On the Nature of the Coming World Government

by

John J. Reilly

I have every confidence that a political authority which is both sovereign and universal will be
established sometime in the 21st century. The human world is now only a day or two wide, even
by ordinary commercial transport. It is absurd to think that a society so concentrated could
endure indefinitely without a government for the whole. During the time of the great European
colonial empires, it required an act of will to keep worldwide social entities together. By the end
of the 20th century, an act of will was required to inhibit their formation. In the 21st century, this
resolve must inevitably weaken once, twice, maybe three times. Then the world will collapse
into what Toynbee called a "universal state." This development is so inevitable that it is not even
interesting.

The prospect of a state encompassing the whole planet occasioned much hope and anxiety
throughout the 20th century. The hope was based on reaction to the militant nationalisms that
framed the century's world wars. Since the right to wage war is one of the incidents of national
sovereignty, it was thought that a world with only a single sovereign would necessarily be
without war. The fear was based on the assumption that anything that is universal is also
necessarily totalitarian. If government is only a necessary evil, the logic ran, then a universal
government would be an evil of unprecedented proportions.

Both the hope and the fear are misplaced. They are based on extrapolations of the historically
eccentric experiences of the 20th century. They overlook the common features that the
universal states of particular civilizations have displayed in the past. They also overlook the
nature of the society the coming world government will rule, which is to say, the civilization of
Earth.

The key thing to remember about Earth is that it is essentially an advanced Third World country,
rather like Brazil. This characterization is not necessarily an insult; there are Third World
countries that have a lot to recommend them. The defining feature of Third World status,
however, is not the presence or absence of democracy, or even the level of economic
development. Taking the definition supplied by the former CIA analyst, Patrick E. Kennon, a Third
World country is one in which the government, broadly defined, has little control over civil
society. Using the sort of nautical expression so favored by the CIA in its Cold War period, he
likens a Third World country to a great barge in a slow-moving river. It is hard to steer, hard to
upset, and the very devil to right again if it somehow capsizes.

Countries can be like this for any number of reasons. They may have a tradition of tax avoidance.
They may be so constitutionally constructed that governments cannot do very much and still
remain legal. They may be chaotic places, with no law outside a few major cities. They may just
be dirt poor. Whatever the particular circumstances, what Third World countries have in
common is governments that lack the resources to either serve or police their citizens to any but
the most rudimentary degree.

This is almost certainly what Earth would be like, should unification come late in the next
century. The world in those days should have from 10 to 12 billion people in it. This is quite likely
the figure that the human race will top out at for the foreseeable future, since the demographic
transition to lower birthrates should have spread universally by then. This, of course, would also
imply the general increase in living standards that goes along with the transition. Still, you are
talking about an immense amount of territory, inhabited for the most part by relatively poor
people. Also, since there are likely to be one or more world wars preceding unification, the
infrastructure of civilization may be substantially damaged. The world government may be large,
relative to that of national states. However, it will have to be relatively small compared to the
society it purports to govern, simply because the per capita resources won't be available for
more.

A universal state may have democratic features, but there has never been an instance of one
with a genuinely democratic government. Even the Roman universal state, with its tradition of
popular and aristocratic assemblies, rarely experienced effective Senatorial control. In the 20th
century, of course, we see already that supranational bodies have only the most perfunctory
democratic elements. This is not only true of the United Nations, with its General Assembly of
rotten boroughs and its Security Council that serves chiefly to maintain the coalition that won
World War II. It is also true of the European Union, which has an elected parliament, but one
with very limited powers. (The system has been described as "The German Empire without the
Kaiser.")

The truly "democratic" feature of universal states is their openness to "talents." They all rely
heavily on bureaucracies, which are generally not recruited from the upper classes of the era of
national states that precede them. These bureaucrats can enter government in the most
haphazard fashion. The Roman Empire was administered in large part by "freedmen," who were
former slaves. The Ottoman Empire was, to an appalling degree, run by people who still were
slaves. (The empire's elite troops, the Janissaries, were a slave corps, recruited largely from
Eastern European children.) China achieved universal states twice in its history, and by the
second occasion, in the fourteenth century, it had a well-developed tradition of civil service tests
to recruit staff for the new government. What all these examples have in common, however, is
that world governments are open to some degree of influence from the lower parts of the social
scale.

Something else that all universal states have in common, of course, is that they are all
monarchies. For better or worse, the world government is going to be under the direction of an
emperor, certainly in fact and perhaps also in name. Of course, the title "emperor" has meant
different things in different contexts. It has been borne by men viewed by most of their subjects
as a hated foreign tyrant, but then it has also been held by legitimate and well-loved rulers of
partially parliamentary states. It will mean more than one thing in the coming universal state,
too. Over the 500 years or so that a world government can be expected to exist, much of its
political history is describable in terms of the transformation of the emperor from a military
dictator to a ritual figurehead. Except at the very beginning, during the reign of the founder, the
emperor rarely tries to employ the degree of initiative that the executive of a modern state
routinely uses. What then does he do?

The function of emperors is to read their mail. That, at least, is the conclusion reached by Fergus
Millar is his exhaustive study, "The Emperor in the Roman World." Most of the time, emperors
waited for problems to come to them. They answered queries from their governors and they sat
as the court of last resort in certain legal disputes. They answered a remarkable number of
written petitions from private persons, even from slaves. However, except in extraordinary
situations, and those mostly concerned military emergencies, they did not plan vast reforming
"programs" for their reigns. They scarcely had "policies." Their policy was to keep the great barge
of empire floating along with as little disruption as possible. They could act decisively to aid or
punish individuals, even whole cities, but their capacity to affect life in the empire as a whole
was limited.

Something like this also seems to have been true in China, to judge from Ray Huang's snapshot
history of the Ming Dynasty, "1587: A Year of No Significance." In that case, the right of petition
was rather more limited. It extended to local magistrates, who did not hesitate to pepper the
imperial secretariat with memorials containing their bright ideas. The emperor exercised
"government" by writing "approved" on the memorials he like or "acknowledged" on the ones
he didn't. Except for a few large, continuing government functions, such as guarding the
northern frontier and maintaining the dikes on the Yangtsee, that was the extent of
administrative control that the central government would exert itself to exercise.

The social structures of universal states are not conspicuously unjust, compared to most times
and places, but they are not very egalitarian. Social distinctions are most fluid at a universal
state's beginning, which occurs after the most highly commercial phase of its civilization's
history. By that point, traditional aristocracies have been exchanged entirely for far more flexible
plutocracies. During the era of independent sovereign states, finance and commercial
enterprises tend to slip beyond the effective control of any government. Universal states come
into existence in part precisely to curb the power of money. However, class flexibility is one of
the things that disappear along with the vulnerability of government to market fluctuations. By
the second generation, there will be some attempt to return to a measure of ascriptive status. By
the end of the empire, there will be an elaborate system of ranks and the beginnings of serfdom.

As for "peace," universal states are better at keeping it than are international systems, but this
ability is not absolute. The argument that a world government will ensure the end of war is in
part a semantic confusion. Certainly a world government can do away with the juridical state
known as war. However, this is quite a different thing from suppressing all armed conflict.
Insurgencies small and great clutter the history of every universal state. Sometimes the
insurgents seek to be free of the world government, sometimes they accept it in principle, but
want a change in administration. Not infrequently, and as we see in some areas of the world
today, wars are merely random brigandage by groups with no particular goal or ideology. This
sort of conflict requires any universal state to keep armed forces in being.

Historically, local universal states have also maintained militaries in order to control external
barbarians. These efforts inevitably failed, but for most of a universal state's history, its standing
army is remarkably modest in size. While Earth has no external barbarians at the moment, it
could develop some in the form of breakaway space colonies. This could occur if the world
government pursued a policy of colonization early in its history and later lost control of the
settlements. There is also the possibility that extraterrestrial intelligence will be discovered. Even
if the civilization is far away and lived long ago and could have no way of knowing that mankind
existed, still the very possibility of a threat from space could promote the creation of warning
systems and a force in space intended to counter it.
Whatever the rationale, we may be certain that the world government will have considerable
military forces, though as is the case with everything else about a universal state, quite small
forces in relation to the area and population they will be called on to police. On at least some
occasions, particularly in the last half of the universal state's life, these forces will be used in civil
wars between contenders for the imperial power. The wars in question will be smaller than
those of the 20th century, but destructive enough in their own right. Additionally, they will be
occurring in a civilization that is much less economically dynamic and demographically resilient
than it was during the era of sovereign states. Damage that is done will often stay done. These
remarks about the decline and fall, however, are premature, to say the least.

Let us rather imagine the universal state in its youth, in the 22nd century. There will be cities as
huge and sparkling as anything imagined by modern science fiction. There will be other cities,
perhaps more of them, not much improved from 20th century slums. There will even be notable
ruins in the growing wilderness, as the world's population slowly retreats from its late modern
climax. Politics at every level will be increasingly personal, a matter of family ambition and often
of petty graft. Government on the ground will be tolerant, partly from conviction, partly from
negligence.

It will be a more relaxed world, in many ways a more comfortable world than that of the modern
era. The climate may even be warmer: it may help you visualize this future by thinking of white
Panama suits and slowly turning overhead fans. The economy will chug along under fairly heavy
state regulation. This will advance the interests of large enterprises, but also of job security for
the growing portion of the world's population that works for them. People will have forgotten
that, on the whole, living standards used to increase from year to year; they will complain only
when they decline. New technologies will become a rarity, but the existing stock of industrial
technique will still in many ways exceed those of the 20th century. For ordinary people living
ordinary lives, things will not be so bad.

As for the world government itself, it will normally impinge on people's lives rather lightly. Taxes
will be raised for it one way or another, though not necessarily through taxes on individuals. If
there is an elective feature to the central government, participation in the elections is likely to be
a ritualized matter. The people will love or mock the emperor and his government, but the
universal state itself will be beyond question. It will seem to be the end of history, and few
people will want to return to a world of sovereign states. Universal government will be
considered not just inevitable but right, the only way that civilization could conceivably be
organized.

This is scarcely an ideal future. Still, it is very far from the worst that might happen.

End