Everyone Who Wants World Government Has No Route to It, Except One

A surprising number of serious people think the world should eventually have one government. Sam Harris, near the end of the fourth chapter of The End of Faith, gathers several of them and adds his own voice. Bertrand Russell argued for it after the bomb. Einstein signed letters for it. The idea recurs in every generation that has looked at the scale of the problems and noticed that no institution is the same size as the problems.

The reasons they give are consistent. Nuclear weapons cannot be held safely by two hundred sovereigns who each get to decide alone. Climate does not respect a border, and neither does a pathogen. Wars between states are the oldest and largest killer we have not abolished, and the only proven way to abolish war between two territories is to put them under one law. Whatever one thinks of the details, the logic is not silly: problems that are global need a decision-maker that is global, and we do not have one.

The Concession They All Make

Now notice what every one of these authors does next. They concede that world government is a very long way off, and they admit they have no idea how to get there.

This is not a small gap in the argument. It is the argument's entire practical content. A destination with no route is a wish, and the people proposing it are honest enough to say so. Harris says it. Russell said it. The literature is full of the sentence "of course, this is not going to happen soon", followed by nothing.

So I want to ask the question they leave open, and I think there is an answer.

Why There Is No Route From Here

Start with why the route is missing. World government would mean the existing states giving up sovereignty to a body above them. Who, in the current arrangement, would decide to do that?

The governments would. And the governments are precisely the bodies that lose everything in the transaction. A national government that hands its powers upward has abolished itself. No representative regime, of any party, has an incentive to do that, and none ever has except at gunpoint after losing a war.

This is not a matter of persuading them. It is structural. The only actors with the authority to build a world government are the actors whose existence it would end. Every plan that begins "the nations must agree to" has already failed, because the nations are their governments, and their governments are the obstacle.

The problem is the same one I have described on this blog in other contexts: a decision that would benefit the public at large and cost the intermediaries their position will not be taken by the intermediaries. It does not matter how good the decision is.

The One Actor That Does Not Lose

There is one party to this that does not lose anything by the creation of a world government, and it is the public.

A citizen of a country whose foreign policy, defence and climate policy are decided globally has lost nothing he actually had. He did not decide those things before; his government did. What he loses is a flag on the decision, and what he might gain is decisions that are the right size for the problem.

So the question becomes how the public, rather than its governments, could ever be the party at the table. And here the direction is clear even if the path is long. A population that decides its own national questions directly is a population that can decide, directly, to pool a question with its neighbours. A referendum in two countries on a shared arrangement is a step toward a shared arrangement. A hundred such steps, on questions where the interest is obviously shared, is a great deal of world government built from below, with no minister ever having to vote himself out of a job.

Representative regimes cannot take that path, because every step of it runs through the bodies that lose. Direct democracies could, because every step of it runs through the body that does not.

Why This Is the First Step and Not the Last

I want to be careful about the size of the claim.

I am not saying direct democracy in a few countries produces world government. I am saying it is the first step in a long sequence that currently has no first step at all. The authors who want the destination have been standing at the trailhead for eighty years looking for a path and not finding one, because every path they can see begins with the governments. The one that begins with the publics is the one they have not looked at, largely because publics deciding things directly is itself considered fanciful.

But consider the order of difficulty. Getting one country to decide its large questions by direct vote is hard and has been partially done: Switzerland does it, several American states do parts of it. Getting two hundred governments to abolish themselves has never been done and no one can describe how it would begin.

If you want the second thing, the first is the only place I can find to start. The world government literature has a destination and no route. Direct democracy is a route, and it happens to point there, whether or not anyone who walks it intends to arrive.