Comments: The Inaugural Conference of the Post-Cold-War Movement for World Government

Abstract

What happened at the Brisbane conference on the Practical Politics of Global Integration, held on 13-14 June 2016, and is happening within the ranks of international-relations scholars, is the emergence of a school of thinking about world politics that goes beyond global governance (itself dating only to 1995) to that of global government. Books like those below mark a historic beginning of renewed efforts to restore the ideal of world government to respectability among international relations scholars, historians, and national government officials. Historically, the ideal of world federal government was at a height at the end of the Second World War — when the liberal and socialist democracies were united and the United Nations to keep the peace was established —, but the breakup of the grand alliance and the coming of the Cold War seemed to end the prospects of a democratic and constitutionally limited world republic. Nevertheless, the end of the Cold War (1990) opened a historic opportunity to craft a new world order, as President George H.W. Bush said. Was the opportunity squandered in an American“unipolar moment”? Not definitely. Economic globalization has overcome any brief U.S. unilateralism in international relations today. Globalization is the present reality, as President Bill Clinton said in 2000. Hence, theories of world politics are giving way from Realism to Liberal Internationalism, Constructionism, Cosmopolitanism, Functionalism and the like. After publication of Our Global Neighborhood in 1995, advanced theorists began searching for a term to cover increasing functional cooperation among states, without directly implying the merging of sovereignties as in the former federalist movement. They came up with the term governance, which now is in common usage in a wide variety of contexts, international and domestic. Most writers shy away from global “government”, for it sounds premature; but they will say “governance”. Something more than cooperation. But by Brisbane there was unembarrassed and plain spoken consideration of world government. Governance does not come to grips with the interstate anarchy, or provide effective solutions to global problems beyond the capacities of nation states to solve alone, like climate change or mass migrations, or solve the weaknesses of the United Nations. World government is a myth, as G.A. Borgese used to say,“incorporating the faith and hope of its age, mediating between the ideal and the real, and calling the mind to action.” In 2016, it was significant, to my mind, that this inaugural conference on world government was held in Australia — generally regarded as on the far side of the Earth — in order to provide a starting point for the global integration of humanity in pursuit of peace. Where else could it go but up? But the new scholarship on world government is not the image of the old world federalist movement. The new thinking does not see