Global Governance, Global Government

Institutional Visions for an Evolving World System

Luis Cabrera

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781438435909, 9781438435893
• eBook ISBN: 9781438435916
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Recent years have seen a remarkable resurgence in rigorous thought on global government by leading thinkers in international relations, economics, and political theory. Not since the immediate post-World War II period have so many scholars given serious attention to possibilities for global political integration. This book will be of interest to students of international relations, political theory, international economics, secuity and gender studies. It pulls together some of the leading current thinkers on global government into a conversation about provocative global institutional visions. Chapters here explore whether a world state should be viewed as inevitable, ways in which global moral and political communities might be sustained, and reasons to reject world government in favor of improvements to governance in the United Nations and other institutions.

1

Introduction: Global Institutional Visions

Luis Cabrera

Not since the world state “heyday” of 1944–1950 have so many prominent thinkers been exploring possibilities for global political integration. Then, in the aftermath of the horrors visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, it was the fear of global nuclear annihilation that spurred a remarkable range of scholars and public intellectuals, political figures and activists to press for the near-term creation of a global Leviathan. In recent years, leading researchers in international relations, economics, and political theory have offered rigorous, detailed treatments of whether trends in global economic integration could lead to some form of world government, or whether more comprehensive global political institutions should be created as a means of providing security against nuclear weapons or solving other, genuinely global problems. Numerous other recent commentators, while rejecting full global government, have proposed dramatic reforms in global governance, including the creation of a world parliament. This volume is part of an ongoing effort to bring together some of the leading current thinkers on global government and global governance and put them in conversation about their own, often provocative visions for the future of the world system.¹

A global government is understood here as a cohesive institutional system of fully global scope that exercises, at minimum, formal supremacy in decision making over states or other political subunits on a significant range of legislative and juridical activities. How extensive the range of activities must be for an entity to be considered a world government,² whether it must also exercise a full monopoly on the exercise of the legitimate means of collective violence, and how closely it must resemble the state in its governing organs or institutions, remain very much open to discussion, as the chapters in this volume begin to show³ (see also Craig 2008; Weiss 2009). However, commentators generally are careful to distinguish either that they are predicting or recommending the creation of some form of comprehensive global government capable of obtaining compliance from all states, or that they are discussing more limited proposals in global governance (see Marchetti 2006; Brock 2009, ch. 4).

Global governance will be understood broadly, as purposive and continuing coordination among actors in the global system to address specific problems. Actors involved in such coordination can include states, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, transnational lobbies and activist groups, professional networks, and others (see Commission on Global Governance 1995; Rosenau 1996, ch. 8; Murphy 2000; Wilkinson and Hughes 2002; Slaughter 2004; Held and Koenig-Archibugi 2005; Beeson 2007). Problems requiring such coordination could include border-spanning environmental issues, trade, crime, the regulation of financial or other services, the promotion of human rights standards.

Governance effected through formal suprastate institutions is a particular emphasis in this volume. Such institutions can usefully be conceived as being on a “compliance continuum” progressing from those engaged in primarily intergovernmental coordination, where exit or noncompliance has relatively low costs for state actors, to supranational institutions with some robust powers to obtain compliance with their rules or judgments. The World Trade Organization is often cited as a paradigm supranational institution—and one of near global scope, with more than 150 member states and growing—since its dispute resolution bodies are empowered to impose punitive tariffs on member states found out of compliance with trade rules (Jones 2004; Cass 2005). Some institutions of the European Union, in particular the European Court of Justice, also would be clearly at the supranational end of an “intergovernmental-to-supranational” continuum (see Stone-Sweet and Caporaso 1998; Stone-Sweet, Sandholtz, and Fligstein 2001), as would the institutions of the European human rights regime examined in this volume by Jamie Mayerfeld.

The global parliamentary institutions envisioned in many proposals for cosmopolitan democracy would fall toward the middle of the continuum. Such proposals generally are aimed at asserting, or reasserting, some popular control over political decision making. However, most advocates of promoting more democratic global governance, including Richard Falk and Christine Keating in this volume, reject the advocacy of comprehensive global government (see also Held 2004; Archibugi 2008). Institutions that have much weaker compliance powers in relation to their state members, for example the UN General Assembly, would be placed near the intergovernmental end of the continuum. Some such institutions play a significant role in these chapters. The importance of a range of noninstitutional global actors also is highlighted in relation to institutions. Overall, though, the emphasis here is at the supranational end of governance, on institutional visions for formalizing or routinizing the production of significant social goods in the global system. Thus, the accounts here are animated by the many of the same questions that drove authors in the world state heyday after World War II:

Can the conditions necessary for human flourishing, or for bare species survival, be established while even partial anarchy obtains in the global system?

Should the advocacy of global government be rejected, for fear of potential tyranny, forms of domination, or on other grounds, in favor of more limited institutions?

If so, can such institutions reliably obtain compliance from states, in particular if their mandates are not seen as broadly in alignment with the interests of powerful states?

In this introductory chapter, I first provide background for understanding the recent resurgence in world state thought with a brief examination of the post–World War II heyday. I then review some of the major recent contributions on both global government and forms of enhanced global governance, while working to situate each chapter in this volume within current key debates on global governance and global government.

The World State Heyday

What is unique today is the careful attention being given to world government and other plans for large-scale political union.… What was once the dream of poets and philosophers has become a serious factor in politics—something to be reckoned with by those who formulate and execute foreign policy.

—Percy Corbett, “Congress and Proposals for International Government”

When Yale international law scholar Percy E. Corbett penned those words for a 1950 article in International Organization, world government indeed seemed to many an idea whose time had come. Never before had the advocacy or exploration of the possibilities for global political integration been such a central part of academic, political, and societal discourse.⁴ In the immediate aftermath of the nuclear attacks on Japan, such luminaries as Albert Einstein set aside their core research activities to publicly campaign for a strongly empowered world government as necessary to prevent global nuclear war (Einstein 2007[1946]; see Caudill 1991). Einstein's colleagues on the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, including later Nobel laureate physicist Niels Bohr, stopped short of calling for global government but insisted on integrated global control of all nuclear weapons, as discussed in Campbell Craig's chapter in this volume. Mathematician, philosopher, and future Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell presaged some current authors in writing about the possibility of a world state emerging under hegemonic U.S. leadership, or perhaps in the aftermath of a future world war, on the way to developing a highly elaborated proposal for world federation (1945; see Russell 1959).⁵

Numerous world state arguments attracted wide readership in this period. Emery Reves's The Anatomy of Peace was printed in condensed form in 1945–46 by the mass-circulation Reader's Digest, and tens of thousands read and debated his propositions on global integration in groups organized by the magazine (see Heater 1996, 158). The case for a world state made by longtime Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins reached millions of readers, first in editorial form in the weeks after the bombing of Japan, and then in his 1945 book, Modern Man is Obsolete. Other influential works were produced by Cord Meyer, who in 1947 was elected president of the United World Federalists; and by federalist vicepresident Vernon Nash, who by the 1949 publication of his book, The World Must Be Governed, had made an estimated 1,500 public speeches advocating world government (see Usborne 1950). Earlier in the decade, the call by New York Times League of Nations correspondent Clarence K. Streit (1946) for an Atlantic Union of democratic states—one designed to lay the foundation for a full global government—also had attracted significant attention, ultimately selling more than three hundred thousand copies (see Wooley 1988, 55).

In Britain, Henry Usborne, MP, in his maiden speech to the House of Commons and in widely circulated written works, called for his country to take the lead in promoting global control of nuclear weapons and the creation of a democratic global government (Usborne 1946; see Baratta 2004, 162–66). He founded the All-Party Parliamentary Group for World Government, which at its height claimed more than two hundred members. In France, American actor and World War II bomber pilot Garry Davis, who had been given temporary residence by the French government after renouncing his U.S. citizenship and declaring himself a citizen of the world, inspired street demonstrations by tens of thousands there when, in late 1948, he interrupted the UN General Assembly with a speech demanding a global constituent assembly. In short order, such leading French intellectuals as Camus, Sartre, and Andre Gidé had expressed solidarity with him, and he was granted an audience with French President Vincent Auriol (Wooley 1988, 54–55).

In the United States, though a Truman administration plan to place nuclear weapons under international control ultimately failed, as explored in some detail by Campbell Craig here,⁶ the broader social movement for world government remained vigorous. By July 1949, twenty-two U.S. state legislatures had adopted a resolution calling for the president to lead the way in producing a world government constitution to be submitted to all countries for ratification, and other states had passed similar measures. In Congress, dozens of resolutions were introduced, beginning in 1947, either supporting some form of world federation, or supporting the transformation of the United Nations into a body capable of interpreting and enforcing international law.⁷ In 1949, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Relations was weighing eight discrete proposals on world or regional federation, and nineteen senators and more than one hundred representatives had backed a resolution stating that a fundamental objective of U.S. foreign policy should be the transformation of the United Nations into “a world federation open to all nations with defined and limited powers adequate to preserve peace and prevent aggression through the enactment, interpretation, and enforcement of world law” (Wooley 1988, 55).

Perhaps the most publicly visible high point came in October 1949, when the House Committee on Foreign Affairs staged two days of hearings under the heading, “To Seek the Development of the United Nations into a World Federation.” The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held fully two weeks' worth of similar hearings in February of the following year. Neither resulted in congressional action, however,⁸ and by the time of the Senate hearings, the U.S. State Department was expressing firm opposition to all resolutions under consideration (Wooley 1988, 56–57). Soon after, the outbreak of the Korean War and the cold war intensification that it signaled, along with internal conflicts in the United World Federalists (Hennessy 1954), and declining public support for supranationalism in general, combined to bring an abrupt end to the postwar global government heyday.

The Current Resurgence

Proposals for world federation or other forms of global government were consigned for some forty years to mostly the fringes of political, social and academic discourse. Some scholars of international law such as Louis Sohn and Grenville Clark (1966; see Heater 179), political theorists such as Kai Nielsen (1988; 2003), and serious journalistic commentators such as Jonathan Schell (1982)⁹ did continue to offer nuanced arguments in favor of global political integration. Additionally, some World Federalist–affiliated authors, notably Errol Harris and James Yunker, maintained the advocacy of near-term global federation as a solution to security and other issues.¹⁰ The ideal overall, however, was generally pushed aside in favor of arguments for more incremental reforms in international order, or by arguments in the realist and neorealist tradition skeptic...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• 1 Introduction: Global Institutional Visions
• 2 Why a World State Is Inevitable
• 3 How Far Will International Economic Integration Go?
• 4 Why World Government Failed after World War II: A Historical Lesson for Contemporary Efforts
• 5 Is a Global Ethic Possible?
• 6 A Global, Community-Building Language?
• 7 Global Democracy, Self-Determination, and the Possibility of Exit
• 8 Toward Humane Global Governance: Rhetoric, Desire, and Imaginaries
• 9 World State and Global Democracy
• 10 A Madisonian Argument for Strengthening International Human Rights Institutions: Lessons from Europe
• 11 Domination in Global Politics: Reflections on Freedom and an Argument for Incremental Global Change
• 12 Women's Organizations and Global Governance: The Need for Diversity in Global Civil Society
• Contributors