World Government

The creation of a strongly empowered world government has been advocated by some as the necessary defense against some external threats faced by states—just as the domestic state has been seen as the necessary means of protecting individuals from the threats inherent in a state of nature. Others have looked to a world government as a means of ensuring that all persons' rights are secured and that all have access to sufficient resources and opportunities. The form such a government would take varies across accounts, from a strong central government holding a monopoly on global military power to a less cohesive set of institutions to which states have ceded some aspects of sovereignty, similar to the current European Union.

Although historically it has had some prominent advocates, including Dante Alighieri and, in the early 20th century, novelist H. G. Wells, world government in general has been relegated to the fringes of mainstream academic and popular discourse. It has been seen as not feasible, or not desirable because of fears of global tyranny perpetrated by a comprehensive global power. There are two notable periods of exception. The first occurred from about 1944 to 1950, spurred by the creation of nuclear weapons and the U.S. destruction of [Page 1811]Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, during World War II. Then, such leading intellectuals as Albert Einstein argued that a world government must be created to contain the terrible new power. Einstein staged a publicity campaign for world government, and written works promoting the idea attracted large popular audiences. Resolutions were introduced into the U.S. Congress supporting the creation of a world federation, or the transformation of the United Nations along world-state lines, and foreign affairs committees in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate staged major hearings on such proposals in 1949–1950.

In the same period, Henry Usborne, member of Parliament (MP), used his maiden speech to the House of Commons to call for Britain to lead the way to a United Commonwealth of Nations. He went on to found the All-Party Parliamentary Group for World Government, which, at its peak, claimed membership of more than 200 MPs. Support for a union of Atlantic democracies was formally affirmed in 1949 by the foreign ministers of Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium, as well as leading political figures in Canada and the United States. In France, such prominent intellectuals as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, along with tens of thousands of street demonstrators, supported calls for a world government.

The initial peak of world government advocacy diminished relatively quickly, amid the intensification of the Cold War and U.S. fears about Soviet global designs. For decades afterward, the world government concept had relatively little public support and few academic defenders. By the 1990s, however, in the optimism that accompanied the end of the Cold War and the growing emphasis placed on economic and other forms of globalization, academics were again giving serious attention to world government. Some speculated about the rise of a global currency or fully integrated global “internal market,” as well as the erosion of state sovereignty and possible decline of the state itself as a primary political power. Perhaps the most influential account was offered by economist Dani Rodrik. He argued that some form of global government was the likely outcome of a “trilemma” arising in an age of global economic integration. If the benefits of economic integration were to be fully realized, he asserted, either domestic democratic politics must be suppressed, to avoid undue interference with global markets, or such politics will be shifted upward to the global level, with nation-states playing less prominent roles. Rodrik argued that the global expansion of democratic politics was the most likely outcome.

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