An Outline Structure of Democratic World Government

An Outline Structure of Democratic World Government

Introduction - problems and benefits of World Government

The idea of world government has not received a good press for many years. It

tends to make most of us think of Stalinist dictators and fascist domination of

the globe. I wish to argue, though, that there is a viable form of democratic

world government which could bring many benefits.

A democratic world government that really worked would lead to a major increase

in the freedom enjoyed by all people on the planet. It would also make more

equitable the international balance of power which currently so heavily favours

the rich developed nations and their citizens at the expense of the much larger

numbers of citizens in the underdeveloped world.

The billion-dollar question is, though, whether there could be a form of

democratic world government which was workable and sustainable, not inefficient

and expensive, and above all which was fair?

Conventional ideas about world government, which typically picture it in the

form of a global parliament passing universal laws in order to create an

identikit legal framework for all world citizens, suffer from three severe

problems. Firstly, the near-impossibility of persuading all of the world's

countries to hand over their sovereignty to a global government of this sort.

Secondly, the risk - of which we are, and must always be, very aware - of

permitting a future global dictatorship of a particularly intransigent kind

(imagine how difficult it would be to dislodge a Hitler if he was in possession

of the kind of absolute power available through such a form of government). And

thirdly, as we see sometimes today in the European Community, the tendency of

such a large-scale government to create detailed, uniform laws for the entire

area it governs; the impetus would be towards a sort of global standardisation,

almost certainly based in the cultural attitudes of the West, which would

massively erode the rich cultural variations which exist in the world.

A preferable system of world government, if such could be invented, would meet

all of these objections, as well perhaps as providing a global framework

designed to encourage the democratic possibilities of all nations. Perhaps such

a system might look something like the one I shall now describe.

New form of World Governmen...

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...ting government

has always been balancing on a knife-edge, threatened on all sides by despotic

forces; in some cases (China) the population has failed to win through. One of

the major benefits of the full world government system would be that populations

would only have to force their governments to sign the voluntary world

government treaty, by the sort of courageous popular action we have seen so much

of, in order to ensure their country's future democratic health; from this

single action all else would safely follow. If their government subsequently

started to digress from the democratic path, or was overthrown and replaced by a

totalitarian alternative, no doubt it would soon fall foul of some world

government laws, and would then leave itself open to the full range of sanctions

which the world government could persuade other populations to bring against it.

A fitting plan for the opening decades of the 21st century? Perhaps. If it

worked such a system of world government would almost certainly represent a

quantum leap forward in the levels of freedom enjoyed by the poorer citizens of

the world, as well as to some extent those of us in the developed nations.