noteworthy wrote:
This paper by Steven Huybrechts won the National Defense University President's Award for Excellence in Writing in 2004. It's an interesting fusion of influences, many of which may be familiar to the MemeStreams community.

This is a awefully self serving perspective for an American to have. We don't run our internal government based on this philosophy and we don't seem to have this level of problem with it. The USA is unlikely to fragement, present political polarization notwithstanding, and the breakup of Canada predicted by one of the papers you reference is an idea that is as out of date as the reference. This reasoning here is also a little circular. World Government must operate on a might makes right model or it will degenerate into a might makes right model?!

We're biologically wired to do a lot of things that we don't actually do because in this society they are stupid things to do. The very definition of civilisation is the ability to rise above base instinct. There are certainly people in this world who are uncivilized. For example, people who chant "God is great" while dragging charred bodies through the streets. This is not something we ought to aspire to.

I think World Government must serve the interests of the people it represents. To the degree that representatives are not democratically selected the interests of the people are not represented. Even in the US we do not choose our UN rep directly. A person who is elected by electors we elected nominates someone who is approved by people we elected. The degree of indirection introduces a great deal of difference between the perspective of the representative and the perspective of the represented. Our UN rep represents a political party and not a country.

Of course, undemocratic countries are far worse. I'm somewhat sympathetic to Fukuyama's proposal for a league of democratic states. If Syria isn't qualified to participate in what we consider a reasonable world government then we shouldn't include them until they are prepared to represent the interests of their citizens. You aren't going to see the kind of leadership required to make that happen when everyone's attitude about the rest of the world is "fuck it, who cares."

Clearly, the US is not constrained by international law, and needed to demonstrate that to the middle east. The UN offers a forum for these people to present their views but we cannot allow them to use it to forward interests through some process technicality which are not in line with that of their people or the rest of the world.

On the other hand, many people in the United States are tremendously ignorant about the rest of the world. Americans aren't unique in this respect, but the ratio of ignorance to access here is probably unparralleled. "I don't know a damn thing about France" is rapidly becoming "The French are obviously irrelevent, all they do is surrender." Any student of Chinese history will tell you that when ignorance gives way to hubris you're one step away from a revolution.