I think a one-world government of some sort is both necessary and inevitable in the long run. More and more problems simply cannot be dealt with purely at the national level. Some methods of dealing with these issues already exist in the form of international organizations such as the UN, the WTO, the World Bank, the International Criminal Court, as well as smaller multi-national organizations like NATO, OPEC, the G-8, etc. The treand over the past hundred years or so is for more of these super-powers (in the original sense) to exist and to take on more power over more issues. I think it is inevitable that as the world continues to shrink and nations begin working together on more and more issues like global warming, international trade, the Internet, etc., that more formalized structures will come into place to establish and enforce agreements between countries.
I don’t think that this will necessarily look anything like the US or even the EU, or that it should.
For those who object that countries like China and North Korea will have too much power, keep in mind that those countries already make decisions that we have to live with the effects of. If NK succedes in getting nuclear weapons, it won’t just be its own citizens that have to worry. If China continues to increase its rate of carbon emissions, the rest of the world will have to do something about it. I, for one, believe that these issues - indeed all issues - are better dealt with through the rule of law than through the rule of arms.
It is true that a single super-government would perpetuate and legitimize some injustices and create new ones. International opinion, IMO, is too harsh on Israel (just as I think US opinion is too supportive), for example, and according to the new book The Clinton Tapes, European and UN opinion on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was appalling. (Most European ministers and then-UN Sec. Gen. Boutros Boutros-Ghali thought that a Muslim nation within Europe was “unnatural” and illegitimate.)
Nevertheless, I believe that if the UN as it is now composed had its own military/police force that it could direct without the explicit permission of its member states (just as both US regular army and state National Guard units can be mobilized without permission of the individual US states)–one, say, with the same resources as the combined militaries of the EU–and the independance to actually use it, that there would be less bloodshed and war than there is now.
Government–at whatever level–doesn’t prevent injustice, it merely provides a method of dealing with it other than having the aggrieved parties fight directly between themselves. Sometimes that method is to have the party in power crush the party not in power, but in a working liberal government, it usually means filing papers is preferential to firing bullets.
Which is why I said: