The Case for World Democracy

This week saw intense world-wide media coverage of the inauguration of President Obama, replacing the hated Bush, and it got me thinking.

In the interconnected globalised age we find ourselves in, it’s starting to genuinely matter to the rest of the world who ends up in power in the US. As the old saying goes, when the US sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, and they’ve been pretty much laid up in bed with the flu for the past 8 years.

Even though the policy of the man at the top has far-reaching implications on the world at large, we’re unable to project any influence upon that choice of leader – he is remote and unaccountable to anyone but a small fraction of the world’s population.

What I think’s notable about this is it seems almost like a blown-up version of society thousands of years ago; a small group of the nobles and the king together dictate policy, while the great unwashed mass of the population have no say at all. Maybe that’s a flawed analogy, but it feels to me like we’re hitting a transition point; just as the scattered tribe gave way to the city-state, and the city-state gave way to the nation-state, so too must the nation-state give way to something greater; perhaps continent-states, maybe even a world-state.

I feel the real question  is if the process of evolution towards a global state will be smooth and frictionless, or if pressure will build along the fault-lines until it’s released all at once in a violent earthquake.

Clearly though, we need to give organisations like the UN and EU much more in the way of balls than they do right now. At the moment they’re unions of nations, not unions of people, and this is a severe failing.

I think we need to try and wean ourselves off the old ideas of patriotism, the focus on the things that make us different, not the things that make us the same. There’s no shame in federalisation! Great cities like New York, London, Rome, Athens etc. are not diminished because they are a part of larger nations, and the UK is not diminished because it’s a part of the EU. The French aren’t that bad, really.

I almost certainly won’t see a global state in my lifetime, but I really do kinda hope that we’ll see the beginnings of such a thing. If a black man can get elected as the President of the United States, then I guess I can have hope for anything.