We already have a world government in the United Nations. The fact that it is a very weak government==like our own Continental Congress or our own national government before federalism took hold==shouldn’t detract from the fact that it does perform some governmental functions.
The UN does many useful things that some of the smaller member nations have difficulty doing for themselves, like monitoring elections and human rights abuses. It organizes relief efforts, weapons inspections, peacekeeping forces, disaster relief. It also collects comparative statistical information on things like life expectancy, infant mortality, balances of trade, etc., which inspire nations to do better relative to others.
The UN is likely to remain weak so long as it is dominated by a five-member security counsel==China, Russia, France, the UK, and the USA==and a financing system that depends on the voluntary contributions of member states. We, for example, refuse to pay our fair share to protest its bloated and somewhat corrupt bureaucracy, nonetheless we find it useful vehicle for the projecting American power and influence.
Nonetheless, we have found it extraordinarily useful to go through the UN when we want to organize a boycott or embargo of some rogue country, or to sanction our intervention into things like Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In this respect the UN provides a value legitimation function for nation states, as well as a way for allies to support us with material and moral assistance. It is also one way we can conduct back channel diplomacy with countries we don’t have formal diplomatic relations with, like Iran and North Korea.
Should we ever overcome our financial difficulties and find our way back to the moral high ground so that others once again see us as a credible force for good in the world, we could do ourselves and the world a lot of good by taking a more active leadership role in working through UN to establish peace, prosperity and security. But this would entail coming to terms with certain historical realities.
One of which is the recognition that empires and nation states are no longer viable. Just as the Greek city-states have fallen by the wayside as a viable polity, so too have nation states. The world is simply too economically interdependent for nation states to stand on our own, much less project themselves as empires. If China goes down, we do too. The reason we can not militarily defeat even poor backward countries like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, is that any indigenous people who know the local terrain are defending their homes and their families from conscripts and mercenaries, will sooner or later push the invaders from their soil.
Just as the map of Europe changed in 1871 (when Prussia, Bavaria, Silesia, and Galicia came together to become modern Germany), so too the map of the world is changing. Europe is amalgamating into the European Union. NAFTA was the first step in creating a North American co-prosperity zone. China is already a collection of ethnically and linguistically distinct peoples, and it is only a matter of time before Taiwan, Singapore, and the other satellites of Greater China go the way of Hong Kong. Africa is trying to organize itself into a United States of Africa, and South America is looking to create it’s own co-prosperity zone (if only we would stop interfering).
So, the world is already “chunking” and aggregating into larger units, and there is no reason to believe that once current nation states have been digested and reformed into continental unions, that they could not find sufficient common cause to organize global projects, like a kind of world parliament, sometime in the future. The main impediment to this is the disparity between rich and poor, the developed and undeveloped countries, and traditionalist anti-progress countries, and modern secular and postmodern societies.
Globalization is like a great acid bath to all of this. For example, globalization has moved our manufacturing bases to low wage countries in the third world, in effect, sharing out our technology and leveling our standards of living downward and theirs upward. The consumerism of the modern global economy is dissolving the parochialism of all but the most backward and remote of countries. You can now get a Coke in almost any corner of the world.
Traditionalist societies are getting “progress” whether they want it or not. Unfortunately, a lot of development aid is simply a scam whereby developed countries set up some huge construction project which is set up primarily to enrich the company that does the construction and corrupt local government officials who take bribes to allow them to do it. All too often the dam or whatever is being built doesn’t work, displaces natives from subsistence farming, and saddles the host country with an ecological disaster and a mountain of debt. Policing and remediating this sort of thing on a global basis would be a huge step forward for the developing world and a worthy governmental function.
