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...fair and effective system of world governance more necessary than ever--but it also makes it unlikely. In these circumstances, it may be useful to sketch briefly scheme for world governance that is an improvement over present circumstances, without being hopelessly utopian. That means that any such scheme must be appropriate for international politics as it actually exists.
The most salient feature of international politics has long been its anarchic character. Ever since the rise of sovereign nation-states, there has been no sovereign power above them. The absence of a super-Leviathan, combined with the absence of a broad consensus on values or on procedures of conflict resolution, means that international politics has long been, in Rousseau's terms, a "state of war," real or potential. There have been truces, temporary remissions, and zones of peace--but so long as anarchy prevails, there can be no end to the possibility of war.
In the nineteenth century, the main European powers constituted a 'concert' to try to preserve the post-Napoleonic peace settlements. But this was primarily a mechanism of consultation, and the concert eventually fell apart over the issue of intervention in domestic affairs.
After World War I, statesmen and citizens began to think of going beyond the sovereign nation-state. The League of Nations seemed like a big step forward, because of its provisions against aggressive wars and its procedures for peaceful change. But it was a strictly inter-national organization: its coercive powers depended on the willingness of the major states to put them into effect. Even worse, the League's strong connections with the territorial status quo established by the post-1918 treaties thwarted the application of its provisions for peaceful change.
When the United Nations was founded in 1945, it was designed to prevent a fiasco like the League of Nations, rather than to cope with the mess left by World War II. The Security Council of the UN had much more power than the Council of the League. But within two years, the Cold War showed that this power was meaningless in practice unless the major states were able to serve as a kind of directorate--which, during the Cold War, they were not.
After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, hopes for a new global regime flourished again. But these hopes were dashed, even though a fundamental cause of the Security Council's paralysis had been eliminated. In a unipolar world dominated by one sovereign nation-state--since 1990, the United States--the UN could function effectively only when it followed the lead of the United States.
The UN in the past half century has faced a further difficulty, caused by the collapse of the traditional distinction between international and civil conflicts. During the Cold War, one of the chief conflicts between the United States and the USSR concerned the nature and composition of domestic regimes. In the years since the Cold War ended, a number of states, especially in former colonized areas, have disintegrated, and their fragmentation has incited outside interventions, further blurring the distinction between wars waged between states and those within a state.
At the same time, an emergent concern for human rights, a secondary issue when the UN Charter was established, has also helped to erode the barrier between interstate and domestic affairs, as the UN has in recent years succeeded in extending its jurisdiction and in inventing new methods of peacekeeping. But it still does not have the kind of supranational power necessary to enforce human rights consistently. Nor does it have the power to force recalcitrant parties to resolve intractable conflicts in the Middle East, Kashmir, Cyprus, and Korea, and between the two Chinas.
As if matters in the traditional domain of world politics--whose primary actors are sovereign nation-states--had not gotten complex enough, a new domain of a very different sort has emerged: a global civil society, in which force (except in the form of terrorism) and conquest...
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