It's inevitable
Isaac Asimov said it somewhere in one of his excellent non-fiction books. Roughly quoted: "One day we will wake up and a world government will be in place. It won't be a matter of debate." Asimov's logic was, as usual, incontrovertible. The resources of the world are limited, and the necessity for cooperating with each other is far greater than any gain we would get from continuing our nationalism. If we can't manage a world government, we will probably regress back to the stone age. Every development of the last 200 years has been in the direction of greater cooperation internationally -- even the setbacks have ended up being two steps forward.
The main reason I strongly support a world government becomes harder to ignore every single day: as globalization of our economy occurs, our local governments' power to speak for us ordinary citizens diminishes. Corporations operate in the white space between national boundaries -- if they don't agree with the policies of one nation, they can simply ignore them and funnel product in and money out through intermediaries, or leave the nation entirely. Even wealthy nations with formerly strong social controls over corporations (such as the U.S.) now basically have no bargaining power, except to hysterically promise lower taxes and less regulation. In this race to the bottom, all of the advances made in standards of living, social mobility and security, and civil rights are being jettisoned in a perverse Darwinian logic. Free Market Weenies will simply shrug and tell us this is inevitable, and we can't do anything about it.
And I ask -- why should we tolerate it, then? In every social exchange there are compromises. But in the global economy, multinational corporations don't have to compromise anymore, because there is no central authority. They can play nations off each other like spoiled children against confused parents, and get whatever their bratty CEO's and shareholders want regardless of who they screw over. Outsourcing is often pointed to as the inexorable logic of globalization, and we are frequently told in the U.S. to expect a long period, maybe a permanent one, of crummy employment and declining standard of living. And I have to ask Free Market Weenies if they think Americans will tolerate that. Or if they have to.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there have been a great many small shifts in power, accumulating to a giant Powerquake, as it were. The faultline of that quake, now being eagerly dynamited by George W. Bush, is U.S. unilateralism. As long as we didn't try to actually use our immense strength as the only world's remaining superpower, we remained respectably in control, speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Bush, like a 4-year-old with no control, grabbed the stick and hit the first thing he saw, and the quake we're all feeling now is our power collapsing. It could not stand more than a single use, and maybe it's better that he went ahead and wasted it now, rather than allowing us to spend years rotting from the inside, but the fact is our unilateral hold over the world is gone. We have lost the world's respect and admiration. Historians will mark 2003 as the year the U.S. began to decline in real power.
When it's over, a globalized nation will stand, with shifting and uncertain alliances and a tremendous need for someone to take direction. No one will tolerate China as a world leader, even though they appear to be the most likely successor, because their credibility as a democratic state is rather frail. I don't know how it will happen, or if it will take a resource war over oil to engender the need, but at some point after the vacuum of power is left by our departure from the scene, the remaining credible democracies of the world will constitute the first world government, likely based on whatever remains of the U.N.
their Scrabble scores are quite different: 