Well I intend the “states” to have about as much power as US States perhaps a bit more.
Extraterrestrials?
But, all U.S. states were organized from the start along roughly the same lines (separation of powers, elected legislature, separately elected governor, independent judiciary), so the question of what does or does not qualify as the “republican form of government” guaranteed by the Constitution has never come up. But if we’re going to organize a federal world-state, by the federation of pre-existing states with widely varying cultures and traditions, we have to decide whether Saudi Arabia can keep its absolute monarchy, Iran can keep its theocracy, North Korea can keep its Communism, etc.
A patriotic, militaristic anthem might do for the Federation of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which has (nonhuman) enemies. But IRL we’ll probably be waiting a very long time for any such to happen along. (Otherwise, why didn’t they conquer us before, when we were divided and weak and they could play Earth states off against each other the way European powers did Indian nations in colonial America?)
There’d be no lyrics. Everyone would just march in formations while fireworks and artillery was set off.
How about The Immigrant Song? Just because Zeppelin fuckin rules.
I gotta say, I’ve got to put my vote in for any World Anthem that invokes the image of the grim spectre of death advancing unstoppably through the chill dark.
'Might make it a little hard to perform before ball games, though. Eh…I always hated baseball, anyway.
Why is the premise always “America f**k yeah, it rocks! Just how specifically do we want to go about forcing our wants on the rest of the world?”
World Anthem! I know, let’s debate which awesome American-centric Christian right-wing songs would be best!
Absolutely nobody who’s a patriotic, jingoistic American WANTS a world government, remember?
But some (neocons, not paleocons) do want an American World Empire.
I get the feeling you haven’t wholly thought this through, but the word you are looking for is probably “march”: however, I’ll play along and suggest Barry Gray’s Thunderbirds theme music. That or “Too Drunk To Fuck” by the Dead Kennedys.
Generally I would say that national anthems that have a militaristic feel to them do so because they’re commemorating or valuing a military victory, or military history of the nation in general. You don’t start by writing the song, and then wait for the enemy to show up; you defeat the enemy, and then you write the song about how excellent you were to do so.
So I think writing a militaristic song before aliens show up is putting the cart before the horse.
In those terms, i’d have to say we should wait to see what the World Government was like and what effects it has before we select a song. The most important thing, at least theoretically, is that it is personal to the nation.
Well, I’m not sure how much thinking LeMay has put into this, but the whole point of patrotism is a patria, an “us” who is better than “them”: we need a “them”, be they terrorists, communists, satanists, niggers, spics, wogs or Jews in order to define ourselves against, to hold ourselves up against, and if necessary to fight and die for. Dulce et decorum est and all that. Who they are is immaterial; the whole point of them is that they are not us: this is the whole concept of The Other. Patriotic anthems need to necessarily set Us up as being better than Them, whether they be “God save the King of Ourland”, “How beautiful is the verdant majesty of Ourland”, “Arise people of Ourland and throw off your shackles”, or “Themland takes it up the arse, doo-dah, doo-dah”. Me, I think we should set our teeth against people who cannot use possessive apostrophes.
I think only some sort of utter threat to all of humanity (like extraterrestrial invasion) will be the only thing that will motivate the formation of a world state.
Then we might well have to wait forever for a world state. At any rate, there certainly does not appear to be any kind of grassroots internationalist political movement in existence or on the horizon, more’s the pity. (Communism was, or purported to be, an internationalist movement in its day; but whenever Communists won power in a country, they always turned out to act like nationalists or even imperialists. So it goes.)
FWIW, in this old GD thread I discuss a suggested path by which a non-oppressive world state might, very gradually, be achieved. But I perceive no political will anywhere to take even the first step down that path.
If that’s going to happen the EU will have to become less liberal (i.e., they’ve forbidden the death penalty for member states)
I have no strong views either way on the death penalty, but why should that, of all things, be a deal-breaker? A world state with no executions anywhere would not be such a bad thing.
Neither would one that didn’t use money, like Star Trek. But simply imposing a system might not be workable, or even a good idea.
I mean, I’d like to live in a world that didn’t use the death penalty. In the same sense that I’d like to live in a world where there was no emergency eyeball surgery, if you get me.
And then, of course, you have the exact opposite: “This Is My Song”, to the melody of Finlandia.
WRT money, that makes sense. WRT the death penalty, it does not. I doubt any place in the world (with the possible exception of Texas) that has the death penalty places such cultural importance on it that they would refuse participation in an international union just for that. If it is a sticking-point, it would be so only because of some deeper reason, e.g., the regime is authoritarian and has a lot of dissidents and wants execution as an option for dealing with them; but that kind of situation would complicate a country’s entry into an international union in any case.
You know, before I clicked the link I imagined it was somebody singing “This is my song” over and over again to Sibelius, which would totally rock:
“This is my song, this is my song, this is my song diddle-um-dum-dum”