World Government
TLDR: Utopia prevents wars by having a single government for the universe. Corruption is prevented by federalism, enforced by a mixture of futarchy and Georgist land policies.
Prerequisites: Land Ownership and Futarchy
There is no salvation for civilization, or even the human race, other than the creation of a world government.
- Albert Einstein
In the wake of both world wars intellectuals, activists, and politicians from across the globe pushed for the formation of a world government. Their hope was to prevent the kinds of horrible bloodshed they’d just witnessed from ever happening again.
The League of Nations was the first attempt. The groundwork was laid in large part by women activists like Jane Addams, and strongly championed by American president Woodrow Wilson. The central idea was to create a political body where conflicts between countries could be settled by arbitration and democratic ideals, rather than violence.
Unfortunately, the league was doomed: Republicans in the senate shot down US participation on the grounds that it would infringe on domestic rights and sovereignty. Meanwhile, the great powers in Europe pushed for an agenda of brutal reparations from Germany, which fostered division rather than unity. In 1933 the newly-appointed chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler, withdrew from the league to overwhelming domestic support.
During and after World War 2, the great powers of the world tried again. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill coined the term United Nations to refer to a collection of allied powers, most notably America, Britain, China, and the USSR. This group came to be known as the Allies, to distinguish it from the formal organization created in the war’s aftermath that we today think of as the United Nations.
Like the League of Nations, the United Nations began to unravel as a meaningful entity almost immediately. The development of nuclear weapons and the rising tensions between the communist east and the capitalist west led to the start of the Cold War. Despite being established largely to promote peace, the UN was crippled from any real ability to intervene. Why? Because the Security Council was created with permanent seats for the major powers and an associated ability to absolutely veto any military actions. This meant essentially all conflicts that involved the great powers were off-limits for the UN to interfere with. This toothlessness means that to this day the UN is largely a symbolic entity, without real power to prevent wars or major conflicts, such as the present one in Ukraine.
Perhaps a world government is doomed to fail. Power structures like the United States, or United Nations largely emerge out of necessary alliance to fight enemies. In the absence of aliens or serious colonies on other worlds, there is no need for all the governments of the world to join together as a military force.
But I think it’s desperately important that we try. A world (or solar/galactic/universal) government is our only real hope for the long-run future.
Leviathan
World peace and a universal government are classic utopian dreams. Setting aside those who pushed for world conquest out of a desire for power or religious totalitarianism, there are many philosophers and intellectuals in history who called for and put forward key insights into the need for a united world government.
Master Kong (Confucius) wrote in the Book of Rites about a utopia called “Great Unity” (大同) wherein all people are at peace thanks to being personally wise, loving their communities, and benevolent guidance of elected administrators under a single emperor.
Over a thousand years later, during the English Civil War (1642-1651), Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan. In it, he argues that war and conflict are the natural state of human existence, and it is only through the formation of governments and signing away the right to use violence to an absolute sovereign that we can find peace.
While Hobbes’ work is centrally concerned with national integrity, the ideas apply at any scale. In a world with no social restrictions, the strong may prey on the weak without fear of being crushed by an overwhelming superior power for their use of violence. And even in the absence of conflict this produces waste. If each person spends 5% of their time guarding themselves and their property, the establishment of laws and police will yield gains as long as they’re effective and collectively take less than 5% of each person’s time to maintain.
Or at least, that’s true so long as the power structure doesn’t take advantage of having a monopoly on violence. Hobbes’ Leviathan is a fantastic method (and perhaps the only method) of creating peace, but it’s a terrible method of preventing tyranny.
Might a Singleton be Bad?
Small-government, right-wing libertarians and hardcore left-wing social justice advocates don’t often agree, but I can easily imagine both being upset with certain notions of a worldwide superpower. While liberal democracies are better than monarchies at not abusing their power (and futarchies might be even better still), the old adage about power corrupting clearly applies.
The majority of the world believes in gun control. The majority of the world also believes that marriage is between a man and a woman. Here’s the wonderful Our World In Data for what a population-weighted map of the world looks like:
A global government set up through democratic methods (even if those methods only involve voting on values, a-la futarchy) will involve a move-towards the middle no matter who you are. While issues of gun control and gay rights are meant to highlight what a move like this would involve for people in the USA, there are similarly hot-button issues in every specific place that the majority of the world has a clear stance on. Chinese people might not like being told that their leaders are corrupt aggressors who are in the midst of perpetrating genocide and tyranny. Or perhaps they’d simply object to the global majority who think that nuclear power is bad.
If adopting a global government means having my local school’s educational curriculum set by an East Asian political bloc rich with anti-western propaganda, count me out. Sometimes the majority is right, but a one-size-fits-all approach to virtually anything is bad, and having a central government for the world runs a huge risk of that government abusing its power to crush local cultures and enforce a kind of destructive uniformity.
And yet, in its absence we are destined for war and evil. Some problems simply require a universal coalition to solve. How can we balance this need while protecting the freedoms and customs of local peoples?
Utopian Universal Federal Government
The key solution, I claim, is well executed federalism. By federalism, I mean a system of government that manages large-scale affairs in a centralized way, but defers questions of local governance to smaller governments. The United States is a federal government in that it decides some things on a national scale, some things on a state scale, and others on a county or city scale. It is well-executed insofar as it divides questions of policy appropriately between the various governmental layers.
In Utopia there is a single federal government for the world (or universe). Certain challenges, like the prevention of wars or the protection of the atmosphere, requires policies on this scale. Others, like the setting of speed limits and granting of licenses to buy drugs, are local in scope and so are handled by local governments.
The universal government is a futarchy, and it is through the measuring and valuing of federalism that centralization of power is prevented. (Tyranny is additionally fought against by valuing other good things like freedom.) Many organizations across the world measure federalism by doing things like surveying people and asking them if they think a government initiative needs to be executed at the global scale, or whether it could be done locally. These measures are then aggregated and weighed according to the world’s sense of how much federalism is a priority. Policies that reduce the degree to which the universal government defers to local governments when appropriate are thereby rejected, and policies that appropriately decentralize power are adopted.
Local governments are a natural extension of the rights granted to exclusive clubs and/or land-owners. Let’s say that Iceland wants to set up a stronger social safety net than the rest of the world. To do this, the inhabitants of the island would form a government organization that collectively buys the rights to the entire island. This Icelandic Government could then resell property rights to the inhabitants with the stipulation that they must agree to the Icelandic laws and governance to live there.
Because property rights are temporary, even for a local government, there is a repeated opportunity for borders to shift and change depending on the will of the people. If a minority of the island decides to break away from the government, they can offer a counter-bid for that part of the parcel. Governments would understandably not want to enter a bidding-war, and so in most situations land is divided diplomatically, with overlapping rules of law that serve as the best compromise. It is through this mechanism that the right to self-determination is protected.
In this way the world becomes shaped as an Archipelago (highly recommended link). A huge variety of options exist for inhabitants of Utopia, with governments that range from the anarchic to the ultra-totalitarian. Religious communities are particularly common, enforcing their particular conception of the good life on a patch of land that reflects the size and homogeneity of their populace.
Basic rights are granted to all Utopian people, and one thing that the global government does enforce and protect is the right to emigrate. If a tyrannical local government emerges within the Archipelago, or even one that promotes slavery or putting people in prison, it cannot prevent its citizens from leaving and joining a less-governed place. Only murderers, attackers, kidnappers, war-makers, or others who clearly violate the universal law of non-violence can be imprisoned (in their choice of prison), making exile (possibly alongside public shaming) a remarkably common punishment for serious violation of local laws.
Despite having a wide variety of legal and social structures, often nested multiple levels deep, there are common practices in Utopia. Futarchy, for instance, often occurs in local governments as well as in the universal government. Local governments often collaborate to have the same standards and leverage their shared customs for greater trade and harmony.
In general, the presence of a world government that covers all lands and spaces where functioning local governments haven’t found purchase makes the world a more free, open, and peaceful place.