Campbell Craig
“The Resurgent Idea of World Government”
Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 22.2, pp. 133-142, 2008

Thomas G. Weiss
“What Happened to the Idea of World Government”
International Studies Quarterly, no. 53, pp. 253-271, 2009


In the March 2009 issue of The Federalist Debate, we highlighted, with regard to an article by Paul Kennedy, the current in-depth revision by American historians of the “one and only thought”. The conviction is spreading that the prosecution of the globalization process requires international cooperation and potentially supra-national institutions. Co-operation is the globalization's raison d'état, like war is for the national States. The current debate, although we shall not underestimate dangerous nationalist, micro-nationalist and tribalist backfires, is rather concerned about the alternative between Global Governance and World Government.

The hostility to federalist ideas has subsided in many authors for whom the profession of “realism” constituted a precursory certificate of scientific worth. Campbell Craig and Thomas Weiss tellingly represent the revision in progress, as testified by the passages we reproduce below.

Campbell Craig observes: “The idea of world government is returning to the mainstream of scholarly thinking about international relations. Universities in North America and Europe now routinely advertise for positions in ‘global governance’ a term that few would have heard of a decade ago. Chapters on cosmopolitanism and governance appear in many current international relations (IR) textbooks. Leading scholars are wrestling with the topic, including Alexander Wendt, perhaps now America's most influential IR theorist, who has recently suggested that a world government is simply ‘inevitable’. While some scholars envision a more formal world state, and others argue for a much looser system of "global governance," it is probably safe to say that the growing number of works on this topic can be grouped together into the broader category of ‘world government’, a school of thought that supports the creation of international authority (or authorities) that can tackle the global problems that nation-states currently cannot”.

Craig believes that that idea, which was absolutely popular in the 1940s, lost vigor after “the failure of the Baruch Plan to establish international control over atomic weaponry in late 1946 signalled its demise, for it cleared the way (as the plan's authors quietly intended) for the United States and the Soviet Union to continue apace with their respective atomic projects. What state would place its trust in a world government when there were sovereign nations that possessed, or could soon possess, atomic bombs? Certainly, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was willing to do so, and once the two states committed themselves to the international rivalry that became known as the Cold War, the impossibility of true global government became obvious and the campaign in favor of it diminished”.

The idea became topical again when the inability of the national States to deal successfully with problems putting at risk the world population, like that of nuclear proliferation, became apparent, so much so that the World Federalist Movement (WFM), Craig observes, has today about 50,000 members all over the world. “Theorists considering world government regard the thermonuclear dilemma as particularly salient, because it epitomizes the dangers of the continuation of the interstate system. As long as sovereign nations continue to possess nuclear arsenals, nuclear war is possible, and the only apparent way to put a permanent end to this possibility is to develop some kind of world government, an entity with sufficient power to stop states – not to mention subnational groups – from acquiring nuclear arsenals and waging war with them”. On this point there is by now a widespread agreement among scholars.

“Scholars nevertheless disagree whether an informal, loose form of governance is sufficient, or whether a more formal world state is necessary… The more important objections to world government posit not that it is impractical but that it is unnecessary and even undesirable. According to one such argument, the world should be governed not by a genuinely international authority but rather by the United States… The case against Pax Americana, however, can be boiled down to one word: Iraq. The war in Iraq has shown that military operations undertaken by individual nation-states lead, as they have always done, to nationalist and tribal reactions against the aggressor that pay no heed to larger claims of superior or inferior civilizations… In conceiving and executing its war in Iraq, it would have been difficult for the Bush administration to undermine the project of Pax Americana more effectively had it tried to do so. The United States could choose in future to rally other states behind it if it can persuade them of a global threat that must be vanquished. But, as Wendt implies, to do that successfully is effectively to begin the process of world-state formation”. With regard to the objections to a world government raised by Kant himself, Craig expresses his opinion considering them out-of-date in the present conditions: “One can raise two points in response to Kant's deeply important concern. First, he wrote in the 18th century, when the spectre of war was not homicidal and the planet did not face such global crises as climate change and trans-national terrorism. International politics as usual was not as dangerous an alternative to his vision of perpetual peace as it potentially is today. Second, as Deudney argues, there is one central reason to believe that a world government could avoid the temptations of tyranny and actually exist as a small, federal authority rather than a global leviathan. This is the indisputable fact that – barring extraterrestrial invasion – a world government would have no need for a policy of external security. States often become increasingly tyrannical as they use external threats to justify internal repression and authoritarian policies. These threats, whether real or imagined, have throughout history and to the present day been used by leaders to justify massive taxation, conscription, martial law, and the suppression of dissent. But no world government could plausibly make such demands”. Craig's conclusion is: “the deepest argument for world government – the spectre of global nuclear war – will endure as long as sovereign nation-states continue to deploy nuclear weaponry. Whatever occurs over the near-term future, that is a fact that is not going away. The great distinction between the international system prevailing in Niebuhr and Morgenthau's day and the system in our own time is that the chances of attaining some form of world government have been radically enhanced by the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a unipolar order. This condition, however, will not last forever”.

Thomas Weiss too cites some cornerstones of the thought about the United Nations and formulates a self-criticism of the scholars' contribution to the responsibility of its missed democratic evolution: “The usual explanation for this sorry state of affairs and institutional disarray is a lack of political will, great power politics, or classic collective action problem… but blame also should be apportioned to us scholars for our lack of imagination. We analysts of international organizations have strayed away from paradigmatic rethinking. We have lost our appetite for big and idealistic plans because so many previous ones have failed…”.

Weiss too, like Craig, tells us a story about the retreating from the idea of government to that of governance, and explains the confusion between the two, concluding that “as is worth repeating, at the national level we have governance plus government. And, despite well-known weaknesses, lapses, and incapacities, the expectation in Berlin, New Delhi, Brasilia, and Johannesburg is that existing institutions are routinely and predictably expected to exert authority and control. For the globe, we have only the feeblest of imitations-institutions that routinely help ensure postal delivery and airline safety, to be sure, but that routinely do far too little to address such life-threatening problems as climate change and ethnic cleansing”.

To the causes for such a state of affairs highlighted by Craig, Weiss adds the most recent: “September 11th and the Bush administration turned customary wariness toward international organizations into visceral hostility toward the UN. One now requires unknown powers of imagination to envision a Washington, DC, where the idea of world government would be a staple of public policy analysis. Yet in 1949, House Concurrent Resolution 64 argued in favor of ‘a fundamental objective of the foreign policy of the United States to support and strengthen the United Nations and to seek its development into a world federation’. It was sponsored by 111 representatives, including two future presidents, John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford, as well as such other future prominent politicians… Throughout the 1940s, it was impossible in the United States to read periodicals, listen to the radio, or watch newsreels and not encounter the idea of world government”. What happened then to the idea of World Government? “The short answer to the question […] is: the United States became obsessed with anticommunism; Europe focused on the construction of a regional economic and political federation; the burgeoning number of post-colonial countries shifted their preoccupations toward nonalignment and Third World solidarity; and scholars got out of the business”.

Also about the dispute between the supporters of governance and those of government Weiss overcomes his own previous positions and invites his entire profession to change their mind: “Proponents of global governance – and it would be difficult to say that I am not in this category, having edited the journal with that title from 2000 to 2005 – make a good-faith effort to emphasize how to best realize a stable, peaceful, and well-ordered international society in the absence of a unifying global authority. But this pragmatism also reflects an assumption that no powerful global institutions will appear any time soon, a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. But agency is essential; and better problem solving will not simply materialize without more muscular intergovernmental organizations, ?rst and foremost those of the UN system. Paradoxically, intergovernmental organizations seem more and more marginal to our thinking at exactly the moment when enhanced multilateralism is so sorely required. And ironically, this reality coincides with a period when globalization – and especially advances in information and communication technologies along with reduced barriers to trans-national exchanges of goods, capital, and services, of people, ideas, and cultural influences – makes something resembling institutions with at least some characteristics of supra-nationality appear feasible… What gets lost as we struggle to comprehend an indistinct patchwork of authority is that current intergovernmental organizations are insufficient in scope and ambition, inadequate in resources and reach, and incoherent in policies and philosophies. It is humbling to realize how much our aspirations have diminished, how feeble our current expectations are in comparison with earlier generations of analysts who did not shy away from elements of a world government and robust intergovernmental bodies. At Bretton Woods in 1944, John Maynard Keynes and the British delegation proposed a monetary fund equal to half of annual world imports while Harry Dexter White and the American side proposed a smaller fund with one-sixth of annual world imports. As the late Hans Singer sardonically noted: ‘Today’s Fund is only 2 per cent of annual world imports. The difference between Keynes’s originally proposed 50 per cent and the actual 2 per cent is a measure of the degree to which our vision of international economic management has shrunk” (Singer 1995, 19).

“Like the United Nations itself, global governance is a bridge between the old and the as yet unborn. It cannot solve those pesky problems without passports that are staring us in the face: global warming, genocide, nuclear proliferation, migration, money-laundering, terrorism, and worldwide pandemics like AIDS… I still firmly believe that human beings can organize themselves to solve global problems. There are numerous ways to think about an eventual supra-national global entity, and human agency is an essential element for every one… Perhaps as much as any recent event, the global financial and economic meltdown that began last year… made even clearer what many less serious previous crises had not – namely the risks, problems, and enormous costs of a global economy without adequate international institutions, democratic decision making, and powers to bring order, spread risks, and enforce compliance. ‘The global financial and political crises are, in fact, closely related’ no less an observer than Henry Kissinger (2009) wrote on Inauguration Day, but the financial collapse ‘made evident the absence of global institutions to cushion the shock.’ Most countries, and especially the major powers, are not ready to accept the need for elements of global government and the inroads that this would entail for their own autonomy. Nonetheless, the logic of interdependence and a growing number of systemwide and life-threatening crises place this possibility more squarely on the international agenda and make parts of a world federal government an idea that is both necessary and possible… At a bare minimum we require more creative thinking about more robust global organizations. It is certainly not far-fetched to imagine that over the coming decades we will see a gradual advance of intergovernmental economic agreements including a global currency along the lines that Europe has nurtured since the Second World War. Who would not have been denounced as a crank seven decades ago for thinking that political and economic union were possible among France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other European states?”