An Asean-10, as it is sometimes called, will be a dynamic, free-market area of 500 million people by early next century. Already, ASEAN wields enormous diplomatic clout, either driving or codriving APEC, ARF and ASEM.
—Wall Street Journal
In 1500 B.C., there were around 600,000 autonomous polities on the planet. Today, after many mergers and acquisitions, there are 193 autonomous polities. At this rate, the planet should have a single government any day now.
World government? Traditionally, the idea of world government has been embraced mainly by left-wing peaceniks. In other corners, it draws various kinds of disdain, two of which are of special interest. One school finds the notion hopelessly unrealistic—and files those left-wing peaceniks under the label "woolly-minded one-worlders." The second school finds the notion plausible but terrifying—and speaks ominously of a coming "New World Order."
Roughly speaking, what divides these two schools is which half of "Jihad vs. McWorld" they extrapolate from. Many members of the first school look to the future and see evermore-virulent tribalism: civil war, cross-border ethnic strife, and terrorism—all empowered by new and deadly technologies, and all in the explosive context of overpopulation and environmental stress. Thus, according to the writer Kaplan, the "grid of nation-states is going to be replaced by a jagged-glass pattern of city-states, shanty-states, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms." Private armies and drug cartels will flourish and "criminal anarchy" will emerge as "the real ‘strategic’ danger.."
In scenario number two, the problem isn’t chaos, but rather a spooky kind of order. The order emanates partly from the multinational corporations and globetrotting financiers who animate Mc-World. They swear allegiance not to any nation, but to profit alone, and they’ve implanted their values in such supranational bodies as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, whose tendrils threaten to slowly engulf and then smother national self-determination. In this view, the alphabet soup of supranational organizations—IMF, WTO, UN, NAFTA, and so on—is the harbinger of a coming planetary authority, the sovereignty-crushing New World Order. In some apocalyptic visions on the fringes of Christian fundamentalism, such institutions literally represent the Antichrist.
One difference between these two schools—between the people who fear chaos and the people who fear order—is that the latter are more likely to be insane. They have a tendency, for example, to mistake unassuming dark-colored helicopters for attack aircraft sent by the United Nations.
Ordinarily, sane people are a more reliable guide to the future than crazy people. But here the opposite may be the case. If history is even a roughly accurate guide, much power now concentrated at the level of the nation-state will indeed migrate to international institutions. World government—a single, centralized, planetary authority—may or may not arrive, but something firm enough to warrant the name world governance is in the cards. World governance, you might say, is human destiny, the natural outgrowth of the millennia-old expansion of non-zero-sumness among human beings.
This isn’t to say that the "chaos" theorists are wholly wrong. Indeed, there are at least two senses in which history will vindicate them.
First, the "fragmentation" and "tribalism" that are part of the chaos scenario are indeed growing, and will keep growing. In fact, that massive net decline in the number of polities on earth—from 600,000 to 193—masks a recent reversal. Over the past century, the number of polities has actually grown. But, as we’ll see, this and other manifestations of "tribalism" are not just reconcilable with world governance; oddly, they are inseparable from it, integral to it.
Second, the chaos at the heart of the chaos scenario is not a figment of anyone’s imagination. But, as we’ll also see, it is precisely this chaos that is helping to drive the world to the final level of political organization, the global level.
THE LOGIC OF UNITY
The reason to expect the eventual triumph of global governance lies in three observations. (1) Governance has always tended to expand to the geographic scope necessary to solve emerging non-zero-sum problems that markets and moral codes can’t alone solve. (2) These day many emerging non-zero-sum problems are supranational, involving many, sometimes all, nations. (3) The forces behind this growing scope of non-zero-sumness are technological and, for plain reasons, bound to intensify.
Consider the long, slow economic recovery of the European Middle Ages, when commerce began to flow beyond the bounds of localities. Growing trade among German cities was threatened by pirates and brigands. As we’ve seen, the merchants in these cities solved the problem by forming the Hanseatic League—not a full-fledged national government, but still a form of governance. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe, it was kings who smoothed the path for commerce, quelling trouble, harmonizing law, creating the nation-state. At work here was a general principle: as commerce expands, enmeshing more and more people, it gives them a shared interest in protecting it from friction and disruption.
Today, as commerce swamps the borders of nation-states, there are many sources of potential friction and disruption. One is trade disputes, which carry the threat of trade wars. Another, put on display during the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, is lack of "transparency," of good financial data about ostensibly healthy nations—a shortcoming that can lead finally to a panicked and ruinous exit of foreign investment.
Both of these problems raise the "trust" barrier to non-zero-sum gain. And trust barrier generally get breached by governance in one sense or another. Among the emerging institutions of world governance that address these particular trust problems are the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. The WTO rules on trade disputes (much as national courts resolve quarrels between companies, though with less binding authority, at least for now). The International Monetary Fund lends money to troubled nations to prevent panics (the rough global analogue of a nation’s bank deposit insurance) and tries in exchange to get sound management and clean bookkeeping— transparency.
It is easy to laugh at nationalist fanatics who see these bodies as embryonic threats to free nations everywhere, who rail against the "secret tribunals" of the World Trade Organization. Chances are, after all, that your home has never been searched by an officer wearing a badge that says "IMF" or "WTO."
Still, if what authority these bodies do have exists in response to increasingly non-zero-sum relations among nations, and if technology is very likely to sustain this trend, then it doesn’t take a wild-eyed visionary to imagine more and more authority migrating to the global level. Indeed, the Asian financial crisis, by reminding the world of its interdependence, brought calls for stronger international authority from such non-wild-eyed people as the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board. As the New York Times summarized the post-Asia conventional wisdom, "only the most dogmatic free market ideologues think the increasingly integrated global economy can get by without a super-national organization to serve as financial watchdog, scold, mediator and lender of last resort."
Watchdog, scold, mediator, lender—these don’t sound very forceful. But to be a "lender of last resort"—to lend when the private sector refuses to—is to subsidize, and with subsidy comes power. Indeed, much of the American government’s power over states consists not of legalized coercion, but of strings attached to subsidies. Mainstream plans for post-Asia reforms of the IMF followed this model of government control—a stronger role as lender of last resort, along with tighter strings: more financial disclosure, more fiscal discipline, closer regulation of banking.
As the Asian crisis subsided, the more ambitious of these plans began to fade. Even so, by the spring of 1999, the IMF had voted to set up a permanent "contingent credit line" for emergency use by countries that had met IMF standards of transparency and austerity. Since countries certified as eligible for these bailouts will presumably have an easier time attracting foreign capital, there will be a firm incentive to pass muster. Thus the "contingent credit line," however tenuous it sounds, may evolve into a systematic extension of IMF power.
And bear in mind that supranational lending institutions, even when their influence is more ad hoc, can seem plenty coercive to nations badly in need of a loan. Here is a sentence from a 1998 issue of the Asian Wall Street Journal: "The World Bank plans to oppose a South Korean government plan to set up a fund to buy equity stakes in troubled companies, probably dooming the proposal." To the South Koreans, this leverage no doubt felt strikingly like supranational authority.
Also bear in mind that loose organizations which solve non-zero-sum problems have a history of foreshadowing firmer authority. In the nineteenth century, various Italian states harmonized their tariff schedules, deepening economic integration and easing the eventual march toward national political unity. Who knows what could eventually become of the World Trade Organization?
This is in one sense a silly comparison. Economics was hardly the only force at work in nineteenth-century Italy. That other great mixer of non-zero-sum cement, hostility toward an alien power (Austria), played a role. Clearly, such hostility won’t be a factor in the evolution of world governance, assuming any extraterrestrials out there continue to keep their distance.
Indeed, for political conglomeration to take place without war either in the backdrop, as a threat, or front and center, as a reality, would mark a contrast not just with Italian and German history, but with history, period—and, for that matter, with prehistory. As we’ve seen, when social organization moved to the supravillage level of the chiefdom, fighting very often, if not always, figured in. Sometimes the fighting was local, with one village chief conquering the others and thus becoming founder of a chiefdom. But when the merger happened less coercively—as one would hope in the case of world governance— an enemy seems to have loomed outside the chiefdom.
The United States, it is true, moved from a loose confederation to a true nation during peacetime. But it was war that had pushed the states over the threshold to confederation, and the specter of future war figured in the arguments for centralization laid out in the Federalist Papers.
In short, if space aliens don’t attack the planet, yet it nonetheless moves toward firm supranational governance, the transition will be without known precedent. Still, there are two big reasons not to rule out such an aberration.
GETTING PULLED TOGETHER
First, though it’s true that few if any big, voluntary political consolidations have taken place in the prolonged absence of war and the threat of war, it’s also true that, so far as we know, there’s never been a prolonged absence of war and the threat of war. Who knows how powerful economic logic alone might prove if it didn’t keep getting a boost from collective antipathy? If common enemies didn’t keep pushing people together, maybe people would have time to relax and get pulled together—more slowly, but no less surely.
The European Union may now be illustrating the point. It began as a zone of liberalized trade, in some ways like the North American Free Trade Agreement. But look at how much power is centrally wielded now. In 1996, amid fears of Mad Cow Disease, the EU banned Britain from exporting beef—not just to the other nations in the Union, but to the whole world! Among the other things the EU has done matter-of-factly: prohibit member states from importing Iranian pistachio nuts (which seemed to contain high levels of a natural carcinogen); and tell member states they could—and, indeed, must—permit the sale of the impotency drug Viagra.
If a nation-state can’t decide where to export its beef, which pistachio nuts are acceptable, and what remedies are available to impotent citizens, then it is not fully sovereign in the old-fashioned sense of the word. How did this happen? How is it that one minute you’re a mere free-trade zone, and the next minute—or, at least, the next half-century—you’re banning pistachio nuts? How did the European Coal and Steel Community morph into the European Community and then into the European Union? Actually, the transition is surprisingly logical: one non-zero-sum game leads to another, which leads to another, and so on. The logic is worth fleshing out, in part because the World Trade Organization shows signs of following in some of the EU’s footsteps.
First, nations trade with one another (non-zero-sum game number one). Then they see further gains in mutually lowering tariffs (game number two). Then they decide all would benefit by dampening quarrels over what qualifies as a violation of this agreement, so they set up a way to settle disputes (game number three). Crossing this last threshold— forming an inchoate judiciary—is what turned the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade into the World Trade Organization.
But adjudication entails tricky questions. For example: How do you handle covert trade barriers? When a country makes it illegal to import shrimp caught in nets that kill sea turtles, is that really an environmental law, as advertised, or protectionism in disguise? Both the EU and the WTO weigh in on such matters. Thus did the WTO wind up telling the United States to quit barring shrimp imports from several Asian nations. In theory, the U.S. could have ignored the ruling. All the WTO would have done in response is to approve retaliatory tariffs by aggrieved countries—tariffs those countries could levy even without the WTO’s blessing. Still, the U.S. has benefited from so many WTO rulings that it has a stake in preserving respect for them. This, really, is the whole idea behind governance: the voluntary submission of individual player to an authority that, by solving non-zero-sum problems, can give out in benefits more than it exacts in costs. This net benefit is why WTO rulings may well become more binding, whether through sheer custom or through new law.
As supranational governance greases transborder commerce, more questions arise. If each nation has different food-testing and food-labeling laws, won’t that make life more complicated and expensive for pan-European food producers, and indeed for their customers? Moreover, if each nation has separate food laws, mightn’t they morph into covert trade barriers? Mightn’t French farmers support laws that deem Portuguese food processing substandard, or that define "cheese" so stringently as to keep some imports from carrying that label? All told, then, wouldn’t uniform food laws make things cheaper and simpler for most people? Yes, says the EU (game number four) and thus acquires another function. (And yes, said the United States early in the twentieth century; it was growing interstate commerce that carried such regulatory functions from the state to the federal level.)
As Europe has already shown, the chain of non-zero-sum games needn’t end with regulatory and judicial power. With transnational commerce growing, all those national currencies became a bother. There was the cost of currency exchange and nagging uncertainty about exchange rates. Wouldn’t most Europeans benefit from a single currency? Yes, the EU decided. But one currency meant one central bank. So each nation lost its autonomous central bank and, at a more symbolic level, its currency (or, as they aptly say in Britain, its sovereign). At this point—with nations having surrendered their control of monetary policy—the line between a loose association of nations and an outright confederacy has arguably been crossed.
A "to-be-sure" is in order. To be sure, European integration was, from the beginning, not a strictly economic project. It was conceived as a way of "waging peace"—reuniting a war-torn continent with economic bonds that would make war unthinkable. (The plan seems to have worked.) Still, there was also a purely economic logic behind fusion, which is why European corporations pushed for it and the stock market applauded it. Indeed, just as Europe was unifying its currencies, The Economist published an article called "One World, One Currency," noting the analogously powerful economic logic behind global monetary union. The article stressed the near-term political impossibility of such a goal, and, moreover, some economists doubt its sheerly economic wisdom. Still, as exchange rates gyrated in the aftermath of the Asian crisis, there was serious talk in both Argentina and Mexico about adopting the U.S. dollar as official currency.
All in all, the moral of the EU story is: Presto! International trade, via self-regenerating non-zero-sumness, can expand the scope of governance. No extraterrestrials necessary! As technology continues to shorten economic distance, the logical scope of supranational governance could conceivably become the whole planet. This may be hard to imagine now, given the cultural and linguistic diversity of the world and the simmering hostility among some of its peoples. But remember: If ninety, even sixty, years ago, you had predicted that someday France and Germany would have the same currency, the reply would have been: "Oh, really? Which nation will have conquered which?"
GETTING PUSHED TOGETHER
Even if murderous extraterrestrials aren’t a strict prerequisite for global governance, they would be a big time saver. Even if sheerly economic forces could in theory get people to put aside their petty differences (a big if ), nothing does the trick quite like the common threat of death.
As it happens, the end of the second millennium has brought the rough equivalent of hostile extraterrestrials—not a single impending assault, but lots of new threats that, together, add up to a big planetary security problem. They range from terrorists (with their menu of increasingly pooky weapons) to a new breed of transnational criminals (many of whom will commit their crimes in that inherently transnational realm, cyberspace) to environmental problems (global warming, ozone depletion, and lots of merely regional but still supranational issues) to health problems (epidemics that exploit modern thoroughfares). None of these things has quite the galvanizing effect of space invaders, but they are all scary, and they all imply upranational governance in one sense or another. They threaten many nations with common perils that are best overcome through cooperation.
The timing is convenient. With economic organization reaching the global level, and governance showing faint signs of doing the same, that great historical congealer of governance—an external enemy—disappears by definition. Meanwhile, a whole slew of non-zero-sum problems arise that are rather like an external enemy; they push people together, to escape common calamity, rather than pulling them together for common gain.
You can already see some of the new structures of governance emerging. They are tenuous, but in their very weakness future strength is visible. Consider the Chemical Weapons Convention. The CWC gives an international body unprecedented power to spring surprise searches on any member state at the behest of any other member state. In 1997, when the U.S. Senate debated the treaty before ratifying it, critics warned about a loss of American over-eignty. In reply, defenders of the convention found themselves in the odd position of stressing its underlying weakness: if the inspectorate tries to search your garage, the American government can stall, and if the search seems unconstitutional, can thwart it. Presumably true. Still, if other countries can do the same, then much of the CWC’s value to the U.S.—the ability to demand inspections in foreign countries—goes down the drain. And if the U.S. wants to realize that value—if it wants other nations to surrender a bit more sovereignty—then it will have to surrender a bit more sovereignty. That’s the way these games work.
The question, then, is whether the value of a stronger inspectorate will ever warrant the price of lost sovereignty. And the answer is almost certainly yes. The spread of technological information—including how to make weapons—has always been unstoppable in the long run, and new media, notably the Internet, are making the long run very short.
Actually, chemical weapons are the least of the problem. On the Richter scale of weapons of mass destruction, they barely register. It is biological and nuclear weapons that ensure that by 2020 any well-funded terrorist group will have the know-how to kill 50,000 people in any given city.
Biological weapons are much easier to make and to hide than nuclear weapons. The encroachment on sovereignty that they will call for is, to current ensibilities, shocking. All kinds of industrial and medical facilities will have to be monitored. The personal possession of some equipment will probably have to be banned, and surprise inspections will be necessary. This prospect—that some supranational agency could demand to search your basement or your kitchen freezer—would now strike most Americans as unthinkable, even if local police were in tow to guard against abuse.
But trauma has a way of making the unthinkable widely thought. In the middle of World War II, the historian Arnold Toynbee met with a number of notables in Princeton, New Jersey, to discuss the postwar world. By the end of the meeting, Toynbee had convinced John Foster Dulles—a temperamentally conservative man who would later become secretary of state in a Republican administration—that world government was essential. Dulles signed on to the group’s conclusion that "as Christians we must proclaim the moral consequences of the factual interdependence to which the world has come. The world has become a community, and its constituent members no longer have the moral right to exercise ‘sovereignty’ or ‘independence’ which is now no more than a legal right to act without regard to the harm which is done to others."
And World War II, bear in mind, was not as scary for the average American as biological weapons will be. There was no chance in 1942 that whole American cities would be decimated without warning. Once this threat becomes real, appreciable sacrifices of sovereignty are among the less extreme solutions that will get trotted out. (And among the more benign. Persecuting particular groups, such as Muslims, may seem far-fetched now, but recall the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Wouldn’t supranational governance be preferable?)
Lots of non-zero-sum problems how the same logic: basic technological trends make their growth all but certain, and their eventual solution will likely entail real accretions of supranational governance. Global laws on the prescription of antibiotics? Sure, if their too-casual use creates strains of super-bacteria that can cross oceans on any airplane. Limits on each nation’s saltwater fish harvest, complete with random inspections of any fishing boat and stiff penalties? Sure, as the oceans thin out. An International Monetary Fund whose regulatory power approach those that national governments now possess? Quite possibly, in the wake of a global depression.
And then, of course, there is that notorious sovereignty-sapper, cyberspace, which empowers offshore tax evaders, offshore infoterrorists, offshore copyright violators, offshore libelers. (And sometimes the culprit may be on-shore, using an offshore computer.) Nations will find it harder and harder to enforce more and more laws unless they coordinate law enforcement and, in some cases, the laws themselves.
Viewed separately, the various layers of supranational governance may not seem momentous. But they add up. We can’t predict for sure which problems will find strong supranational solution, but a broader prediction is possible: as technological evolution keeps doing what it has always done—expand and deepen non-zero-sumness—much supranational governance will be in order.
In the end, then, the "chaos" and "order" scenarios find a kind of reconciliation. Whole new species of chaos will indeed arise, but—assuming we respond to them wisely—they will drive the world to a new level of political organization that is capable of preserving order. What the "chaos" theorists fail to see is that chaos is just a non-zero-sum problem, something people are good at solving.
