Roberto Mangabeira Unger - Governing the World Without World Government

Governing the World
without World
Government

Governing the World
without World
Government

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

First published by Verso 2022

Roberto Mangabeira Unger 2022

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-909-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-910-8 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-911-5 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Unger, Roberto Mangabeira, author.

Title: Governing the world without world government / Roberto Mangabeira Unger.

Description: First edition paperback. | London ; New York : Verso, 2022.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022010693 (print) | LCCN 2022010694 (ebook) | ISBN 9781839769092 (paperback) | ISBN 9781839769115 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: International organization. | Globalization. | International cooperation.

Classification: LCC JX1954 .U63 2022 (print) | LCC JX1954 (ebook) | DDC 341.2dc23/eng/20220412

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010693

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010694

Typeset in Sabon MT by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

Contents

Defining the Task:
A Pathway Rather
than a Blueprint

To imagine the making of order in a world in which sovereign states remain in command is work requiring both less and more than genius. At the frontiers of thought, in science, philosophy, and art, we value limit-defying originality. In this mission, however, so important to the future of humankind, the thinker must suppress all vanity: the impulse to make proposals setting him apart from the preconceptions of his time. His sole concern must be to find a way to make the necessary possible. His proposals must have a foothold in the struggles and practices of the world as it is, rather than as he would like it to be.

The first step must be to define the task and to characterize the features of promising ways to execute it. The task is to design arrangements that can produce global public goods without establishing world government. Global public goods are benefits to all humanity that sovereign states are unable to secure by their independent initiative but that they need and want. The benefits with the most immediate claim to our attention are ways to avoid great evils, such as major war and calamitous climate change.

The list of global public goods is always open. And the boundaries separating what states can do on their own independent initiative, what they can achieve by collaborating with other states, and what they can accomplish only through rules, institutions, and practices including all or much of the world are never clear or uncontested.

It follows from this understanding of the task that the response must consist of a set of arrangements useful to serve the full range of global public goods: from the narrower and more superficial to the broader and more basic. A proposal worth considering must not be a heap of discrete solutions to largely unconnected practical problems; it must be a coherent and defensible design capable of dealing with the different, the open-ended, and the unexpected. As a consequence, one of its most important qualities must be to lend itself to correction and improvement in the light of experience. It must represent a pathway rather than a blueprint.

Another implication of this understanding of the task is that the approach to global governance must not be, or be seen to be, part of a movement to world government: to the establishment of an authority standing above the sovereign states of the world. It is not good enough to respect state sovereignty over domestic matters. No national government will view home rule as making up for the confiscation of sovereignty in international affairs.

The objections to world government are normative as well as practical: humanity develops its powers only by developing them in different directions. Each form of national life, embodied in distinct practices and institutions, represents an experiment in how to be human. State sovereignty shields national difference.

The means for assuring the provision of global public goods in a world of sovereign states must begin in a recognition of the limited and flawed ways for providing such goods now. No one familiar with international affairs would deny that the present arrangements for global governance are grossly inadequate. To fail to acknowledge, however, the clues that they offer to a way forward is to deprive ourselves of a source of guidance more useful than speculation ungrounded in the harsh realities of dealings among states.

Fantasy and fabrication. If we believe ourselves free to write on a clean slate, unburdened by political constraint and unguided by historical experience, we can fabricate an unlimited number of schemes of global governance. We can lend them a semblance of plausibility by trading on the analogies between the construction of world order and the evolution of constitutional arrangements within nation-states. All that this exercise requires is the marriage of technical ingenuity to political self-deception. On the model of those who sat down in Paris in the eighteenth century to write an imaginary constitution for Poland or for Corsica, we can pretend to play Lycurgus to the world. If plans for the reordering of the world drafted without regard to the real power of real states could help bring about a consequential improvement in the condition of humanity, they would already have done so.

Consider an example of such a plan. It could be offered either as a way of reforming the United Nations system or as an alternative to that system. There will be a Council of States, a Council of Regions, an Executive Committee, and an International Constitutional Court to develop standards and settle disputes. The vote in the Council of States will be weighted by a formula taking account of population, GDP, and GDP per capita (as a proxy for other strengths, including military force). In the composition of the Council of Regions, choice and affinity may trump geography.

No state will enjoy in these councils the prerogative of the veto. All important issues regarding the provision of public goods will be settled by agreement between the two councils (as in a bicameral domestic legislature). At first, the most basic questions about the world order will be left in the purview of the General Assembly of the United Nations and matters regarding the use of armed force in the jurisdiction of the UN Security Council. But as the system evolves, the two councils will gradually acquire powers now vested in these UN bodies until the new arrangements have either transformed the UN system or superseded it. The twin councils will set up, from time to time, special organizations to deal with particular international risks.

It is an idle fabrication: anyone could design many other plans, along different lines. None would ever be implemented because none provides the agents who count mostthe states of the worldwith means to accomplish goals that they cannot accomplish right now, if they really want to do so, with the institutional equipment that they already possess. My proposal will show how a plan preserving what is most attractive in my example can result from the joint initiatives of states that refuse to compromise their sovereignty.