World Government - Solution To World Peace?

Dmitri October 3rd, 2007

The human quest for peace is as unending as the human desire for war, evident as both diplomacy and warfare coexisted through the ages. However it is only after the massive loss of lives in the two World Wars and the advent of destructive atomic weapons, did humans come to the realisation that wars will end humankind unless some measures to ensure peaceful co-existence was found. One of such proposals was a World Government backed by imminent thinkers like Albert Einstein, Baha’ullah and Lord Alfred Tennyson.

There were several proposed models of a world government which ranged from a league of nations to the most popular concept, a federal world government with autonomous nation states, not very much unlike Switzerland or United States of today. The league or union of nations are much more of military or political alliances than any serious world government so we will take a federalist type of unified global government into consideration. Although good in theory, a federal world government is highly likely to fail or lead to even further conflicts, due to several ground realities, a couple of them explained below.

The United Nations : Closest one could get to a World Government

One of the biggest roadblocks to a world government is the diversity of humans on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, beliefs, nation and other cultural differences. Proponents of equality would brush off these differences making the universal and often heard statement “all humans are equal”. However reality is evident how far such an ideology goes, all one has to look at are the relentless ethnic, racial or religious conflicts of today. Despite the desire for human equality, the differences cannot be wished away and nor be fought off. They will come in the way when a world government is formed; the diversity of humans will inevitably make some groups feel un-represented or perhaps even victimised, leading to rebellion and conflicts. There will also be ambiguity in judicial and political systems as a system which is acceptable and works for one group may not be so for another. There is good that comes out of a one-size-fits-all approach to legal or political system.

In addition to the limitations arising from unavoidable human differences, a world government would also entail massive administrative difficulties and representation problems, assuming it is a democratic set-up. The larger and more powerful countries like United States, China or Russia will exert their dominance and influence over the under-represented or weaker countries and will usually have their way over them. This will widen the identity gap between races, economic classes and social order which will lead to widespread separatist and rebellion movements as seen in erstwhile Soviet Union. Additionally there will also be administrative difficulties arising from the geographical size of a world nation, which will lead to rampant corruption, violence and social problems in the lesser accessible geographical areas like Africa. Bureaucratic hurdles will increase manifold to keep every group happy which will make the administrative mechanism inefficient and slow.

The above limitations are only a few obvious ones, as experienced at present by countries with large multi-ethnic populations like China, India, Indonesia and erstwhile Soviet Union. In a real World Government, there could be many more unforeseen problems which would crop up which might be even more serious than the above mentioned ones. In such a situation the only way to sustain a world nation would be through suppressing dissent. This will end up reducing a world government to another empire where the powerful rule over the weak. This is one of the primary reasons why no countries had their governments make any serious initiatives or proposals to start a world government. Most of the revolutionaries for world government are driven by unrealistic idealism and sometimes for the sake of radicalism, without much consideration of reality and real implications of a global administration.

The closest we can get to a world government in the present age is United Nations and yet it is hampered by severe drawbacks. Over the years, the UN has turned nothing more than a foreign policy tool for powerful countries, its effectiveness as a world organisation is limited only to weak and powerless countries.

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