A few years ago, I thought I would not live to see a unified world government, but it now seems to be coming very quickly. The silver lining in the global financial crisis might be the end of the sovereign nation state. The current system with its economic disparity and endless wars might soon go the way of feudalism. European leaders are calling for a global “New Deal” with a unified set of financial regulations for the whole world. Global warming demands a unified regulation of industry. It’s coming and its going to be great! I might even live to see war become permanently illegal : )
A global federation of semi autonomous states, a global bill of rights, a single global currency, health care and education for all the world’s children. All these things are possible and I see them coming soon.
Some would say I’m not patriotic, but I would disagree. The world is my fatherland, and all people are my brothers.
The trend of the crisis has actually been the opposite of what you decribe. National protectionism has so far been the biggest distinguishing characteristic. States promising to help the domestic market, and at the same time promising very clearly that not a single penny of the tax payers money will make it across the national border into foreign hands. Some have even gone as far as calling it “pacifistic mercantilism”. I agree with you tho that there are some bright spots, but a world government is still very distant. I do however believe that the european union will be officially pronounced a federation within the next 50-100 years and that the political climate will become more and more polarized. Bigger nations, sure, but I dont think it will be a possitive thing.
and about that patriotism… it’s one of those ism’s that should have been left behind in the trenches of WWI.
The european union is a democratic entity. Just because more people are introduced to a system, i.e. each vote weights less, it does not neccessarily mean it will be less democratic. Even in a world government power could still be divided (or not) between different administrative bodies, hence the power would not be absolute.
In any case since there has never been any world government so stating your opinions as if they were to be obvious to everyone is a bit lame.
Why would national borders be a more just or natural state of dividation than any other administartive region? Say we were to split Spain into three sections, and turn it back to Castille, Leon and Aragon. Why would that be any less justified or democratic than anything else? It’s not like the nations of the world are perfect organs. Just look at giants such as China, Russia or India and then look at the puny states of Europe.
As long as there is a wide variety of states each with their own unique legislative institutions. There are some things that ought to be common across all people and other things that ought to be particular to each individual (or group of individuals) depending on their unique idiosyncracies and dispositions. It’s similar to why there should be competition in the marketplace - so long as there is healthy competition and the consumer has a wide variety of options, it don’t matter whether the competition consists of Microsoft and Apple in particular, Burger King and McDonald’s, Nike and Reebok, etc.
If the world is one state, then when that state becomes corrupt and tyranny emerges, as it always does, who will liberate it? Where will all the refugees go? This is why global government is synonymous with totalitarianism. There is no competition. The pond scum always floats to the top, no matter how many checks and balances are in place. America is a prime example of that.
Running the government of a state can not be compared to and has nothing to do with running companies in a market economy. This has been layed down by economists, sociologists, structuralists and free thinkers alike over and over again, so please keep those metaphores hidden away. However if I interpret your post correctly you go with the good ol’ “diversity leads to equality” and although that is correct in every way there are just as many examples of ridiculously centralized states where equality has prospered. If diversity → equality, as opposed to standardization → discrimination would be true then anarchistic societies would be the best. True enough we can’t really know because they haven’t existed in modern time but I’m sure that most people are hesitant to trying.
As with all revolutions it would be executed from within. The french, american, russian, iranian, turkish, spanish revolutions were all more or less strictly internal wars, and the list of successfull ones grows ever longer. If you look at the endless times a foreign power has tried to “liberate” a country or people you can see that in almost all cases they have ultimately failed, just look at the bloody history of Europe. Or to take more contemporary examples Vietnam, the british-irish “war” of the 90’s, the Kuwait war, the numerous wars between Israel and it’s neighbours etc. Each has in the end resulted in, if any, marginal changes to borders and power balances.
It’s a perfectly good metaphore for the present purposes. You people who nit-pick at every little discrepancy between the metaphore and what it represents don’t even understand why they’re used. Of course there’s pently of ways that government and capitalist markets are nothing alike, but a few of the ways in which they are alike, which seems lost on you, applies in this case. They are alike, not in that diversity = equality, as you misinterpreted, but in that it doesn’t matter who the players in the competative game are. A handful of competing businesses could merge and breakup in a whole assortment of different combinations, and so long as there remained a handful of them to compete with one another, the market overall would continue to function as it always did. Just the same, it doesn’t matter which country’s border the law is confined to, or whether those borders are merged with other borders or broken up into smaller states, so long as each one’s laws are confined there, the purpose of keeping each nation’s laws within its borders is still met.
Neither government nor market is a game and to describe those part of it as players is both done poorly and a bit distastefully, especially considering recent events in the financial market. Companies in a market economy are there to compete with each other to serve their customers needs by pushing down prices and offering better service however states does not exist so they can compete with each other. Rather the other way around. I am glad that many of the worlds countries seems to have -if only temporarily- left competition behind in the trenches of WW1, on the battlefields of WW2 and most recently in the arms race of the cold war. Competition between states is not for the benefit for it’s inhabitants nor anyone else, but some among the wealthy and influental are sometimes attracted to the possible benefits of competition.
And “keeping each nation’s laws within it’s borders” can still apply since the nation is the planet and the borders are the upper layers of the atmosphere.
Just as you have to make any country. Your point being that you can’t actually walk on the border between two nations and see a large black line as when it is drawn on a map? Nations are forged through revolution, personal unions, political unions (I rpobably forgot something) or, most commonly, through war. I do however think that modern man is able to create sympathy and unity across large geographical distances between cultures, ethnicities and religions without bloodshed (once again points at the state of the art european union which many sociologists already claim to be more of a federation than a union of independent states)
They’re already made - that’s my point - and no it doesn’t matter that they are the particular countries they are. Like you said, Spain could have remained Castille, Leon and Aragon, and my point would still stand. The law is too powerful a tool of mass control to hand it over to an elite few. Better to leave it in the hands of a local government so that, if it is abused, such abuses remain local.
I do like your optimism for global philanthropy though.
Talking in terms of players and game theory is in no way disrespectful. I think you might be confusing the connotations of those words with the different connotations of similar words in your language. I would exept almost any professor to use ‘game’ language when describing these types of entities.
I’ve got a better example then those. WWII. Where would we be right now if it weren’t for America joining Great Britain in the fight and liberating most of Europe from the control of the Nazi party? I know exactly where we would be. The United National Socialist States of Deutschland! Is that the kind of world you want to live in? That is the kind we would have with a world government. How would you incite a world rebellion? It would be nearly impossible. With the type of spy technology available to government agencies, there will be no successful insurrections in the future. This is why it is critical to make the right choices right now. We have to have a balance of power to keep things from getting out of hand. World government is not such a balance. It is absolute power, and it will absolutely be corrupted. And when it does, it will be too late. How would we fight a rebellion with no food or weapons?
Also, a lot of those revolutions were incited by the Rothschilds who were trying to get rid of the monarchs.
I see your point but as I said, the EU is a very good example of centralization and unification of very old states states. some has been in existance since the fall of the roman empire. Another thing is that for someone to be able to malpractice power they’d first have to convince everyone that they are actually not power hungry psychopaths and I would naively think that it is much harder to please the opinion of the whole world than the opinion of a country or a contintent. Moreover there would be no need for presidents or prime ministers, that is one person who is a representative for the country since there is no one to represent us to. Having the ruling party create a “flat” government where there are secrataries/ministers in many different areas but without a head of government is plausible. They would of course need someone who was ultimately responsible for what the government did, such as a minister of government, but someone in such a possition could have it only to observe that government carried out the edicts of the parliment. In any case if a world government would ever come into existance sometime in the future I dont think it will be organized in the classical way a state is today, with a head of state and government etc. The entire planet is a too big place for that.
Thank you for that but I think I’m capable enough to interpret metahpors for myself. Sweden is actually the worlds best english speaking country that doesn’t have english as it’s mother tongue you know
I still think saying that those who hold millions of fates in their hands, through either government or private comany are playing a game is a very ill term. Especially considering the trends in the liberal democracies of the world toward social liberalism, toward enviromentalism, toward ecology and toward a very roboust system of regulation in certain markets. The players in a game metaphor is simply out-of-date.
Germany agressed the allies, not the other way around. The allies didn’t as much liberate europe as Germany attacked it. And if you look at the world war it actually was, and then look at the geopolitical differances after the war you can see that only Germany and Poland were changed by it. In Italy and Japan there was only a change of government. If that doesn’t convince you count the number of wars that has existed between states in mans history and check how many that ended with a white peace or minor changes. My point remains.
That’s true, but I’m not saying a unification of several states is bound to end in failure - it may carry on for quite some time as a functional and prosperous place to live - but you do run the following risk: that if the system should fail in terms of political corruption, every citizen in the federation will suffer. I’m still talking strictly about legislation here, so I think that even if a unified federation of states (like the EU) were allowed to grow and prosper, it’s laws should remain local to each state, thereby reducing the shear number of citizens who would suffer should certain local power holders turn corrupt.
I actually thought of a better analogy than a capitalist market: I don’t know what you call them, but oil tankers partition their hull into compartments that can close or open. That way, if there’s an oil spill, they can close off that compartment so that only the oil within it leaks out, and all other compartments keep their oil safe and secure inside. Keeping the law compartmentalized within certain borders (whether national, regional, or something else entirely) can serve the same purpose. If those laws become corrupt because some power hungry dictator wants to weild them for his own purposes, it doesn’t have to ‘leak’ out to other areas of the world.
I’m skeptical about this. When I look at the reactions of citizens to questionable acts carried out by men in power, I see a frightening amount of apathy and passivism. Just think about the Patriot Act. Furthermore, who’s to say that if a politician is able to convince the people that he’s an OK guy, he isn’t pulling the wool over their eyes? That’s more or less the trick of the trade. Even in democracy, we see it happen all the time. Deomcracy is not a system in which the politicians don’t become corrupt or power hungry; it’s a system that prevents that corruption and power hunger from harming the people (and even then, only to certain degrees and extents).
Meh, perhaps. I don’t know. I don’t think we’ve had any precedents for this sort of thing, have we? None come to mind really.
It could work, maybe, but I would strongly recommend putting that “minister of government” in place, and rather than a minister, I’d say make it a house of representatives. It needs to be an organization that speaks for and has the interests of the people in mind. That would be the main point, right? To prevent the government from becoming corrupt and harmful to the people? I agree that it would need to be prevy to every government policy, action, and contrivance. Nothing should be allowed to unfold behind closed doors. It should therefore also exercise the function of disclosing what it knows about the government to the public.
What do you base this on? There are many very old federations in existance, to name a few the United States, Russia, Switzerland (the oldest, dating back to medieval times), Venezuela, Australia and Ethiopia. These are today regarded as more or less obvious states and no one could ever imagine how or why they would split up. I think these examples also very diverse and covers most dangers when enlarging a state.
Religious differances - Ethiopia has 2/3 orthodox christian inhabitants and 1/3 muslim. The state has been in existance in it’s current form since 1991 and is an extremely stable and democratic country compared to it’s neighbours, such as Eritrea, Kenya and Somalia.
Revolution & dictatorship - Venezuela has had several military dictators but overthrown them all. It has entered and exited a political union with Colombia peacefully. Today it is at the same democratic & industrial level as it’s neigbours.
Cultural differances - The United States experienced the worlds rapidest mass immigration in history. It is true that there has been trouble regarding that, but that has happened in nation states to the same degree. Another example is South Africa, which before it released Swaziland and Lesotho as sovreign states was a federation.
Threatening neigbours - Switzerland… Need I say more, Hitler and Mussolino even respected their independence.
I don’t see any tendancy in that these countries have any problem’s that nation states do not have with corruption or any of the other things you mentioned. Your point was that in a federation the former nations needs to keep some legeslative/executive and maybe even legislative (as in the US) rights. However the only of my examples where it is actually so is, of course, the US. The rest of the countries today sees the “members” of the federation as mere administrative divisions, while in the past these were -in some cases- separate states.
In any case most sociologists see it as close to an impossiblity as it can get when it comes to the human sciences that a country in western europe or the US would become a dictatorship or in some way have a government which intentionally harm parts of it’s population or otherwise seek to profit in an immoral way from the power it has been given. Things such as freedom of speech and freedom of/from religion are so deeply rooted in our identity and our culture that it would require either the greatest rethorical ever to have walked the earth, or the largest conspiracy ever created to pull that off. Even if that were to happen the level of information and education we have aquired as unique individuals would end such a regime quite quickly. The only possible scenario I can think of is if our educational system became so crappy that we actually became stupider, but in that case no degree of regional rule would help anyway.
I see your point, but it is in no way a problem that applies only to or at a higher degree to federations, which you seem to recognize as well.
Yes a house of representatives is a good idea lol. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that, it’s a much more natural and obvious solution ^^
Another thing that hit me when I read this part is that there most likely would be a much lower degree of secrecy among the government when there is no longer any nation to threaten it. I realize that things such as terrorists, guerillas and other militant organizations that opose the legitimite government will exist even in a unified world government but if you completely remove the “national security” aspect I would at least hope that transparency would be better.
I don’t see how this addresses the point I was making. You seem to be arguing that it’s possible for a group of states to unify together and function well as one country and stay that way for a long time. I never said they couldn’t. But just because you can list examples doesn’t mean it’s bound to work out just as well in every possible case. There are plenty of examples in which the unification of seperate states where the law was universalized within that union proved harmful. Think about what happened to the German federation, for example, when Hitler seized power. Or how about the Soviet Union? Venezuela (ironically) is a third example - you say that Venezuela has been through several dictatorships as though that’s okay so long as they can be eventually overthrown. I tell you those dictatorships would have had a much harder time establishing themselves in the first place if Venezuela consisted of several legally independent states within a federation.
