I’ve heard some hosts on talk radio talk about “those one-worlders.”
Now, I don’t know if this planet is ready for it now, but why would a one-world government be bad? To me it sounds like a good idea to implement (I’ve read a lot of sci-fi where this happens). We’re all human–how different can our interests really be?
From my perspective, I look at the US. At the time of it’s founding, the states were much more independent, but even though we have these separate divisions we are one country.
So what is bad about taking that last sentence and replacing “states” with “nations” and “country” with “world”?
I admit that part of the reason I read this thread about the new Chick tract, which references the evils of a one-world government. Is the oppostion to that idea purely from a Biblical standpoint, is it nationalism, is it prejudice, or all of the above.
A one-world government, at least a representative one, would be very bad for the first world. The vast majority of the world’s resources go to a vast minority of its people. Eliminating the various governmental wedges that uphold that, while not eliminating it entirely, would cause a huge shift. The super-rich would be okay, because they control concrete assets. The working class that lives primarily off wages would be fucked, because they would now be in open competition with everyone in the world. That would lower the wages due to both living standard divergence and overpopulation. The only holdup would be geography, and that only in industries where shipping costs represent a significant portion of cost. Then again, free trade laws are taking us there now.
Of course, it would be a huge improvement for most people. Aside from the economic advantages for the Third World, they would get much better government, they could expect a functional infrastructure, and they could leverage their voting power to dominate the political landscape. And presumably there would be little or no warfare, which tends to be more of a hardship on them than the developed countries.
Free trade laws are creating a global economy without a global polity: It is in a first-world corporation’s economic interest to outsource jobs to a third-world country because the latter typically has no trade unions, labor-protection laws, minimum-wage laws, or environmental-protection laws. If we had a world government, such laws could be enacted globally.
What BrainGluton said. All the folks harping against a one-world government would be perfectly fine to have such a beast, if they could put their guys and their priorities in charge. It’s the deep, unspoken fear that they’ll be the first ones against the wall when the revolution comes that puts 'em against the idea.
The reason it works in sci-fi is because if there’s an alien civilization, a one-world Earth government doesn’t exist in a vacuum - it functions to deal with / fight / guard against / whatever another government / coalition / big spiny thing. I’m not sure I can imagine a government that exists in a vacuum - a government with no other governments at the same level of soverignty to play tug of war with. In practice I suspect you need both the threat of another power or the benefit of large scale cooperation with it. To get a one-world government in isolation, with no alien government or independant space colonies or anything, I suspect you’d need a major Earth crisis, Malthusian or otherwise, to take the place of an opposing government.
I agree with this. Humans will find some excuse or another to split as long as their isn’t some other “world” to hold ourselves against. After all, one of the main functions of government is to protect against foreign invasion. What’s the point if there are no foriegners?
That said, with the global market being what it is today, I can imagine some kind of body set up to enforce international laws, stronger than the UN and international courts are today, but still relatively weak. More of a global independent arbitrator, making sure all parties to a treaty follow it, than a soverign government.
There is nothing about a global government that is inherently worse than a large state government: After all, a peasant near Vladivostok already votes for the same President as a wealthy Muscovite even though the distances between them, linguistically, ethnically, culturally and physically, are almost as large as those between any two humans on the planet. I am already in thrall to a majority of people I don’t know: “country” is merely an arbitrary level at which democracy is currently feasible.
That’s a nice big brush you’ve got there. Even if a benevolent one world government were to exist I wouldn’t be interested. I don’t think they’d be as responsive to my interest as a nation might. After all the needs of those in Germany might not be the same as those in Peru.
How many people are leaving the US because they don’t like the government? If OWG is just a fantasy, why not fantasize about one that’s just as benevolent as the US?
I don’t think a one-world totalitarian government “coming down” is any more likely than a full-scale nuclear war. Which would you prefer? What’s your plan for reducing the risk of the latter and putting an end to war, genocide, and terrorism?
Like everyone else, my first reaction on 9/11 was, “Thank God we don’t have a one-world government”.
Suppose the U.S. were to join the European Union? (Politically impossible under present circumstances, but bear with me.) So far as I know, there’s nothing in the EU treaties saying every member state has to be in Europe. The EU is a new thing: A real international quasigovernment, something less than a state but more than a mere association like the U.N. – and formed by voluntary admissions, not conquest. Europe has been torn by periodic wars ever since the fall of Rome, and now it appears there will never be war in Europe again. Unlike NAFTA, the EU has a supranational parliament elected by the people. Suppose it were expanded: The U.S. joins the EU, we scrap the dollar and convert to the Euro, and we pressure Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand to do the same. Russia, too, as soon as it becomes just a bit more democratic than it is now. Then we have an international union of all modern industrialized democracies – internally peaceful, freely trading, and governed by a multinational, supranational, elected parliament. We make it a policy to promote constant expansion of the union, with conditions: Nobody will be forced to join, but we will make membership very attractive. (It already is, just ask the Turks.) Nobody gets to join until they have a genuinely democratic government and a high level of respect for human rights. Eventually – and by “eventually” I mean in a century or two – we would have a democratic federal world government. We Westerners would, of course, be outnumbered and outvoted – but, since we got in on the ground floor, we get to determine the shape of the world government and its institutions.
Forgot to mention that the more diverse the population, the less likely a government is to be totalitarian. The UN is about as far away from a totalitarian government as you can get and still have a centralized organization–and a lot of American conservatives are making it sound like that’s a bad thing.
Actually, the model I play with is for each major region to form a regional federation at its own pace. The EU is leading the way, but we can speculate about regional federations forming in Sub-Sahran Africa, the Arab world, Southeast Asia, Latin America, etc. The US is already a regional federation and China, India, Russia are also too big to expect to link up with other nations. Other countries like Japan and Canada are not easily roped in geography-wise and there are countless other complications, but it’s an idea worth specuating about.
The “one world” part isn’t really an optional configuration. For the foreseeable future, that’s exactly how many worlds we’ve got.
Question is, therefore, whether to govern it or continue with our pastiche of different systems that have no formal intersystem to settle disputes, resolve concerns, and otherwise do the decision-making process thing.
I am always astonished at the number of non-anarchists who think a world government is not necessary. Their reasoning could, if applied to national governments, support the claim that national governments are not necessary. Just let each village or municipality make its own laws and let them deal with each other as circumstance and inclination dictate — make alliances or attack and sack or whatever. And from there, the same argument applies reiteratively to municipal governments. Just let each neighborhood or family do their own thing, make their own rules, work things out with the neighbors with whatever mixture of diplomacy and aggression seems to work for them, and let each one pave their own bit of sidewalk their own way if they want one.
Heck, I am an anarchist — I think a nontraditional, nonhierarchical and totally egalitarian system is not just possible but eventually inevitable — but even I can see that in the short term we need a world system. The world has gotten too damn small to be run as an amalgamation of disparate little fiefdoms and regimes and whatnot.
The United States couldn’t hold together when the southern states thought their way of life was threatened.
I can’t imagine the more rascally countries in the world would be fine with a world government telling them to stop starving minorites, circumcizing women, making nuclear bombs, etc.
In order to have a one-world goverment, that federal governent would have to be willing to go to war with the annoying countries.
I think this statement and the OP are both a bit odd. We do have a world government. There are about three hundred years worth of relevant treaties that spell out the interactions between countries. Much more work has been done in the last fifty years. I can sue an individual or corporation in another country or even a foreign government. I can seek cooperation in apprehending criminals. There is a reasonable consensus about when military action is legitimate. If you look at how we justify our invasion of Iraq - you need to start by accepting that we are bothering to justify it in the context of accepted international law.
Just as common law is evolutionary, international law is evolutionary. No we don’t have a world constitution, but the UK doesn’t really have one either and they still have a government. No, not every country subscribes to protocol but that can happen even between states in the union.
The EU is going to drive other regional trading blocks to adopt many of the same measures in order to remain competitive. In twenty years the US will either be leading a real North American block or it will be subservient to the EU. Of course conservatives don’t like this - the basis of conservatism is that change is bad! Of course, this is a very silly way to think.
