We live in an age that is gesturing towards global government. This is not a conspiracy theory; it is something which perfectly respectable politicians, academics, policymakers and UN officials routinely talk about. What is crystallising is not exactly a single world Government, but rather a complicated mixture of aligned institutions, organisations, networks, systems and fora which has sometimes been given the fancy name of a ‘bricolage’ by international relations theorists. There is no centre, but rather a vast and nebulous conglomeration.
This does not mean, though, that global government (or ‘global governance’, as it is more commonly known) is emerging organically. It is being purposively directed. Again, this is no conspiracy theory; it is something that the people involved openly discuss – they hide their plans in perfectly plain sight. And this has been going on for a long time. In the early 1990s, when the Cold War had drawn to a close, the UN convened something called the Commission on Global Governance, which released a final report – called ‘Our Global Neighbourhood‘ – in 1995. It makes for fascinating reading as a kind of ‘playbook’ for what has followed in the field in the 30 years since – establishing as it does a clear rhetorical and argumentative pattern in favour of the global governance project that is repeated to this day.
The basic idea is as follows. In the olden days, when “faith in the ability of Governments to protect citizens and improve their lives was strong”, it was fine for the nation-state to be ‘dominant’. But now the world economy is integrated, the global capital market has vastly expanded, there has been extraordinary industrial and agricultural growth and there has been a huge population explosion. Ours is therefore a “more crowded, interdependent world with finite resources”. And this means we need “a new vision for humanity” which will “galvanise people everywhere to achieve higher levels of cooperation in areas of common concern and shared destiny” (these “areas of common concern” being “human rights, equity, democracy, meeting basic material needs, environmental protection, and demilitarisation”). We need, in short, “an agreed global framework for actions and policies to be carried out at appropriate levels” and a “multifaceted strategy for global governance”.
This is not difficult reasoning to parse. The central argument can be summarised as follows: global governance is necessary because the world is globalising, and that brings with it global problems that need solving collectively. And the logic must be impeccable in the minds of those who are engaged in the global governance project, because what they say has remained essentially the same ever since. Hence, if we fast forward from 1995 to 2024, we find world leaders finalising a revised draft of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s proposed ‘Pact for the Future’, a memorandum of guiding principles for global governance which will be the culmination of his ‘Our Common Agenda‘ project, launched in 2021. While there is a bit more meat on the bone in this document than there may have been in Our Global Neighbourhood in terms of policy, we see a more-or-less identical argument playing out.
Hellbound and Down 