division of the world into two ideologically opposed camps—led by the United States (US) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)—produced mutual distrust that pervaded the reception of all proposals for world government. Soviet opposition to all Western proposals as attempts to impose “American monopolistic capitalism” on the world (Goodman 1953: 234) made the world federalist movement’s goal of establishing a universal federation infeasible. The Soviet leadership also condemned the AUC’s proposal for an exclusive union of democracies as part of the Cold War rivalry—an attempt to strengthen the anti-communist (anti-Soviet) bloc. | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | In a distorted fashion, the Soviet Union became the historical manifestation of socialist or communist thought. Socialist ideas can be traced back to the French Revolution, but developed more fully as a response to negative aspects of the rapid growth of industry in the nineteenth century. At the same time that technological advancements promised great material progress, the changes they wrought in social and economic relations were not all positive. While the many workers, or “proletarians”, in new industrial factories worked under terrible conditions for meager wages, the few factory owners, “the bourgeoisie” or “capitalists”, amassed great wealth and power. According to Karl Marx (1818–1883), human history is a history of struggles not between nations or states, but between classes, created and destroyed by changing modes of production. The state as a centralized, coercive authority emerges under social modes of production at a certain stage of development, and is only necessary in a class society as the coercive instrument of the ruling class. The capitalist economic system, however, contains within it the seeds of its own destruction: capitalism necessitates the creation of an ever-growing proletarian class, and a global revolution by the proletariat will sweep away “the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally” (Marx & Engels 1848 [1988: 75]). The state will fall along with the fall of classes: | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | The society that will organize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe. (Engels 1884 [1978: 755]) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | In a communist vision, capitalism is a necessary but transitional and ephemeral order of things; the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by forces it unleashed itself is necessary to attain a new world order, “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Marx & Engels 1848 [1988: 75]). World peace and freedom as nondomination for all (Roberts 2017), including freedom from the “alienated” or “estranged” labor (Marx 1844 [1978: 71–81]) produced under capitalism, will be achieved through the transformation of a capitalist to a communist social order: | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end. (Marx & Engels 1848 [1988: 73]) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | The Russian revolutionary, V.I. Lenin (1870–1924), drew on Marx to argue that the proletarian class needed to seize the coercive apparatus of the state to oppress the resisters and exploiters, the bourgeoisie, however, Lenin was committed to world revolution, and to the view that the state is “the organ of class rule”, and that even the | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | proletarian state will begin to wither away immediately after its victory because the state is unnecessary and cannot exist in a society in which there are no class antagonisms. (Lenin 1918: 65) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | In the context of the post-World War I world that witnessed the collapse of empires as well as the fortification of others, buttressed by the League of Nations, Lenin’s vision of a new communist world order entailed an appeal to the colonized to mount anti-imperialist revolutions. This contrasted with U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s less radical interpretation of self-determination as good self-government, a formulation that was consistent with the civilizing narrative based on racial hierarchies, and the continuation and extension of a colonial international order (Pedersen 2015). | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Later Soviet leaders and elites who rejected Western proposals for world federation somewhat inconsistently envisaged the transcendence of nation-states and world capitalism, and the establishment of a world socialist economy governed by a “Bolshevik World State” (Goodman 1953: 231). In communist ideology, ultimately, balance-of-power politics between states enjoying unrestricted sovereignty did not cause war; the real cause of war was capitalism. In practice, the Soviet Union’s internally and externally repressive policies made a mockery of socialist ideals of a classless society, or a world of peaceful socialist republics, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself spelled the practical end of one alternative to a capitalist world order. | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | The end of Cold War ideological divisions led some to have great expectations in the 1990s of enhanced global cooperation to rid humanity of the threat of global nuclear annihilation and to increase global commerce and spread prosperity, the material bases for building a truly global moral and political community of humankind. The end of the twentieth century was marked by an unbridled faith and optimism in the inexorable twin triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy as the end of history (Fukuyama 1992). With the collapse of Soviet-style state socialism, the world witnessed neoliberal transformations on a global scale, driven by the “ideology of free markets, trade liberalization, deregulation, and the small state” (Lüthi 2020: 596). Quinn Slobodian has described the paradoxical ascendancy of “globalist” neoliberalism, entailing the development of a world state and regulatory laws that privileged the “encasement” of markets from domestic democratic regulation and accountability, leading to an institutional project to redesign “states, laws, and other institutions to protect the market” (2018: 4 and 6). As neoliberalism spread on a global scale, so did the deterioration of conditions for robust democratic politics, precipitating serious backsliding of democratization. | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | The optimism of the 1990s and early 2000s was thus short-lived as a variety of persistent and deepening structural injustices of the modern international system produced conditions ripe for violent conflict and mass atrocities, the global war on terror after 2001, the global financial crisis of 2007–9, growing numbers of displaced people, rising socioeconomic inequality, and the hollowing out of social welfare protections, not to mention the disruptive consequences wrought by climate change, and the Covid-19 global pandemic. The persistence of racial subordination and gender inequalities, as well as the ascendancy of a neoliberal world order, have provoked much critical debate about how these and other dominating hierarchies, backed by powerful international institutions, law, states, and corporations, can be tamed or overthrown, or how the crises they generate may accelerate structural transformations at the global level in a more emancipatory direction. | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Contemporary international relations theory developed out of the urgent need to explain and predict the causes of war and peace in world politics. International relations theory has also developed in response to globalization, which has wrought “fundamental changes in the spatial and temporal contours of social existence” (Scheuerman 2002 [2018]), characterized by the uneven increase and intensification of social interconnectedness, economic integration, and the “shrinkage of geographic distance on a world scale” (Keohane 2001). While much of international relations theory’s approach to world government has remained focused on the problem of overcoming interstate anarchy for the sake of human security in the face of common global threats, a “global politics paradigm” (Zürn 2018) has emerged which understands world government as only one possible institutional development among others in a system of global governance characterized by the co-constitution of transnational, international and domestic realms of politics and political contestation. | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Contemporary international “realists” or “neorealists” claim not to evaluate the contemporary states system in normative terms. They liken the international order to a Hobbesian state of nature, where notions of justice and injustice have no place, and in which each unit is rationally motivated to pursue every means within its power to assure its own survival, even at the expense of others’ basic interests. Some realists have thus held that ideas of world government constitute exercises in utopian thinking, and are utterly impractical as a goal for human political organization. Assuming that world government would lead to desirable outcomes such as perpetual peace, realists are skeptical that world government will ever materialize as an institutional reality, given the problems of egoistic or corrupted human nature, or the logic of international anarchy that characterizes a world of states, all jealously guarding their own sovereignty or claims to supreme authority. World government is thus infeasible as a solution to global problems because of the unsurpassable difficulties of establishing “authoritative hierarchies” at the global or international level (Krasner 1999: 42). Furthermore, Kenneth Waltz, in his seminal account of neorealism, Theory of International Politics, clearly favors a system of sovereign states over a world government (1979: 111–2). World government, according to Waltz, would not deliver universal, disinterested, impartial justice, order or security, but like domestic governments, it would be driven by its own particular or exclusive organizational interests, which it would pursue at the expense of the interests and freedom of states. This realist view thus provides a sobering antidote to liberal and other progressive narratives that foretell peace through interdependence. | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | William Scheuerman has argued (2011: 67–97), however, that so-called “classical” realists of the mid-twentieth century were more sympathetic to ideas of global institutional reform than contemporary realists. “Classical” and “progressive” realists such as Reinhold Niebuhr, E.H. Carr, and Hans Morgenthau, as well as John Herz and Frederick Schuman, supported a global reformist agenda, prompted by the advent of economic globalization, technological change, modern total warfare, and the nuclear revolution. Although a desirable end-goal, the feasibility of global political change towards a world government in the form of a global federal system, according to Reinhold Niebuhr, would depend on deeper global social integration and cohesion than was evident in the mid-twentieth century (Scheuerman 2011: 73). In addition, Niebuhr was concerned that absent the required social and cultural basis for global political unity, the achievement of world government would be undesirable, since in such conditions, a world government would require authoritarian devices to rule, raising the specter of a global tyrannical power (72–6). Others, such as James Burnham, posited that a world state could only arise through imperial conquest (Deudney 2019). Despite these caveats, realist prudence-based as well as functional arguments for a Weberian world state have gained traction again (Cabrera 2010; Ulaş 2016; Araujo 2018; Craig 2019). | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | “International society” theorists, or the “English school”, argue that although there is no central overriding authority above sovereign states, their relations are not wholly lawless or devoid of authoritative and enforceable norms and rules for conduct. The anarchy between states does not preclude the concept of a norm-governed society of states (Bull 1977). Since “international society” theorists do not see the absence of a central global authority as necessitating a state-eat-state world, they regard the idea of world government as unnecessary, and potentially dangerous, since it may serve as a cloak in the struggle for imperial domination between states. Martin Wight has noted that the moral ideals of cosmopolitanism typically translate in practice into political tyranny and imperialism (1991). As an alternative to world government, and echoing both Rousseau and Kant, Chris Brown forwards | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | the ideal of a plurality of morally autonomous, just communities related to one another in a framework of peace and law. (1995: 106) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Establishing an international society, ideally conceived, would make a supreme world government unnecessary. Andrew Hurrell, however, argues that | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | it is important to recognize the extent to which social, environmental and, above all, technological change is likely to affect the scale of governance challenges, the sources of control and governance, and the subjects of control. (2007: 293) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | For these reasons, Hurrell does not consider a retreat to a traditional state-based pluralism to be feasible, but argues that the development of a “stable, effective and legitimate international society” requires redressing global inequality through the significant redistribution of political power to buttress the collective political agency of the weak and marginalized (2007: 318).Liberal internationalist accounts of world order are motivated by more than just the traditional preoccupation with problems of war and peace. This school of international relations thought, more than the preceding two, is explicitly critical of traditional accounts of state sovereignty. Richard Falk has depicted the contemporary world order as one of “inhumane governance”, identifying the following ills: global severe poverty affecting more than one billion human beings, denial of human rights to socially and culturally vulnerable groups, the persistent use and threat of war as an instrument of politics, environmental degradation, and the lack of transnational democratic accountability (1995: 1–2). A liberal internationalist agenda is advanced when progress is made on alleviating or correcting these ills. However, Falk is explicit that | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | humane governance can be achieved without world government, and that this is both the more likely and more desirable course of action. (1995: 8) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | By world government, Falk means a form of global political organization that has, at minimum, the following features: | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | compulsory peaceful settlement of all disputes by third-party decision in accordance with law; general and complete disarmament at the state and regional levels; a global legislative capacity backed up by enforcement capabilities; and some form of centralized leadership. (1995: 7) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Instead of world government, Falk calls for “transnational democratic initiatives” from global civil society as well as United Nations reform, both of which would challenge and complement the statist and market forces that currently produce our contemporary global ills (1995: 207). Most liberal international theorists thus envision the need for authoritative international and global institutions that modify significantly the powers and prerogatives traditionally attributed to the sovereign state. | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Anne-Marie Slaughter has also rejected the idea of cosmopolitan democracy and a global parliament as infeasible and unwieldy (2004: 8 and 238). Slaughter is an advocate of “global governance”, in the sense of “a much looser and less threatening concept of collective organization and regulation without coercion”, to solve common global problems such as transnational crime, terrorism, and environmental destruction (2004: 9). According to Slaughter, states are not unitary, but “disaggregated” and increasingly “networked” through information, enforcement, and harmonization networks (2004: 167)—producing | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | a world of governments, with all the different institutions that perform the basic functions of governments—legislation, adjudication, implementation—interacting both with each other domestically and also with their foreign and supranational counterparts. (2004: 5) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | A networked world order, she argues, | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | would be a more effective and potentially more just world order than either what we have today or a world government in which a set of global institutions perched above nation-states enforced global rules. (2004: 6–7) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Although Slaughter is keen to highlight the promise of “global governance through government networks” as “good public policy for the world and good national foreign policy” (2004: 261), she acknowledges that in contemporary world conditions of radical social, economic and political inequality between states and peoples, effective and fair global governance will require the networks comprising global governance to abide by the norms of “global deliberative equality”, toleration of reasonable and legitimate difference, and “positive comity” in the form of consultation and active assistance between organizations; in addition, global governance networks would need to be made more accountable through a system of checks and balances, and more responsive through the principle of subsidiarity (2004: 244–60). Without movement towards a more equitable world of mutual respect, however, it is difficult to see actually existing global governance networks operating in an impartial and generous spirit to help | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | all nations and their peoples to achieve greater peace, prosperity, stewardship of the earth, and minimum standards of human dignity. (2004: 166) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | In this vein, Thomas Weiss has lamented the intellectual and political shifts in perspective from world government to global governance, arguing that current voluntary associations, organizations and networks at the global level are “so obviously inadequate” to meeting global challenges that we | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | are obliged to ask ourselves whether we can approach anything that resembles effective governance for the world without institutions with some supranational characteristics at the global level. (2009: 264) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | While many contemporary international relations theorists seem to reject the feasibility, desirability, or necessity of world government, constructivist theorist Alexander Wendt has argued that the “logic of anarchy” contains within it the seeds of transformation towards a “global monopoly on the legitimate use of organized violence—a world state” (2003: 491). Using Aristotelian and Hegelian insights, Wendt offers a teleological account of the development of world order from an anarchic states system to a world state, arguing that | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | the struggle for recognition between states will have the same outcome as that between individuals, collective identity formation and eventually a state. (2003: 493) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Technological changes, especially those that increase the “costs of war” as well as “the scale on which it is possible to organize a state”, affect the struggle for recognition among states, undermining their self-sufficiency and making a world state “inevitable” (2003: 493–4). Wendt draws on the work of Daniel Deudney (1995 and 1999), who argued that the evolution of destructive technology makes states as vulnerable as individuals in a Hobbesian state of nature: | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Hence nuclear one-worldism—just as the risks of the state of nature made it functional for individuals to submit to a common power, changes in the forces of destruction increasingly make it functional for states to do so as well. (Wendt 2003: 508) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Deudney, however, has recently argued that the world state solution, involving a top-down hierarchical mode of government, is impractical and conceptually dead; his proposed alternative is a “negarchic”, republican-federalist conception of world order that solves the problems of anarchy through the development of regimes of mutual restraint and obligation, but without the risk of despotism or totalitarianism accompanying hierarchical world government (2019 and 2020). | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | According to Wendt, however, the path of world state formation is inevitable, and would be characterized by the emergence of “a universal security community”, in which members expect to resolve conflicts peacefully rather than through force; a “universal collective security” system that ensures the protection of each member should “crimes” occur; and a “universal supranational authority” that can make binding authoritative decisions about the collective use of force (2003: 505). Driving this transformation is the struggle for recognition, and the | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | political development of the system will not end until the subjectivity of all individuals and groups is recognized and protected by a global Weberian state. (2003: 506; for a critique of teleological arguments about institutional forms, see Levy 2020) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Wendt recognizes that powerful states enjoying the benefits of asymmetrical recognition may be most resistant to world state formation. He argues, however, that with the diffusion of greater violence potential to smaller powers (such as al-Qaeda and North Korea), | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | the ability of Great Powers to insulate themselves from global demands for recognition will erode, making it more and more difficult to sustain a system in which their power and privileges are not tied to an enforceable rule of law. (2003: 524) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Based on the assumption that systems tend to develop toward stable end-states, a world state in which individuals and | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | states alike will have lost the negative freedom to engage in unilateral violence, but gained the positive freedom of fully recognized subjectivity. (2003: 525) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | is the inevitable end-state of the human struggle for recognition. At the same time that Wendt sees world state formation as an inevitable trajectory of the struggle for recognition between individuals and groups, he argues that a world state could take various forms: while collectivizing organized violence, it need not collectivize on a global scale culture, economy or local politics; while requiring a structure that “can command and enforce a collective response to threats”, it need not abolish national armies, or require a single UN army; and while it requires a procedure for making binding choices, | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | it would not even require a world “government”, if by this we mean a unitary body with one leader whose decisions are final. (2003: 506) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | We now turn to debates about world government among contemporary liberal theorists. Since the publication of John Rawls’s landmark A Theory of Justice in 1971, liberal theorists such as Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge have sought to formulate a cosmopolitan version of liberalism by extending Rawlsian principles of domestic justice to the international realm. According to Beitz, a cosmopolitan liberal conception of international morality is | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | concerned with the moral relations of members of a universal community in which state boundaries have a merely derivative significance. (1979 [1999a: 181–2]) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Cosmopolitan liberalism evaluates the morality of domestic and international institutions based on “an impartial consideration of the claims of each person who would be affected” (1999b: 287). A cosmopolitan liberal theory of global justice thus begins with a conception of humanity as a common moral community of free and equal persons. There is debate among contemporary theorists about the relationship and distinction between moral cosmopolitanism and political or institutional cosmopolitanism in the form of a world state or government (Beitz 1994; Dufek 2013; Ypi 2013; Cabrera 2018 and 2019). | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Contemporary liberal theorists have traditionally argued that world government, in the form of a global leviathan with supreme legislative, executive, adjudicative and enforcement powers, is largely unnecessary to solve problems such as war, global poverty, and environmental catastrophe. World government so conceived is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve the aims of a liberal agenda (Yack 2012). Even cosmopolitan liberals have not argued that moral cosmopolitanism necessarily entails political cosmopolitanism in the form of a world government. | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Although Rawls himself rejects cosmopolitan liberalism, disagreeing with his liberal critics on several critical issues related to global distributive justice, they are united in their agreement that a world state is not part of a liberal ideal for world order. In his treatise on global order, The Law of Peoples, Rawls forwards the concept of a society of peoples, governed by principles that will accommodate “cooperative associations and federations among peoples, but will not affirm a world-state” (1999: 36). He explicitly states his reason for rejecting the idea of a world state or government: | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Here I follow Kant’s lead in Perpetual Peace (1795) in thinking that a world government—by which I mean a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central governments—would either be a global despotism or else would rule over a fragile empire torn by frequent civil strife as various regions and peoples tried to gain their political freedom and autonomy. (1999: 36) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Other liberal thinkers have similarly rejected the desirability of world government in the form of a domestic state writ large to cover the entire globe (Beitz 1999b: 182; Jones 1999: 229; Tan 2000 and 2004; Pogge 1988: 285; Satz 1999: 77–8; Risse 2012). | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | In a related objection, “communitarian” liberals, such as Michael Walzer, argue against a centralized world government as a threat to social pluralism. Walzer thus endorses “sovereign statehood” as “a way of protecting distinct historical cultures, sometimes national, sometimes ethnic/religious in character”, and rejects a centralized global order because he does not | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | see how it could accommodate anything like the range of cultural and religious difference that we see around us today. … For some cultures and most orthodox religions can only survive if they are permitted degrees of separation that are incompatible with globalism. And so the survival of these groups would be at risk; under the rules of the global state, they would not be able to sustain and pass on their way of life. (2004: 172 and 176) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | At the same time that distinct communities may constitute intrinsic human goods, Walzer also endorses social and political pluralism as an instrumental good: given the diversity of human values, he argues that they | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | are best pursued politically in circumstances where there are many avenues of pursuit, many agents in pursuit. The dream of a single agent—the enlightened despot, the civilizing imperium, the communist vanguard, the global state—is a delusion. (2004: 188) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | A world of distinct, autonomous communities may be important to curbing the appetite of a hegemonic or global state to re-make the world in its own image. Liberal nationalists and communitarians thus object to world government due to the homogeneity argument—world government may be so strong and pervasive as to create a homogenizing effect, obliterating distinct cultures and communities that are intrinsically valuable. Liberal political pluralists (Muñiz-Fraticelli 2014) are concerned that any state, including a world government, could destroy associative groups that constitute legitimate sources of political authority; and by destroying the rich social pluralism that animates human life (Walzer 2004), produce a loss of value (Miller 2007; Valentini 2012). | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | The liberal rejection of world government, however, does not amount to an endorsement of the conventional system of sovereign states or the contemporary international order, “with its extreme injustices, crippling poverty, and inequalities” (Rawls 1999: 117). Rawls’s rejection of a world government does not negate the legitimacy and desirability of establishing international or transnational institutions to regulate cooperation between peoples and even to discharge certain common inter-societal duties. Thus, after his rejection of a world state, Rawls goes on to say that in a well-ordered society of peoples, organizations | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | (such as the United Nations ideally conceived) may have the authority to express for the society of well-ordered peoples their condemnation of unjust domestic institutions in other countries and clear cases of the violation of human rights. In grave cases they may try to correct them by economic sanctions, or even by military intervention. The scope of these powers covers all peoples and reaches their domestic affairs. (1999: 36) | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Rawls’s vision of global order clearly rejects a world of atomistic sovereign states with the traditional powers of absolute sovereignty. Instead, his global vision includes “new institutions and practices” to “constrain outlaw states when they appear” (1999: 48), to promote human rights, and to discharge the duty of assistance owed to burdened societies. | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | Thomas Pogge argues that realizing | world-government |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/world-government/ | a peaceful and ecologically sound future will … require supranational institutions and organizations that limit the sovereignty rights of states more severely than is the current practice. (2000: 213) | world-government |