This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and it’s a huge problem, but I don’t really see a lot of discussion about it. We have the technological means now for every single person on the planet to communicate directly with every single other person, in near-real time. The only real barrier to it is logistical (and is mostly impeded by resource hoarding). That’s amazing. And the recent election in Nepal via Discord has me thinking again about how the internet could form the basis for a real, democratic, world government. There are a ton of problems that would need to be addressed, off the top of my head:
- not everyone has internet access
- not everyone that has access has unfettered access
- It’s hard to preserve anonymity and have fair elections
- it’s hard to verify elections haven’t been tampered with
- what happens when violent crimes are committed?
- how do taxes work in this system?
- how do armed forces work in this system?
I don’t think any of these problems are necessarily unsolvable, but I don’t know how. So, how would we get from where we are to where we want to be? How do we even define what the end state should look like?
Take a moment and think about what the global conditions were like 300 years ago, and think about how things improved every 50 years since then.
Around 1725, most of the world was rural, poor, and ruled by monarchies, with low life expectancy and little technology. By 1775, Enlightenment ideas and early industrialization began shifting societies. In 1825, machines and railroads transformed economies. By 1875, electricity and vaccines improved life. In 1925, cars, radios, and modern medicine spread. By 1975, civil rights, global trade, and computers reshaped the world. And today? Well, you can probably tell how our modern lives are better today than they were in the 1970s.
To put things in perspective, in the 1800s, only around the 10% of the world was literate, but today only around 10% are illiterate. Similarly, in the 1800s, more than 90% people were living in extreme poverty, but today that’s around 10%. The same goes for many other stats. What does this tell us? It tells us that things do get better with time. Even though we went through plagues, wars, famines, droughts, and genocides we did come out the other side better than we did before.
So maybe, just maybe, we don’t need a global government. Maybe vastly different people separated by culture, land, and history shouldn’t be forced into a system with people they don’t understand very well. Maybe it’s better for us to respect the concept of sovereignty that has persisted throughout history, and focus on strengthening the trends that have brought us tremendous progress over time… like improving the access and quality of education globally, developing and sharing new advancements in medicine, innovating new technologies to make our lives easier, pushing for and protecting civil rights and individual liberties, and generating wealth and prosperity through market economies.
The point is that maybe it’s better that we focus on improving what we know works from historical trends instead trying to create a global government, which will certainly create a whole new set of issues. Perhaps what we need is more dialogue and cooperation through forums like the UN instead of consolidation through a world government.
These don’t need to be mutually exclusive though. A lot of the progress in Europe the past 80 years is a result of the improved cooperation brought by the EU.
The EU isn’t like the UN, where everyone is equally represented (sans veto powers), but is a democratically elected super-national body with opposing super-national political factions. I can see a concept like that working on a global scale some time in the (relatively far) future.
The EU consists of a bunch of European countries that are similar culturally, economically, and politically. It makes sense for them to form a union that aims to achieve their common interests. A lot of similar unions exist like ASEAN, Arab League, African Union, etc. These are still different than having a single government for the entire world. There are way too many differences for that to work, different cultures, unequal economies, different religions, different politics, etc. This global government would end up trying to appease everyone to maintain the unity, but this would ultimately lead to have no teeth. In other words it’ll be reduced to what the UN is now.
Oh, I definitely meant far future. While the differences are far too big today, I can see gradually increasing cooperation between e.g. the EU and African Union at some point culminating in the construction of a governmental body that has some regulatory power over them both.
Once such a body exists, I can imagine that it over time accumulates power, bringing the two unions even closer together. The EU started out as a relatively small organ, and has grown gradually to what it is today over many decades. My point was that if some “global government” ever forms, I think that kind of gradual process is how it will happen. Starting out with trade agreements, and then gradually regulating more aspects of government.
I mean that’s a completely fair point of view. If we make the assumption that humanity will continue to progress with time, even if there are periods of regression, then I could see where you’re coming from. Humanity did evolve from being nomadic tribes to creating settlements of tribes to creating nations from settlements to creating empires from nations to today where we’re forming unions of empires and nations. It’s logical to think that with time we’ll have these unions merge and create a higher authority, and if we follow this trajectory it should eventually lead to a global government. I just hope we don’t go extinct before that happens.