Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship

Chapter 8. World Government Is Here!

Chapter 8 World Government Is Here! ROBERT E. GOODIN Diagnostics:Why So Scary? World government has long been the great bogeyman of international political theorizing. It spooked Immanuel Kant. At one point in his essay Perpetual Peace he speaks of it as a “soulless despotism” that would threaten to “choke the seeds of good.” It has similarly spooked generations of writers ever since. But what is it exactly about world government that people find so scary? Maybe what people fear is how it might come about. Suppose, for example , that the only possible way world government could arise would be by some expansionist imperial power swallowing up all in its wake. That would be pretty scary. Ditto if a bloody world revolution were the only way to get there.  World government would be scary if those were the only ways to get there—which, of course, they are not. Neo-Hegelians point to other perfectly coherent pathways, via the dynamics of recognition. Neo-functionalists point to routes whereby the European Coal and Steel Community turned into the European Economic Community (EEC) and then into the European Union (EU). In this neo-functionalist scenario, states would just cede ever-increasing power over functionally demarcated areas to some suprastate entity that is demonstrably capable of coordinating them more effectively , with those multiple overlapping functional jurisdictions eventually forming a consolidated world government. Neo-liberals trace ways in which occasional crises lead to an expansion of the range of people to whom power 150 On Cosmopolitan Alternatives holders are accountable. A similar logic might lead to an expansion of the range of matters over which central power holders have power and for which they are accountable. Maybe, however, what spooks people about world government is not so much what it would take to get there as what it would be like to be there. In the Star Wars trope, world government could be like the Federation, noble and benign. Or it could be like the Empire, evil and avaricious. And there is no guaranteeing which it will be initially, much less eventually. That thought, too, might well give us pause. It might, until we remember that we already have long experience honing institutional mechanisms to guard against abuses of power by central authorities. The Anti-Federalists—“Brutus,” the “Federal Farmer,” and company—expressed precisely the same fears about the strength of the central government proposed in the U.S. Constitution of 1789. Nobody would pretend that that charter got everything exactly right. But nobody could credibly deny that our long experience of such institutional architecture gives us a pretty good idea how to check and balance power within a large and increasingly strong central state. And the same institutional machinery that is effective in checking and balancing powers within national government can readily be replicated at other levels of government, whether supranationally or subnationally. So I cannot really see how this second worry with world government should unsettle us all that much either. Those brusque dismissals will hardly end all those long and tedious arguments . At this point, however, I am not trying to put arguments to rest. My initial aim here is purely diagnostic. I am merely trying to figure out what it really is that frightens people about world government. And in diagnostic mode, I just cannot bring myself to believe that either of the things mentioned above is what really has them so spooked. Those are the things that people seize upon and dress up as reasons, to be sure, when challenged for reasons to rationalize their reactions. But I just cannot credit those ostensible reasons as the root causes of people’s skittishness. Instead, I suspect people’s visceral fear of world government derives almost wholly from a simple fear of the unknown. World government is unfamiliar . We’ve never had a literal world government. We’ve not seen anything remotely resembling one for fully a millennium or two. And we all know (from postcolonial critical race theory and such like) about the way in which “Othering” can stir up fear and hatred of people of unfamiliar races, religions , and so on. In institutional terms, world government is the ultimate Other. World Government Is Here! 151 Insofar as that is an accurate diagnosis of contemporary anxieties about world government, a remedy is readily to hand. The standard way to overcome fear of the unknown is to assimilate it...