Abstract

Although the current consensus judgment on world government is highly negative, Alexander Wendt’s 2003 article in the European Journal of International Relations, entitled “Why a World State Is Inevitable,” has generated significant interest within the international relations profession. However, it may be that debating the inevitability thesis represents a misallocation of intellectual resources. The important question is not whether world government is inevitable or not, but rather whether it is desirable or not. And the question of desirability depends critically on the nature of the proposed world government. Up to this point, most discussion of world government, pro and con, proceeds from the assumption that the world government would be the “omnipotent world state” of traditional world federalist thinking: a very powerful and centralized state entity that would stand in relation to its component nations much as the federal government of the United States stands in relation to the component states. But more recent contributions focus on a limited world government, in which the component nations would retain such rights as unilateral withdrawal and independent military forces. A far more interesting case may be made for a limited—as opposed to an unlimited—federal world government